public health
tsmith | February 26, 2008This is the fourth of 6 guest posts on infectious causes of chronic disease.
By David Massaquoi
Working in public health is an interesting and satisfying job. Adding infectious disease investigation to such task makes the job not only difficult but the challenges of encountering numerous disease conditions; including learning about the Morgellon's disease. In recent years, doctors have been faced with an unexplained skin disease condition, dubbed "Morgellons Disease". I will not go into details with all the debates on merits and demerits of this "New" or "Emerging"? condition. However, as…
tsmith | February 25, 2008This is the second of 6 guest posts on infectious causes of chronic disease.
By Courtney Cook
Scientists have been aware of a relationship between infections and mental illnesses for quite some time. For example, during the 1918 influenza pandemic, some patients were seen to exhibit a delirium unlike that which had typically been associated with a viral infection. In a 1926 report, Karl Menninger called it a "schizophrenic syndrome" and further observed that two-thirds of those diagnosed with schizophrenia after having influenza fully recovered from the mental illness within five years.…
terrasig | February 25, 2008[Note: I originally posted this last Thursday under another title but it got lost in other events of that day. As I find it ironic that Mr Comarow has been attacked by an alternative medicine practitioner and advocate, I find this story worthy of reposting.]
A few weeks ago the skeptical blogosphere was up in arms about an article in US News & World Report by Avery Comarow on alternative medicine services in US academic medical centers. Mr Comarow is a senior medical writer for USN&WR and best known as editor for the last 18 years of the magazine's annual feature, America's Best…
tsmith | February 25, 2008This is the first of 6 guest posts on infectious causes of chronic disease.
by Matthew Fitzgerald
Viruses cause cancer?
Cancer researchers have for decades known that viruses can cause cancer. It is now estimated that 15% of the world's cancers are caused by infectious diseases including viruses. Some of these include: Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) and cervical cancer; Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) and nasopharyngeal cancer & lymphoma; Hepatitis B and liver cancer. In fact cancer researchers use this knowledge of viruses causing cancer by utilizing EBV and SV40 and other viruses to "…
mikethemadbiologist | February 24, 2008A while back I wrote about how the Office of Human Research Protection (OHRP) had blocked the implementation of a checklist for ICUs that would most likely prevent roughly 20,000 deaths from infectious disease annually. ScienceBlogling Revere reports that the OHRP has reversed its decision (italics mine):
The Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) -- part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services -- has concluded that Michigan hospitals can continue implementing a checklist to reduce the rate of catheter-related infections in intensive care unit settings (ICUs) without…
tsmith | February 21, 2008I've written previously how people will do crazy things for aesthetics. I know some would consider any tattoo in this category; I can't since I have a few myself. However, I'd never heard of a 3D tattoo before. I don't mean just the art appears to make the tattoo stand out and look 3-dimensional; I mean implanting materials underneath the tattoo to make it physically stick out. It's not always a happy ending though; more on a breast-implanted tattoo turned bad (and the "before" photo) after the jump.
Tattoo studio owner Lane Jensen decided his "buxom cowgirl" tattoo on his calf needed…
grrlscientist | February 20, 2008tags: book review, HIV, AIDS, Africa, epidemic, public health, Helen Epstein, The Invisible Cure
"AIDS has come to haunt a world that thought it was incomplete. Some wanted children, some wanted money, some wanted property, some wanted power, but all we have ended up with is AIDS."
-- Bernadette Nabatanzi, traditional healer, Kampala, Uganda, 1994.
The occurrence of AIDS in East and southern Africa is uniquely severe: even though less than 3 percent of the world's population lives here, this region is home to more than 40 percent of all those people with HIV infections. Throughout much of the…
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…
mikethemadbiologist | February 17, 2008Sara Robinson continues her assault on the lies surrounding healthcare. One target--'rationed' healthcare.
We'll have rationed care
Don't look now: but America does ration care. And it does it in the most capricious, draconian, and often dishonest way possible.
Mostly, the US system rations care by simply eliminating large numbers of people from the system due to an inability to pay. Last year, one-quarter of all Americans didn't go to a doctor when they needed one because they couldn't afford it. Nearly that many skipped getting a test, treatment, prescription, or follow-up appointment…
terrasig | February 13, 2008
We comply with the HONcode standard for trustworthy healthinformation: verify here.
Regular readers may note that I have been diddling with the content of my left sidebar and posting a new disclaimer tab to indicate the accuracy and objectivity of the health information presented herein.
I added these details as part of my application for accreditation by the Swiss-based Health on the Net (HON) Foundation, a non-profit organization formed in 1996 to deal with the then-new issue of how a reader can determine the quality and objectivity of medical information on a website. You…
tsmith | February 12, 2008Four 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.
mikethemadbiologist | February 10, 2008There's a good chance that the air during the Beijing Olympics in 2008 will be harmful to the athletes. Now they also can't eat the food (italics mine):
When a caterer working for the United States Olympic Committee went to a supermarket in China last year, he encountered a piece of chicken--half of a breast--that measured 14 inches. "Enough to feed a family of eight," said Frank Puleo, a caterer from Staten Island who has traveled to China to handle food-related issues.
"We had it tested and it was so full of steroids that we never could have given it to athletes. They all would have tested…
tsmith | February 8, 2008
The fever hit suddenly in the form of a piercing headache and painful sensitivity to light, like looking into a white sun. At that point, the patient could still hope that it was not yellow fever, maybe just a headache from the heat. But the pain worsened, crippling movement and burning the skin. The fever rose to 104, maybe 105 degrees, and bones felt as though they had been cracked. The kidneys stopped functioning, poisoning the body. Abdominal cramps began in the final days of illness as the patient vomited black blood brought on by internal hemorrhaging. The victim became a palate…
mikethemadbiologist | February 8, 2008There's quite a few infectious disease-related legislative proposals floating around Congress, so I'm going to start previewing them. I'll start with an easy one: H.R. 766, which calls for a National Infection Prevention Week (pdf here).
It's sponsored by Rep. Roger F. Wicker (R-MS) and Rep. Tim Murphy (D-PA) and has been referred to the Subcommittee on Health of the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House of Representatives (hence, the "HR"). Here's the entire text of the bill (it's short):
Whereas protecting the health of Americans includes providing every citizen with access to safe…
mikethemadbiologist | February 6, 2008A rant in Boston's Weekly Dig lays out why the healthcare problem is a wage problem:
Dearest Governor/ Presidential Candidate/ Botox Abuser,
Thanks for leaving us with the mandatory health insurance law. I really appreciate being told that I'm legally obligated to have health insurance by January 1st (which I don't), and pay $196/month (which I can't afford), or be subject to a $219 yearly penalty (which will soon be $912). To repeat: I can't afford to spend $196/month for health insurance, so somehow I can afford $912 for the year for nothing???
So basically, because of your landmark law,…
terrasig | February 6, 2008I received a special missive this morning from the Foundation for Biomedical Research that reported the home of UCLA nicotine researcher, Dr Edie London, was vandalized/terrorized by a fire set to a "device" on her front porch. The story now appears at the Los Angeles Times:
London, a professor of psychiatry and bio-behavioral sciences and of molecular and medical pharmacology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, uses lab monkeys in her research on nicotine addiction.
FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller confirmed that officials with the Joint Terrorism Task Force were investigating the…
mikethemadbiologist | February 5, 2008I think I was a little too optimistic about MRSA (methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus) in pigs staying in pigs and not spreading to humans. A recent study in the Netherlands found that people exposed to pigs were 1000 times (yes, one thousand) more likely to be MRSA carriers than the general population, and the MRSA strain was usually the 'pig' strain.
What does this mean? The authors conclude:
After introduction of the new MRSA risk category in a hospital [Mad Biologist: screening those in contact with farm animals], which is located in a region with a relatively high density of…
tsmith | February 5, 2008I mentioned previously a clash between religion and public health, where a Liberian immigrant was jailed for importing bushmeat. She argued that infringing upon her religious freedom in this manner was unconstitutional; authorities argued that she couldn't put others at risk because of her religious beliefs. Another clash where religious beliefs are at odds with public health is simmering in the U.K.; more after the jump.
Women training in several hospitals in England have raised objections to removing their arm coverings in theatre and to rolling up their sleeves when washing their…
scientificactivist | February 5, 2008A few interesting items have recently come up in the news and in the scientific literature about various methods for preventing the transmission of HIV.
First up is a study (1) published in PLoS Medicine this week that demonstrated the effectiveness of a combination of antiretroviral drugs in preventing viral transmission in a monkey model of HIV. The researchers demonstrated that taking the antiretroviral drug emtricitabine (FTC) orally could reduce the chance that a macaque would become infected. Adding tenofovir-disoproxil fumarate (TDF) increased protection, and injecting both drugs (…
j7uy5 | February 4, 2008I haven't been posting much. I have been trying to figure out
why. Probably it is because all I want to say is that Bush is
an idiot, and I guess I have said that already. More than
once.
But this latest gig is a particularly egregious case. I would
like to comment upon the situation, because it illustrates something
about health care policy that is not obvious.
The budget proposal put forth by the Administration calls for
href="http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/04/nussle-health-care/">$200
billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid over the next five
years.
Granted, this is…