infectious disease
revere | August 3, 2008We have numerous examples of basic science that becomes unexpectedly useful and other examples of how veterinary science is useful to human health. Once you begin to understand how the world works it gives you tools that can be extended. The first stick used to knock a banana off a tree proved useful for lots of other things as well -- for example, whacking another monkey trying to poach on your personal banana patch (the Second Amendment of the Monkey Constitution gives all primates the Right to carry a club). So it's not such a big surprise that work on bird flu to save humans might have…
revere | August 2, 2008A new article in the British scientific journal, The Lancet, suggests that seasonal influenza vaccines may not be effective in preventing community acquired pneumonia in people 65 years old and older. This is the group specially targeted by CDC for vaccination each year and, not coincidentally, an age group that includes me. So I have both a scientific and personal interest in the subject. This isn't new news. We've previously discussed the evidence that shows seasonal vaccines are less effective in the elderly a number of times (see here and here) over the last few years, but the proposition…
tsmith | August 1, 2008Real life work has once again stepped in, so I won't have the Helicobacter posts up until next week. However, in the meantime, a big story has broken regarding the 2001 anthrax attacks--a potential suspect, and his suicide before he could be arrested. Will we ever actually get to the bottom of this? More discussion below...
A bit of a primer on the anthrax attacks, as it's been awhile since they were in the news. Recall that just after the chaos of 9/11 in 2001, envelopes containing anthrax were sent to a number of news organizations and senators, resulting in 22 cases of anthrax and 5…
revere | July 31, 2008There's a tremendous amount of influenza A/H5N1 ("bird flu" virus) all over southeast asia and other areas where the virus is endemic in poultry. Where is this virus, exactly? We know it's in the infected birds and in their respiratory secretions and feces. We know it occasionally infects mammals (including humans). Is it found in the environment? We know very little about this, although there is good evidence it is in water where aquatic birds like ducks spend time and likely one way the virus is spread from bird to bird. In lab experiments, the virus remains intact on inanimate surfaces for…
tsmith | July 29, 2008 Helicobacter pylori is, by bacteriological standards, a relative newcomer to medicine. Although its pathogenesis has been studied for only about the past 20 years, there are reports from as far back as the late 19th century of small, helical bacteria in the stomachs of some patients. Largely these anecdotal reports were relegated to the "hmm, interesting" file and not followed up for many years. It wasn't necessarily that others didn't follow (or care about) the research; the lack of studies on them, despite occasional reports in the literature, is probably due more to the fact that we…
tsmith | July 23, 2008Revere once again is the voice of reason regarding latest developments in Tomatogate (e.g., the ongoing outbreak of Salmonella, serovar Saintpaul). Has the source been identified?
For those of you who many not have been following this closely, the outbreak has now hit almost every state, with over 1200 confirmed cases identified since April and more than 200 hospitalizations. Though the outbreak was initially associated with tomatoes, investigators were unable to link tomatoes to the specific strain--a relatively rare one--and advice to consumers to avoid varieties of tomatoes didn't put…
revere | July 21, 2008Lots of bloggers follow HIV/AIDS, although we haven't. Maybe because it's no longer an automatic death sentence, it has fallen off the public radar screen, but not because it isn't a huge public health problem. Just how big a problem seems to be a matter of some sensitivity for the Bush administration:
Since the fall of last year, rumors have been circulating that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will release revised statistics indicating that the number of people with new HIV infections living with HIV in the United States is actually higher than previously reported. Some…
revere | July 14, 2008CDC has discovered a new way a bird can cause bird flu: its own incompetence:
A laboratory building that contains a deadly strain of avian flu and other germs is among four that lost power for more than an hour Friday when a backup generator system failed again at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Alison Young, Atlanta Journal Constitution)
The outage was due to a bird causing a Georgia Power transformer to fail.
As Tom Skinner, CDC spokesperson/flack points out, power outages happen and at a complex campus like CDC's they are unavoidable. Powered systems are not the only…
revere | June 30, 2008We started blogging on public health at the beginning of the 2004 - 2005 flu season, although we didn't concentrate on flu immediately. We intended to use the public health problem of influenza, a disease that contributes to the death of almost 40,000 US citizens a year, as a lens through which to look at public health. The interest in bird flu and pandemic flu followed naturally. The intervening years saw seasonal influenza outbreaks that were milder than previous years, but this resourceful virus made a comeback in the flu season just concluded. CDC has just summarized the 2007 - 2008 flu…
tsmith | June 28, 2008 Balance is a tricky thing to find in area, and medicine is notorious for its trade-offs. A drug that may make you well in the long run may also have side effects that make taking the medicine difficult. Even drugs that we often think of as typically innocuous, such as antibiotics, can have an enormous cost associated with their use, both at the individual and the population level. Sachs covers our love-hate relationship with antibiotics and germs in general in her book, Good Germs, Bad Germs. More after the jump...
Sachs opens her book with a dramatic example of the cost of our "war"…
tsmith | June 25, 2008I had ended up with a ratty old piece of Army gear, a space suit that belonged to nobody A little voice started speaking in my head. What are you doing here? the voice said. You're in an Ebola lab in a fucking defective space suit. I started to feel giddy. It was an intoxicating rush of fear, a sensation that all I needed to do was relax and let the fear take hold, and I could drift away on waves of panic, screaming for help.
Martha was looking into my eyes again.
The little voice went on: You're headed for the Slammer.
Richard Preston opens his new publication, a collection of essays…
revere | June 25, 2008In our earlier discussion of the science behind greenhouse gases we pointed out that all objects radiate electromagnetic radiation, doing so at a peak wavelength dependent upon their surface temperatures. That means two things. One is that things at the usual temperatures in our world are radiating EM radiation at wavelengths characteristic of the far infrared region. The other is that by measuring the intensity of infrared you can also measure the surface temperature of the body without touching it. Commercial devices are touted as highly accurate. Clinicians use them to measure body "core…
revere | June 21, 2008The beach in Indonesia may look nice, but don't let that distract you:
There is an English word for deliberately neglecting to tell people something they have asked you about. It's called lying. On that basis, the Indonesian government, primarily in the person of their Minister of Health, Siti Fadillah Supari, are liars. They have publicly declared their intention to lie by announcing they will no longer notify the world promptly about new human cases of bird flu. The acknowledged motive is to improve the reputation of Indonesia in the eyes of the world. Currently the country is the world's…
tsmith | June 20, 2008
Here in the Iowa City-Cedar Rapids corridor, the waters have been going down for several days, and people are being allowed back into their homes and businesses to begin assessing the damage and cleaning up what remains. However, while the dangers from the initial flooding are receding along with the waters, the clean-up and aftermath bring about a new set of misery.
Flooding is a potential nightmare when it comes to infectious diseases. The water can bring people returning to their flooded residences into contact with sewage, animal carcasses, and other sources of pathogens--and warm…
revere | June 9, 2008Last fall the animal slaughter giant Tyson Foods, Inc. was selling chickens with a USDA approved label, "raised without antibiotics." Some people thought that was a bit misleading insofar as Tyson routinely used ionophores in their feed designed to prevent a fungal disease in the birds. The USDA classes ionophores as antibiotics. The agency had "overlooked" the additive and when it was forcefully brought to their attention, they asked Tyson to add words to their label indicating it used no antibiotics that could cause antibiotic resistance in humans. Tyson added the words in December but…
revere | June 7, 2008Like most public health scientists I am fascinated by the complicated relationship between the environment and disease. You build a military base somewhere and sexually transmitted diseases follow. You build a dam in Egypt and urinary schistosomiasis, a chronic debilitating disease that also predisposes to bladder cancer, entrenches itself in an area because infected workers are attracted from far away endemic areas. They work and often urinate in the water, seeding the shallows of rivers and lakes with schistosome eggs. When the eggs get into the snails, they germinate, the schistosome…
revere | May 19, 2008It seems with every terrible natural disaster we have to say the same thing. Dead bodies aren't a public health risk:
Contrary to popular belief, dead bodies left from natural disasters such as the China earthquake and Myanmar cyclone are not a source of disease or a health threat to survivors, the World Health Organization said Friday.
[snip]
"There is a widespread and erroneous belief that dead bodies are a source of disease and therefore a threat to public health. This is untrue," [Arturo Pesigan, WHO's Western Pacific Region's headquarters in Manila] said.
"There has never been a…
revere | May 16, 2008At this moment I'm sitting in a Chicago O'Hare airport waiting room reading a news article on MSNBC's website telling me I am in more danger from breathing the air here in the terminal than I would be breathing the air on the airplane when it reaches cruising altitude. This was the conclusion from a just published study done by the National Institute for Occupational Study and Health (NIOSH), the federal research agency on workplace health problems, and two collaborating universities, Harvard and University of Massachusetts. NIOSH has been looking into the environment of the cabin crews, but…
tsmith | May 15, 2008I'm taking a quick hiatus from my hiatus. I mentioned that I had quite a bit of travel upcoming, and I happen to be in the midst of my first trip. However, it just so happens that where I've landed--Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia--is experiencing an outbreak of hand, foot, and mouth disease in kids, caused by Enterovirus-71. More after the jump...
You may have read about this virus in prior weeks, as China has been dealing with a major outbreak there:
The number of hand-foot-mouth disease (HFMD) cases reported in China this year rocketed to 15,799 as of Tuesday, resulting in 26 deaths, according…
revere | May 11, 2008The subject of a recent post, rabies, put us in mind of another rare, invariably fatal neurodegenerative disease, Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (CJD). There is now pretty good evidence that the outbreak of CJD in Europe since the 1990s is caused by the same agent that causes Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), also known as mad cow disease. The incriminated transmissible material is an unconventional agent, an infectious protein (now called a prion). When a prion from a BSE case in cattle is consumed it causes a disease very like CJD in humans. Technically it is called new variant CJD (nvCJD…