infectious disease
tsmith | February 23, 2010Student guest post by Dayna Groskreutz
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in adults in the United States. Acute coronary syndrome (ACS) is a term which includes both heart attacks and unstable angina. ACS occurs, in part, due to atherosclerosis, or plaque accumulation leading to narrowing of the artery. Some known risk factors for atherosclerosis and ACS include smoking, family history, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. Recently, the role of inflammation in the development of atherosclerosis and ACS has been an area of intense study. Proposed causes of inflammation include…
tsmith | February 23, 2010Student guest post by Ron Bedford.
The first week of February 2010 must have been some sort of Post Polio Syndrome (PPS) week. The New York Times ran a story about PPS on February 2nd.
On the following Saturday, during the broadcast of the 2009 AKC/Eukanuba National Championship dog show, a Labrador Retriever named Benton was honored with an AKC Humane Fund Award for Canine Excellence (ACE) in the service category for his work as an assistance dog for his owner, Margo Dietrich, a polio survivor who "lives with physical limitations due to experiencing adult-onset Post Polio Syndrome".
Since…
tsmith | February 22, 2010Student guest post by Anh To.
When I found out my only non-smoking cousin had nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), I was puzzled. With all the hype about cigarette smoking associated with various kinds of cancers in the media, I did not understand why none of my smoking cousins had NPC but the one who didn't smoke did. At first, I thought it must be due to the second hand smoke. Now, I understand that the picture is very complex.
Before I go into what I have learned over the past several months, I need to make a disclaimer. I am not an expert in NPC. I am an average college student. This…
tsmith | February 22, 2010Guest post by Zainab Khan
In most western countries, germs have become synonymous with the idea of something bad that needs to be killed as quickly as possible. However, people have long been questioning the validity of these ideas; a few decades ago it was hypothesized that not enough exposure to germ can and does cause insufficient development of an individuals immune system. New studies have recently shown that this idea of getting rid of all germs, and keeping children exposure to them at an absolute minimum, may possibly cause more harm then good; over cleanliness is suspected to be…
revere | February 14, 2010The mosquito is the vector for diseases like malaria, yellow fever and West Nile. They are major scourges of public health, and while we have sunk a fair amount of money in drying to eradicate them, we haven't put as much money into developing the technology for the war on mosquitoes as the war on other humans. Think of the Star Wars Initiative and the investment and difficult of zapping a single missile before it hits an population area. The technology is super expensive (and super profitable for defense contractors. And so far nobody has been able to make it work. The idea of shooting a…
revere | January 22, 2010It was some time after the pandemics of 1957 and 1968 that we were able to judge their severity and it will likely be some time after this one has finally burned itself out, most likely to become "just another" seasonal flu, that we will be able to gauge the 2009 swine flu pandemic. A lot of data is being generated but it will take time to harvest it and send it to the scientific market for consumption. A report in today's Lancet reminds us that we aren't seeing all there is to see, even with unprecedentedly rapid means of communication and better surveillance than ever in the history of our…
revere | January 17, 2010There is an old vaudeville joke where a man goes to the doctor complaining about pain in his arm:
Doctor: Have you ever had it before?
Man: Yes, once before.
Doctor: Well, you have it again.
CDC reported on their weekly FluView website on Friday that the Iowa Department of Public Health (IDPH) reported to CDC that in September a boy (age not stated) had a flu like illness from which he fully recovered and for which he hadn't required hospitalization. In November IDPH determined it was swine flu, but not the pandemic H1N1 but a swine-origin H3N2. According to CDC there was "no clear exposure"…
revere | December 28, 2009It's the end of the calendar year and the traditional time the media looks back on "the biggest stories of the year." There are websites about almost any subject (even one on a particular model of running shoe, I am told), but those of us who write specialized blogs (as opposed to ones about politics or current events) rarely expect our subject matter to show up on one of those lists. We've been writing about flu for over five years, here, and while re recognized the possibility our subject would come into vogue -- that's indeed why we were writing about it -- it still took us and everyone…
revere | December 25, 2009So far the pandemic of 2009 has been bad enough but not anywhere near as bad as one could imagine. Let's hope it stays that way. While winning new knowledge from actual disease and sickness is not anyone's favorite strategy, it is likely we will learn a great deal about influenza in the years to come as we begin to mine the wealth of data it is producing. Science, even at its most urgent, is still a slow, methodical process, but this pandemic and the resources devoted to tracking it and the tools being developed to analyze it is a watershed event in flu science. Dogmas will fall and probably…
revere | December 13, 2009Red wine has been touted for its health benefits but these don't seem to extend to warding off swine flu. The virology laboratory in Bordeaux in the southwest of France tested via RT-PCR over 1200 nasopharyngeal swabs between May 1 and the first week in October and found 186 positive for the new pandemic strain. They looked at five of these cases more closely, monitoring them for duration of viral shedding. Two of the five kept shedding for 2 to 4 weeks (paper in Eurosurveillance by Fleury et al., v. 14, #49, December 10, 2009).
The first case was a non-obese previously healthy male in his…
revere | December 12, 2009We complain when there isn't enough swine flu vaccine and we complain when our health departments don't count all the cases. It's probably good so many people are out of work and can't eat in restaurants, because they aren't getting inspected because all available staff are trying to deal with the flu pandemic:
The current swine-flu wave may have peaked, but thousands of public health workers are trying to vaccinate millions of people against the new disease, fearing that another wave could emerge in the new year. Yet recession-driven budget cuts have thinned their ranks so far that they are…
revere | November 27, 2009It seems swine flu is full of surprises that turn out not to be surprises. Or so it's claimed. Or not. Here is CDC's Dr. Anne Schuchat, the agency's chief health officer and spokesperson on swine flu, responding to NPR's Melissa Block's question about what has been her biggest surprise:
Dr. SCHUCHAT: I shouldn't have been surprised, but I have been surprised about this disproportionate toll that it's taking in pregnant women. I think I'd never lived before a pandemic before, and I actually hadn't seen the really sorry and just the tragic stories of healthy pregnant women coming down with such…
revere | November 24, 2009All geeks love science jokes (one of my favorites: what's purple and drives to work? Answer: an Abelian grape [explanation, the elements of an Abelian group commute, i.e., a + b = b + a]).
Science jokes are good. You can learn some science from them. In particular, the first three or four of this set of groaners involve viruses and infectious diseases and each tell you -- vividly -- an important truth. The rest are pretty good, too.
Enjoy (hat tip Boingboing):
revere | November 19, 2009The Director of Loyola University Medical Center's clinical microbiology laboratory is reported as saying that rapid flu tests are a public health risk. Here's some of what he said and then my explanation as to why it is misleading or just plain wrong:
Rapid influenza diagnostic tests used in doctors' offices, hospitals and medical laboratories to detect H1N1 are virtually useless and could pose a significant danger to public health, according to a Loyola University Medical Center researcher.
"At Loyola, we determined four years ago that the rapid tests for influenza detected only 50 percent…
revere | November 14, 2009We've talked aplenty about how much we still need to understand about influenza. Not just its basic biology but its dynamics. How does it spread over space and time and how existing infection rates affect future infection rates and how each are related to the number of susceptibles in the population. It's even more than that. There are other viruses perhaps competing for or perhaps cooperating with the flu virus in its sole job, to make copies of itself, using the host's (i.e., our own) biological machinery. You can imagine a scenario whereby once a lot of cells are infected by one virus,…
revere | November 10, 2009Nursing homes (Long Term Care Facilities, LTCFs) are a favorite hunting ground for respiratory viruses, including flu. They are open to the general community, where visitors and employees mingle freely with the residents. The residents are usually of an advanced age, have other sicknesses that make them vulnerable and often have less active immune defenses. So when the swine flu pandemic began at the end of April, the Public Health Laboratory at Ontario's Agency for Health Protection and Promotion ramped up their respiratory infection outbreak registration system with the prospect that LCTFs…
revere | November 9, 2009We only just got to the surgical/N95 mask article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). We've been traveling and haven't been able to keep up with what others were saying, but we're sure it's been well covered by the usual suspects. So we'll just add our take here, for what it's worth.
As most readers here know, what kind of mask (if any) will best protect a health care worker or anyone else at high risk of exposure to people infected with influenza virus is a difficult question. We still remain unsure whether flu is transmitted mainly by large or small droplets. If most…
revere | November 4, 2009It's being described as a "dramatic settlement" that will set a pattern for the nation. Let's hope so, because the agreement reached yesterday by the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC) and hospital player Catholic Healthcare West (CHW) sounds like just what the doctor ordered. It covers 32 CHW facilities in California and Nevada, where CNA/NNOC represents 13,000 registered nurses.
Some details:
A centerpiece of the agreement is the creation of a new system-wide emergency task force, comprised of CNA/NNOC RNs and hospital representatives following…
revere | October 31, 2009Statins for influenza are in the news again, this time because of a paper given at the Annual Meeting of the Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA). We'll get to it in a moment, but first a little background.
Statins are cholesterol lowering drugs that are taken by tens of millions of people (including me; I take 20 mg of generic simvastatin a day). The statins are a group of drugs that competitively inhibit an enzyme, 3 hydroxy 3 methylglutaryl coenzyme A reductase (HMG-CoA reductase). They are quite effective in lowering cholesterol and have an excellent safety profile (not perfect,…
revere | October 30, 2009One frequently hears claims that the current swine flu pandemic has been exaggerated because there are "only" 1000 or so deaths, while seasonal flu is estimated to contribute to tens of thousands of deaths a year. There are two reasons why this is not an apt comparison. We've discussed both here fairly often. The first is that the epidemiology of a pandemic and seasonal flu are very different. Epidemiology studies the patterns of disease in the population and swine flu is hitting -- and killing -- a very different demographic from seasonal flu. Its victims are young and many are vigorous and…