ebola
tsmith | August 22, 2012Regular readers don't need to be told that I'm a bit obsessed with zoonotic disease. It's what I study, and it's a big part of what I teach. I run a Center devoted to the investigation of emerging diseases, and the vast majority of all emerging diseases are zoonotic. I have an ongoing series of posts collecting my writings on emerging diseases, and far too many papers in electronic or paper format in my office to count. Why the fascination? Zoonotic diseases have been responsible for many of mankind's great plagues--the Black Death, the 1918 "Spanish" flu pandemic, or more recently, HIV/AIDS…
tsmith | August 18, 2012August, 1976. A new infection was causing panic in Zaire. Hospitals became death zones, as both patients and medical staff succumbed to the disease. Reports of nightmarish symptoms trickled in to scientists in Europe and the US, who sent investigators to determine the cause and stem the epidemic. Concurrently, they would find out, the same thing was happening hundreds of miles to the north in Sudan. In all, 284 would be infected in that country, and another 358 in Zaire--over 600 cases (and almost 500 deaths) due to a mysterious new disease in just a few months' time.
The new agent was Ebola…
dr. dolittle | August 17, 2012
Image from: National Geographic, photograph by Joel Sartore
In 2009, scientists at the California Academy of Sciences Steinhart Aquarium discovered some of the snakes suffering from a strange illness that caused them to stare off into space, appear like they were drunk and even tie themselves into knots they could not escape. Other serious symptoms included the buildup of proteins, susceptibility to secondary bacterial infections and body wasting. This mysterious illness posed a big problem for captive snakes like boa constrictors and pythons because it can rapidly spread among animals.…
tsmith | July 30, 2012Uganda just can't catch a break. They've recently been hit with nodding disease, a mysterious syndrome where children repeatedly nod their heads and undergo serious seizures, typically leading to death. Now they're in the grips of another Ebola outbreak. This will be the fourth time the country has suffered through Ebola since 2000, when the virus was first found in the country:
The first occurred in August of 2000; the first case died in Gulu on the 17th of September. Despite an investigation, doctors were unable to determine where or how she had contracted the disease. Her death was…
tsmith | July 9, 2012I know summer is winding down, but there's still plenty of beach time left and some great books to take along with you. Two giants in the field have recently released memoirs of their respective fights against infectious diseases: William Foege's House on Fire: The Fight to Eradicate Smallpox and Peter Piot's No Time to Lose: A Life in Pursuit of Deadly Viruses.
I'll begin with William Foege. Foege is a native Iowan, an Epidemic Intelligence Service alum, and former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. His book, as the title suggests, focuses on his role in the fight…
tsmith | May 18, 2011Ebola has long been associated with wildlife. From the early days, bats were viewed as a potential reservoir (though it wasn't confirmed that they actually harbored the virus until 2005). Contact with wild animals--particularly primates which were butchered for food--was also long thought to be a risk factor, and now we know that primates can become ill with Ebola and pass the virus to humans.
What hadn't been examined until 2008 were pigs. I mean, it's not exactly the animal you associate with central Africa, where many of the Ebola cases have been concentrated. However, pigs are much more…
lborkowski | May 17, 2011A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Charles Ornstein at ProPublica: Cardiac Society Draws Bulk of Funding from Stent Makers
Deborah Blum at Speakeasy Science: A Chemical (Battle) Cry
Tara C. Smith at Aetiology: Ebola in Uganda: current and past outbreaks
Tim Lougheed in Environmental Health Perspectives: Phosphorus Paradox: Scarcity and Overabundance of a Key Nutrient
Maryn McKenna at Superbug: Drug-resistant bacteria in bedbugs
tsmith | May 16, 2011Via H5N1 and other sources, there's at least one new Ebola case in Uganda:
The rare and deadly Ebola virus has killed a 12-year-old Ugandan girl and health officials said on Saturday they expected more cases.
The girl from Luwero district, 75 km (45 miles) north of the capital Kampala, died on May 6, said Anthony Mbonye, the government's commissioner for community health, in the first outbreak of the virus in Uganda in four years.
"Laboratory investigations have confirmed Ebola to be the primary cause of the illness and death. So there is one case reported but we expect other…
mpendergrast | June 21, 2010Mark Pendergrast writes: To kick off this book club discussion of Inside the Outbreaks, I thought I would explain briefly how I came to write the book and then suggest some possible topics for discussion.
The origin of the book goes back to an email I got in 2004 from my old high school and college friend, Andy Vernon, who wrote that I should consider writing the history of the EIS. I emailed back to say that I was honored, but what was the EIS? I had never heard of it. I knew Andy worked on tuberculosis at the CDC, but I didn't know that he had been a state-based EIS officer from 1978…
edyong | July 9, 2009As the world is now painfully aware, pigs can act as reservoirs for viruses that have the potential to jump into humans, triggering mass epidemics. Influenza is one such virus, but a group of Texan scientists have found another example in domestic Philippine pigs, and its one that's simultaneously more and less worrying - ebola.
There are five species of ebolaviruses and among them, only one - the so-called Reston ebolavirus - doesn't cause disease in humans. By fortuitous coincidence, this is also the species that Roger Barrette and colleagues have found among Philippine pigs and even…
sporte | November 24, 2008Ebola virus has impressed me as creepy ever since I read "The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story some years back by Richard Preston. (I guess he has a new book, too, Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science but I haven't been in airport for the past couple of weeks, so I haven't read it yet.)
Technorati Tags: blast, phylogenetic trees, Ebola, viruses
Infectious agents that cause diseases with gruesome symptoms really excite those of us with an interest in microbiology. Tara has written about this paper, too, and summarized the details.
I…
tsmith | August 30, 2007As I've noted before, filoviruses are some of my favorite pathogens. I don't work on them myself--though in the pre-children era I certainly thought about it--but I find them absolutely fascinating to read about and follow the literature. Mostly, I think, this is because after knowing about them for so many years (Marburg was discovered in 1967), and so much research (over 1500 papers in Pubmed, or roughly a paper for every person these viruses have killed), we still know relatively little about the most basic questions--such as where there viruses are maintained in nature, and how they…
tsmith | March 27, 2006Part One: Introduction to Emerging Diseases and Zoonoses
Part Two: Introduction to Emerging Diseases and Zoonoses continued
Part Three: Bushmeat
Part Four: War and Disease
Part Five: Chikungunya
Part Six: Avian influenza
Part Seven: Reporting on emerging diseases
Part Eight: Disease and Domesticated Animals
Part Nine: The Emergence of Nipah Virus
Part Ten: Monkeypox
Part Eleven: Streptococcus suis
Part Twelve: Salmonella and fish
Part Thirteen: new swine influenza virus detected
Part Fourteen: dog flu strikes Wyoming.
Part Fifteen: Clostridium species.
Part Sixteen:…