infectious disease
revere | January 20, 2007Reading the comments here can be both exhilarating and dismaying. The peevishness I see about WHO falls into the dismaying category. People who follow bird flu have a tendency to get crotchety with WHO over some of its more flagrant gaffes and obvious attempts at spinning, although which way the spin goes isn't always clear. But WHO does a lot with a little, a budget less than that of some major American hospitals. We've been (we think appropriately) critical of WHO here, but it is an agency that also has done, and continues to do, a powerful amount of good in this world. The recent…
tsmith | January 16, 2007Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is one of those nebulous diseases that's really more of a diagnosis of exclusion than anything else. As the name suggests, it's characterized by overwhelming fatigue--often so much so that patients can barely get out of bed--as well as a number of non-specific symptoms, including weakness, muscle pain, and insomnia. Currently, there is no diagnostic test for the disease, and the cause(s) is (are) unknown. Indeed, it should be noted that there's disagreement over even the most basic assumption that such a thing as CFS exists, or whether it's merely…
tsmith | January 11, 2007In yesterday's post regarding the current outbreak of Rift Valley Fever in Kenya, I noted:
...while there's little people in the area can do about periodic flooding, scientists are actively examining the relationship between weather and RVF outbreaks. This hopefully will prove useful to predict--and potentially ward off--future disease outbreaks via animal vaccination.
Little did I know that this outbreak had already been predicted by scientists working in this area--back in September. More after the jump...
The deaths from Rift Valley fever could have been avoided if Kenya had heeded a…
tsmith | January 10, 2007 When it comes to hemorrhagic fevers, Ebola and Marburg tend to get the lions' share of the press. Both are highly fatal, both can cause people to die in excruciating ways, and both have come to represent somewhat our fear of and fascination with emerging exotic diseases. However, as I've pointed out previously, as far as actual fatalities--or even illnesses go--both viruses are small potatoes. Other viruses that can also have hemorrhagic manifestations--including dengue and yellow fever--are much more common. One of these other viruses that frequently causes hemorrhagic fever is Rift…
tsmith | January 9, 2007This is bizarre....White rats pop up in toilets
Residents of a neighborhood next to the University of Arizona say small, live white rats have been swimming through sewer pipes and into their toilets.
Making it from the sewer into someone's toilet is a difficult trip. A 4-inch pipe runs from the house to a sewer main. And there's no "trap door" or other barrier in place. If the lines are running, the rats have to hold their breath and swim uphill against the water current.
The best part of the article:
The Pima County Health Department said it's best not to handle or touch a toilet-surfing rat…
tsmith | January 8, 2007When people think of Iowa, many of them think of our agriculture (for good reasons). Obviously, it's big business here. We ranked first in the nation in production of corn, soybeans, eggs, and pork in 2005. Indeed, population-wise, hogs here outnumber humans by more than 5 to 1. This is one reason research at our center focuses on zoonotic disease (diseases which can be transferred between animal species), and specifically, diseases of domesticated animals. A story in the news today shows one reason why we study what we do:
Iowa State health officials say someone in eastern Iowa has…
revere | January 1, 2007The Reveres get a lot of emails from folks who think their issue is worthy of mention on Effect Measure. For the most part, they are right, and the only reason for not mentioning them is the time and attention span of The Reveres. One of the privileges of blogging is the blogger gets to set the agenda. Periodically I get emails from someone who feels very passionately about the harm being done to military personnel by mandatory anthrax vaccination. I've even blogged about it on occasion (on the old site, here, here, here and here), and I think there are some serious public health issues…
revere | December 28, 2006I'm not sure why I'm bothering to say this -- again -- but it always seems to be necessary. The horrific oil pipeline explosion in Nigeria that took over 260 lives is now being treated as a possible focus of epidemic disease because of the decaying bodies. Dead bodies in mass casualties do not cause disease, no matter how many times we see reports like this:
Nigerian health officials are disinfecting the site of an oil pipeline explosion that killed more than 260 people and injured dozens more.
Fumigation work began on Tuesday night, according to health officials.
"Our concern is to prevent…
revere | December 25, 2006Measles is now uncommon in the US, thanks to vaccination. Last year there were only 66 cases. But half of them came from a single, unvaccinated 17 year old who traveled to Romania on a church mission that visited an orphanage. The next day she returned to the US and attended a gathering of other church members, 33 from Indiana and one from Illinois. Three wound up in the hospital.
Measles vaccination is not 100% effective but it is estimated to be over 90% in pre-school and school aged children. In this instance, 32 of the 34 cases were unvaccinated:
"The outbreak occurred because measles was…
tsmith | December 21, 2006Ho ho ho, and welcome to the early Christmas edition of Animalcules. Sit back, grab some hot cocoa, and click below to open your Christmas gift of some of the most interesting microbiology-themed blog posts over the past month.
To start us off with, in a new blog to me (the Cornell Mushroom blog), we learn how a fungus assists in the transmission of a nematode from the environment to the host--in this case, cattle. It's a fascinating example of commensalism.
From the same blog comes another post on Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (or Bd), a fungus which is a cause of skin infections in…
tsmith | December 19, 2006 Libya to execute HIV medics
(Previous posts on the topic)
A court convicted five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor Tuesday of deliberately infecting 400 children with HIV and sentenced them to death, despite scientific evidence the youngsters had the virus before the medical workers came to Libya.
The United States and Europe reacted with outrage to the verdict, which prolongs a case that has hurt Libya's ties to the West. The six co-defendants have already served seven years in jail.
The sentence brought cheers in Libya, where there is widespread public anger over the infections.…
tsmith | December 14, 2006Today's New England Journal of Medicine has an article (free access) with more information on the Tripoli Six, who are still awaiting their December 19th verdict.
tsmith | December 13, 2006If the last circumcision post caused a lot of heat, this news is likely to cause even more of an uproar worldwide. From NBC News comes word that the NIH will be announcing shortly that they're stopping two trials looking at circumcision and HIV in Africa, because the intervention group (those who were circumcised) show far less HIV infections than the uncircumcised men:
NBC News has learned that the National Institutes of Health will announce at Noon ET Wednesday that two clinical trials in Africa have been stopped because an independent monitoring board determined the treatment was so…
tsmith | December 12, 2006 I've written previously about how it's a bad idea to import exotic pets, after "exotic" African species of small animals were imported into the United States and housed alongside prairie dogs that were also to be sold as pets. The African animals brought along with them their own diseases, including monkeypox, which then spread to the prairie dogs and onto humans, causing at least 80 cases of monkeypox in the U.S.
Think this is a rare event, unlikely to re-occur? Think again. The Baltimore Sun has a story on how "exotic" pets like these African rodents enter the U.S. by the millions…
revere | December 9, 2006You may think bird flu is a disaster still waiting to happen, but in one way it is a disaster that already happened. One of the shoes dropped between October 2005 and May 2006 when the H5N1 subtyupe of highly pathogenic avian influnza spread to the poultry flocks of 50 countries. Since 2003 the outbreak has resulted in the slaughter of some 240 million birds. In 2005 it burst out of Asia and spread into Europe, the Middle East and Africa. So even without the "other shoe" dropping -- a change in the virus to allow easy transmissibility from human to human -- the damage already done is immense…
tsmith | December 8, 2006As I've been busy this week, other Sciencebloggers (with Revere leading the fray and more posts here) have updated everyone on the newest developments in the case of the Tripoli Six (previous update here), the six medical workers on trial for their lives in Libya, accused of spreading HIV to more than 400 children in a hospital there. Nature's Declan Bulter broke news on a new Nature paper showing, using molecular phylogenetics, that the strains of HIV which infected the children were already circulating in the hospital prior to the medics' arrival--again, showing that these workers are…
revere | December 7, 2006There is a new paper in the Journal of Immunology I found more than a little disconcerting. University of Rochester scientists have found that the cells in the immune system responsible for antibody production, the B-cells, also express high levels of the enzyme cyclooxygenase-2 (Cox-2). Overproduction of Cox-2 can cause pain and fever, which frequently accompany reaction to infection. The problem is that treatment of B-cells with inhibitors of the enzyme (Cox-2 inhibitors) also markedly affected the ability of the B-cell to produce antibody. What are some Cox-2 inhibitors? Aspirin, Ibuprofen…
revere | December 6, 2006We are asking the scienceblogging community once again to rally on behalf of our colleagues on trial for their lives in Libya. They have been accused of infecting over 400 children with HIV (see previous posts, here, here, here, here, here and here). When last we made an appeal (here) the response was extraordinary and spread quickly to the blogosphere on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum. The campaign to save the six health workers began with a strongly worded editorial in Nature and spread via the science blogosphere to the wider science and human rights organizations…
tsmith | December 1, 2006Revere over at Effect Measure has an excellent post linking together the current bird flu situation with John Snow's investigations of 19th century cholera outbreaks. It's an interesting take on the situation--check it out.
tsmith | November 30, 2006 Esther Lederberg dies at 83
Stanford University microbiologist Esther Miriam Zimmer Lederberg, a trailblazer for female scientists and the developer of laboratory techniques that helped a generation of researchers understand how genes function, has died at Stanford Hospital.
Professor Lederberg, who lived at Stanford, was 83 when she died Nov. 11 of pneumonia and congestive heart failure.
She discovered the lambda phage, a parasite of bacteria that became a key tool for the laboratory study of viruses and genetics, and was the co-developer with her husband [Nobel prize winner Joshua…