norovirus
sa smith | August 16, 2010Thanks to BleachGate, this is probably the first time many of you all in the Skeptical Community have heard about Crohns Disease (SPOILER: kid with Chrons gets booted from a 'support' forum for speaking out against woo-'treatments').
Crohns is an inflammatory bowl disease (IBD), where your guts do fun things like shrink until your bowls are obstructed, or your body decides you need more passages out of your intestines (Google 'fistula'. I dare you.), and some times you just good-old-fashioned poop blood. So, dont confuse IBD with IBS, and dont get me started on IBS.
Crohns is the usual grab-…
mpendergrast | June 21, 2010Mark Pendergrast writes: To kick off this book club discussion of Inside the Outbreaks, I thought I would explain briefly how I came to write the book and then suggest some possible topics for discussion.
The origin of the book goes back to an email I got in 2004 from my old high school and college friend, Andy Vernon, who wrote that I should consider writing the history of the EIS. I emailed back to say that I was honored, but what was the EIS? I had never heard of it. I knew Andy worked on tuberculosis at the CDC, but I didn't know that he had been a state-based EIS officer from 1978…
sa smith | March 11, 2010Weve all heard of that stupid book/diet that tries to tell you what to eat based on your blood type. Of course thats stupid and just a gimmic to get you to buy hundreds of dollars of crap 'supplements' for your blood-type (oh for Petes sake...).
I totally didnt know this before I read this neat Nature review, but there are actually viruses out there that can use the histo-blood group antigens (A, B, O) as their receptors!
Noroviruses!
Apparently, Type O are the most susceptible to some kinds of norovirus infection, and Type B are the least.
Now, this might be something other kids learned in…