infectious disease
sporte | November 19, 2008I'm sure everyone else thinks the big news today is the announcement by the Washington State Health department requiring hospitals to report MRSA cases to the state. I think the cool news is their on-line database. We'll get to that a bit later.
What is MRSA?
MRSA stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. It's a serious pathogen that causes skin infections and greater damage if it enters the body.
The Seattle Times report - a quick summary
For the past three days the Seattle Times has been running a series on hospital-acquired cases of MRSA. According to the report, 6…
revere | November 14, 2008The idea of stopping flu "at the border" has received almost uniformly bad reviews from public health experts. Once human to human transmission starts we won't be able to stop it by closing our borders, although we likely will cause the usual unintended consequences, like preventing vital personnel and supplies from getting to where we need them. At least if we do it in the usual ham handed way this administration is famous for. We learn via CIDRAP News that federal officials are still willing to give a "risk-based border strategy" (RBBS) a go, at least in the form of an exercise. Now, at…
revere | November 13, 2008If there's an influenza pandemic in the near future all bets are off when it comes to unplanned for consequences. Well, maybe not all bets. Right now the only oral antiviral likely to have any effectiveness in a pandemic is oseltamivir (Tamiflu), although how effective and how long it would retain any effectiveness is in question. But there's a lot of it out there and it will be taken in high volume and, either in its capsule form [oseltamivir ethylester-phosphate (OE-P)] or its active form [oseltamivir carboxylate (OC)], excreted into the sewer system in massive quantities (discussed here…
revere | November 10, 2008The common simile of someone being shunned like a leper is an irony considering we still don't know how leprosy is transmitted. Leprosy (now usually referred to as Hansen's Disease) is still being diagnosed in the US, with an annual incidence of about 150 cases a year and a prevalence of about 3000 cases. Those 3000 cases under treatment are probably an underestimate, since the disease is difficult to diagnose and there is little knowledge or experience with it among health care providers.
EurekAlert notes a report to be presented at the upcoming meeting of the American Society of Tropical…
tsmith | November 6, 2008 I know I have many promised posts, and I'll get to them one day. Alas, the family and day job come before blogging, and I've been swamped with ongoing projects, grant applications, and manuscripts. I've been so busy, in fact, that revere over at Effect Measure beat me to the punch on my own upcoming paper, looking at antibodies to Streptococcus suis in Iowa swine workers. The paper is scheduled for the December issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases, but the unedited draft is already up in their ahead of print section. As revere already has a good overview of the paper, I'll just point…
revere | November 6, 2008Three years ago we discussed (we were still on blogspot then) a spreading outbreak of a mysterious disease in Sichuan (Szechuan), China. Any mysterious disease outbreak in China always raises warning flags since southern China is the incubator for influenza. The Chinese discounted the possibility of bird flu, saying it was instead a massive outbreak caused by the bacterium Streptococcus suis, Type 2, an important cause of disease in pigs. S. suis sometimes causes human menigitis or septic shock, but the final total of 215 cases and 38 deaths seemed atypical. But it turned out Chinese…
revere | November 5, 2008Some good news out of the West African country of Gambia: a stunning reduction in malaria in the last five years as a result of some fairly simple techniques:
Incidence of malaria in Gambia has plunged thanks to an array of low-cost strategies, offering the tempting vision of eliminating this disease in parts of Africa, a study published Friday by The Lancet said.
At four key monitoring sites in the small West African state, the number of malarial cases fell by between 50 percent and 82 percent between 2003 and 2007, its authors found.
The tally of deaths from malaria, recorded at two…
revere | October 27, 2008Earaches, respiratory infections and diarrhea are the bane of existence for young parents. All are potentially the result of contagious agents. The most common agent for diarrhea in infants and children is rotavirus, a double-stranded DNA virus, that CDC estimates causes 400,000 doctor visits, 200,000 emergency room visits and 55.000 to 70,000 hospitalizations each year in the under 5 year old age group. Infection produces significant immunity, and while there are seven different serotypes (A through G), 90% of infections are serotype A. In addition to diarrhea, rotavirus infections cause…
sporte | October 23, 2008Two interesting events are happening, Monday night, Oct. 27th.
At the UW: Josh Rosenau from the National Center for Science Education will be speaking at 6 pm about Creationist attacks on science education. (Josh is also a Science Blogger).
In Ravenna, at Third Place Pub: Ted White from the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute will be talking at 7 pm about infectious disease.
If you're interested hearing Josh, contact Kristy Brady, kbrady at u.washington.edu.
If you're interested in infectious disease, just show up at the pub.
It would be hard to choose which event to attend, but I won'…
revere | October 20, 2008Flu season is upon us and with it the perennial question, should I get a flu shot. In 2006 the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) extended its 2004 recommendation that children 6 months to 23 months be vaccinated (2 doses) to now include children 6 months to 59 months (<5 yyears old). I'm in a targeted group to get vaccinated (over 65 years) and my three grandchildren are in the targeted group for children (one will slide into the window during flu season). What do we know about the usefulness of getting vaccinated? It's been studied, but unfortunately the results are…
revere | October 12, 2008I am still trying to retrieve my lower jaw from the floor, where it fell after reading this:
When Indonesia's health minister stopped sending bird flu viruses to a research laboratory in the U.S. for fear Washington could use them to make biological weapons, Defense Secretary Robert Gates laughed and called it "the nuttiest thing" he'd ever heard.
Yet deep inside an 86-page supplement to United States export regulations is a single sentence that bars U.S. exports of vaccines for avian bird flu and dozens of other viruses to five countries designated "state sponsors of terrorism."
The reason:…
revere | October 9, 2008Every 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 - 2004 when a retrospective tally showed over 150 pediatric deaths associated with flu. That was more than half again as much as we thought were occurring, although data was not very good. So a new pediatric surveillance system was put in place. One of the things it is showing is that methicillin resistant…
revere | October 5, 2008An article in The Straits Times from newswire Associated Press (AP) drew my attention to a festering disagreement between proponents of an innovative global sharing initiative for influenza information and the World Health Organization, the official UN Agency that has run the global influenza surveillance system for more than a half century. The new system, The Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID), began midway through 2006 and has made rapid progress. It came into being to deal with dissatisfaction with the existing system wherein WHO allowed influenza gene sequence…
revere | October 2, 2008Scientists have been using genetic data to estimate when species first appeared for some time. The basic idea is to use differences between species and a guess as to how fast sequences change as a molecular clock, running it backward until they show the same sequence. The same trick can be done with viral genetic information. If you know the genetic sequence of a virus at one point in time and then at a later time you can make an estimate of how fast the clock is ticking. An analysis along these lines has just been done with a newly found lymph node sample from Kinshasa (Democratic Republic…
tsmith | October 1, 2008Just in time for the introduction of Autism's False Prophets by Dr. Paul Offit (the current choice for Scienceblogs' book club), Jenny McCarthy comes out with yet another interview decrying vaccines, blaming autism on the greed of pharmaceutical companies, and how her son was "healed" from autism by his diet, vitamins, and "detoxing".
Embedded video from CNN Video
I'll have a review of Dr. Offit's book up later this week. In the meantime, you can read what he says about it over at the Scienceblogs' Book Club page.
revere | September 30, 2008A fascinating paper in CDC's journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases has more details on a problem we first mentioned, on the basis of news reports, back in June. It's about a possible relationship between West Nile Virus infection and the mortgage crisis, but the paper also gives a dramatic example of how the physical, biological and social environment can affect disease patterns and risks in populations.
Infection with West Nile Virus is primarily a disease of birds. It is transmitted from bird to bird by mosquito bites and the disease is maintained by the cycling between birds and mosquitoes…
tsmith | September 4, 2008 Oh, let's go back to the start... --Coldplay, "The Scientist"
A decade ago, a paper by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues was published in The Lancet, detailing the cases of 12 children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Anecdotal reports from parents of several of these children suggested that the onset of their condition followed receipt of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Wakefield concluded following this research that the MMR vaccine was unsafe, and could play a causative role in the development of autism as well as gastrointestinal disease--the first volley in the…
ddobbs | August 27, 2008When I called out a Scientific American post yesterday about a rise in measles cases because of unvaccinated children, I forgot to include a link to a longer story on the same issue that ran in the NY Times. It's short, but worth a look as well:
Measles Cases Grow in Number, and Officials Blame Parents’ Fear of Autism - NYTimes.com
More people had measles infections in the first seven months of this year than during any comparable period since 1996, and public health officials blamed growing numbers of parents who refuse to vaccinate their children.
Many of these parents say they believe…
revere | August 19, 2008News reports that nonagenarians had robust antibodies against the 1918 flu strain were intriguing on several levels but I wasn't sure how many doors were still open to these being antibodies that developed in the years after 1918. After all, the 1918 subtype was H1N1 which circulated freely until the 1950s when it was displaced by the next pandemic strain, H2N2. H2N2 in turn was pushed aside by H3N2 in 1968. Then H1N1 returned in 1977 (some say it escaped from a Russian laboratory) and since then H3N2 and H1N1 have been co-circulating. Some years are predominantly H1N1, some predominantly…
revere | August 6, 2008A curious paper on the 1918 flu pandemic appeared this month in CDC's journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases. It seemed provocative, at least on the surface. It claimed that the conventional wisdom underlying pandemic flu preparations was wrong. It's not the flu virus we should be defending ourselves against but the common bugs of the upper respiratory tract that take advantage of new fertile ground to grow in after the flu virus invades:
Medical and scientific experts now agree that bacteria, not influenza viruses, were the greatest cause of death during the 1918 flu pandemic.
Government…