infectious disease
tsmith | January 27, 2006This time giving $900 million to fight tuberculosis.
Microsoft Corp.'s founder Bill Gates pledged $900 million to fight tuberculosis on Friday, kick-starting a $31 billion funding drive against a disease which kills one person every 15 seconds.
Tuberculosis has reached alarming proportions in Africa and other poor countries, where co-infection with HIV/AIDS makes a deadly combination.
"This is a very tough disease. It is going to take all of us --private sector, the pharmaceutical companies, philanthropy and governments in countries that have the disease -- to participate as well," Gates…
tsmith | January 26, 2006This has already been written up by the MSM (such as this article), so I'll just quote a bit from them:
Circulation of money may predict pandemics
A popular U.S. Web site that tracks the geographical circulation of money could offer new insights into predicting the spread of infectious diseases like bird flu.
Money, like diseases, is carried by people around the world, so what better way to plot the spread of a potential influenza pandemic than to track the circulation of dollar bills, researchers reasoned.
Researchers in Germany and the United States did just that to develop a mathematical…
tsmith | January 25, 2006Day 1: History of Pandemic Influenza.
Day 2: Our adventures with avian flu.
Day 3: Challenges to pandemic preparedness
Day 4: 1918 influenza virus reconstructed
Day 5: How ready are we, and what can YOU do?
Many more influenza posts can be found at this link.
tsmith | January 24, 2006 It seems I may have spoken too soon. Quoting myself:
One historical event that has been the subject of much speculation over the decades has been the Plague of Athens, a mysterious outbreak that is thought to have changed the direction of the Peloponnesian War, and for which the cause still remains uncertain.
This plague has been attributed to bubonic plague, toxic shock syndrome and/or necrotizing fasciitis due to Streptococcus pyogenes or Staphylococcus aureus, Salmonella, yellow fever, malaria, Ebola, influenza, and smallpox, to name just a few. Typhus seems to fit the description…
tsmith | January 24, 2006So, like Kevin over at No Se Nada, this started out as a comment on his avian flu policymaking post but got rather wordy, so I'm spinning it off over here. For those keeping track, the initial volley was this post, but previous discussion was had over here as well (and this post discussed some of his comments from that one).
So, in response, I think we are talking past each other a bit. I see a lot of difference between "wolf-crying" and simple education. I'll re-post what I said in the comments here regarding that issue (in response to the question, "How do you inform people that this…
tsmith | January 23, 2006See, it's posts like this (and many of the comments that follow; hat tip to Mike) that make me worry about "bird flu." I'm more concerned about the inaccurate information and attacks on those who work in the field (and the effect this may have on public acceptance of real public health advice) than I am about the actual virus at the moment. Too many people think avian influenza is either just "media hype" or a government conspiracy (one commenter even cited the oft-refuted notion that HIV was a man-made virus. Aargh). They downplay it because it's killed relatively few people thus far,…
tsmith | January 23, 2006 Two new big stories regarding AIDS: some good, some bad. First, the good. It's been reported that a single-pill, once-a-day AIDS treatment may be available by the end of the year. Though the drug regimen to treat AIDS is less oppressive than it was a decade ago, it's still a difficult and confusing process. Combining drugs has been diffcult--mainly because no single company oned rights to all the drugs needed for an optimal combination. Now, Gilead Sciences (developers of Tamiflu) and Bristol-Myers Squibb have agreed to collaborate and combine 3 drugs into one pill (a New England…
tsmith | January 20, 2006I'm late to the party, but Chad over at Uncertain Principles put out a call for great experiments/observations in our fields. Like others have said, that's a tough one, so I thought I'd first run through some of the highlights and big breakthroughs in the fields of microbiology and infectious disease epidemiology that have made the field what it is today, and then end with the one I think is most important. Feel free to disagree.
Obviously, several early advances stand out that allowed for the field to really start to develop. In roughly chronological order:
Antony van…
tsmith | January 20, 2006Carl Zimmer over at The Loom has post discussing Toxoplasma, and how it can affect behavior--and may play a role in the development of schizophrenia. (Check out his post for the details).
As Zimmer mentions, this is a controversial hypothesis. Though support is growing for acceptance of the idea that infectious agents can cause all kinds of diseases that have traditionally been deemed "genetic" or "lifestyle" diseases, it is a slow and uphill battle. It also happens to be an interest of mine. I discussed another putative cause of schizophrenia, Chlamydia species, here. These type of…
tsmith | January 19, 2006 Mike the Mad Biologist has some worrisome new findings on Acinetobacter, an emerging bacterial pathogen that has cropped up in the Middle East and Mexico. Mike discusses a new study on Acinetobacter genomics, showing that it has an island with 45 resistance genes, and that it's resistant to damn near everything. Just what we need--more "superbugs."
Antibiotic resistance, Acinetobacter
tsmith | January 17, 2006
...be prepared to take some disinfectants along for the ride.
One thing that is a total geek-out for me is reading about ecology. It's one of the areas I wish I'd taken more coursework on back in college. At the time, it didn't much interest me--studying species interactions was boring, and molecular biology was much more interesting. I've pretty much flipped 180 degrees on that one. (Well, molecular biology isn't boring, but it's moved off its rung as a top interest). My main interest as far as ecology is concerned is microbial ecology--especially of the ecosystem we like to call…
tsmith | January 16, 2006Malaria is one of mankind's oldest known killers, with descriptions of the disease dating back almost 5000 years. Each year, malaria causes 300-500 million infections, and up to 3 million deaths--about 5000 Africans die of the disease every day; one child succumbs every 30 seconds. The disease is caused by a number of species of the Plasmodium genus. (In humans, malaria is almost always caused by one of four species: Plasmodium vivax, Plasmodium ovale, Plasmodium falciparum, and Plasmodium malariae, with P. falciparum causing the most severe disease). Unlike many pathogens I discuss on…
tsmith | January 12, 2006I should request other people write my posts more often! Back in November, I wrote a post about a novel type of antibiotics made from naturally occuring antimicrobial peptides that are produced by a wide variety of organisms, including humans. In that post, I referenced something called "phage therapy," which is another somewhat "outside of the box" idea for treating bacterial infections. Now, Mike the Mad Biologist has an excellent post providing more information on phage therapy and its possibility as another potential weapon in our antibiotic arsenal:
"Phage therapy" is short for…
tsmith | January 12, 2006I'm still working on finishing up 3 manuscripts (one book, 2 journal articles) so I've not blogged quite as much this week as I generally do. Next week I should be back up to speed, and have a few topics in the queue that I want to get to. Luckily for you, though, John Hawks has a pair of excellent posts discussing infectious disease issues, Sciencblogs neighbor RPM at Evolgen has a post on microbial diversity, and fellow PT contributor Mike Dunford has a post discussing the CCR5 deta 32 mutation, HIV resistance, and West Nile over at The Questionable Authority. Discussion of these and a…
tsmith | January 12, 2006I mentioned this CBC "docudrama" yesterday. Just wanted to give a quick update, since they added a lot of info to their site since I checked it out yesterday morning (including a fictional blog!). So, some resources that might be interesting even to those of you who didn't catch it on TV:
Transcripts of interviews with experts. This is an excellent resource: extensive interviews with those at the top of the field, including Robert Webster, Jeffrey Taubenberger, John Barry, Mike Osterholm, and others.
An article on the 1918 pandemic.
Common H5N1/pandemic influenza questions and answers…
tsmith | January 10, 2006For those of you in Canada, check this out tonight at 9.
BLACK DAWN: THE NEXT PANDEMIC
A fifth estate "What if..."
Wednesday, January 11th at 9:00 p.m. on CBC-TV
What would happen if the World Health Organization declared what has long been expected and feared: human-to-human transmission of the avian flu virus?
Black Dawn is a docudrama featuring leading epidemiologists, doctors and emergency planners who imagine the impact avian flu would have as it spreads around the globe. Some predict the coming pandemic will be more lethal than all of the world's previous plagues. Black Dawn combines…
tsmith | January 10, 2006Okay, one more quick post. I've talked quite a bit on here (and over on Panda's Thumb) about the importance of surveillance, and how the current death rates from H5N1 influenza ("bird flu") are likely to be artificially high, since we're more likely to diagnose the very ill cases than the mild or asymptomatic ones. (See here and here for the relevant posts). Indeed, that first post linked discusses a study carried out here at the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the U of Iowa, which found that swine workers were much more likely to be infected with swine influenza viruses than those…
tsmith | January 5, 2006Microbial ecology, and its relation to the development of infectious disease, is an ever-growing field of study. Of course, there are a vast number of bacterial species living amongst us, most of which do not cause us any harm. Others may infect us only when, so to speak, the stars align in a certain manner: when a number of factors collide that result in the development of a diseased state. For instance, we may already be immunocompromised due to the presence of another infection--something minor, such as a rhinovirus, or something more serious, such as HIV--and this chink in our armor…
tsmith | December 24, 2005NHANES is an abbreviation that's quite familiar to epidemiologists of all stripes: the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. This survey dates back to 1956 with the passage of the National Health Survey Act, providing legislative authorization for "a continuing survey to provide current statistical data on the amount, distribution, and effects of illness and disability in the United States." Generally, information from these surveys has been used to look at the effect of nutrition, particularly micronutrients, on the health status of the population, or subgroups within the…
tsmith | December 16, 2005 I love these historical analyses of disease--real, or fictional. One historical event that has been the subject of much speculation over the decades has been the Plague of Athens, a mysterious outbreak that is thought to have changed the direction of the Peloponnesian War, and for which the cause still remains uncertain:
[2] As a rule, however, there was no ostensible cause; but people in good health were all of a sudden attacked by violent heats in the head, and redness and inflammation in the eyes, the inward parts, such as the throat or tongue, becoming bloody and emitting an unnatural…