infectious diseases
lborkowski | March 7, 2013Haiti's cholera epidemic began in October 2010, as the country was still reeling from the devastation of the January 2010 earthquake. The epidemic has now claimed nearly 8,000 lives, and although transmission has slowed, more than 1,500 new cases are still reported each week. Evidence suggests the cholera bacteria arrived in Haiti via UN peacekeepers from Nepal and spread because of an inadequate sanitation system in peacekeeper housing. Last month, however, the UN responded to a compensation lawsuit by invoking immunity under section 29 of the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of…
lborkowski | February 11, 2013Celeste and I have an op-ed in the Washington Post's local opinion section about DC's paid sick leave law, which contains an exception that's especially problematic during flu season: it doesn't cover tipped restaurant workers. Read "Your meal shouldn't come with a side of the flu" at the Washington Post's site.
And if you want to eat at restaurants where workers have paid sick days (and other benefits many of us take for granted), check out the Restaurant Opportunities Center's 2013 Dining Guide, or download the accompanying iPhone or Android app for your city.
lborkowski | January 25, 2013by Kim Krisberg
When it comes to good health, America is far from top dog.
Yes, we may spend the most, we may have some of the most advanced medical technologies and we may produce some of the best doctors. But when it comes to the ultimate measure of a health care system's success — the health of people and populations — it seems we are losing a winnable battle.
"There's hardly anything more consequential than Americans dying earlier and being sicker," Dr. Steven Woolf, chair of the Institute of Medicine's and National Research Council's Panel on Understanding Cross-National Health…
lborkowski | January 9, 2013By Rebecca Kreston
“Pneumocystis Pneumonia --- Los Angeles,” in the June 5, 1981 edition of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, was an economical seven paragraph clinical report cataloging five observed cases, accompanied by an explanatory editorial note on the rarity of this fungal disease. It seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary from MMWR, a publication that has been issuing the latest epidemiology news and data from around the world for 60 years. The report was included in that week’s slim 16 page report detailing dengue in American travelers visiting the Caribbean,…
cmonforton | January 8, 2013With five days left in calendar year 2012, the Obama Administration released to the public its current plan for regulatory and deregulatory activities, including those affecting individuals exposed to hazards in their work environment. Executive Order 12866 (adopted in 1993) says the annual regulatory plan “shall be” published in October, and the Regulatory Flexibility Act (5 USC 602) says the semi-annual regulatory agendas “shall” be published in April (Spring) and October (Fall). The Obama Administration failed to meet either of these deadlines, and simply issued for 2012 one regulatory…
lborkowski | December 20, 2012Pakistan is one of only three countries where polio is still circulating (Afghanistan and Nigeria are the others), and its eradication efforts have just encountered a horrific setback: Over the course of 48 hours, gunmen shot and killed eight vaccination workers in and around Karachi and Peshawar. The United Nations has pulled off the streets all staff involved in the polio vaccination campaign. Jibran Ahmad reports for Reuters that the government is nonetheless determined to continue immunization efforts:
Karachi police spokesman Imran Shaukat said teams were supposed to tell police of their…
lborkowski | December 3, 2012December 1 was World AIDS Day, and this year's theme is "Working Together for an AIDS-Free Generation." In the 2011 United Nations Political Declaration on HIV and AIDS, countries set ambitious goals to reach by 2015:
Reduce sexual transmission by 50%.
Reduce HIV transmission among people who inject drugs by 50%.
Eliminate new infections among children and substantially reduce the number of mothers dying from AIDS-related causes.
Provide antiretroviral therapy to 15 million people.
Reduce the number of people living with HIV who die from tuberculosis by 50%.
Close the global AIDS resource…
cmonforton | November 7, 2012Hurray! The Presidential election is over. Let's hope this means that Obama Administration officials will come out from under their beds and embrace their regulatory authority to issue some strong public health and environmental regulations. At the Labor Department (DOL) there's much work to do to expand workers' rights, ensure workers' lives and health are protected, and improve the information provided by its agencies. Leave a comment with your ideas for immediate action by the Labor Department.
Here's my short version of my wish list for major DOL activities for the next 6 months:
MSHA…
cmonforton | September 24, 2012[Update below, 9/26/2012]
When Secretary of Agricultural Tom Vilsack announced in January the USDA's proposal to modernize the poultry slaughter inspection system, he promised several things. He said the new system would save taxpayers and poultry producers money while improving food safety. (In "The Age of Greed," law professor Rena Steinzor explains on whose backs those savings are borne.) Secretary Vilsack also insisted that USDA inspectors
"will continue to conduct on-line carcass-by-carcass inspection as mandated by law."
That requirement is a long-standing provision of the Poultry…
lborkowski | July 25, 2012The 19th International AIDS Conference is happening this week here in Washington, DC, and as the Washington Post's David Brown reminds us, it's a very different gathering from one that took place in San Francisco in 1990, when HIV was a mystery and AIDS a death sentence. Today, AIDS is still a terrible disease, but better understanding of it has improved both interventions and attitudes. "The issue is no longer what to do but rather whom to do it for, where, how quickly and at what cost," Brown writes. He offers this global snapshot:
Today, more than 8 million people in low- and middle-income…
lborkowski | July 12, 2012I wrote last week about the importance of the Freedom of Information Act, and Stacey Singer of The Palm Beach Post has just published a piece that shows how important sunshine laws can be for public health. Singer revealed that Florida is in the midst of tuberculosis outbreak that's claimed 13 lives and sickened at least 99 people, six of them children. Another 3,000 people may have been exposed to the bacterium through close contact with contagious sufferers. "Fortunately, only a few of the cases have developed drug resistance so far," Singer reports.
State health officials explained that…
cmonforton | May 31, 2012The Obama Administration's quest to appease business interests' claims about burdensome and outdated regulations awoke a giant in the form of the civil rights, public health and workers' safety communities. From the Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Council of LaRaza, to the American Public Health Association and Nebraska Appleseed, the feedback is loud and clear: USDA should withdraw the regulatory changes it proposed in January (77 Fed Reg 4408) which would shift the responsibility for examining and sorting poultry carcasses with obvious defects from USDA inspectors to the…
lborkowski | April 25, 2012Today is World Malaria Day, and the World Health Organization has launched a new initiative, dubbed T3: Test, Treat, Track. It urges countries where malaria is endemic to test every suspected malaria case, treat every confirmed case with anti-malarial medicine, and track the disease with "timely and accurate surveillance systems." The good news is that scaled-up malaria prevention and control efforts -- including delivery of 145 million insecticidal bed nets in 2010 alone -- have saved a million lives over the past decade. But, the WHO points out, there's still a long way to go in combating…
lborkowski | March 29, 2012by Kim Krisberg
A couple weeks ago on the southern-most tip of the continental United States in Key West, nearly 70 residents gathered at a town hall meeting to talk about mosquitoes. And not just any mosquito. A special, genetically modified mosquito designed to protect people's health.
While the modified mosquito has yet to make the two-mile wide island its home, local mosquito control officials are busy making the case that its intentional release will help safely contain the risk of mosquito-borne dengue fever, which made a startling reappearance in Key West in 2009. The male mosquito is…
lborkowski | January 12, 2012Two years ago, a 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, killing 300,000 Haitians and leaving 1.5 million homeless. Nine months later, a cholera epidemic began -- its first victim a 28-year-old man who bathed in and drank from a river that was likely contaminated by raw sewage from an encampment of UN peacekeepers from Nepal. Half a million people have been stricken by cholera since then, and 7,000 have died. New cases are being reported at a rate of roughly 200 per day.
Cholera is also spreading in the Dominican Republic, which shaires the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. Officials from CDC, UNICEF,…
lborkowski | January 10, 2012At her Superbug blog, Maryn McKenna reports on a disturbing, but not unexpected development: over the past three months, 12 cases of tuberculosis at a single Mumbai hospital have been found to be resistant to all the drugs used to treat the disease.
This is not the first time totally drug-resistant tuberculosis (TDR-TB) has been reported; in 2009, McKenna notes, the disease was identified in 15 patients in Iran. This was only three years after extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) was first identified. The drivers of such rapidly evolving drug resistance include inadequate…
cmonforton | December 1, 2011The worker-led organization Restaurant Opportunities Center United released this month a new type of diners' guide, one that focuses on working conditions for the employees at 180 restaurants nationwide. The US restaurant industry employs 10 million individuals and is the fastest growing sector in the economy. More than half of restaurant workers, however, earn less than the federal poverty line and very, very few (an estimated 10%) are offered paid sick leave. [Achoo!! from the waitress. Sniffle, sniffle, cough, cough from the cook.]
The 30-page Consumer Guide on the Working Conditions of…
lborkowski | November 22, 2011by Kim Krisberg
It's too early to tell just how many families Elizabeth Frerking and her colleagues at the Saline County Health Department in Marshall, Mo., will have to turn away, but it's likely to be too many. As of Oct. 1 and due to cuts in federal immunization funding, Frerking can only administer vaccines to children with no insurance at all or those with Medicaid coverage. However, it wasn't always like that.
"Previously, any family could come here and get immunizations -- we didn't turn anybody away," Frerking, the department's vaccine coordinator, told me. "Now, we get to be the ones…
lborkowski | November 4, 2011SciDev.Net's TV Padma reports that tuberculosis experts are looking to India to develop affordable TB-testing kits. An estimated four million cases of the disease go undetected, and two million TB patients die every year. India has increased its efforts at finding and treating cases of the disease, but diagnostics still present a challenge, Padma explains:
TB tests come in a range. Latent infections can show up as a reaction when the protein, tuberculin, is injected under the skin. Blood tests may reveal immune molecules (gamma interferon) produced by the body to protect against the bacterium…
lborkowski | September 21, 2011By Kim Krisberg
Just a few days ago, an event in the small town of Lilburn, Georgia, may have saved the life of someone living half a world away. It wasn't a black-tie gala or a celebrity telethon. It wasn't even about a disease that most of us here in the United States think much about. In fact, it was as easy as doing what us animal lovers would do anyway: vaccinating our beloved Fido or Whiskers against rabies.
In honor of World Rabies Day, which takes place Sept. 28, Lilburn's Banfield Pet Hospital held a rabies vaccination clinic, half of the proceeds from which were donated to the…