public health
tsmith | July 6, 2006So, today apparently is "blog about diarrhea" day. Hope no one's eating lunch. (One of the upsides of being a microbiologist is that we can talk about blood and gore and bodily fluids while we eat and no one gets grossed out. Or, perhaps, that's a downside. Anyway, I digress...)
Two still hospitalized, four treated after E. coli outbreak at daycare
Six confirmed cases of a serious E. coli infection and four additional "suspected" cases are being looked into by the [Tennessee] Department of Health, according to Debbie Hoy of the agency's Cookeville office this Tuesday. All of the infected…
tsmith | July 6, 2006 Some towns have all the luck. Brainerd, Minnesota, population ~13,000, was previously famous as the home of Paul Bunyan, and the setting of the Coen brothers' film, Fargo. Little did I know it had another claim to fame: its very own brand of mysterious diarrhea. All about it after the jump.
Brainerd was the site of the first outbreak of this eponymous diarrhea back in 1983. It is described as an idiopathic syndrome--meaning that we don't have a clue what causes it. The diarrhea is acute in onset, explosive and watery, can last for months, and doesn't respond to antibiotic treatment…
scientificactivist | July 4, 2006This week's Ask a ScienceBlogger question is "What are some unsung successes that have occurred as a result of using science to guide policy?" I think there are several good answers to this question, including several successes in basic science (the NIH, basic science funding), health (vaccination, AIDS relief), space (NASA, the Hubble Telescope), and environmental (the formation of the EPA, the Kyoto Treaty) policy. One success that might not be so obvious, though, was the Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT).
When it was signed and ratified in 1963 by 113 countries, including almost all of the…
tsmith | July 1, 2006More interesting topics, too little time...
Mike discusses the dearth of qualified people to work in clinical microbiology labs--and the effect it may have on your health.
I'm a wanna-be history nerd. I really enjoy the topic, but as a science major, I didn't have a lot of time to take formal coursework in college, and since then much of my reading has focused on historical issues that are somehow related to science or medicine. So, there's a new blog to update me on all the other cool history news.
I've had several posts on butterflies and moths this week. It's also a theme at…
mikethemadbiologist | June 30, 2006This week, our benevolent Seed Overlords ask, "What are some unsung successes that have occurred as a result of using science to guide policy?" Well, I thunked, and thunked, and thunked. Then my head began to hurt. Then I thought of one unsung success.
Vaccination.
Think about it. Typically, vaccination policy is decided by experts, and politicians usually don't meddle in it. There are problems with our vaccination policy--we don't vaccinate enough people, and we vaccinate the wrong groups (most experts claim that the most effective strategy would be to vaccinate those under 18, since…
tsmith | June 30, 2006 One of the things I love about science--but that can also be frustrating--is that every new piece of information leads to a new unanswered question. We've learned so much about microbiology and human disease since the time of Koch and Pasteur, but in many other ways, we're still at square one. One reason is because research over the last century has largely focused on disease-causing organisms--and within those, many studies have focused on identifying factors that allow these organisms to cause disease. This concentration has led to many breakthroughs (such as vaccine targets), but it…
tsmith | June 29, 2006 People make terrible jokes about "mad cow" disease. ("Why is PMS called PMS? Because mad cow was already taken.") Pundits use it as an example of an over-hyped disease (and to be fair, estimates of total cases due to the consumption of contaminated beef in the UK have varied widely, ranging from a few thousand up to well over 100,000). Vegetarians note it as one benefit that comes from their soyburgers. Everyone, it seems, has an opinion.
So-called "mad cow" disease, in humans, is a progressive neurological disorder more correctly called variant Creuzfield-Jacob disease (vCJD).…
tsmith | June 28, 2006 Especially in religious circles, much has been made about the "uselessness" of condoms for the prevention of infection with the human papilloma virus (HPV). This is the virus that is responsible for almost all cases of cervical cancer, against which a new vaccine was recently approved (for more background, see this post). Approximately 20 million Americans are currently infected with HPV, and over their lifetime, about half of sexually active adults will be infected at one point. Though most strains of the virus are harmless, a small portion of them cause cervical cancer in women, a…
tsmith | June 27, 2006 I blogged a few months ago about a case of plague (due to the bacterium, Yersinia pestis) in a woman in California. I'm still doing some reading for the promised post on Black Death, CCR5, and other topics discussed in the comments section, but in the meantime, I wanted to alert y'all to an ongoing outbreak of the disease (in the pneumonic form, meaning the bacteria is present in the lungs and therefore is person-to-person transmissible) in the Democratic Republic of Congo:
The sole aid agency fighting an outbreak of pneumonic plague in the remote lawless corner of the Democratic Republic…
tsmith | June 27, 2006This is all of 24 hours old, so I know it's already ancient history in the blogosphere, but I did want to mention the news of Warren Buffet's ~$37 billion donation to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. (As Stephen Colbert put it, Buffet's so rich that he's hired Bill Gates to spend his money.)
This means additional funding for research into and prevention of diseases such as TB, malaria, and guinea worm, in addition to increased education funding here in the US. And, this donation is in addition to the amount he already invests in his own foundation, the Susan Thompson Buffett…
tsmith | June 23, 2006I have an admission. I am tattooed. Twice. A small thing, but it's pretty incredible at the visceral reactions I sometime receive when people find out. (They're not in oft-seen areas under normal attire, but neither are they anywhere "naughty.") I get head shakes and tongue-clucks from many of my elders; nose crinkles from folks of my own generation who simply think tattoos are unattractive (either on anyone, or on women specifically), or compliments from people who are inked themselves. I understand the range of reactions and hey, to each their own--I'm all for diversity of opinion.…
tsmith | June 23, 2006Rebecca over at Memoirs of a Skepchick makes an excellent argument against the new HPV vaccine:
Before the invention of the fire extinguisher in 1816, people used sensible fire safety precautions. They did not leave oily rags piled in buckets next to the ashtray. They did not set their farts on fire. And they always kept their curtains far away from heating devices.
After the invention of the fire extinguisher, all hell broke loose. It didn't take long for games such as "Tie a Lit Sparkler to the Cat" and "Flaming Monopoly" to explode -- literally and metaphorically -- in popularity all over…
mikethemadbiologist | June 20, 2006...when it comes to funding and resources. And this will have serious ramifications for your health. In talking to a hospital clinical microbiologist today, he told me that microbiology labs in hospitals and states are suffering from two problems.
The first problem is that, unlike the Chemistry and Hematology laboratories which have been able to cut their personnel due to technological advances, most of the work done in microbiology laboratories is still labor intensive. Most microbiological diagnoses require isolating strains to pure cultures, and there's no rapid or cheap way to do this…
tsmith | June 19, 2006[From the archives; originally posted November 28, 2005]
Have you ever wondered how Kevin Bacon and the lights of fireflies related to malaria and power grids? I know it's something that's kept me up many a sleepless night. One word: interconnections.
Many of you have probably heard of the "Six degrees of Kevin Bacon"game. This is based on the work of Stanley Milgram beginning in the 1960s, and brought up again more recently in a 1998 Nature paper, "Collective Dynamics of 'Small-World' Networks," by mathematicians Watts and Strogatz. Milgram conducted a number of studies using his "lost…
tsmith | June 16, 2006Welcome to the June edition of Animalcules! Apologies for the lateness; I only had a few minutes to get online yesterday, and that was mainly devoted to checking email and making sure there were no crises that needed my attention. So, without further ado...
From the Scientific Creative Quarterly comes a humorous entry: Prokaryotes of America Unite. Almost makes me feel bad. (You also may want to check out Scientific Creative Quarterly editor David Ng's new blog here at Scienceblogs: The World's Fair.
Jennifer over at Science Matters has a nice post discussing background information on…
tsmith | June 15, 2006[From the archives; originally posted November 16, 2005]
I know, everyone's so sick of all the new "omics"es. But "metagenomics" is one that I don't see going away anytime soon. At its core, metagenomics is a way of looking at organisms in concert as a complex ecology, rather than as an individual, as genomic analysis has traditionally been done. Rather than isolating 10 different species of bacteria from, say, a gram of soil and analyzing them all separately, a metagenomics strategy would investigate all the organisms in the soil (or in sea water, dental plaque, or even human feces). A huge…
tsmith | June 14, 2006[From the archives; originally published November 18, 2005]
Malaria is one of the world's leading infectious killers. World-wide, almost 40% of the world's population is at risk of acquiring this disease--many of them in poor countries with limited resources to control the disease. Each year, malaria causes 300-500 million infections, and up to 3 million deaths--about 5000 Africans die of the disease every day; one child succumbs every 30 seconds. Mosquito-borne, simple devices (such as mosquito nets over beds) have been shown to drastically decrease the incidence of disease. Though these…
tsmith | June 13, 2006Sunday's New York Times has an article discussing the worldwide increase in diabetes:
The number of people around the world suffering from diabetes has skyrocketed in the last two decades, from 30 million to 230 million, claiming millions of lives and severely taxing the ability of health care systemsto deal with the epidemic, according to data released Saturday by the International Diabetes Federation.
While the growing problem of diabetes in the affluent United States has been well documented, the federation's data shows that 7 of the 10 countries with the highest number of diabetics are in…
tsmith | June 11, 2006Like a Saturday roundup, but a day delayed. Some other topics I found interesting this week, but didn't have a chance to elaborate on...
Afarensis mentions new research on the evolution of the Crenarchaeota, a group of archae.
Laura Bush speaks on the President's malaria initiative.
Both Ed and Janet muse on the FDA approval of the new HPV vaccine--and ramifications thereof.
Via Eastern blot, 2006's Art of Science winners.
Wanna work at Seed? They're looking for fall interns; deadline is July 6th.
And of course, don't forget to send in your submissions for this week's Animalcules…
mikethemadbiologist | June 10, 2006The FDA just halted clinical trials for using the antibiotic Ketek (telithromycin-a macrolide antibiotic) to treat ear infections and tonsilitis in children because it can cause liver failure, blurred vision and loss of consciousness in adults. Some FDA officials have urged withdrawing Ketek entirely because the danger to patients. Unfortunately, we might need Ketec to treat certain multidrug resistant infections. I would urge that Ketec not be banned (but labelled like hell) so that it can be used as a drug of last resort, in the same way colistin is (which can cause kidney damage).