epidemiology
grrlscientist | June 23, 2010tags: Great Microbiologists, Lego, brickfilm, animation, technology, scientists, history, microbiology, animalcule, streaming video
This is yet another Lego animation. This time, instead of recreating highlights of the World Cup 2010 games, this one shows highlights for the history of the field of microbiology. It's actually good enough to show as an intro to a microbiology course.
More Lego films can be found at Brickfilms.
kstarko | June 22, 2010Karen Starko writes: Even though I am a former EIS officer I am still amazed by the many successes of the EIS that Mark Pendergrast so clearly details in Inside the Outbreaks, The Elite Medical Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service. As I reflect on the outbreaks and epidemics described in the book and my own experience, I realize that the case study method employed in the training course and the two-year hands-on program plays a critical role in the success of the EIS program.
Picture this: young doctors, nurses, veterinarians, and other health professionals, many barely out of…
lborkowski | June 22, 2010The ScienceBlogs Book Club has come back to life, and is now featuring Mark Pendergrast's Inside the Outbreaks: The Elite Medical Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service. Mark Pendergrast's introductory post is well worth a read. He describes Alexander Langmuir, the "visionary leader" who founded the Epidemic Intelligence Service within the CDC in 1951; gives examples of some of the many different kinds of outbreaks EIS officers deal with; and identifies some of the ways the EIS has evolved over the past several decades.
I'll be putting up a couple of posts about Inside the Outbreaks…
lborkowski | June 22, 2010Liz Borkowski writes: Mark Pendergrast's Inside the Outbreaks: The Elite Medical Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service is a fast-paced tour through nearly six decades of epidemiology achievements by this relatively small program of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It's a fast and fascinating read, and its episodic structure makes it an easy book to carry around and dip into whenever you've a got a few minutes of free time.
The public-health professionals who join the EIS - usually for two-year stints, though some stay longer - are often young and willing to take risks…
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…
lborkowski | June 16, 2010In 1999, two machinists who worked next to each other at a Pratt & Whitney jet engine plant in North Haven, Connecticut were diagnosed with glioblastoma, a rare and fatal brain cancer. Their wives started compliling information about other employees at the same company who'd received similar diagnoses, and focused attention on the workers' illneses until Pratt & Whitney agreed to hire University of Pittsburgh biostatistician Gary Marsh to conduct a study. Carole Bass reports for the New Haven Independent on the findings, the second phase of which have just been released:
Marsh and…
grrlscientist | June 1, 2010tags: HIV and 'Flu -- The Vaccine Strategy, microbiology, epidemiology, virology, vaccines, medicine, public health, viruses, influenza, HIV, Seth Berkley, TEDTalks, TED Talks, streaming video
Seth Berkley explains how smart advances in vaccine design, production and distribution are bringing us closer than ever to eliminating a host of global threats -- from AIDS to malaria to flu pandemics.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers…
revere | April 30, 2010On the surface the story in Wired made perfect sense: Twin Study Deepens Multiple Sclerosis Mystery. It is about a new study from the National Center for Genome Resources that compared the genetic endowments of three sets of identical twins, one each of which contracted multiple sclerosis (MS), the other didn't. This was a full bore effort that wound up costing $1.5 million over a year and a half to sequence 2.8 billion base pairs in each twin, determine if they come from the mother or father and then -- and this is the amazing part -- determine the entire epigenome of the CD4 cell, one of…
tsmith | April 29, 2010Student guest post Dayna Groskreutz
Pulmonary hypertension (PH) refers to a condition in which there is high blood pressure in the vessels carrying blood from the heart to the lungs. Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is a subset of PH referring specifically to an increase in the pressure within the pulmonary arteries (rather than the pulmonary veins or capillaries). The high blood pressure in the vessels causes thickening of these arteries, making it hard for the heart to pump blood to the lungs. Pressure builds up and backs up. Over time, stress on the heart causes it to enlarge, and it…
tsmith | April 29, 2010Student guest post by Raj Nair.
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic inflammatory demyelinating disease that affects the central nervous system (CNS) consisting of the brain and the spinal cord [1]. It is thought to be an autoimmune disease since individual's immune system attacks their own healthy tissues [1]. However, studies to ascertain triggering factors such as genetic, environmental, and infectious causes are still in progress [2]. So one wonders "Who is more susceptible to develop MS" Literature reveals that typically people between 20 and 50 years of age are commonly diagnosed…
tsmith | April 27, 2010Student guest post by Desiré Christensen
Colorectal cancer (aka colon cancer) includes cancers of the colon, rectum, and appendix. Colorectal cancer is more common in developed countries (e.g. United States and Japan) compared to developing countries in Africa and Asia. Each year in the United States, there are around 150,000 cases of colorectal cancer diagnosed and about 50,000 people die from this cancer. Risk factors for colorectal cancer include lifestyle factors (e.g. habitual alcohol use; high-fat, low-fiber diet; obesity; sedentary lifestyle; smoking), family history of intestinal…
tsmith | April 26, 2010Student guest post by Andrew Behan
Malignant Mesothelioma (MM) is a rare type of cancer which manifests itself in the thin cells lining the human body's internal organs. There are three types of MM; pleural mesothelioma, peritoneal mesothelioma, and pericardial mesothelioma, affecting the lining of the lungs, abdominal cavity, and lining of the heart, respectively (1). Pleural mesothelioma is most common, consisting of about 70% of all MM cases and has a poor prognosis; patients live a median time of 18 months after diagnosis. (Note: for the purposes of this article, MM will be used to…
tsmith | April 26, 2010Student guest post by Jay Watson
Tired again? Perhaps it's the crappy weather, because you're sure that you've been getting enough sleep. After all, you can't remember the last time you spent less than ten hours in bed per night. Hopefully it's not mono; one of your friends had it a few months ago and it's all but knocked her out. However, you soon realize that you've only talked to her on the phone since she got engaged, so there's no way that's it. It's strange, even everyday activities like running errands has turned into something utterly exhausting. As you consider the reasons as…
tsmith | April 23, 2010Student guest post by Zainab Khan
Schizophrenia has puzzled and often times scared not only the scientific community, but also the general public since its emergence. Cases of schizophrenia-like behavior have been well documented in history. As this disease has been studied, factors such as genetics, environment, and even personal habits have all been associated to some degree with schizophrenia. However, evidence in past years has mounted showing an association between infectious agents and schizophrenia. The three main infections associated/studied with schizophrenia have been…
tsmith | April 22, 2010Student guest post by Ron Bedford
The NYT (Kolata, 2010) recently published a story we'd all like to believe in. After their "lab's usual end-of-the-week beer hour," two Harvard neurology researchers noticed similarities between not only genes associated with both the innate immune system and Alzheimer's disease (AD), but structures, characteristics, and actions of selected proteins as well. Dr. Rudolph E. Tanzi, Dr. Robert D. Moir, and their team found "striking similarities" between the well-known innate immune system protein, LL-37, and amyloid β-protein (Aβ), long considered a waste…
jgoldman | April 21, 2010
Figure 1: Humpback whale
The question is: what do you use to study the health of whales in the wild?
The answer is: not what you'd think.
Unlike smaller sea mammals like seals or sea lions, it is very hard to obtain blood samples from whales without first killing them.
Meet Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, from the Zoological Society of London. She studies whale health, but has had to rely on dead, stranded or captive animals for blood samples, which are hardly representative of whales in the wild.
Figure 2: Dr. Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse
So what's the next best thing to whale blood? Well, SNOT,…
revere | April 9, 2010This week Canadian public health researchers published the long awaited paper on possible association between vaccination for seasonal influenza the previous flu season and risk of having a medically diagnosed infection with pandemic influenza during the first wave of infections (April to July) just as that season was ending. When preliminary results were first announced there was only vaccine against seasonal flu, which was still being given, and the results were contrary to what we thought we knew about flu biology and the immune system. Inevitably it became caught up in the wider anti-…
revere | April 8, 2010Yesterday I gave a nod to an important epidemiologist, the late Alice Stewart. I'm old enough to have known her, but not old enough to know the most famous epidemiologist of all -- indeed sometimes called the "Father of Epidemiology" -- Dr. John Snow. Snow is also claimed as the "Father of Anesthesiology" because he administered chloroform to Queen Victoria during the births of her second and third children, thus popularizing the practice in the mid 19th century. Neither epidemiologists nor anesthesiologists seem to be aware that their dad had two families, but that's another issue. The…
revere | April 7, 2010If you aren't an epidemiologist of a certain age -- or even if you are -- you've probably not heard of Alice Stewart. Alice was one of England's premier epidemiologists in the mid to late 20th century, but I didn't meet her until she was in her 80s. At the time she could still bound up the two flights of stairs to my office like a teen in good shape. I'm not exaggerating. She literally took it at top speed and without becoming breathless. When she died at age 95 in 2002, obituaries frequently described her as "indefatigable," and she was certainly that. "Boundless energy" might be another…
revere | April 1, 2010The AMA just took over a journal called Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness. In fact they proudly announced they were the exclusive publisher and distributor of the journal, formerly published by Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins. I wouldn't even know about it except it was in connection with a press release of an article likely to be of interest any health care worker: ":Which Health Care Workers Were Most Affected During the Spring 2009 H1N1 Pandemic?" by Santos, Bristow and Vorenkamp of Weill-Cornell Medical School in New York. And the AMA even said it was redesigning the…