infectious disease
revere | April 1, 2008If you were infected with seasonal influenza virus, how long before you start having symptoms (the incubation period)? How about how long before you start shedding virus so that you can infect others (the latent period)? When are you most infectious? Expert opinion. based on experience and the scientific literature, says that the incubation period is about 2 days but you might start shedding virus after only a day, i.e., before you get any symptoms. You are most infectious on day 2 of your illness. But will everyone who is infected really "come down with" the flu? We know that a good…
tsmith | March 25, 20081980 marked a milestone in infectious disease epidemiology: the World Health Organization declared the smallpox virus eradicated in the wild. However, while smallpox currently exists only in frozen stocks, poxviruses as a class certainly haven't disappeared. A related virus, monkeypox, regularly causes illness in Africa, and even spread half a world away in the American midwest.
Additionally, Africa isn't the only area with endemic poxvirus infections. Brazil has been dealing with their own poxvirus outbreak, and poxviruses have popped up in Europe as well. More on both of those after…
tsmith | March 24, 2008In this NY Times article on parents who are opting out of vaccinations, one mom notes her objections:
"I refuse to sacrifice my children for the greater good," said Sybil Carlson, whose 6-year-old son goes to school with several of the children hit by the measles outbreak [in San Diego]. The boy is immunized against some diseases but not measles, Ms. Carlson said, while his 3-year-old brother has had just one shot, protecting him against meningitis.
"When I began to read about vaccines and how they work," she said, "I saw medical studies, not given to use by the mainstream media, connecting…
tsmith | March 24, 2008 As I mentioned Friday, the good folks from Google were part of the crowd at this year's ICEID. This included a talk by Larry Brilliant, described on his wikipedia page as "...medical doctor, epidemiologist, technologist, author and philanthropist, and the director of Google's philanthropic arm Google.org." His talk discussed not only stopping outbreaks in their tracks--as current outbreak investigations seek to do, and Brilliant himself as worked on, as part of his background in vaccination campaigns for polio and smallpox--but to pay attention to "the left of the epidemic curve" as part…
revere | March 24, 2008If you want to know what advances in public health and medicine in the last 150 years have done the most for the overall health of the community a major contender for the top spot would have to be the provision of safe and abundant drinking water. The first piped water supplies for major American cities date to shortly before the Civil War (mid nineteenth century) and disinfection with chlorine didn't start until the end of the first decade of the 20th century. The results for major waterborne infectious diseases like typhoid fever and various maladies just categorized as diarrhea and…
revere | March 23, 2008My children are no longer young. In fact they are old enough to have children of their own and when my daughter asked me if I thought her then 6 month old should get a flu shot I didn't hesitate: Absolutely, I said. And he did. Two of them, the required number. That was just before the flu season, which he has so far weathered just fine. Sadly that's not true for all children. The two most vulnerable groups for dying from influenza are children under 5 and the elderly (me). I got flu shots, too, although the evidence it will help me is not as good as the evidence my little grandson will be…
tsmith | March 21, 2008If one over-arching theme came out of this conference, it was the concept noted in the title: "one medicine, one health." In one of the early lectures, a speaker polled the audience to find out how many attending were veterinarians, and how many worked in human health. The room was divided pretty evenly, which attests to the importance of animals in the emergence of new diseases in humans. Regular readers, of course, will know that these diseases that cross species boundaries--zoonoses--make a large proportion of the emerging diseases we see (~75% by several estimates). Early Monday…
revere | March 20, 2008I eat a lot of salad. Not because I think they are healthy but because I like salads. When I go to lunch at the hospital cafeteria I usually eat from the salad bar, and believe me, that's not a pro-health measure. You'd know what I mean if you saw the salad bar. But green leafies are supposed to be good for us, too, so that's a bonus. But a new study from CDC suggests that they are not quite as healthy as they once were:
Over the past 35 years the proportion of foodborne outbreaks linked to the consumption of leafy green vegetables has substantially increased and that increase can not be…
tsmith | March 19, 2008
Did Yersinia pestis really cause Black Plague? Part 1: Objections to Y. pestis causation
Did Yersinia pestis really cause Black Plague? Part 2: Examination of the criticisms
Did Yersinia pestis really cause Black Plague? Part 3: Paleomicrobiology and the detection of Y. pestis in corpses
Did Yersinia pestis really cause Black Plague? Part 4: Plague in modern times
Did Yersinia pestis really cause Black Plague? Part 5: Nail in the coffin
revere | March 13, 2008Influenza is spread person to person but there are viruses that depend upon another intermediate host to travel from host to host. Many of these viral diseases are found in tropical climes, although they used to be common in temperate regions. The US had quite a lot of malaria and yellow fever in the 18th and 19th centuries. These are both mosquito-borne diseases. They were eliminated by eliminating the mosquito species that carried them. Lately the US has had a resurgence of encephalitis viruses, especially West Nile and Eastern Equine Encephalitis. Recently a new mosquito-borne viral…
tsmith | March 11, 2008 After Karl Rove's appearance here Sunday night, Laurie Garrett's talk on Monday was downright uneventful--despite a talk which included discussion of AIDS, abortion, and welfare, among other things.
Garrett, for anyone who may be unfamiliar, is currently a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations. She's the author of The Coming Plague and Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health. She's reported on infectious disease and global health for almost 30 years, writing for a variety of publications in addition to her own books. Her talk last night…
revere | March 10, 2008I've said it before and I'll say it again. If you occupy a country you also assume responsibility for its public health. That's both international law and it's the right thing to do. In Iraq we haven't done that. So while I am about to say it once more, after I've said it I have something else to say, too, something that underscores my point in triplicate.
But first the main point:.
It is the kind of news that everybody had been dreading. An outbreak of cholera in Iraq, which started in two Northern provinces, has already reached Baghdad and has become Iraq's biggest cholera outbreak in…
revere | March 9, 2008
(Source unknown)
It's a lousy disease, but Radio New Zealand's headline has to be one of the more amusing headlines I've seen in ages: "Listeria sandwiches on sale at hospital cafe":
Listeria has been found in packaged sandwiches sold by a cafe at Middlemore Hospital, Auckland.
Food contractors to Counties Manukau District Health Board, Spotless Services, informed the DHB of the situation on Friday.
The contamination was found in Naturezone Thai chicken sandwiches, sold by the Aviary Cafe on Monday, 3 March. (Radio New Zealand)
So what's this Listeria stuff about, anyway? This material is…
tsmith | March 7, 2008It's just not been Vegas' week. First a ricin-laced hotel room, then a clinic-associated outbreak of hepatitis C virus (and potentially hepatitis B and HIV) that could become enormous. Meanwhile, an outbreak of hepatitis E is raging in Uganda. So what are these virues, and how in the world could a medical catastrophe of this magnitude happen in the U.S.? More after the jump...
The group of hepatitis viruses (A, B, C, D, E, and G) are related in name only. They've all been either associated with or found to cause hepatitis--inflammation of the liver. This can be acute inflammation (short…
revere | March 5, 2008Things are changing. And here's some evidence. This is a great story (hat tip Boingboing). It's about a new test for African sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis), a disease carried by the tse-tse fly that afflicts an estimated 66 million people in 36 countries. Not a nice disease:
At first, the main clinical signs of human trypanosomiasis are high fever, weakness and headache, joint pains and pruritus (itching). Gradually, the immune defence mechanisms and the patient's resistance are exhausted. As the parasite develops in the lymph and blood of the patient, the initial symptoms become more…
revere | March 3, 2008Highly pathogenic variant of avian influenza A of the subtype H5N1 is here to stay, at least in the world's poultry population. While it's around it continues to cause sporadic but deadly human infections, some 369 of them of whom 234 have died (official WHO figures as of 28 February 2008). So this virus can infect humans and make them seriously or fatally ill. There is truly massive exposure because people live in close contact with infected domestic poultry in many countries. And the human population has not seen this subtype of virus before so there is little natural immunity. All that's…
revere | February 29, 2008All I can say is that it's a good thing Canadian Press's Helen Branswell isn't a blogger or she'd put all the rest of us flu bloggers out of business. She is the professional flu reporter's professional (one of the best of the flu reporters once described a story of hers to me as "annoyingly good"). Being in Canada she also has more of an international perspective, as in a recent story about differences between seasonal flu in the US and Canada this year, a story that would have escaped the notice of US based reporters (hat tip to crof):
Maps generated by the Public Health Agency of Canada…
tsmith | February 27, 2008This is the sixth of 6 guest posts on infectious causes of chronic disease.
By Ousmane Diallo
I was dumbfounded when I read this news article relating HPV to the increase of lip and oral cancers because of oral sex.
It reminded me my younger years, as a med student, debating with my professor of psychology the fundamentals of Freudian psychoanalysis, the Id, the Ego and the Super-ego. It was a rather philosophical debate more than anything else, a combination of religious and cultural reciprocal statements of beliefs. At that time, we were exposed to the new French "sexual education"…
tsmith | February 27, 2008This is the fifth of 6 guest posts on infectious causes of chronic disease.
By Rachel Kirby
There are about 500,000 (or approx 1 in 544 people) in the United States who suffer from Crohn's disease, and is most prevalent in both men and women between the ages of 20-30. Crohn's Disease is an autoimmune disease which causes a chronic inflammation of the digestive tract. It can affect the entire digestive tract but is most prevalent in the lower small intestine and in the ileum. It will cause swelling, causing pain and diarrhea.
More after the jump...
Though a lot is known about the disease;…
tsmith | February 26, 2008This is the third of 6 guest posts on infectious causes of chronic disease.
By Whitney Baker
While working out at the gym last night, I was perusing the latest SHAPE magazine to help pass the time. In it, I read a small article about researchers finding an association between Adenovirus-36 and human obesity. Since I am in the infectious disease field, I was already aware of this proposed link- an infectious cause (or contributor) for obesity. But for the millions of health-conscious readers hearing of this for the first time, what would they make of it? Would they have visions of…