outbreak
tsmith | September 7, 2006Drug-Resistant TB in South Africa Draws Attention From U.N.
The World Health Organization will hold an urgent meeting this week to seek ways to deal with deadly strains of tuberculosis that are virtually untreatable with standard drugs.
The meeting, in Johannesburg on Thursday and Friday, comes in response to recent reports from a number of the world's regions about a small but growing number of cases of the deadly strains, known as extreme drug-resistant tuberculosis, or XDR-TB.
"XDR-TB poses a grave public health threat, especially in populations with high rates of H.I.V." and few health…
tsmith | August 15, 2006 There's been quite a bit of discussion in the news lately about how safe we are (or aren't) in the light of the recent terror arrests in the UK. As we approach the 5-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, many changes have been made in the name of protecting us from terrorism. Some of them, including adding additional first responders and public health workers (and preparing them for a variety of emergency situations) are good in theory, but have been sorely underfunded. Other measures, unfortunately, are little more than theater as Revere suggests, including the current focus on your…
tsmith | August 10, 2006So it would seem.
West Nile is spreading beyond birds, horses and humans. A squirrel has tested positive for the virus and hundreds more are showing the same symptoms
People are finding squirrels in their yards or parks that look like they've been injured because they aren't able to walk. In some cases they're disoriented, running around in circles or shaking. Now it's believed they're suffering from West Nile.
(More below...)
West Nile virus (WNV) is another arbovirus; that is, a virus that's transmitted by an arthropod (in this case, the mosquito). Typically, the virus cycles between birds…
tsmith | August 10, 2006I wrote several posts on mumps outbreak here in Iowa this past spring. However, we aren't the only I-state to have dealt recently with an outbreak of vaccine-preventable disease. An editorial in yesterday's New York Times highlights the dangers of withholding vaccincations.
(Continued below...)
In the spring of 2005, an outbreak of measles occurred in Indiana. The unvaccinated index case had been traveling in Romania on a missionary trip, where she picked up the virus. Measles is one of the most infectious viruses we know of, and when she returned home, she ended up spreading the virus…
tsmith | July 11, 2006 Longtime readers know of my fascination with Ebola. Much of it is fueled not by the fact that it's a major killer of humanity, because it's not: in 30 years, it's been responsible for a bit less than 2,000 human infections, and ~1,200 deaths. Bats have long been suspected to be a reservoir of the virus, and recent studies have confirmed that they can carry the virus.
With at least one strain of Ebola (Ebola Reston), we know that our primate cousins are more severely affected than we are. This strain has been found to infect captured primates brought into the United States from the…
tsmith | July 10, 2006Ames, Iowa may not exactly be thought of as a major tourist destination, or sporting venue. Last week, however, it was both, as the host of the first ever Special Olympics USA National Games, with Ames serving as an "olympic village." Most of it went off rather smoothly, but it also became newsworthy for another reason:
Illness identified at Special Olympics
Several people affiliated with Special Olympics teams who fell ill this week have tested positive for norovirus, a common cause of what is known as the stomach flu, state health officials announced Saturday.
Overall, 52 people…
tsmith | July 7, 2006Those of you who have followed creationism/intelligent design literature over the years have probably felt as if you're living in an alternate universe sometimes. In that literature, many times it seems as if "up" means "down" and "highly supported by the evidence" means "a theory in crisis."
You may not have been following the comments to this thread on AIDS (and lord, I can't blame you), but if you have been, you've seen a similar phenomenon, where it's suggested that mutations found in RNA viruses are just due to sloppy lab work, essentially blowing off an entire field of research.…
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…
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…
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 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 9, 2006I wrote recently how evolution and phylogenetic analysis of HIV isolates has provided evidence that the progenitor to HIV jumped into humans in Cameroon or a nearby area. Obviously it's a topic that's interesting to me, but may seem a bit esoteric to some. RPM over at Evolgen has a new post showing another application of phylogenetic analysis to HIV that may be of interest to readers here, where infectious disease epidemiology meets CSI.
tsmith | June 9, 2006The new issue of Nature Medicine has a number of excellent articles on topics in infectious disease. I'm going to discuss a few of them in more detail next week (or possibly the week after; next week will be a short one for me), but in the meantime, I'll highlight two articles in particular that may interest readers: Here on the midwest mumps outbreak, and this story on phage therapy to treat "superbug" infections. (It just happens to be written by Thomas Häusler, who is the author of the book I reviewed in this post.
tsmith | June 7, 2006 A recent story detailing an outbreak of sexually-transmitted diseases has gotten a good deal of attention from news outlets and blogs. The reason it's newsworthy is because the individuals affected aren't teenagers or single twenty-somethings; they're senior citizens. So, let me point out the obvious: even "old people" have sex.
This sometimes uncomfortable fact of life was driven home to me when I was just a teenager myself, when my grandma was discussing the difficulty she had showering (she'd just had surgery). Someone had asked whether grandpa was much help, and she mentioned that…
tsmith | June 3, 2006More interesting stuff I didn't get to...
First, outbreak news that I've not had a chance to write about. A huge cholera outbreak is ongoing in Angola; meanwhile, a small measles outbreak has been reported in Boston.
Invasive bullfrogs may be spreading around the deadly chytrid fungus that has been implicated in mass amphibian deaths around the world.
The FDA has approved a new shingles vaccine for adults who had chickenpox.
New studies show that the time to get kids interested in science is when they're young.
And something I keep meaning to mention...BlogHer. Not familiar? Read all…
tsmith | May 26, 2006As pointed out yesterday, flu blogging has been light this month, even though there have been interesting developments. As such, to catch up a bit, I'm posting an overview of the current Indonesian cluster and some other thoughts below the jump...
As always, I point anyone who wants to keep up-to-date on the latest news over to Effect Measure for excellent analysis of what it all means, or to H5N1 for news from around the world on the topic. Obviously, the biggest news of the moment is the Indonesian family cluster, which appears to not only be an example of human-to-human transmission, but…
tsmith | May 26, 2006Species of the bacterium Clostridium have long been a scourge of humans. They are gram-positive, spore-forming bacteria that can be found in the soil around all of us. The spores then germinate when exposed to anaerobic conditions.
Clostridium botulinum is the cause of botulism, a serious and potentially fatal paralytic illness often caused by ingestion of contaminated foods. More recently, the bacterium has been used as the source of that anti-wrinkle miracle, BoTox: botulinum toxin type A, allowing all of Hollywood to smile without a wrinkly forehead (ah, the wonders of nature!).…
tsmith | May 25, 2006I feel a bit guilty. I still get occasional comments on this post about the outbreak of chikungunya on several islands in the Indian Ocean. Since I'm obviously not involved in the actual outbreak investigation, all I have to offer is news reported elsewhere--and it's not exactly been a landslide of information. However, Nature does have some news to offer, based largely on a new paper published in PLoS Medicine (summary here).
Previously, the complete genomes of three isolates of the virus had been determined. Two were from strains isolated in 1952 during the first known Chikungunya…
tsmith | May 23, 2006Scary.
A woman is feared to have died from ebola after taking ill on a plane home from Africa yesterday.
Passengers and crew on the flight to Heathrow are understood to be panicking that they have contracted the contagious virus.
They helped the Briton when she was vomiting and bleeding. Some even shared their drinks with her.
Last night, tests were being run to confirm whether she had the haemorraghic fever.
The 38-year-old was on Virgin Atlantic flight VS602 from Johannesburg. It is understood she worked at an embassy in Lesotho.
(Continued after the jump)
First, I'll note that this story…