infectious diseases
terrasig | August 21, 2009The other day Orac at Respectful Insolence wrote about yet another case where failure to vaccinate has caused a resurgence, in this case of measles in New Zealand.
Otherwise preventable and potentially fatal diseases are popping up in communities around the world as the importance of immunization is ignored by a generation of parents who never knew these diseases.
Well, looks as though they're beginning to find out.
I'm keeping my eye on a similar case brought to my attention by my Twitter feeds from Colorado (if I can't be there, I'll at least read about it). This report from the…
sb admin | July 16, 2009Among the problems with our countryâs system of meat production is the routine use of antibiotics in livestock. Dosing the animals regularly helps them grow faster and survive cramped factory-farm conditions, which means cheap, abundant meat for consumers. The problem is that overusing antibiotics contributes to antibiotic resistance. Cheap meat doesnât seem like such a bargain when more and more people are dying from antibiotic-resistant infections.
Representative Louise Slaughter (D-NY) has introduced the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2009 (HR 1549), which would…
terrasig | May 5, 2009I wanted to contribute to today's discussion of anti-vaccinationist, pseudoscience-pawning Jenny McCarthy being given not only an appearance on Oprah but, as reported by Orac, a deal with Oprah's production company for her own show.
The public attention that Jenny McCarthy's rants have gotten were bad enough. But, now, to have the soapbox of one of the most influential names in society?
I had to go outside the science blogging community with this. So, I wrote to the Philadelphia attorney who writes the award-winning blog, Field Negro.
Good evening, Counselor,
I know that your view of Oprah…
sb admin | May 5, 2009By Angene Johnson
After a recent dinner at my uncleâs house in Virginia, I finally had a chance to look at the March edition of National Geographic on my train ride back to Foggy Bottom (Washington, DC).  As I flipped through the front of the magazine towards this monthâs cover article, on saving energy in homes, the âEnvironmentâ article caught my eye. Entitled âMosquito Hosts,â the short piece describes one consequence of the currently tanking economy that I hadnât previously considered.  Â
Apparently, the recent increase in home foreclosures has resulted in a spike in the number of…
terrasig | May 4, 2009My clinical counterpart, surgical oncologist Dr David Gorski, has an excellent post up today at Science-Based Medicine on the irresponsible and misleading information being provided at The Huffington Post during the current H5N1/2009 influenza ("swine flu") outbreak. "The Huffington Post's War on Medical Science: A Brief History" provides a cautionary tale for us in embracing web-based news sources as our excellent print newspapers are going by the wayside.
Within the post, Dr Gorski shows that he is even more familiar with my writing than myself by citing a post at the old Terra Sig on the…
sb admin | April 14, 2009The latest issue of the Economist highlights a new idea in malaria prevention. Traditional prevention efforts emphasize spraying, but mosquitoes evolve resistance to insecticides. Now, Penn State Universityâs Andrew Read offers this insight, which can help avoid the resistance problem:
To stop malaria, we only need to kill the old mosquitoes.
Once an adult female Anopheles mosquito feeds on a human already infected with malaria, it still takes 10-14 days for the parasite to mature and migrate to the mosquitoâs salivary glands, at which point she can infect another human. Since most female…
sb admin | April 6, 2009by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
When an Ebola virus related lab accident in German occurred, special pathogens researchers girded themselves for bad news. Working with agents for which there is currently no treatment of vaccine requires high containment laboratories, often touted as being virtually fail safe. While engineering and procedural controls can be instituted to minimize accidents, the wild card is always the human element, so accidents in these laboratories happen. There has already been an Ebola related death in such circumstances, and when the German woman pricked her…
sb admin | March 13, 2009by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
I'm just getting around to reading the Brief Report by Blachere et al., "Measurement of airborne influenza virus in a hospital emergency department" (Clinical Infectious Diseases 2009:48:483-440) but it's quite interesting. We've noted fairly often here that we still don't know for sure what the main modes of transmission of influenza are, something that surprises many people. We "know" that flu can be passed from person to person via the respiratory secretions from runny noses, coughs and sneezes but we often don't think more deeply about this. We…
sb admin | March 12, 2009In today's New York Times, columnist Nicholas Kristof turns his attention to a problem that's been worrying the public health community for the past several years: MRSA, or methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus. The bacteria's antibiotic resistance makes it hard to fight, and it's responsible for a growing toll of deaths over the past year - including several among otherwise healthy people.
Kristof focuses on Camden, Indiana, a small farm town where family doctor Tom Anderson recently became alarmed by the number of MRSA infections he was seeing:
He began seeing strange rashes on his…
sb admin | March 2, 2009by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
The scientific literature is full of specialized papers that on their face would seem to be of little interest. Here's a title like that: "Prevalence and seasonality of influenza-like illness in children, Nicaragua, 2005-2007" (Gordon et al., Emerging Infectious Diseases 2009 Mar). Over 4000 Nicaraguan children, aged 2 to 11 years old and living in the capital of Managua were followed for 2 years, April 2005 to April 2007 and observed for development of ILI (influenza-like illness). We know a lot about influenza in major industrialized countries in…
terrasig | February 25, 2009Okay people, these students in Miss Stacy Baker's biology classes and Extreme Biology blog have been rocking my world for quite some time. They've now burst onto the national media and were all the buzz of the recent ScienceOnline'09 conference.
For those not familiar with the story, Stacy Baker is a biology teacher at the Calverton School in Huntingtown, Maryland, who began a website for student activities and class notes back in 2006. With the boundless enthusiasm of ninth-graders and more seasoned AP biology students, the site has become interactive: a blog, Extreme Biology, with videos…
sb admin | January 26, 2009by revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure
The peanut butter/peanut paste ingredient based salmonella outbreak has been in the news lately and we've discussed it here (and here, here, here, here, here). There are now about 500 reported cases and six deaths. That's a case fatality ratio of just over 1%. So what if there were a disease outbreak of 100,000 cases with a case fatality ratio of 20%? I think we'd be pretty alarmed. But it happened in 2005. And it happened in 2006 and 2007 and last year, 2008 And it's happening, now, too. It isn't salmonella or or even HIV/AIDS, although it is…
sb admin | October 10, 2008by revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure
Every parent's or grandparent's nightmare is to have their darling little one suddenly carried off by illness. Flu isn't on the radar screen of most parents but in recent years the public health community is taking notice. The first alarm occurred in the bad flu season of 2003 - 2004 when a retrospective tally showed over 150 pediatric deaths associated with flu. That was more than half again as much as we thought were occurring, although data was not very good. So a new pediatric surveillance system was put in place. One of the things it is showing…
terrasig | September 22, 2008Here's an update on E. coli-gate in Tularosa, NM:
Okay, so it's more than fluid - it's about a pint of sludge left in front of each house where the garbage truck stopped. But this is ridiculous:
[Tularosa resident Ken] Riedlinger took samples from the sludge puddle to the Diagnostic and Technology Center in Alamogordo and they found a huge amount of E. coli, he said.
"The upper tray reported it's infinite, the numbers were too great to count," Riedlinger said. "This is massive, massive E. coli. This is deadly stuff."
E. coli is a bacterium found in the lower intestine of warm-blooded animals…
terrasig | September 20, 2008Dear PharmMom,
Your daughter-in-law found this one on your local TV news station:
TULAROSA, N. M. (KRQE-KBIM) - Fluid leaking onto city streets from a contract garbage truck has tested positive for the E. coli bacteria, according to the town's mayor.
Alamo Disposal has been picking up the trash for many in Tularosa for the last three years. Recently resident and city officials noticed something leaking from a truck into the middle of the street.
Tularosa Mayor Ray Córdova then inspected the vehicle and smelled something extremely foul coming from it. That's when he told residents to take…
terrasig | April 6, 2008Alamosa is a town of 8,500 residents on the west side of the Rockies in southern Colorado, equidistant to Denver and Albuquerque. You may sometimes hear of Alamosa described by Al Roker or other morning weather reporters as the "nation's icebox" in setting the low temperature of the lower 48 US states, a title for which it fights with Fraser, Colorado (home of Winter Park ski resort).
Alamosa is also a strikingly beautiful place in the middle of some unique geological features, including the nearby Great Sand Dunes National Monument, a massive group of dunes several hundred feet high…
sb admin | March 25, 2008Rachel Nugent at Global Health Policy reminds us that itâs World TB Day. Sheâs got good news and bad news about tuberculosis around the globe. On the plus side, tuberculosis control funding has reached an all-time high, and the number of TB cases per capita has dropped. On the minus side, the number of cases is increasing, and more and more of these cases are turning out to be resistant to many of the drugs generally used to fight them.
In todayâs New York Times, Celia W. Dugger looks at the lives of South Africans with MDR and XDR TB (MDR is multi-drug-resistant, XDR extensively drug-…
terrasig | February 19, 2008For more details on this story, you can go to Mark Chu-Carroll, Orac, Mike the Mad Biologist, or the Autism Blog. I just wanted to share my personal views on the need for childhood vaccinations and support a public information campaign from the AAP.
Until I started medical blogging, I had not realized quite how vocal was the community of individuals refusing to vaccinate their children, mostly at the urging of those who claimed that vaccines and related components caused illness in their own children. I will first say that no drug product, natural or otherwise, is completely and absolutely…
sb admin | January 14, 2008Revere at Effect Measure addresses a troubling article, published in yesterdayâs Atlanta Journal-Constitution, about the Centers for Disease Control and Preventionâs handling of the Andrew Speaker tuberculosis case. You might remember the case, because it got a lot of media attention. Speaker was the Atlanta lawyer who was thought to have XDR TB and boarded a plane to return home from Italy despite having been told not to by health authorities. CDC issued an isolation order for Speaker, and held a press conference about how he couldâve spread the disease aboard his international flight. It…
terrasig | December 1, 2007Today is World AIDS Day but I wish to relay the need for a different kind of help.
Terra Sigillata has just learned that HIV/AIDS researcher Dr Sonia Napravnik and her daughter Sophia were among those whose apartments were destroyed by fire Wednesday night in Carrboro, NC. Sonia is a research assistant professor in the Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Wednesday night Sonia Napravnik's apartment building caught on fire. Her
unit (3rd floor) was destroyed. It is presently unclear how much of her stuff will be retrievable but we are…