zoonosis
tsmith | September 27, 2016The 2013-2016 West African Ebola virus outbreak altered our perception of just what an Ebola outbreak could look like.
While none of the three primary affected countries--Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea-have had a case since April 2016, the outbreak resulted in a total of over 28,000 cases of Ebola virus disease (EVD)--65 times higher than the previous largest EVD outbreak, and more than 15 times the total number of cases of all prior EVD outbreaks combined, from the virus's discovery in 1976 to a concurrent (but unrelated) outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2014.
In March 2016…
tsmith | August 3, 2014Since yesterday's post, several people have asked me on various social media outlets about the airborne nature of Ebola. Didn't I know about this paper ("Transmission of Ebola virus from pigs to non-human primates"), which clearly showed that Ebola could go airborne?
Indeed I do--I wrote about that paper two years ago, and it in no way changes my assertion that Ebola doesn't spread between people in an airborne manner.
Let me back up. The paper in question was an experimental study done in the wake of the 2008 finding of the Reston Ebola virus in pigs and a previous study looking at the Zaire…
tsmith | June 19, 2013Student guest post by Julia Wiederholt
I don’t think there is a single person that can claim to have never had the joyous experience (sarcasm intended) of suffering from the influenza. We all recognize the common symptoms that accompany this infectious little virus taking up residence in our bodies: the chills accompanying a fever, the total body ache, the nausea, and overall feeling of malaise. Typically this virus comes and goes within a week without serious side effects. When novel strains of the influenza pop up however, there can be more serious complications as your body lacks a…
tsmith | June 17, 2013Student guest post by Naomi Kirschenbaum
Although we can never know, there are estimates in the range of 15,000 displaced pets in the wake of 2005 Hurricane Katrina. Many of the dogs found their way to shelters and homes in our community around the Monterey Bay in California. As a local veterinarian the most notable observation I saw was how it “seemed” that so many were heartworm positive. Six years later we have a published study finding a 48.8% prevalence of heartworm in these dogs.
This story is an example of a few important lessons. First, how things seemed to me, in my clinical…
tsmith | June 17, 2013Student guest post by Jack Hamersky
After successfully completing a job interview I had the opportunity to take the next step in my employment process: taking a Tuberculosis or TB test. I have received the test before but never really understood the point of testing for a disease no one ever sees in my community. I always thought, “Why not focus all this effort and money on more prevalent infectious agents such as Ebola or HIV?” You know, focus on something important. So, as the nurse called me in from the waiting room I began to curse that hard little bubble that would soon be forming…
tsmith | June 5, 2011The E. coli story is moving quickly. A news report out today suggests that sprouts might be the culprit (though it should be emphasized that the outbreak strain hasn't been isolated from these vegetables yet):
Mr Lindemann said epidemiological studies all seemed to point to the plant nursery in Uelzen in the state of Lower Saxony, about 100km (62m) south of Hamburg - though official tests had not yet shown the presence of the bacteria there.
"Further evidence has emerged which points to a plant nursery in Uelzen as the source of the EHEC cases, or at least one of the sources," he said.
"The…
tsmith | April 25, 2011Just received an email from Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases saying that my recent article, The Emergence of Staphylococcus aureus ST398, will be available for free online for the next two weeks. It was submitted roughly a year ago so it's already a bit dated in this quick-moving field, but provides an overview of "livestock-associated" MRSA up to mid-2010 or so--including food-associated MRSA.
mpendergrast | June 21, 2010Mark Pendergrast writes: To kick off this book club discussion of Inside the Outbreaks, I thought I would explain briefly how I came to write the book and then suggest some possible topics for discussion.
The origin of the book goes back to an email I got in 2004 from my old high school and college friend, Andy Vernon, who wrote that I should consider writing the history of the EIS. I emailed back to say that I was honored, but what was the EIS? I had never heard of it. I knew Andy worked on tuberculosis at the CDC, but I didn't know that he had been a state-based EIS officer from 1978…
grrlscientist | April 13, 2008tags: hamster, PetSmart, lawsuit, lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus, LCMV, zoonosis
Portrait of a murderer:
A Siberian dwarf hamster, Phodopus sungorus.
Orphaned image.
I just learned that a lawsuit was recently filed in Massachusetts Superior Court on behalf of a man who died one month after receiving a transplanted liver that was later determined to be infected with lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV). Apparently, the organ donor purchased a pet hamster from a PetSmart in Warwick, Rhode Island, and this hamster was later shown to be infected with this deadly virus.
LCMV is…