Journalist and Author
By coincidence, there’s a paper out today that’s a great follow-up to my last post. In the Archives of General Psychiatry, researchers from Emory University, University of Colorado and University College London propose that the excessive cleanliness of modern life doesn’t only contribute to the rise in allergic disease, but is responsible for increase in […]
When I talk to people about drug-resistant organisms and how to protect yourself against them, hand-washing and hand hygiene — for individuals and especially for health-care workers — are at the top of my list. Inevitably, I’ll get asked next about hand sanitizers, the alcohol-based gels that now are just about everywhere: outside hospital rooms, […]
There’s huge news today in the results of a major drug trial for HIV prevention, but the news comes balanced with significant cautions and caveats. For the first time, researchers have shown that if men who are not infected with HIV take routine doses of AIDS treatment drugs, they can markedly reduce their risk of […]
Among the many skills admired by journalists (always finding the free food; never going out of the office; yes, those are said in jest), skidding in just under deadline may be the most valued. I am making a flourish of that skill here, sliding in a mention of an important observance this week just as […]
I came down hard — justifiably, I think — on health care workers a few days ago in discussing the extraordinary toll of hospital-acquired infections on vulnerable patients. So for equal time, here’s the story of some health care workers who take risks on their patients’ behalf instead of subjecting them to risk. In its […]
I’m giving a speech at a conference this morning, so this has to be quick, but I can’t let it pass by, and neither should anyone else: It’s huge, sad news. The Office of the Inspector General of the US Department of Health and Human Services released a report this morning showing that 13.1 percent […]
This is just amazing. Ninety-two years and a few months ago, a US Army private died at what is now called Fort Riley, Kansas. It was July 1918, and the 21-year-old recruit had been sick for two days with a fever and a headache, an aching chest and a hard, hacking cough that didn’t bring […]
Yesterday and today are early-publication days for the December issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases, the free peer-reviewed journal published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Are you reading it? Why not? Your tax dollars pay for it. Go, now.) Among many interesting stories — more on those in later posts — there are two […]
My WiSci blogging colleague, Brian Switek, AKA Laelaps, has written a book, Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature (Bellevue Literary Press), that’s out this week. It’s his first book, and it’s very good. (To sample some of the swelling chorus of praise, visit Speakeasy Science or The Intersection or […]
So, following on polio, a little more about diseases crossing borders. As a kid, I went to a girls’ convent school outside London. (Blazer, boater, motto, crest. Elocution and deportment. Embroidery classes.) There were about three Americans that I remember, and a few South Asians living in the UK, and some girls whose parents were […]
I talked on Monday about the risks to the worldwide polio eradication campaign of vaccine-derived polio (VDPV), the mutated form of the vaccine virus. New bulletins from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention remind us that original wild polio can bounce back in perilous ways as well. The WHO […]
Discouraging news from India, in the long campaign of polio eradication that has seen so many ups and downs (my last post on polio here): A girl who was vaccinated against polio in one of the enormous national campaigns held every few months there has become paralyzed. But not for the reason that is usual […]
There’s some new news out — along with a fair amount of public reaction — regarding “pig MRSA” or, to use the technical term, MRSA ST398, the “third epidemic” strain that emerged in pigs in the Netherlands in 2004 and has since appeared, in animals, retail meat, and humans, across the European Union, in Canada, […]
The annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America is taking place this week in Vancouver. This afternoon, one of the researchers presenting there released a startling bit of news: the spread in Ohio (and likely elsewhere in the United States) of a MRSA strain that is common in the rest of the world […]
Here at Casa Superbug, we’re in the midst of moving 1,200 miles, so I’m a little slower reading email than I really ought to be. That’s scant excuse, unfortunately, for not noticing one of the biggest global-health stories in years. Mitigating circumstance: Almost everyone else missed it too. The news is the effective eradication of […]
…And does paying it keep them poor? That’s the provocative question that underlies a report released Thursday by the World Health Organization: Working to overcome the global impact of neglected tropical diseases. What’s a “neglected tropical disease,” or NTD for short? In the WHO’s definition, there are 17; they are bacterial, viral and parasitic, and […]
Out of all the scary diseases, none seem to make people horripillate quite as much as the viral hemorrhagic fevers: Ebola, Lassa, Marburg and the rest. That might be due to their still-murky origins, crossing over from the edges of the world of animals into the infringing habitats of men. It might be their uncomfortable […]
Since July, the Food and Drug Administration has been moving — quietly and cautiously, but moving — to raise the stakes in its long and so-far unsuccessful battle to rein in overuse of antibiotics in agriculture. For those new to the topic, this is the use of antibiotics not in treatment-sized doses, to cure disease […]
People who are interested in infections that are transmitted in hospitals (umm, ghouls like me) have a special sick relish for Clostridium difficile, or in its short form, C. diff. C. diff lives in the intestines, part of a complex population of many bacteria — you did know there are more bacteria in your body […]
A few days ago, health authorities in southern France announced that they’d found two cases of the mosquito-borne disease chikungunya in the Var, in Provence. Chikungunya is a nasty disease; it causes high fevers and severe joint pain, and its name comes from words in a Mozambiquan dialect that describe victims being “bent over” in […]