When it rains, it pours

...and that's not just a comment on the weather here. The past few days have been packed. In addition to the work stuff, I've been gearing up for classes next week and getting my kids off to their new school year (and my son in kindergarten). It's always nice when hard work pays off, but it would be even nicer if it didn't all pay off in the same week. But of course, when it rains, it pours. In addition to the publicity for the HIV article, a Reuters story on my Streptococcus suis talk in Wisconsin came out earlier this week, and was mentioned in the ProMed email alerts yesterday: Emerging Streptococcus Suis Threat Mainly Related to Occupational Exposure. More after the jump...

Streptococcus suis, a gram-positive bacterium that is endemic in swine in the United States, appears to cause more human infections than has been documented previously, particularly in people who are in close contact with swine.

In a report at the annual International Conference on Diseases in Nature Communicable to Man, held here last week, Dr. Tara C. Smith described findings from an investigation of whether S. suis is underreported or misdiagnosed as a zoonotic pathogen.

I've written previously on S. suis here. I keep meaning to do an update, as that post was written prior to the identification of a case of S. suis in a New York farmer (the first such case in the U.S.), and long before the current S. suis outbreak in Vietnam.

Anyway, the article goes on to describe our research, of which the bottom line is that more people are probably being occupationally infected with S. suis than we currently recognize. We're working on setting up additional studies to look at this more carefully (since the sera I used wasn't collected specifically to look at S. suis, nor were the questionnaires designed to ask about a past history of potential S. suis disease), so stay tuned...