There’s lots of news to catch up with regarding the new coronavirus that emerged last summer in the Middle East and has been causing concern to international health authorities all autumn: additional cases, additional deaths, and new lab evidence that is more than a little concerning.
Antiseptics Used to Prevent Health Care Infections Might Cause Them. Oops.
Well, this is ironic. The Food and Drug Administration is warning the country of the possibility of health care infections caused by the antiseptics used to disinfect skin before health care procedures — that is, to prevent infections. They consider it a serious enough problem that they have scheduled a hearing about it next week.
Fungal Meningitis From Injections: Not Even Close To Over
There’s been an extraordinary outbreak going on over the past few months here in the United States: cases of fungal meningitis, a rare illness, primarily caused by Exserohilum rostratum, a plant pathogen that is equally rare as a cause of human infections. Since the beginning of October, 541 people have been made ill by the infection, in 19 states, and 36 have died. The cause has been traced to contamination in steroid injections for pain relief, made by a compounding pharmacy in Massachusetts which — according to federal investigative reports — was operating outside the lines of what compounding pharmacies are allowed to do. More than 14,000 people are believed to have received the shots.
I haven’t been covering the outbreak because I’ve been following other stories, and also because friends in the mainstream media, particularly the excellent health-science team at the Boston Globe, have been covering it well. (Here’s an archive from their paid site and one from their free site.) But last night I happened to get a close and moderately exclusive look at this complex story, so I thought I’d share.
Resistant Bacteria in Pork — And Problematic Pharmaceuticals Too
Bad news today from an investigation conducted by Consumers Union that was released on the web and will be published in the January issue of the nonprofit’s magazine, Consumer Reports. Tests on pork chops and ground pork, bought in six cities under a variety of labels, showed high rates of contamination with a range of bacteria, many of which were antibiotic-resistant — and also showed evidence of a drug so controversial that it is banned in some other countries.
WHO Announces Family Cluster of Cases of New Coronavirus
(This post has been updated; read to the end.)
Holidays. It never fails.
Today, while the United States has been largely off-line following our Thanksgiving holiday (and while Northern Europe was on its way to the pub for Friday evening revelry), the World Health Organization announced four new cases of the novel coronavirus that caused a great deal of worry immediately before the October hajj season. (Earlier posts here and here.)
In its bulletin, released by the WHO’s Global Alert and Response team (GOAR), the agency said:
- Four additional laboratory-confirmed cases have been identified; one of the four has died.
- One case is in Qatar, the location of one of the original two cases earlier this year.
- Three of the new cases, including the dead person, are in Saudi Arabia, site of the other original case (who also died).
- Two of the three Saudi cases, including the dead person, are members of the same family.
- In that family, two other people have also fallen ill, and one has died. The man who recovered showed no laboratory evidence of infection with the novel coronavirus. Analysis of the case of the person who died is continuing.
Thankful For A Good Kid, And A Chance To Pay It Forward
On a day when we all think about food, I want to revisit, and update, my favorite food-related story of the year.
Constant readers may remember, from back in June, the story of 9-year-old Martha Payne of Scotland. Her blog “Never Seconds,” featuring photographs of her unhealthy school lunches, caused so much embarrassment in her school district that the county council tried to shut her down. The news of their mendacious unfairness rippled across the media and the Internet, and hundreds of thousands of people — including a number of celebrities, and thousands of Superbug readers — applied enough pressure to get the decision reversed.
Martha (whom I’ve never met) seems to be a smart, sensible kid, with caring, thoughtful parents; her mother is a primary-care doctor, and her father has a small farm. With rare maturity, they resisted enormous pressure to monetize her celebrity, and turned the attention into a benefit for someone else.
Actually, lots of someones. They asked readers and supporters to donate to a charity, Mary’s Meals, that feeds schoolchildren in some of the world’s poorest areas — including Malawi, where Scottish roots date back to the arrival of explorer David Livingstone in the 1860s. At this point, five months later, Martha and her family have raised £120,000 (almost $200,000), enough to build a kitchen and distribute school supplies to thousands of kids.
Advice for the Annual Observance of Food-Poisoning, Umm, Thanksgiving Day
My grandparents — children of Irish and Scottish immigrants, for whom calories per penny was a much more important food value than fine cuisine — had a little mnemonic for Thanksgiving. It went like this:
Turkey, tetrazzini, ptomaine.
Perhaps that requires a little explanation.
The turkey part should be self-evident. Tetrazzini — a cream-sauce casserole based on spaghetti, one of those early 20th-century dishes invented to honor Italian opera stars — was what they did the second day with the turkey leftovers. Ptomaine (the “p” is silent) was what they worried lay in wait for them on the third. A late 19th-century term that has passed out of use, it derived from the notion that poisonous compounds lurked in rotting food.
For people who grew up before the antibiotic era — and who learned to cook when refrigerators were literal ice chests that kept things cool at best — “food poisoning” was a reasonable fear, and a risk they refused to take. On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, no matter how delicious it appeared, whatever remained of the turkey went into the trash.
The Persistence of Resistance And Some Reasons Why
Tuesday marked the start of the United States’ Get Smart About Antibiotics Week, an annual observance by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that tries to direct attention to the root causes of antibiotic resistance and possible fixes. (It is also European Antibiotic Awareness Day, and also the first day of Australia’s Antibiotic Awareness Week. I don’t know of other national observances; if you do, leave them in the comments!)
To mark the day and jump-start awareness, the CDC and a number of US medical and public-health organizations held press events. The observances and the policy statements that came from them were important — but reading between the lines, it is discouraging how much there is yet to do.
(By the way, constant readers: Sorry to be gone so long. Some challenges in the extended family of Casa Superbug; almost all better now, hope everything will be over by the weekend. Meanwhile…)
[Read more…]
Looking Inside the Dead: The Rise of the Virtual Autopsy
We’ve all been so justifiably preoccupied with former Hurricane Sandy that you may have missed a story unfolding in England this past week. So, as a distraction from the trees, traffic and sludge:
Ronald Brown, an English veteran of World War II, would quietly complain from time to time about his bad leg, the reminder of a land mine that he stepped on in August 1944 in France. Army surgeons felt it was safer to leave the mine’s fragments in his flesh than to try and fish them out, and ever after, Brown’s knee set off airport scanners and ached too much for his grandchildren to sit on it.
Human Health, Hog Production and Environmental Harm
I’ve been offline not just for deadlines (as usual), but also because I was preparing for the annual conference of the National Association of Science Writers; I am a member and was a presenter on a couple of panels. The NASW meeting is twinned every year with a second meeting hosted by the nonprofit Council for the Advancement of Science Writing; NASW sessions are peer-to-peer journalism learning, whereas CASW ones feature academic researchers talking about their newest work.
This year’s meetings (collectively called SciWri12, or #SciWri12 if you want to find them on Twitter) were held in Raleigh, NC, and one of the most striking talks there was a report from epidemiologist Steven Wing of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill about his decade-long work investigating the local health effects of very large swine farms. (I’ve written about Wing’s work before.)
The newest news is a paper that he and his team published just as his talk commenced, in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, which finds an association between air pollution and odor in the near vicinity of swine farms, and hikes in blood pressure in local residents. When you put the pieces together — most hog c0nfinement operations are in poor, non-white areas; cardiovascular disease is endemic in African Americans; North Carolina lies within the worst US area for cardiovascular disease, known as the “Stroke Belt” — you can see that anything that makes blood pressure chronically worse is bad news for public health.
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