public health
mikethemadbiologist | March 13, 2007Last night, I was reading some of the comments you leave here, and, in response to a post about a surgeon who thinks evolution is irrelevant to medical practice (Got Antibiotic Resistance?), fellow ScienceBlogling Mark left a comment. I'll get to the comment in a minute, but tragically, I hear stories like his far too often. Mark writes (italics original):
Mike, you've nailed exactly what pisses me off so much about Egnor. Right now, we're talking about something that's become deeply personal to me.
Since January, my father has been paralyzed from the waist down. The cause of it is MRSA. He…
mikethemadbiologist | March 12, 2007I haven't been able to respond to Michael Egnor's idiocy about evolution because I've been recovering from a meeting, but fortunately my fellow ScienceBloglings have. But I'll add my two cents anyway. Here's the really stupid part from Egnor (italics mine):
Doctors don't study evolution. Doctors never study it in medical school, and they never use evolutionary biology in their practice. There are no courses in medical school on evolution. There are no 'professors of evolution' in medical schools. There are no departments of evolutionary biology in medical schools.
The evolution--not the…
scientificactivist | March 11, 2007On 2 February, Texas became the first state in the nation to enact a mandatory vaccination scheme for human papilloma virus (HPV), the primary cause of cervical cancer. The vaccine, Gardasil, is produced by Merck. Although welcomed by many, this was a surprising development since it was brought about by an unusual executive order from conservative Republican governor Rick Perry.
The executive order requires all girls entering the sixth grade to undergo the series of vaccinations, although concerned parents are given the choice to opt out if they so desire. Not surprisingly, there was an…
mikethemadbiologist | March 9, 2007There's something very interesting about the unfolding story of the possible FDA cefquinome approval (I've covered it here). After doing a Technorati search, virtually all of the blogs that discuss this issue are either non-partisan or progressive/liberal (I say 'virtually' because I might have missed one, but I actually didn't see any). The rightwing bloggysphere is nowhere to be found. Any thoughts on why that might be? Maybe they are just slow off the mark on this one? Infections don't check political affiliation....
mikethemadbiologist | March 7, 2007Or maybe terrifying is a better word. I just returned from the Network on Antimicrobial Resistance in Staphylococcus aureus meeting, where I learned some very interesting things about S. aureus (since I'm going to refer to MRSA, methicillin resistant S. aureus repeatedly, go check this link if you want to know more about MRSA):
1) 43% of all skin infections in the U.S. are the result of one strain of MRSA. Not 43% of staphylococcal infections. All skin infections.
2) According to the NHANES study, the number of people who carry S. aureus asymptomatically (in other words, it lives up your…
mikethemadbiologist | March 5, 2007...high levels of resistance to cephalosporins and beta-lactam antibiotics are sure to follow. Sunday, the Washington Post covered the FDA approval of the use of cefquinome in cattle to treat respiratory pneumonia. The article provides a pretty good synopsis of what happened, so I won't summarize the whole thing, but this decision represents a complete corruption of the regulatory process by industry. It's that simple.
Here's why cefquinome use in agriculture is really stupid: bacteria that evolve resistance to cefquinome, also become resistant to cefepime, a vital drug in the treatment…
mikethemadbiologist | March 2, 2007There's a very interesting Boston Globe story about Paul Levy, the CEO of Boston's Beth-Israel Deaconess Hospital. He's not only a CEO, but also a blogger. His blog, Running a Hospital, is, well, self-explanatory--I guess you can blog about work...if you're the boss. Levy appears to have started a minor kerfuffle because he has been posting his hospital's catheter-associated ICU infection rates.
Some of the other hospital heads are bothered that Levy is doing this. Personally, I think patients should be informed about infection rates when choosing a hospital, since hospital-acquired…
mikethemadbiologist | February 26, 2007When I heard that Republican Senator and presidential candidate John McCain spoke at the Discovery Institute, I was disappointed but not surprised. In March, there's going to be a report released about antibiotic resistance in bacteria. A major finding of the report: roughly 40,000 people die every year from hospital-acquired antibiotic resistant bacterial infections.
The problem of antibiotic resistance is, fundamentally, a problem of evolutionary biology. Species of bacteria which had very few resistant strains (or none at all) now contain high frequencies of resistance strains (e.g…
tsmith | February 21, 2007...I'm sure they'll be happy to see that Gambia's president is curing AIDS:
From the pockets of his billowing white robe, Gambia's president pulls out a plastic container, closes his eyes in prayer and rubs a green herbal paste onto the rib cage of the patient -- a concoction he claims is a cure for AIDS.
He then orders the thin man to swallow a bitter yellow drink, followed by two bananas.
"Whatever you do, there are bound to be skeptics, but I can tell you my method is foolproof," President Yahya Jammeh told an Associated Press reporter, surrounded by bodyguards in his presidential compound…
tsmith | February 14, 2007...some vintage posters raising awareness about the other VD: venereal disease.
(Click on them to go to the original site). A few more highlights below the fold...
And this one, which is better appreciated at larger size so you can read the print:
There are 20 posters in all, plus this syphilis comic book from 1965:
Happy Valentine's Day!
mikethemadbiologist | February 12, 2007Here's some very good news about MRSA (methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus): U.S. hospitals are beginning to implement their own versions of 'search and destroy' (italics mine):
Hospitals can stem the alarming spread of a dangerous and drug-resistant staph infection by screening new patients and keeping them quarantined, say doctors who tried this novel approach.
One model is a pilot program started in 2001 at the Pittsburgh Veterans Affairs Healthcare System, which has dramatically cut the rate of the potentially deadly germ, called methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or…
mikethemadbiologist | February 8, 2007By way of Effect Measure, I came across this Consumer Reports article about bacterial contamination of chicken. The short version: I'm not convinced that the bacterial contamination problem has become worse--keep in mind, I'm not saying that bacterial contamination is not a problem, only that the problem has remained constant in scope.
A good comparison to the Consumer Reports ('CR') study is the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System ('NARMS') report. For almost ten years, NARMS has been collecting bacterial isolates nationwide from store-bought meat products, including…
mikethemadbiologist | February 5, 2007I want to follow up on a point Amanda made in response to my post about the Texas plan to immune all girls against HPV. (Maybe between the two of us, we'll rub some good points together and come up with an idea...) Amanda writes (italics mine):
...it's true that the opt-out policy does mean that it's going to be a lot harder for vindictive, misogynist parents to refuse to protect their daughters from cervical cancer. It's the difference between neglect and active abuse, really. Without mandatory vaccinations, denying your daughter preventative treatment was easy, since you simply had to…
mikethemadbiologist | February 3, 2007It should tell you just how loony the Christopath right is when a conservative Texas governor gains admission to the Coalition of the Sane (for the time being, anyway). How did Texas governor Rick Perry do it? By mandating that schoolgirls receive the HPV vaccine, and that the state subsidize the vaccinations. From the AP:
Some conservatives and parents' rights groups worry that requiring girls to get vaccinated against the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer would condone premarital sex and interfere with the way they raise their children.
By using an executive order…
tsmith | February 2, 2007"Sheesh, kids today" generally is a phrase said to malign the young'ins, who are typically characterized as slothful video game junkies. This stereotype ticked me off when I was a teenager (ah, back in the day...) and I'm sure some teenagers today feel the same way. So just to help combat that for "kids today," I want to highlight this fundraiser started by two high schoolers, and being spread around on MySpace and other venues: Dollars for Darfur.
We started Dollars for Darfur because we got tired of waiting for others to change the world. Dollars for Darfur is a national high school…
tsmith | February 2, 2007Introduction to Microbiology and Infectious Disease
You and your normal flora, Part I
You and your normal flora, Part II
tsmith | February 2, 2007It's been awhile since I've written about HIV/AIDS denial on here. To be honest, the whole area has just burned me out a bit; it gets tiresome to even discuss issues with people who so fundamentally deny the basic tenets of microbiology and infectious disease epidemiology. But in my absence, there's been quite a bit going on, much of it collected here at the AIDStruth website. However, I have to draw your attention to a notable story today.
The first is like something out of "Law and Order." An HIV-positive man is appealing his conviction in Australia of endangering the lives of three…
tsmith | February 1, 2007 Heart disease is still often considered a disease of men. Ask the average joe on the street, and they'll probably tell you that men die of heart attacks, and women die of breast cancer. Of course, this is incorrect. In fact, heart disease is the leading killer of women in America: 1 in 3 women dies of heart disease. To make women more aware of the danger of heart disease, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and partner organizations are sponsoring a national campaign called The Heart Truth. The campaign's goal is to give women a personal and urgent wakeup call about…
tsmith | February 1, 2007I've mentioned a few times the work of Ignaz Semmelweis in preventing "childbed fever" in new mothers. To recap:
Semmelweis was a physician in Vienna in the 1840s, with an interested in "childbed fever," a leading cause of mortality in women who'd given birth. During this time, he noticed that the mortality rate from this disease in a hospital division where medical students delivered babies was 16%, while in a division where midwives delivered them was ~2%. It was also known that childbed fever was rare when women gave birth at home. Semmelweis thought there was something the med students…
tsmith | January 30, 2007Readers who are regulars at Effect Measure or Deltoid will be familiar with the opinions of attorney and author Michael Fumento. Fumento considers himself an avian flu "skeptic," and recently issued a "challenge" (the title, "My avian flu challenge to the leftist bird-brained squawkers", might give you some clue as to its scientific value) to bloggers, in response to one blogger's comment that "... there was a "50%/50%" chance of [an influenza] pandemic in the next year":
I took advantage of Mr. Paramedic's oversight to bet him 10-1, with him picking the dollar amount, that there would be…