public health
tsmith | January 29, 2008Yesterday I mentioned the controversy over needle exchange programs as an analogy to the objection the administration has to providing heroin anti-OD kits containing Narcan to drug users. In a bit of good timing, the LA Times has an article about a 73-year-old HIV+ lay preacher, of all people, who was on arrested while working a needle exchange program--which remain illegal in his home state, Texas.
terrasig | January 29, 2008. . .that's the message from Dr Bertha Madras, deputy director of the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy, to heroin and morphine users whose lives might be saved in the overdose situation by public distribution of "overdose rescue kits" comprised of a $9.50 nasal spray containing Narcan.
Narcan is the brand name for naloxone, an antagonist (blocker) of these drugs at μ opioid receptors. When an overdose of opioid drugs binds to these receptors in the respiratory control center of a primitive part of our brain, one stops breathing, a situation that pathologists say is "…
mikethemadbiologist | January 28, 2008Say hello to the Office on National Drug Control Policy and to faith-based drug overdose prevention. One public health intervention that saves lives is the distribution of Narcan nasal sprays to drug users:
The nasal spray is a drug called naloxone, or Narcan. It blocks the brain receptors that heroin activates, instantly reversing an overdose.
Doctors and emergency medical technicians have used Narcan for years in hospitals and ambulances. But it doesn't require much training because it's impossible to overdose on Narcan.
The Cambridge program began putting Narcan kits into drug users'…
tsmith | January 28, 2008 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…
terrasig | January 28, 2008If you read nothing else: Men with prostate cancer should avoid any dietary supplement containing testosterone (or anything that sounds like it) or that offers claims of increased virility, sexual performance, or increased muscle mass.
Consumption of a herbal/hormone dietary supplement has been linked to two cases of aggressive prostate cancer as reported in a paper in the 15 January issue of Clinical Cancer Research (abstract free; full paper paywalled) . The observations and follow-up studies were conducted by urologists at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School and Baylor…
tsmith | January 28, 2008Via new acquaintance Tom Levinson of the Inverse Square blog comes an all-too-familiar story of our "compassionate conservative" administration putting their own morality above proven public health programs:
Fact 1: public health officials around the country...are distributing rescue kits [containing Narcan, see below --TS] that save heroin users from overdoses. The kits cost $9.50, and they are credited with reversing 2,600 overdoses in 16 such local programs around the country. For context: NPR reports that "overdoses of heroin and opiates, such as Oxycontin, kill more drug users than AIDS…
tsmith | January 25, 2008 A few months back, I blogged about World Rabies Day, noting that this virus is still a huge public health threat in many areas of the world. A few weeks ago, biologist Olivia Judson wrote a post on a potential "coffin for rabies" on her New York Times blog, describing more about the reality of the disease and what we could do to practically wipe out this virus in humans. I have a bit more on it over at Correlations.
Image from http://www.powhatananimalhospital.com/disease/rabid%20dog.jpg
mikethemadbiologist | January 24, 2008A couple of weeks back I posted about the Office of Human Research Protections' shutting down a highly effective infection control program. In the NY Times, Jane Brody discusses the program further. Here's the list of the five things the hospitals used to combat hospital-acquired infections:
When inserting a central venous catheter, doctors should do the following:
1. Wash their hands with soap.
2. Clean the patient's skin with chlorhexidine antiseptic.
3. Put sterile drapes over the entire patient.
4. Wear a sterile mask, hat, gown and gloves.
5. Put a sterile dressing over the catheter…
mikethemadbiologist | January 23, 2008I'm posting about this because I want Orac's head to explode. Apparently, the first episode of the ABC legal drama, "Eli Stone", involves the protagonist taking up the mercury militia, anti-vax cause:
While police and legal dramas often use ripped-from-the-headlines topics as the basis of episodes, rarely do broadcast networks allow themselves to stray into the middle of heated debates that contain such emotional touchstones for large segments of their audience, if only because another big segment of a network's audience is likely to be on the other side of the debate.
With "Eli Stone,"…
tsmith | January 23, 2008 Though there still may be some lingering doubt about the cause of the Black Death and subsequent outbreaks of plague, the pathogen behind the outbreaks that have taken place in the last 150 years or so is much less ambiguous.
While Koch and Pasteur ushered in the golden age of microbiology, an outbreak of plague began in China and spread from there. In 1894, while plague was raging in Hong Kong, the Pasteur Institute sent Alexandre Yersin, a physician who had trained with both Pasteur and Koch, to investigate. Yersin was able to access material from a corpse, and inoculated material he…
mikethemadbiologist | January 22, 2008Olivia Judson describes what it would take to prevent almost all rabies deaths from Africa (rabies currently kills around 55,000 people annually):
To eliminate the disease from humans, therefore, it needs to be eliminated from dogs. And the way to do that is through dog vaccination. (At first, it may seem perverse to vaccinate dogs rather than humans, given that it's humans we want to protect. But because rabies is spread by dogs, not people, we can't break the chain of transmission unless we vaccinate the animals that spread it.)
The crucial factor in predicting the spread of an infectious…
mikethemadbiologist | January 17, 200861% of women who have abortions already have children. So much for the 'irresponsible slut' propaganda. By way of Jill at Feministe, I found this Guttmacher Institute report (italics mine):
The majority (61%) of U.S. women who have abortions are already mothers, more than half of whom have two or more children. In many cases, women choose abortion because they are motivated to be good parents. Women who have no children want the conditions to be right when they do; women who already have children want to be responsible and take care of their existing children.
"We found that consideration of…
tsmith | January 16, 2008 Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) has taken up residence in sport teams, prisons, schools, the military, and even swine. A new article in the Annals of Internal Medicine shows that, at least in Boston and San Francisco, it's also causing a lot of infections in men who have sex with men; more after the jump.
To examine this, the authors looked at MRSA infections from a variety of health care settings: medical centers, community health clinics, HIV clinics, and emergency rooms. These were examined in separate analyses. For example, for the medical centers they looked at…
mikethemadbiologist | January 16, 2008The NY Times has an article about the MRSA (methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus) strain that is spreading rapidly among gay men. One factor is that a subset of the gay population is immunocompromised due to HIV, and consequently, is more likely to acquire MRSA skin infections.
This strain is very drug resistant, unlike most community-acquired MRSA ('CA-MRSA'). Most CA-MRSA, while resistant to methicillin, is sensitive to clindamycin. However, this strain has acquired a plasmid (a transferable 'mini-chromosome') that confer resistance to commonly-used drugs to treat MRSA:
"This…
tsmith | January 16, 2008Did Yersinia pestis really cause Black Plague? Part 1: Objections to Y. pestis causation
Did Yersinia pestis really cause Black Plague? Part 2: Examination of the criticisms
Did Yersinia pestis really cause Black Plague? Part 3: Paleomicrobiology and the detection of Y. pestis in corpses
Did Yersinia pestis really cause Black Plague? Part 4: Plague in modern times.
tsmith | January 15, 2008 Some infectious agents, it seems, have been with us since the rise of humanity. Bacteria like E. coli or salmonella don't appear to have one moment enshrined in history where they first appeared on the scene. They've probably long been with us, causing disease sporadically but not spectacularly.
Other agents, however, seem to make their presence known. Syphilis is one of these. The first recorded outbreaks of syphilis (caused by the bacterium Treponema pallidum subspecies pallidum) were documented in Europe in 1495. These weren't syphilis as we know it today. Currently, syphilis is…
mikethemadbiologist | January 14, 2008Certain political acts are beyond the pale, such as cutting a teen suicide hotline. Unless they're gay, then it's called positioning. In light of the Great Orange Satan's and others' calls for Michigan Democrats to muck up the Republican race by voting for Romney, I thought revisiting his cuts for a gay suicide teen hotline would be in order (be very, very careful, he just might win...). About the cuts, I wrote:
Let's leave aside decency and morality and try to forget that Romney eliminated funding for a gay teen suicide hotline to curry favor with the theopolitical Right. Let's not plumb…
mikethemadbiologist | January 14, 2008According to the Boston Globe, bisphenol A levels lower than those found in 93% of people led to obesity in mice:
Thousands of chemicals have come on the market in the past 30 years, and some of them are showing up in people's bodies in low levels. Scientists studying obesity are focusing on endocrine disrupters - which have already been linked to reproductive problems in animals and humans - because they have become so common in the environment and are known to affect fat cells.
...A recent US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found that about 93 percent of the US population…
tsmith | January 11, 2008I'll have new posts up here next week, but meanwhile, over at Retrospectacle, Shelley's made this week plague week. She introduces the topic here, and next dishes about plague fashion. Also in the comments, it's asked:
I recently heard that there is some doubt now that the Black Death may not have been bubonic plague. The doubt based on the speed of transmission, but no alternate disease was mentioned. Is there any other disease that matches the symptoms that could be a likely alternative?
Long time readers know that I've referred to this previously and promised to post on it, so if even…
mikethemadbiologist | January 9, 2008First, before I make too much of the differences between, I agree with Orac that the decision by the OHRP to curtail an excellent healthcare intervention that could prevent thousands of deadly hospital-acquired infections annually is murderously stupid. Like Orac, I have had a couple of ridiculous experiences with human subjects research review boards.
The most ridiculous case involved a study of human Escherichia coli. To get E. coli, erm, fresh from the source, the procedure involves poking your own feces with a sterile swab as they exit your posterior. There are legitimate human…