Infectious Diseases
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Category archives for Infectious Diseases
Troubling New Research on MRSA in Kids
Posted by Liz Borkowski on May 18, 2010 For several years, health professionals have been concerned about the rise in infections from methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA – a bacteria that’s resistant to several of the antibiotics generally used to treat staph infections. CDC estimates that in 2005, there were more than 94,000 MRSA infections in the US, and more than 18,000…
Posted by Among the problems with our country’s system of meat production is the routine use of antibiotics in livestock. Dosing the animals regularly helps them grow faster and survive cramped factory-farm conditions, which means cheap, abundant meat for consumers. The problem is that overusing antibiotics contributes to antibiotic resistance. Cheap meat doesn’t seem like such a…
By Angene Johnson After a recent dinner at my uncle’s house in Virginia, I finally had a chance to look at the March edition of National Geographic on my train ride back to Foggy Bottom (Washington, DC). As I flipped through the front of the magazine towards this month’s cover article, on saving energy in…
The latest issue of the Economist highlights a new idea in malaria prevention. Traditional prevention efforts emphasize spraying, but mosquitoes evolve resistance to insecticides. Now, Penn State University’s Andrew Read offers this insight, which can help avoid the resistance problem: To stop malaria, we only need to kill the old mosquitoes. Once an adult female…
by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure When an Ebola virus related lab accident in German occurred, special pathogens researchers girded themselves for bad news. Working with agents for which there is currently no treatment of vaccine requires high containment laboratories, often touted as being virtually fail safe. While engineering and procedural controls can be instituted…
by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure I’m just getting around to reading the Brief Report by Blachere et al., “Measurement of airborne influenza virus in a hospital emergency department” (Clinical Infectious Diseases 2009:48:483-440) but it’s quite interesting. We’ve noted fairly often here that we still don’t know for sure what the main modes of transmission…
In today’s New York Times, columnist Nicholas Kristof turns his attention to a problem that’s been worrying the public health community for the past several years: MRSA, or methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus. The bacteria’s antibiotic resistance makes it hard to fight, and it’s responsible for a growing toll of deaths over the past year – including…
by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure The scientific literature is full of specialized papers that on their face would seem to be of little interest. Here’s a title like that: “Prevalence and seasonality of influenza-like illness in children, Nicaragua, 2005-2007″ (Gordon et al., Emerging Infectious Diseases 2009 Mar). Over 4000 Nicaraguan children, aged 2 to…
by revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure The peanut butter/peanut paste ingredient based salmonella outbreak has been in the news lately and we’ve discussed it here (and here, here, here, here, here). There are now about 500 reported cases and six deaths. That’s a case fatality ratio of just over 1%. So what if there were…
by revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure Every parent’s or grandparent’s nightmare is to have their darling little one suddenly carried off by illness. Flu isn’t on the radar screen of most parents but in recent years the public health community is taking notice. The first alarm occurred in the bad flu season of 2003 –…