tuberculosis
lborkowski | October 25, 2016A few of the recent pieces I’ve liked:
Eric Boodman at STAT: Night sweats, bloody cough — and a diagnosis that turned a doctor into an activist
Laura Fink in The San Diego Union-Tribune: Debt of gratitude owed to Trump accusers
Eliza Barclay at Vox: How to confront sexist “locker room talk,” according to science
Jie Jenny Zou at Center for Public Integrity: State cutbacks, recalcitrance hinder Clean Air Act enforcement
Joerg Drewke in Guttmacher Policy Review: “Fungibility”: The Argument at the Center of a 40-Year Campaign to Undermine Reproductive Health and Rights
Lenny Bernstein and Scott…
tsmith | February 26, 2013Second of five student guest posts by Nai-Chung N. Chang
Tuberculosis (TB) is a major disease burden in many areas of the world. As such, it was declared a global public health emergency in 1993 by the World Health Organization (WHO). It is a bacterial disease that is transmitted through the air when an infected individual coughs, sneezes, speaks, or sings. However, not all individuals who contract the disease will display symptoms. This separates the infected into two categories, latent and active. Latent individuals are non-infectious and will not transmit the disease, whereas active…
lborkowski | July 12, 2012I wrote last week about the importance of the Freedom of Information Act, and Stacey Singer of The Palm Beach Post has just published a piece that shows how important sunshine laws can be for public health. Singer revealed that Florida is in the midst of tuberculosis outbreak that's claimed 13 lives and sickened at least 99 people, six of them children. Another 3,000 people may have been exposed to the bacterium through close contact with contagious sufferers. "Fortunately, only a few of the cases have developed drug resistance so far," Singer reports.
State health officials explained that…
lborkowski | January 10, 2012At her Superbug blog, Maryn McKenna reports on a disturbing, but not unexpected development: over the past three months, 12 cases of tuberculosis at a single Mumbai hospital have been found to be resistant to all the drugs used to treat the disease.
This is not the first time totally drug-resistant tuberculosis (TDR-TB) has been reported; in 2009, McKenna notes, the disease was identified in 15 patients in Iran. This was only three years after extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) was first identified. The drivers of such rapidly evolving drug resistance include inadequate…
lborkowski | November 4, 2011SciDev.Net's TV Padma reports that tuberculosis experts are looking to India to develop affordable TB-testing kits. An estimated four million cases of the disease go undetected, and two million TB patients die every year. India has increased its efforts at finding and treating cases of the disease, but diagnostics still present a challenge, Padma explains:
TB tests come in a range. Latent infections can show up as a reaction when the protein, tuberculin, is injected under the skin. Blood tests may reveal immune molecules (gamma interferon) produced by the body to protect against the bacterium…
razib | December 6, 2009Two loci control tuberculin skin test reactivity in an area hyperendemic for tuberculosis:
Approximately 20% of persons living in areas hyperendemic for tuberculosis (TB) display persistent lack of tuberculin skin test (TST) reactivity and appear to be naturally resistant to infection by Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Among those with a positive response, the intensity of TST reactivity varies greatly. The genetic basis of TST reactivity is not known. We report on a genome-wide linkage search for loci that have an impact on TST reactivity, which is defined either as zero versus nonzero (TST-BINa…
edyong | October 5, 2009Around 2600 years ago in Egypt, a woman called Irtyersenu died. She was mummified and buried at the necropolis at Thebes, where she remained for over two millennia before being unearthed in 1819. Her well-preserved body was brought to the British Museum where it was examined by the physician and obstetrician Augustus Bozzi Granville. It was the first ever medical autopsy of an Egyptian mummy and Granville presented his results to the Royal Society in 1825. His conclusion: Ityersenu died of ovarian cancer.
The mummification techniques of ancient Egypt were so good that Irtyersenu's corpse…
razib | June 23, 2009Obesity May Have Offered Edge Over TB:
Over the course of human evolution, people with excess stores of fat have been more likely to survive famines, many scientists believe, living on to pass their genes to the next generation.
But these days, obesity is thought to be harmful, leading to chronic inflammation and metabolic disorders that set the stage for heart disease. So what went awry? When did excess fat stop being a protective mechanism that assured survival and instead become a liability?
A provocative new hypothesis suggests that in some people, fat not only stores energy but also revs…