public health
mikethemadbiologist | September 19, 2007Or maybe not? Should doctors be salaried workers? From Political Animal:
UNKIND CUTS?....Last month Blue Cross put physician reimbursement cuts into effect in California and doctors were predictably outraged. "I don't know how anybody can afford to stay in practice and accept Blue Cross rates," Dr. Charles Fishman, a San Luis Obispo dermatologist told the Los Angeles Times. "Boo hoo" was undoubtedly the response from many readers. It's hard for the average American to feel much sympathy for a profession where the median income is $215,000 a year. Soon, Medicare will be making its own cuts,…
tsmith | September 18, 2007...They make be spreading disease.
British hospitals are working on keeping that in check by implementing a new dress code:
British hospitals are banning neckties, long sleeves and jewelry for doctors -- and their traditional white coats -- in an effort to stop the spread of deadly hospital-borne infections, according to new rules published Monday.
Hospital dress codes typically urge doctors to look professional, which, for male practitioners, has usually meant wearing a tie. But as concern over hospital-born infections has intensified, doctors are taking a closer look at their clothing.
"…
tsmith | September 17, 2007 Regular readers may have seen me mention on occasion my father's rather large family. My dad is the youngest of a family of 13 children--12 of whom survived to adulthood. Before my dad was born, he lost a brother to complications from infection with chicken pox; he had a severe infection and developed a fatal secondary pneumonia at just a year old. This was back in the early 1940s, prior to the widespread use of modern antibiotics and certainly long before vaccination for chicken pox. Still, despite the availability of effective chicken pox vaccines today, people still knowingly…
j7uy5 | September 14, 2007The Guardian Unlimited has a provocative
article on the role of
endocrine disruptors in increasing the ratio of girl babies to boy
babies in the Arctic.
I've written about the topic before (
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/02/endocrine_disruptors.php">1
2)
as have
href="http://scienceblogs.com/terrasig/2007/02/lavender_and_tea_tree_oils_may.php">Abel
and
href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/12/satans_perfect_food_tofu.php">PZ.
James Hrynyshyn, on Island of Doubt, has
already commented on
the Guardian article:
href="http://scienceblogs.com/…
tsmith | September 14, 2007Just a quick post to note that fellow ScienceBlogger Nick Anthis has up a post on HIV denial in South Africa. Though this is a topic I've touched on, he goes into a deeper history of it, including more about the cultural reasons for denial (whereas I typically focus more on the science).
In other news, I have an editorial today in the The Times Higher Education Supplement in London. You can find it here (registration required).
tsmith | September 13, 2007Clostridium difficile is an emergent bacterium. A close relative of the bacteria that cause tetanus and botulilsm (Clostridium tetani and Clostridium botulinum, respectively), C. difficile is an intestinal bacterium that can cause colitis. C. difficile has until recently been a fairly rare cause of disease, and then only typically within a hospital setting. However, the emergence of a new, highly virulent strain of the bacterium a few years ago, coinciding with an increase in the rate of serious infections it caused, put this pathogen on the map. And like methicillin-resistant…
scientificactivist | September 13, 2007There's been quite a bit of blogging lately about HIV denialism, so I thought I would take this opportunity to write a little bit about HIV denialism in South Africa--a subject that gets mentioned pretty often is rarely discussed in much detail. I spoke about this topic in my talk on Wednesday, though, because it serves as a nice lesson in the importance of not looking at certain problems too simplistically. The following--an excerpt--is a basic introduction to Thabo Mbeki's HIV denialism based on what I've learned traveling in South Africa and talking to a variety of people who study the…
j7uy5 | September 11, 2007I don't think this has ever happened before. I was
reading an
article about the organizational chart at the
href="http://www.fda.gov/" rel="tag">FDA
and I laughed out
loud.
Unfortunately it was not a good "monkey-on-a-goat" LOL moment; rather,
it was a "WTF-sounds-like-Bush" kind of LOL.
The chart is from this article:
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/357/10/960">Sidelining
Safety — The FDA's Inadequate Response to the IOM,
by Sheila Weiss Smith, Ph.D, in the latest NEJM (Volume 357:960-963).
(It's open-access.)
I've written about this at length before (
href…
tsmith | September 11, 2007...so claims this headline. Only the story screws it up.
The article highlights this dissertation research by Charles Courtemanche at Washington University in St. Louis. Courtemanche's thesis is that the rise in gas prices causes more people to walk, ride bikes, or take public transportation (which they'd also have to walk to), as well as eat at home instead of going out; therefore higher gasoline prices can result in a thinner population. Sounds plausible. I won't get into all the details of his research (the .pdf is available from the above link for anyone interested), but just by…
tsmith | September 11, 2007I 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…
tsmith | September 10, 2007 September 8th was world rabies day. In the United States, this was celebrated with the news that the canine rabies strain appears to be eliminated from this country. In the U.S., rabies in both humans and domestic animals remains rare, though the virus remains endemic in several species of wildlife (especially raccoons, skunks, and bats). However, worldwide, rabies remains a significant public health problem, causing an estimated 50-60,000 deaths per year worldwide--one death every ten minutes. More after the jump...
First, the news about the U.S. and dog rabies. Like most viruses,…
tsmith | September 7, 2007 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…
tsmith | September 6, 2007While E. coli typically makes the news as a food-borne pathogen, that's only one facet of the bacterium. It can be deadly, sure, but it also helps us digest our food; it produces vitamin K for us; benign strains can even protect us from invading pathogens. It's one of the most-studied bacterial species and a "workhorse" for research in microbiology and molecular biology. We use it as a marker of fecal contamination in water, and it can even be used to produce insulin for diabetes patients. So it may come as no surprise that it may one day be a cavity fighter as well:
Imagine being able…
mikethemadbiologist | September 5, 2007...then please take this survey (it's anonymous). The survey designers are trying to understand more about about the concerns of people affected by MRSA. The survey should take about 25 minutes to complete. You can take the survey here. If you know someone who has had a MRSA infection, please forward this link to him or her. Also, if your blog can handle it, please think about posting the link.
purepedantry | September 5, 2007Shocking. An epidemiological study of bands in the US and Europe showed that musicians do really die prematurely. Equally shocking: drugs and alcohol are involved.
From the BBC:
A Liverpool John Moores University study of 1,050 US and European artists found they are twice as likely to die early than the rest of the population.
In all, 100 stars died between 1956 and 2005 with US stars dying at 42 on average and those from Europe at 35.
Drug and alcohol problems accounted for one in four deaths, the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health said.
...
Lead researcher Professor Mark Bellis…
tsmith | September 4, 2007Denial 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…
mikethemadbiologist | September 4, 2007In response to this post about annual influenza (also crossposted here), I received several emails and comments that missed the whole point. I am not denigrating the importance of 'other' diseases. AIDS and cancer are worth curing and preventing. My point about influenza is that preventing most of the deaths can be thought of as 'low-hanging fruit.'
Unlike AIDS or various cancers (there is no single 'cancer'), we don't need a medical or technological breakthrough that might or might not happen. We also don't need behavioral modification, such as STD awareness or smoking cessation…
j7uy5 | September 1, 2007
There may be another crisis brewing in health care finance.
In the early 2000's, health insurance premiums were
increasing by ~10% per year. The increase in premiums was
greater than the increase in health care costs.
Why would insurance premiums go up faster than health care costs?
It is because health insurance companies make most of their money from
investments (
href="http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=29450&ref=rellink">1).
In the early 2000's, their investments (along with everyone
else's) were not doing so well.
Of course nobody knows if the sturm und…
tsmith | August 31, 2007Those 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…
tsmith | August 30, 2007As 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…