infectious disease
revere | May 9, 2008Last October (2007) a 46 year old Minnesota man died of rabies, the only known victim in the US last year. Rabies is a rare disease in the US because we have good veterinary services. Most animals in routine and regular contact with humans are vaccinated against the disease. But bats have become a significant wild animal reservoir and the Minnesota case was a bat case:
Once rabies was suspected, the patient's family was interviewed on October 16 for a history of potential exposure. According to his family, the patient had handled a bat with his bare hands in a semi-open cabin porch in north-…
revere | May 3, 2008In other parts of the world measles is a major killer of children and infants. In my own youth measles was a very troublesome childhood disease that was a major cause of morbidity in the US, with 3 to 4 million cases a year. One in 250 died, almost 50,000 a year were hospitalized and 1000 were left with long term disability. Then, in 1963, measles vaccination was introduced. Since 1997 there have been less than 150 cases a year, mostly less than 100.
Except this year:
However, during January 1--April 25, 2008, a total of 64 confirmed measles cases were preliminarily reported to CDC, the most…
revere | April 24, 2008The art professor is finally cleared but a distinguished biologist was still punished by a ridiculous, mindless, cruel and utterly reckless use of raw power by the Bush administration:
A federal judge dismissed criminal indictments on Monday against an art professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo who was charged four years ago with mail and wire fraud after receiving bacteria through the mail that he said he planned to use in his art projects.
Judge Richard J. Arcara of the U.S. District Court in Buffalo ruled that the indictment against the professor, Steven J. Kurtz, was "…
revere | April 24, 2008In the previous two posts (here and here) we laid out some new results that dissect what might be happening at the molecular level when a patient infected with SARS or bird flu descends into Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) from Acute Lung Injury (ALI) in a just published paper in the journal Cell (Imai et al., "Identification of Oxidative Stress and Toll-like Receptor 4 Signaling as a Key Pathway of Acute Lung Injury", Cell, Vol 133, 235-249, 18 April 2008). We have already discussed their experiments showing that TLR4, a receptor that is part of the innate immune system, was…
revere | April 23, 2008In our previous post we set the stage for discussing the results of a significant new paper by Imai et al. and colleagues on the mechanism of lung damage from diverse pathogens, including SARS, bird flu H5N1, 1918 H1N1 flu, inhalational anthrax and Monkeypox. If this work is verified it is a major step forward in our understanding of how the devastating consequences of Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) and Acute Lung Injury (ALI) come about and may well provide clues about how to treat what is still an essentially untreatable and catastrophic medical condition.
There are two main…
revere | April 22, 2008The cells of your body don't just sit there, unmindful of what is going on around them. They have to respond to things, even cooperate with other cells to get things done for the common good. Humans do the same thing. We've developed a system of signaling to each other using an intricate vocal system, a complex grammar, ears, eyes and smell detecting systems. It's a very complicated package with a lot of moving parts. It's not so surprising, then, that cells also have complex signaling systems with a lot of parts that they use to respond to their environment. Just as we sometimes make a…
revere | April 21, 2008There's an epidemic of a viral disease in Florida, although you wouldn't know it unless you were a vegetable or a farmer:
In recent years, the number of whitefly-transmitted viruses in cucurbit fields, home to crops like cucumbers, squashes, pumpkins, melons and watermelons, has increased to almost epidemic proportions in Florida.
Researchers led by plant pathologists Scott Adkins and Bill Turechek at the ARS Subtropical Plant Pathology Research Unit in Fort Pierce, Fla., are dealing with a "triple threat" to cucurbits: three major viruses, all transmitted by silverleaf whitefly, Bemisia…
revere | April 20, 2008The National Post recently had an interesting article on "disease mongering," an article I largely agreed with. The major point was that fostering a fear of "germs," promoting the idea that following medical advice, especially advice involving "taking your pills," and the very definition of who is diseased and who is not has a suspiciously commercial aspect.
Consider the marketing of hand sanitizers, a subject of interest to the flu obsessed:
The slogan of Purell -- a hand sanitizer manufactured by Pfizer -- is "Imagine a Touchable World." It's hard to miss the implication that the world in…
tsmith | April 16, 2008This is the sixth of 6 guest posts on infection and chronic disease.
By Courtney Cook
Kidney stone disease affects approximately 5% of Americans. While several risk factors are well-established, including genetic predisposition, metabolic diseases, lifestyle, and diet, there are still questions over the actual mechanism of calcium stone formation. Many cases do not have any kind of underlying disorder and therefore it is difficult to know how to treat these patients to prevent further stone formation.
This seemed to change when, in 1998, Kajandar and Ciftcioglu isolated an unusual…
tsmith | April 16, 2008 This is the fifth of 6 guest posts on infection and chronic disease.
By Whitney Baker
My previous blog post examined the idea of an infectious etiology for obesity by a group of possible infectious agents. While these pathogens have been associated with obesity in humans or animals, their causative role in human obesity has not yet been established. So for this round, I thought I'd focus in on the bug showing the most evidence for human obesity: Adenovirus-36.
(More after the jump...)
First, a little background on Adenovirus [1]... it most commonly elicits respiratory illness;…
tsmith | April 15, 2008This is the fourth of 6 guest posts on infection and chronic disease.
By Ousmane Diallo
Last week in class we tackled an interesting topic, the role of Mycobacterium Avium Paratuberculosis (MAP) in the genesis of Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC). The authors Saleh E. Naser (oops the name means in Arabic 'The virtuous helper') and colleagues detected using Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) techniques in a lab based case controls study "viable MAP in peripheral blood in higher proportion of individuals with Crohn than controls". Not surprising after all since the pathology of…
tsmith | April 14, 2008 This is the first of 6 guest posts on infectious causes of chronic disease.
By David Massaquoi
Is this the Beginning of the end of antibiotic resistant problem or just another scientific false hope of eradicating microorganisms that have co-existed with humans for millions of years? In the days before antibiotics, some researchers saw bacteriophages, viruses that can seek out and destroy bacteria, as a promising candidate for fighting infections. Now, as more organisms develop resistance to existing antibiotics, phage research is finding new favor.
(More after the jump...)
At the Society…
revere | April 12, 2008If you want to know the single most important class of public health interventions with respect to infectious diseases in the 20th century it wasn't vaccines but provision of clean water and food supplies. But vaccines may be next. With major waterborne diseases like typhoid and cholera under control, the next big category of infectious diseases was the major childhood ailments: measles, German measles (aka rubella), mumps, chickenpox, polio, diphtheria, whooping cough. Some were just memories by the time I came along (diphtheria, pertussis), one was conquered in my younger years, the others…
tsmith | April 11, 2008 I don't understand how some segments of the population believe that "natural" always equates to "better." I certainly get the appeal of being close to nature; the romanticism of living simply and from the earth. I grew up and live currently in a rural area where people are close to animals and the land. But I also know that some of the most deadly poisons in the world are "natural." I know that, while most microbes out there are harmless, and many are even helpful, there are many that can make you violently ill as well. After all, tetanus, anthrax, and Ebola are all "natural."…
tsmith | April 10, 2008 It's hard to believe that it's been 2 years since Iowa's 2006 mumps outbreak (more background and details on that here, here, here, and here).
By the time the outbreak ended, 8 states had been heavily affected (and 45 reported at least one case), with a total of 6584 cases of mumps and 85 hospitalizations reported by the end of 2006. All told, this was the largest outbreak of the virus in approximately 20 years, after a 1986-1990 outbreak resulted in a change in the recommended vaccine schedule (adding a booster shot of MMR).
A paper out in today's New England Journal analyzes the…
tsmith | April 8, 2008I spent all day yesterday in Madison, Wisconsin, at a conference on Landscape Ecology and infectious disease. I'll discuss a few of the talks and issues below, but I wanted to start out with a bit of an introduction and explain just what landscape ecology (LE) is.
The introductory talk, which covered this ground, was presented by Dr. Michael Wimberly of South Dakota State University. He noted that defining LE wasn't an easy task. At its most basic, of course, it's a field looking at ecology from a landscape perspective--taking a big picture view, if you will. However, what one means by a…
revere | April 7, 2008To everything there is a season, including flu. We are now emerging from the other end of one of the more difficult flu seasons in recent years, although by no means out of the ordinary for the genre. Last time we commented, almost every state was experiencing widespread flu activity by the end of March only seven states reported widespread activity according to CDC:
States that were still reporting widespread flu the week of Mar 22 through 29 were Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Vermont. Regional flu activity was reported in 27 states and local activity…
tsmith | April 3, 2008Early this week, grant application; yesterday and today, IRB and IACUC for another project. But once again, fellow Sbers are keeping me busy reading about stories I'd like to be writing on; see yet again Mike on E. coli O157:H7--everything old is new again; Ed on a new study showing yet again how amazing bacteria are; and DrugMonkey discussing heroin addiction as a family legacy, and notes that this sad story again shows that Narcan saves lives.
revere | April 3, 2008The index case was a 5 year old Miniature Schnauzer with 5 days of nasal discharge and sneezing. The dog recovered but the next case, a 3 year old Cocker Spaniel wasn't so lucky, nor were the 2 Korean hunting dogs (Jindos) or a 3 year old Yorkshire terrier. Then 13 dogs in a shelter started to show signs of nasal discharge, cough and high fever. Antibody studies showed that they had all been suffering from influenza infection, subtype H3N2. These cases happened in the spring and summer of 2007 (NB: this is not flu season). H3N2 is the most common subtype involved in human seasonal influenza.…
tsmith | April 2, 2008Sent off yet another grant, so I'm still (once again) catching up on everything. Meanwhile, some posts for you to check out:
I thought I was self-sacrificing by submitting myself to Kentucky's creation museum for your amusement. Guess I could have stayed home and wasted 2 1/2 hours of my life as Drek did, live-blogging an anti-vaccine movie he was challenged to watch.
Or, if you've had it with vaccine naysayers (and oh look, CNN gave more space to Jenny McCarthy to gush about how chelation and diet allowed her son to recover from autism), head over to Mike's place for a refreshing post on…