infectious disease
tsmith | August 22, 2007Seems like just yesterday that I was watching (from afar) Ewen head off to grad school in journalism. Well, now he's making a splash in the latest issue of Nature, with a story on the potential for a dengue vaccine, and why there may be more of a market for it currently--largely because it's becoming a disease of the wealthy. Check out his Nature article, and read more over at Complex Medium.
revere | August 22, 2007[Given our posts (here, here) on the particularly severe flu season in Australia, we thought it useful to remind ourselves that a bad flu season can be really bad -- worse than the 1918 pandemic in some locations. Here is a post we did back in April 2006 about an interesting paper (see link in post) by Cecile Viboud and her colleagues at NIH that looks at historical records on flu mortality. Flu is a bad disease, pandemic strain or not. Why some flu is worse than others we don't know.]
Originally posted Friday, April 7, 2006:
We talk frequently about the H5N1 virus mutating to a form…
revere | August 20, 2007As promised, here is a second post on the situation in Australia, currently struggling through a very bad flu season. In the first post I quoted the late epidemiologist Irving Selikoff who referred to statistics as "people with the tears wiped away." Statistical summaries are the stock in trade of the public health profession but it is important to keep reminding ourselves of the ocean of tears we wipe away when we quote them.
So it's back to Australia:
He kissed her goodnight and she softly whispered: "I love you" so as not to wake their two young sons, fast asleep in her arms.
It was the…
revere | August 20, 2007This is about the particularly severe flu season being endured by our friends in Australia. Southern hemisphere, so the flu season is in full swing there, the reverse of the northern hemisphere. But "full swing" doesn't quite describe it, so I'm going to do this one in two parts ((all links from Flu Wiki Front Page, news for August 18). The great epidemiologist Irving Selikoff once described statistics as people with the tears wiped away. So the first post today will be statistics, or the equivalent, without the tears . Later today I'll do the other part:
As the flu epidemic continues to…
revere | August 17, 2007I'm not sure which is worse. Pandemic flu preparation which puts most of its eggs (pathogen-free, of course) in the vaccine basket or the one that plans to distribute the non-existent vaccine in a way that it misses the most needy and vulnerable. I guess it's obvious that if the first is bad, the second is very bad so it's worse, but it also a warning that other kinds of preparation may also be seriously flawed from the equity point of view. I know many of you don't care about these folks -- undocumented immigrants, substance users, the homeless, homebound elderly, and minorities. Many…
revere | August 14, 2007We write so much here about influenza A virus that you might get the idea it is an especially clever virus, always changing genetically in ways that allow it to perform new and nastier tricks. But other viruses are capable of doing the same thing, and one of them West Nile Virus (WNV), is currently becoming a a more persistent and serious public health hazard, all because of a clever little genetic trick it learned in the last decade or so.
WNV has been around longer than that, although we didn't have a problem with it in North America until 1999, when this mosquito-borne disease showed up,…
revere | August 10, 2007We've written a lot about US high containment laboratories for potential biowarfare agents and extremely dangerous pathogens for which there is no vaccine or cure. But the UK likes to build these labs, too. In fact they have five of them. Where? Nah, nah. The UK's Health and Safety Executive is not gonna tell you. The terrorists might find out, and I'm sure there's no way they could obtain that information -- unless of course, they read the UK's TimesOnLine, which says they "include the Health Protection Agency Centre for Infections at Colin-dale, northwest London, the Centre for Emergency…
revere | July 31, 2007It's mid summer, so it's time to drag out what we say each summer about spraying for West Nile Virus. First, why we have to say it:
Sacramento County authorities plan to launch a mass aerial-spraying campaign to combat the West Nile virus on Monday.
Mosquito control officials will spray insecticide over 55,000 acres of urban neighborhoods north of the American River. About 375,000 people live in the area.
Last week, county health officials announced that two people have contracted the virus, and West Nile had reached an epidemic rate in the region's mosquitoes.
"We are seeing infected…
revere | July 31, 2007One reason Helen Branswell is such a good flu reporter is she has the best contacts. Of course this is a chicken-and-egg proposition, because she has the best contacts because she is the best flu reporter. She gets it right and she explains it the way it was told to her. [By the way, I am not on her payroll. In fact she is uncomfortable about being praised. But I don't do it for her sake. She doesn't need it anyway. My motive is to show other reporters what good flu reporting is and encourage them to do the same. And there are a number of other excellent reporters, which I try to acknowledge…
tsmith | July 27, 2007XDR-TB has been in the news quite a bit lately, largely thanks to Andrew Speaker's notoriety. Even though his TB was later re-classified as "just" multi-drug resistant (MDR-TB) instead of the initial extremely drug resistant (XDR) type, it did serve to raise awareness about the issues public health authorities face when dealing with something like tuberculosis--and where the gaps are in the control of its spread. (Indeed, a breaking story out of Taiwan shows how difficult it can be to enforce a travel ban).
However, while XDR-TB is rather new on the radar of the general public (and even…
revere | July 23, 2007Bird flu isn't the only virus dangerous to humans that finds its primary home in birds. West Nile Virus (WNV) and other arbovirus infections do, too. WNV is now on the rise in California and seems worse than last year:
There were 18 new human cases of West Nile virus reported this week by the California Department of Public Health, double the number counted since the first case of the year was confirmed on June 20. That brings the state total to 27, and puts the California count slightly ahead of 2005, when the virus sickened 935 and killed 19. Last year, there were only 292 cases statewide…
tsmith | July 18, 2007The strange and tragic case of the Tripoli Six, a group of 5 Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor working in Tripoli, Libya, is finally drawing to a close. The six health workers had been found guilty of infecting up to 400 children in the hospital where they worked with HIV, and had previously been sentenced to death--even though the science had shown that the epidemic began prior to the arrival of the workers. This saga has been dragging on for the better part of a decade (Declan Butler at Nature has a very nice story here discussing the various twists and turns along the way), but…
tsmith | July 9, 2007Last year, Seed magazine and Scienceblogs noted the 25th anniversary of the recognition of AIDS. You'd think that in all that time, especially with the identification of HIV and all the public education campaigns in the 1980s, people would realize by now that HIV isn't spread by casual contact. You can't get it by sharing drinking glasses, by coughing and sneezing around others, by being in the same swimming pool. However, the message still hasn't gotten out in some areas, it would seem, as a two-year old HIV+ boy was restricted from using the pool and showers at an Alabama campground.…
tsmith | July 9, 2007I rarely watch TV, and probably the last time I was a regular viewer of any evening news program was in graduate school, pre-kids. However, I've peripherally followed the Katie Couric drama, her move from the Today show to CBS Evening News, and her subsequent disappointing ratings. I've had a mixed opinion of her for awhile; I think her work to raise colorectal cancer awareness has been a huge positive, but she screws up my opinion of her with things like her "no atheists in foxholes" comment. So I wasn't completely surprised, but am still a bit confused, over her new target: sputum.…
tsmith | July 4, 2007I know many of the HIV threads here get very tedious and repetitive, but occasionally interesting things come out of them. Believe it or not, I've learned a lot about HIV denial over the past year and a half or so. I've long been familiar with Duesberg's objections, but it wasn't until more recently that I realized there still were active denial groups around, and even wholesale germ theory deniers. So to me, the threads aren't all wasted.
Anyway, in one of the ongoing threads, there was discussion of one commenter's "natural" remedies, and her claim that "Germs cannot get a strong-hold in…
tsmith | July 3, 2007A few other topics readers here may appreciate:
First and foremost, this week's Grand Rounds can be found over at Over my med body!. Next week, however, it will be hosted right here at Aetiology for the second time, so send your posts along to me (aetiology AT gmail DOT com), preferably by Sunday evening.
Pediatric Grand Rounds also had a new edition over the weekend, which can be found over at Shinga's Breath Spa for Kids.
National Geographic's July cover story is on malaria--a really good read. (via Panda's Thumb).
Matt Nisbet was late to the scientists and journalists conversation. He…
tsmith | July 2, 2007Over at Uncommon Descent, the blog of William Dembski and friends, a contributor has a post up discussing Peter Duesberg's aneuploidy hypothesis for cancer (which Orac discussed here for more background). The post itself is a bit confusing--it's titled "When Darwinism Hurts," and according to the author's clarification, it's about "Darwinism" leading us down the wrong path as far as cancer research goes. (Though whether cancer would be due to mutations in specific genes or in chromosomes, it's still an evolutionary process, but I digress...) To me, anyway, the more interesting portion was…
tsmith | June 26, 2007 Women do some rather insane things to achieve modern standards of beauty. We wear shoes that do terrible things to our feet. We don bras that dig into our chest and push our breasts into strange conformations. We slide on pantyhose to firm our stomachs, makeup to hide our imperfections, and hair dye to diminish our grays. And we have this strange habit* of yanking other body hair out from the root, be it our eyebrows, underarms, legs, or pubic hair.
Yes, I do have a point here (besides making men squirm). The August issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases has a forthcoming article…
tsmith | June 22, 2007While I was out last week, I completely missed this Science article all about HIV denial and the AidsTruth.org website, and features frequent commenter Richard Jeffreys:
For 20 years, a small but vocal group of AIDS "dissenters" has attracted international attention by questioning whether HIV causes the disease. Many AIDS researchers from the outset thought it best to ignore these challenges. But last year, another small and equally vocal group decided to counter the dissenters--whom they call "denialists"--with a feisty Web site, AIDSTruth.org. It has started to attract international…
tsmith | June 13, 2007 Over at The Examining Room of Dr. Charles, the good doc brings up another instance of quackery from an unexpected source: Dr. Henry Heimlich, originator of the Heimlich maneuver for choking. While that procedure has clearly saved many lives, Dr. Heimlich doesn't stop there--he advocates using his maneuver for drowning victims and asthmatics, neither of which have been scientifically proven (and indeed, major medical associations have spoken out against them). Dr. Charles also reveals that Heimlich also carries out other questionable research, including deliberately infecting HIV+…