public health
tsmith | May 25, 2007A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I reviewed the HIV/AIDS chapter in Tom Bethell's book, "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science." I discussed his characterization of AIDS in Africa:
As the chapter title suggests, Bethell claims that AIDS in Africa is a made-up epidemic; AIDS is really due to simple malnutrition and dirty water supplies, rather than a virus. Government officials, scientists, and journalists are either too brainwashed or too scared to speak against the "AIDS orthodoxy." The evil liberals aren't concerned about AIDS because the real concern of the left,…
tsmith | May 23, 2007 Everyone knows about the "butterfly effect": the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could eventually result in the formation of a tornado in Texas by virtue of very small alterations in the initial conditions of a system. Though this description of it is often decried by people who study chaos theory as an inaccurate oversimplification, it's a useful illustration of the tiny perturbations that can have vast effects on a downstream chain of reactions.
When it comes to infectious diseases, climate change may be the beginning, but environmental effects extend much farther…
tsmith | May 22, 2007I haven't had a chance yet to mention Seed's promotion of the Intel Science and Engineering Fair, the cream of the science fair crop. It's so prestigious, in fact, that it attracts young adults from all over the world to share their research. However, one brought more than the judges bargained for, as she also happened to be in the early stages of measles:
A 15-year-old girl from India who was visiting for the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair has been hospitalized with measles, and New Mexico health officials say she was likely infectious when she was traveling and while at…
tsmith | May 21, 2007 I had a strange worry as a kid. I was very scared of getting bit by a tick and developing Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever (RMSF). I know, weird--even for nerdy kids like me, who knows about Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever? How many readers are even familiar with it?
For those who aren't, RMSF is a zoonotic rickettsial disease transmitted by several species of ticks. Though the disease is named after the geographical region where it was first described back in the late 1800s, the bacterium that causes it, Rickettsia rickettsii (an obligate intracellular pathogen), has been found in almost all…
tsmith | May 17, 2007I wrote several posts last year on the mumps outbreak here in Iowa. We didn't get hit with mumps this year, but there has been an ongoing outbreak in Canada, primarily in Nova Scotia. So how do I fit into this?
Most recently, mumps has been diagnosed in Toronto:
Canada's ongoing mumps outbreak has hit the country's biggest city. And Toronto's public health officials expect the current case count of three infections to climb before the outbreak subsides.
"I think we may see more cases," Dr. Barbara Yaffe, director of communicable disease control for Toronto Public Health, said in an…
tsmith | May 14, 2007 Readers may have noticed that a re-vamped "Ask a Scienceblogger" has appeared, with prior questions and responses at Cognitive Daily and Thoughts from Kansas. Aetiology gets the current installment, discussing the question, "Why is it possible to create vaccines for some microbes and not others?"
First, let me start off with a quibble about how this question was phrased, which suggests that it isn't possible to create a vaccine for some organisms. This suggests a pessimistic view not shared by researchers in the field. Just because we've not been able to create them up to this point--or…
scientificactivist | May 11, 2007This week's New England Journal of Medicine is a virtual smorgasbord of articles on HPV (human papilloma virus) vaccination. Although HPV also causes unsightly genital warts, HPV is more or less the sole cause of cervical cancer. I've written quite a bit here about Merck's HPV vaccine, Gardasil, since a February 2007 executive order by Texas governor Rick Perry made the vaccine mandatory for sixth grade girls in the state but was subsequently overturned by the state legislature (and Perry announced just this Tuesday that he would not veto the bill, which had been passed by a veto-proof…
tsmith | May 10, 2007Last month I noted the story of Robert Daniels, a patient with drug-resistant tuberculosis who's been held in isolation in Arizona in order to prevent spread of the deadly pathogen. While some patient's rights advocates have been outraged, Mr. Daniels' treatment pales in comparison to what Mona at Science Notes writes about:
News has broken that the Canadian government continued to require Native Canadian children to attend residential schools where they could learn "civilized," Christian, European ways, for years after they knew that tuberculosis was rampant in those schools, and they…
tsmith | May 9, 2007I've mentioned several times here at Aetiology that, when it comes to pandemic influenza preparedness, we need more than just vaccines specific for H5N1. Though this virus looks like a looming threat right now, we can't be 100% certain that it will actually cause the next global pandemic; while we're focused on H5N1, a new strain of H2N2 (or another serotype) may pop up out of the woodwork, catching us unawares. However, while this is well known in the infectious disease community and the scientific community, it's been rare to read such information in the mainstream media. Therefore, this…
mikethemadbiologist | May 9, 2007Tragically, Massachusetts is having a hepatitis C outbreak, and it's entirely due to surging heroin use:
The spike in hepatitis C, an illness most often spread by drug needles tainted with the virus, emerges during a period of epidemic heroin use in Massachusetts.
That is almost certainly no coincidence, said John Auerbach , the state's public health commissioner. "I suspect there is a direct correlation between the increase in hepatitis C among younger people and the increase in injection drug use and heroin use, in particular," Auerbach said. "It is terribly tragic, but it is very…
tsmith | May 8, 2007 Smallpox is, without a doubt, the biggest success story in all of vaccination. The practice of variolation, or the purposeful inoculation of naïve individuals with material from scabs of smallpox victims, was practiced for years prior to Edward Jenner's substitution of cowpox for the smallpox (Variola) virus. The vaccinia virus, thought to be a derivative of cowpox, has been used in the 20th century in smallpox vaccination campaigns. Vaccina elicits antibodies that protect from smallpox infection, yet typically causes an asymptomatic or only mildly symptomatic infection. This…
mikethemadbiologist | May 4, 2007No, KPC isn't a new fast food restaurant. It's short for Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase. The bad news: it's very hard to treat. The good news: it's very rare...for now.
Actually, the correct term is KPC-possessing K. pneumoniae*, but we'll just use the slang 'KPC'--it's what all the cool microbiologists use (I'll refer to the carbapenemase gene as the 'KPC gene'). KPC causes pneumonia, urinary tract infections, and sepsis; the mortality rate from these infections is extremely high.
The KPC gene confers resistance to all cephalosporins and Ã-lactam antibiotics: basically,…
mikethemadbiologist | May 2, 2007Yesterday, the NY Times had an article about using vaccination to eliminate or greatly reduce E. coli O157:H7 infections. Strategies differ: some would vaccinate the cows, while others would vaccinate people. The new threat due to E. coli O157:H7 isn't from contaminated meat, but from contaminated vegetables, such as the spinach outbreak. Unfortunately, I don't think vaccination is going to work.
We'll ignore the notion that if we were to institute a mass vaccination campaign of either cattle or people, we might want to target something that kills more than 61 people per year, and, in…
tsmith | May 1, 2007 A few weeks back during the whole Egnor kerfuffle, I mentioned how important an understanding of evolutionary biology was to many areas of epidemiology, and specifically, for vaccine development and implementation. As one example, I brought up the phenomenon of serotype replacement, which can occur due to the use of what are called "multi-valent vaccines." Essentially, these vaccines include strains of pathogens which are either the most common, or the most likely to cause disease--thereby protecting individuals from infection with these specific serotypes, but not making the recipient…
mikethemadbiologist | April 29, 2007Friday, Deputy Secretary of State Randall L. Tobias resigned because he had received 'massages' from an escort service. One of Tobias' major effects on U.S. foreign policy was to promote abstinence-only sex education:
Tobias, who was in Berlin for the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS' 2004 Awards for Business Excellence, said that promoting abstinence and monogamy are "far more effective" than distributing condoms for preventing the spread of HIV, according to Agence France-Presse. "Statistics show that condoms really have not been very effective," Tobias said, adding, "It's been the…
scientificactivist | April 28, 2007On Monday, 23 April, the Texas Senate voted 30-1 in favor of its version of HB1089, a bill overturning Rick Perry's February executive order mandating that all girls entering the sixth grade receive the HPV (human papilloma virus) vaccine Gardasil. On Wednesday, 25 April, the Texas House approved the Senate version of the bill by a 135-2 vote. On Thursday, 26 April, the bill was sent to Governor Rick Perry, who has ten days to sign the bill into law, veto the bill, or do neither (which would have the same effect as signing the bill). Even if Perry vetoes the bill, both the House and the…
tsmith | April 27, 2007I wrote a post back in February about HIV's "Kitzmiller vs. Dover" trial. The trial was appealing the sentence of one Andre Chad Parenzee, a native of South Africa who'd been convicted in Australia back in 2004 of infecting one woman with HIV (and exposing two others). Parenzee knew of his HIV+ status, telling the women he had cancer instead and not disclosing his infection nor using condoms. In the appeal, the HIV "dissidents" led the way, with Valendar Turner and Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos of the Perth group taking the stand and denying that HIV even existed. Papadopulos-Eleopulos…
mikethemadbiologist | April 27, 2007While washing your hands for 15-20 seconds with soap and water is the best way to prevent the transmission of infectious disease through hand to hand contact, in a pinch, alcohol santizers work well. Good news from Australia: you can use sanitizers and drive. From Microbe:
Young health care workers cite many reasons why they don't use appropriate hand hygiene at work. One concern, particularly among some young health care workers who are required to have a zero serum alcohol level to legally drive automobiles while on a probationary license in Australia and some other countries, is the…
tsmith | April 27, 2007Of all the vaccines in a child's repertoire, perhaps the most controversial is the vaccine against Hepatitis B virus. It's not because of concerns about the vaccine's safety necessarily; parents tend to be more worried about the MMR vaccine, since that has received so much press. But many parents feel that the HBV vaccine is unnecessary. HBV is transmitted primarily via exposure to blood or other body fluids, or by sexual transmission. Because they assume their kids will be smart, stay away from drugs, and not have sex with the "wrong" people, they assert that the vaccine is a waste and…
tsmith | April 25, 2007 "Wet nursing," or the practice of allowing a woman other than the mother of a child to provide milk to an infant, has been practiced for millenia. Two hundred years ago, wet nursing was common for a variety of reasons. Upper-class families could hire a wet nurse to enable the mother to more quickly become pregnant again, ensuring adequate nutrition for the newborn infant without the associated decrease in fertility that accompanies breast-feeding. In middle class families, employing a wet nurse allowed the mother to return to her job in the factory or in the field. This practice began…