infectious disease
tsmith | July 5, 2006I mentioned before that I often have my posts mostly written in my head before I ever sit down to type them out. And indeed, though I hadn't had a chance to actually sit at a computer yet, I had a science post all planned for today, based on an article I ran across last week. I think that will wait for tomorrow, though, after reading this post over at Terra Sigillata, where Abel writes about the sudden death of a 23-year-old brother of a former lab intern from a staph infection.
I sometimes get asked why I "waste my time" studying infectious disease, when they don't cause nearly the…
tsmith | July 1, 2006More interesting topics, too little time...
Mike discusses the dearth of qualified people to work in clinical microbiology labs--and the effect it may have on your health.
I'm a wanna-be history nerd. I really enjoy the topic, but as a science major, I didn't have a lot of time to take formal coursework in college, and since then much of my reading has focused on historical issues that are somehow related to science or medicine. So, there's a new blog to update me on all the other cool history news.
I've had several posts on butterflies and moths this week. It's also a theme at…
tsmith | June 30, 2006Sure, predator cats may have dined on our ancestors, but it seems we gave them ulcers (or, more correctly, passed along the bacterium that causes them) when they ate us.
Boo-yah! Take that, Simba.
tsmith | June 30, 2006 One of the things I love about science--but that can also be frustrating--is that every new piece of information leads to a new unanswered question. We've learned so much about microbiology and human disease since the time of Koch and Pasteur, but in many other ways, we're still at square one. One reason is because research over the last century has largely focused on disease-causing organisms--and within those, many studies have focused on identifying factors that allow these organisms to cause disease. This concentration has led to many breakthroughs (such as vaccine targets), but it…
revere | June 30, 2006The momentum is building to release the sequestered flu sequence data. The prestigious scientific journal Nature today published a strongly worded editorial, excerpts of which you can read Nature senior correspondent Declan Butler's blog:
Indonesia has become the hot spot of avian flu, with the virus spreading quickly in animal populations, and human cases occurring more often there than elsewhere. Yet from 51 reported human cases so far -- 39 of them fatal -- the genetic sequence of only one flu virus strain has been deposited in GenBank, the publicly accessible database for such information…
tsmith | June 29, 2006 People make terrible jokes about "mad cow" disease. ("Why is PMS called PMS? Because mad cow was already taken.") Pundits use it as an example of an over-hyped disease (and to be fair, estimates of total cases due to the consumption of contaminated beef in the UK have varied widely, ranging from a few thousand up to well over 100,000). Vegetarians note it as one benefit that comes from their soyburgers. Everyone, it seems, has an opinion.
So-called "mad cow" disease, in humans, is a progressive neurological disorder more correctly called variant Creuzfield-Jacob disease (vCJD).…
revere | June 29, 2006In a post yesterday we talked about West Nile Virus. It causes a mosquito borne disease and most people will have mild or even asymptomatic infections. But you don't want to the be the exception for this one. So what to do?
Here's the typical response in many urban environments:
Yuba-Sutter's annual battle against mosquitoes and West Nile virus will hit the streets tonight as spraying begins in residential areas of Robbins and Meridian.
The weekly spraying will begin tonight in Olivehurst, Live Oak, Linda, Plumas Lake, Marysville, Sutter, Tierra Buena and Wheatland, said Ron McBride, manager…
tsmith | June 28, 2006 Especially in religious circles, much has been made about the "uselessness" of condoms for the prevention of infection with the human papilloma virus (HPV). This is the virus that is responsible for almost all cases of cervical cancer, against which a new vaccine was recently approved (for more background, see this post). Approximately 20 million Americans are currently infected with HPV, and over their lifetime, about half of sexually active adults will be infected at one point. Though most strains of the virus are harmless, a small portion of them cause cervical cancer in women, a…
tsmith | June 28, 2006One of the things that faculty get to do is go to lots and lots and lots of meetings. Today I'm at a 6-hour retreat focused on distance learning, PubMed, and data repositories. (I know, you're all seething with jealousy). I hope to have another post up later this afternoon if I can get to it; in the meanwhile, here are a few notable posts from elsewhere:
Revere at Effect Measure has an overview of H5N1 over the last 6 months, and discusses why SARS and West Nile aren't "false alarms."
Coturnix brings you a potpourri of science news. He also has a DonorsChoose update--check out how…
revere | June 27, 2006One of the knocks on the alarms about bird flu is that it is just another in a series of false alarms like Y2K, West Nile and SARS. Not true. Pandemic influenza is indeed another in a series of alarms, but the only one that might conceivably be considered a false alarm (and this isn't even sure) is Y2K. Let's take them one at a time.
The investment in fixing the Y2K bug was substantial on the part of business and government world wide, extending over several years prior to 2000. It is difficult to say what the results might have been without that investment. In many respects it is similar to…
revere | June 27, 2006The first half of 2006 is coming to an end. So far it was the world's worst for avian influenza, as the disease spread to birds across Asia, Europe and Africa, with new human cases being reported every couple of days.
Since January, at least 54 people have died from the H5N1 avian influenza strain in Azerbaijan, Cambodia, China, Djibouti, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq and Turkey, according to the World Health Organization. That compares with 19 fatalities in Vietnam and Cambodia in the first six months of 2005. Human cases create opportunity for the virus to mutate into a lethal pandemic form.
[snip…
tsmith | June 27, 2006 I blogged a few months ago about a case of plague (due to the bacterium, Yersinia pestis) in a woman in California. I'm still doing some reading for the promised post on Black Death, CCR5, and other topics discussed in the comments section, but in the meantime, I wanted to alert y'all to an ongoing outbreak of the disease (in the pneumonic form, meaning the bacteria is present in the lungs and therefore is person-to-person transmissible) in the Democratic Republic of Congo:
The sole aid agency fighting an outbreak of pneumonic plague in the remote lawless corner of the Democratic Republic…
revere | June 27, 2006The fact seven people in Azerbaijan contracted bird flu from wild birds has been assumed for some time and now has been officially confirmed by researchers in Germany:
Four people have died after catching avian flu from infected swans, in the first confirmed cases of the disease being passed from wild birds, scientists have revealed.
The victims, from a village in Azerbaijan, are believed to have caught the lethal H5N1 virus earlier this year when they plucked the feathers from dead birds to sell for pillows. Three other people were infected by the swans but survived.
Andreas Gilsdorf, an…
revere | June 24, 2006In August of last year we wrote a post, Festering wounds of Iraq. It was about an antibiotic resistant organism, Acinetobacter baumannii, proving very troublesome in wound infections in soldiers. A. baumannii resides in the soil and is a problem world-wide, not just an Iraqi problem. But it is also a problem specifically related to the war in Iraq. Wound infections with this organism are more likely to occur at the time of injury under battle conditions or to be acquired in emergency treatment settings. Preventing this infection in stateside hospitals has also been a challenge. Without the…
tsmith | June 23, 2006I have an admission. I am tattooed. Twice. A small thing, but it's pretty incredible at the visceral reactions I sometime receive when people find out. (They're not in oft-seen areas under normal attire, but neither are they anywhere "naughty.") I get head shakes and tongue-clucks from many of my elders; nose crinkles from folks of my own generation who simply think tattoos are unattractive (either on anyone, or on women specifically), or compliments from people who are inked themselves. I understand the range of reactions and hey, to each their own--I'm all for diversity of opinion.…
tsmith | June 23, 2006Rebecca over at Memoirs of a Skepchick makes an excellent argument against the new HPV vaccine:
Before the invention of the fire extinguisher in 1816, people used sensible fire safety precautions. They did not leave oily rags piled in buckets next to the ashtray. They did not set their farts on fire. And they always kept their curtains far away from heating devices.
After the invention of the fire extinguisher, all hell broke loose. It didn't take long for games such as "Tie a Lit Sparkler to the Cat" and "Flaming Monopoly" to explode -- literally and metaphorically -- in popularity all over…
revere | June 22, 2006The latest chapter in the Chinese Disease Cover-up Follies involves a just published report in the New England Journal of Medicine by eight Chinese doctors reporting the genetic sequences of an H5N1 case that occurred in November of 2003. Old news. Except China didn't officially report its first case until two years later, November 2005. Just as the first issues of the journal were reaching NEJM's subscribers, were notified that one or more of the authors wished to withdraw the paper. Too bad. Too late.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization is expressing shock at the reporting lapse and…
revere | June 22, 2006The Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) is a resource for all manner of information on infectious diseases and especially avian influenza. At their website one can find a technical overview which compiles a lot of bird flu information scattered over many sources. But it is a technical overview (although not overly specialized). Some of the entries may not be self evident even to physicians. We've selected one example because it interests us and we think it might interest others. It's just a couple of sentences but will seem counterintuitive to many.
Laboratory tests do…
tsmith | June 20, 2006[From the archives; originally posted November 22, 2005]
Carl Zimmer has a post today about the work of Dr. Bryan Grieg Fry on the evolution of snake venom. If that name sounds familiar to those of you who aren't reptile specialists, you may have run across Dr. Fry's homepage, or you may have seen his research profiled previously on Panda's Thumb here, or you may have read comments by the good doc in this thread. Zimmer, as always, has an excellent overview of Fry et al's new paper in Nature (link ), but he didn't emphasize the one sneak peek I received from Bryan.
This tasty bit of…
revere | June 20, 2006There is currently no vaccine for a pandemic strain of H5N1 avian influenza, and if a pandemic strain does emerge it will take at least 6 months to get the first batches of one. Currently the productive capacity for influenza vaccines is so overmatched by the needs of a global population, only a tiny fraction of those that will need it could be immunized.
The current experimental (and relatively ineffectual) vaccines for H5N1 are not for a pandemic strain but for a strain current in southeast asia that is still poorly transmissible from person to person. It is thought an easily transmissible…