outbreak

1980 marked a milestone in infectious disease epidemiology: the World Health Organization declared the smallpox virus eradicated in the wild. However, while smallpox currently exists only in frozen stocks, poxviruses as a class certainly haven't disappeared. A related virus, monkeypox, regularly causes illness in Africa, and even spread half a world away in the American midwest. Additionally, Africa isn't the only area with endemic poxvirus infections. Brazil has been dealing with their own poxvirus outbreak, and poxviruses have popped up in Europe as well. More on both of those after…
It's just not been Vegas' week. First a ricin-laced hotel room, then a clinic-associated outbreak of hepatitis C virus (and potentially hepatitis B and HIV) that could become enormous. Meanwhile, an outbreak of hepatitis E is raging in Uganda. So what are these virues, and how in the world could a medical catastrophe of this magnitude happen in the U.S.? More after the jump... The group of hepatitis viruses (A, B, C, D, E, and G) are related in name only. They've all been either associated with or found to cause hepatitis--inflammation of the liver. This can be acute inflammation (short…
Four cases of measles have now been confirmed at a San Diego charter school--the first reported outbreak of measles in school-age kids in that city in 17 years. Unsurprising twist: None of the children, including the one most recently reported with the disease, has been vaccinated. New Scienceblogger Drugmonkey already hits the high (or low, such as it may be) points in this case in a much less restrained manner than I'm able to.
An ongoing outbreak of Salmonella associated with turtles has now sickened more than 100 and caused a quarter of that number to be hospitalized: Cases have been reported in 33 states, but mostly in California, Texas, Pennsylvania and Illinois. Most of the patients have been children. No one has died in the latest outbreak, which began in August. But some patients have experienced severe symptoms, including acute kidney failure. The most common symptoms reported to the CDC included bloody diarrhea, abdominal cramping, fever and vomiting. The median age of patients was 7 1/2 . More after the…
As another Ebola outbreak simmers in Uganda (and appears to be increasing), I recently was in touch with Zoe Young, a water and sanitation expert with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF*, known in the US as Doctors without Borders), who was working in the Democratic Republic of Congo during the DRC Ebola outbreak earlier this fall (and blogging it!) Regular readers know of my interest in this virus, but I'm obviously geographically removed from any of the outbreaks. As such, Zoe and her colleague, physician Armand Sprecher, were generous enough to answer my questions about their work with…
Since its discovery, only a few countries have really been affected by Ebola. The virus has surfaced multiple times in the Democractic Republic of Congo, in Sudan, in Gabon, and now in Uganda. This country was last hit (and hit hard) by Ebola in 2000, when an outbreak there caused at least 425 cases, and killed more than half of those it infected. Now it's currently causing yet another outbreak, just weeks after the outbreak in the DRC was confirmed to have ended--and the strain that's causing this one seems to be distinct from the four known types of virus we've seen to date. More after…
Tuberculosis in humans is most commonly caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, a slow-growing, waxy, rod-shaped bacterium. Transmitted primarily via the air when an infected individual coughs or sneezes, it's estimated that a third of the world is infected with this agent, which causes approximately 2 million deaths every year. Though most infections are asymptomatic, infection is becoming increasingly deadly, due both to the spread of highly antibiotic-resistant strains and due to the increasing number of individuals with both HIV and TB. While M. tuberculosis is primarily a human…
I wrote about an emerging mosquito-borne virus with the strange name of chikungunya in a pair of posts last year. This is a virus that was first discovered more than 50 years ago, but as far as arthropod-borne viruses ("arboviruses") go, it's been a minor player for most of that time, as other arboviruses such as yellow fever, dengue, and West Nile caused more disease and death than chikungunya. However, the virus began to rapidly spread beginning in ~2004, causing around a quarter million infections on the island of La Reunion in the Indian Ocean before moving on to cause smaller…
It's only taken 30 years, but information about Ebola in nature is finally starting to snowball. First, after almost 15 years of disappearing from the human population, Ebola returned with a vengeance in the mid 1990s, causing illness in 6 separate outbreaks in Gabon, Ivory Coast, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and South Africa (imported case) between 1994 and 1996. As doctors and scientists rushed in to contain the outbreaks, they were also able to collect viral samples, and trap animals and insects in the area, searching for a reservoir for the virus. In this decade, there have been…
A few news stories hit my inbox all at once yesterday--and the combination of them doesn't bode well for childrens' health; more after the jump. First, despite several years now of banging the drum for having kids vaccinated against influenza, they're still being overlooked when it comes to pandemic planning: Children would likely be both prime spreaders and targets of a flu pandemic, but they're being overlooked in the nation's preparations for the next super-flu, pediatricians and public health advocates reported Wednesday. The report urges the government to improve planned child…
Following a new PNAS paper regarding the strange facial cancers in Tasmanian devils, I have a post on the topic up over at Correlations. (Be sure to check out the Correlations homepage too!)
In another case of TV shows being prescient, abuzz here at other Scienceblogs is this story, which sounds like a bad B movie: " 6 die from brain-eating amoeba in lakes." The amoeba in question is a species of naegleria, which was featured on the medical drama House last year. According to the article: Beach said people become infected when they wade through shallow water and stir up the bottom. If someone allows water to shoot up the nose -- say, by doing a somersault in chest-deep water -- the amoeba can latch onto the olfactory nerve. The amoeba destroys tissue as it makes its way up…
I mentioned in this post on Marburg virus that another outbreak of hemorrhagic fever had been reported in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC, formerly Zaire). It's now been officially reported by labs in Congo and Gabon that, indeed, this new outbreak is due to the Ebola virus. More on this after the jump. As I've written previously, the DRC has been especially hard-hit by filovirus outbreaks. This was one of the places where Ebola first made its appearance in the human population, and was also the site of large outbreaks of the virus in 1995 and 2001 (with another Marburg outbreak…
Or something like that. I rarely watch TV, but one of the few things I watch every now and then are reruns of the multiple incarnations of Law & Order shows when I run into them on TNT or one of those cable stations. They have all kinds of "ripped from the headlines" story plots, but this is the first time I can recall where a news story was ripped from L&O (well, except that it takes place in Danbury, Connecticut instead of Manhattan): Two people in Danbury have been infected with anthrax contracted from animal skins. Officials say Ase-AmenRa Kariamu contracted 'cutaneous anthrax…
Denial has real consequences-- MMR plea by doctors as measles cases treble in 11 weeks: Parents have been urged to give their children the MMR vaccine as it was revealed Britain is in the middle of the worst measles outbreak for 20 years. The unprecedented warning from the Health Protection Agency came as the number of children suffering from the disease trebled over the last 11 weeks. This is the worst outbreak since the controversial MMR vaccine was introduced in 1988. Take-up of the triple jab - which also protects against mumps and rubella - plummeted to 80 per cent after Dr Andrew…
Those familiar with the history of influenza probably know about the 1918 outbreak of swine influenza in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In the fall of that year, the National Swine Show and Exposition in Cedar Rapids opened, bringing people and their hogs from miles around. Soon after it opened its doors, people noticed their swine were becoming sick--and the symptoms looked suspisciously like those of human influenza. When the virus was characterized years later, it was indeed found to be the influenza virus--and it was very similar to ones that were isolated from humans. This characterization of…
As I've noted before, filoviruses are some of my favorite pathogens. I don't work on them myself--though in the pre-children era I certainly thought about it--but I find them absolutely fascinating to read about and follow the literature. Mostly, I think, this is because after knowing about them for so many years (Marburg was discovered in 1967), and so much research (over 1500 papers in Pubmed, or roughly a paper for every person these viruses have killed), we still know relatively little about the most basic questions--such as where there viruses are maintained in nature, and how they…
The strange and tragic case of the Tripoli Six, a group of 5 Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor working in Tripoli, Libya, is finally drawing to a close. The six health workers had been found guilty of infecting up to 400 children in the hospital where they worked with HIV, and had previously been sentenced to death--even though the science had shown that the epidemic began prior to the arrival of the workers. This saga has been dragging on for the better part of a decade (Declan Butler at Nature has a very nice story here discussing the various twists and turns along the way), but…
One of the most famous stories in all of epidemiology revolves around the very birth of the science, in the midst of a London cholera outbreak in 1854. At the time, the scientific community was divided over the cause of cholera and other diseases. The majority of them accepted the miasma theory, the idea that disease was due to corrupted air ("all smell is disease," noted sanitation commissioner Edwin Chadwick). This idea dates back to antiquity, and increased in popularity in the Victorian era. It's a great example of something that logically made sense, even though it was wrong.…
Way back in a few editions of Animalcules, several of the submissions mentioned a fungus that was killing frogs. Wednesday at the ASM meeting suggested that there may be a way to protect these amphibians: First in a petri dish and now on live salamanders, probiotic bacteria seem to repel a deadly fungus being blamed for worldwide amphibian deaths and even extinctions. Though the research is in its early stages, scientists are encouraged by results that could lead the way to helping threatened species like mountain yellow-legged frogs of the Sierra Nevada mountains of southern California…