Journalist and Author
Oyewale Tomori, president of the Nigerian Academy of Science, says Ebola has been worsened by an epidemic of misspent resources.
The biggest danger of Ebola is letting it spread unchecked in Africa. If we decide to detain people coming from Africa, it could deter health care workers from going there to treat the epidemic.
The Ebola epidemic in Africa looks likely to continue for months more, and it’s possible that another traveler might make it to the United States, either covertly or innocently. If so, let’s try to keep our Ebolanoia under control.
Attention to mundane details is crucial to controlling the spread of an infectious disease.
If you’ve been following the Ebola story, you may have noticed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced a move yesterday to try to keep the disease off US soil. At the five US airports that receive most passengers from the three countries where Ebola is circulating, passengers will be singled out on […]
If you’re at all interested in infectious diseases, you’ve probably heard by now that a person traveled to the United States while infected with Ebola, was diagnosed and is now in a hospital in Texas. (I was on a flight without Wi-Fi yesterday from before the press conference was announced to after it concluded. Turning […]
The United States government proposed several important steps last week that, if accomplished, will significantly change how this country attempts to counter the advance of antibiotic resistance.
A new study shows that people who work with farm animals are carrying superbugs home in their noses.
Without immediate action, Ebola could claim tens to hundreds of thousands more lives by the end of 2014.
A new report in the journal Pediatrics found that between 2003 and 2012, more than 100 children and teens each year were made dangerously ill or paralyzed by infections carried by mosquitoes, and two died.
Big news in the world of food policy, farming and antibiotic use: Perdue Farms, the third-largest chicken producer in the United States, announced today that during the past decade it has ceased using most of the antibiotics that formerly propped up its chicken production. There are caveats to that “most,” and I’ll explain them. But […]
I said last month that I was going to try to stay out of Ebola news because so much is being written about it elsewhere. Since then, the African outbreak — now really an epidemic, since it is in multiple countries — has ballooned to 3,000 cases, and the World Health Organization has predicted it […]
In a new study, researchers measured the gut biomes and obesity levels of mice under various antibiotic regimes, and found some compelling correlations.
I’ve stayed out of the Ebola news so far, for a couple of reasons. First, as longtime readers know, I’m writing a book; I’m in the last 6 months of it and the work is intense and involves a lot of travel. I’m not always available at the exact moment news breaks. Second, I try […]
There’s worrisome news here in the southeastern US, buried in a journal that is favorite reading only for superbug geeks like me. The rate at which hospitals are recognizing cases of CRE — the form of antibiotic resistance that is so serious the CDC dubbed it a “nightmare”—rose five times over between 2008 and 2012.
Remember those six vials of smallpox-causing variola that the feds found last week? They were found in the company of 321 other vials of various deadly diseases.
The nation’s top health leaders will appear in front of congress today to answer questions about the recent lab accidents involving smallpox and avian flu.
The scientist who led the effort to eradicate smallpox in the 1960s speaks out about the vials of the virus recently found in a storage room.
Here’s an update on the vials found on the National Institutes of Health campus last week that were labeled smallpox, and transported earlier this week to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: The CDC and NIH have both confirmed that the virus in two of the tubes is viable. That is, if the vials […]
Among the groups that work on awareness of antibiotics resistance — which include major medical and public health organizations as well as nonprofits trying to direct attention to antibiotic misuse in medicine and agriculture — there has been a lot of anticipation of a forthcoming report by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and […]