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By Richard Knox
Doctors think of drug-resistant Staph germs as living in two different worlds. One type lives in hospitals and can defy a wide array of antibiotics. The other lives in the community and typically resists only one or two drugs.
That's so 90s.
This bug is showing up in hospitals more and more. (iStockphoto.com)
A new study in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases finds a big jump in both types of drug-resistant staph inside U.S. hospitals, and gives some suggestions as to why there's an increase.
Between 1999 and 2006, there was a 90 percent increase in the incidence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, among patients admitted to U.S. hospitals. (Methicillin and its chemical cousins are artificial penicillins that used to be reliably effective against Staph.)
Continue reading "Staph: Blurring the Battle Lines" >
categories: Hospitals, Infectious disease
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- November 24, 2009
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By Joanne Silberner
OK, we're addicted, and it's a pretty sick addiction. Literally. We jones for ProMED, a listserv about exotic diseases, far and wide.
Some people like going to see scary movies. Some people like reading murder mysteries. We're fascinated by up-to-the-minute reports about exotic infections, like bluetongue disease and chikungunya fever, that ProMED sends our way.
ProMED covers more common diseases as well. We've been following H1N1's travels around the world through the postings on ProMED, for instance.
Continue reading "Spanning The Globe In Search Of Disease" >
categories: Infectious disease, Information resources, International scene
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By Maggie Mertens
With all the attention on the danger malaria and HIV/AIDS pose for kids around the globe, you might be surprised to learn that pneumonia kills more than 2 million children worldwide each year--more than any other disease.
A woman holds her 8-month-old, sick with pneumonia, in Bangalore, India. (Aijaz Rahi/AP
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Pneumonia is a preventable and treatable. But antibiotics and immunizations that we take for granted in the US, just aren't available in parts of the world where pneumonia is a big problem.
Almost all the pneumonia deaths in kids--98 percent--occur in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where vaccines, antibiotics and basic medical care are often hard to come by. The death toll has prompted global health groups to mobilize in a fight against pneumonia in children. They're kicking off the effort today.
Continue reading "Pneumonia Leads Global Scourges In Kids " >
categories: Children, Infectious disease, Public Health
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By Richard Knox
Everybody who works in a hospital should wash his hands frequently. But some hands are more important than others.
A few dirty hands can mess up a whole hosptial. (iStockphoto.com)
One careless health-care worker who has fleeting contact with a lot of patients can undermine everybody else's conscientious handwashing, a group of French researchers has found using a mathematical model to simulate infections in a hospital ICU.
An infection "superspreader" can be a radiologist, a physical therapist, or a specialist who consults on many wards. The key thing is that superspreaders are "peripatetic," roaming a wide territory. Other hospital workers who are more rooted to a particular unit don't do as much damage when they forget to wash their hands between patients.
Continue reading "A Single Dirty Health Worker Can Sicken Many" >
categories: Infectious disease, Prevention, Swine Flu (H1N1)
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By Scott Hensley
The appeal of those little pet turtles escaped us, even before we first heard about their role as carriers of disease. Give us a dirty rat any day.
Little pet turtles, like these being inspected at an Atlanta airport in 2006, pose a big salmonella risk--especially for kids. (Ric Feld/AP)
Now our low opinion is bolstered by an in-depth report on a 34-state outbreak of salmonella infections linked to those slimy little reptiles back in 2007 and 2008. Researchers talked with 78 patients or their parents to find out more about the role of turtles in the spread of the dangerous infections. Not a pretty picture.
Most of the folks who got sick--60 percent--were around turtles the week before they fell ill. Sixteen, or 34 percent, said the turtles came from a pet store.
Continue reading "Kids And Pet Turtles Don't Mix" >
categories: Children, Infectious disease, Public Health
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By Scott Hensley
These days just about everyone says data should drive decisions in health care. Results would be better and costs might just be lower.
What to do for an aching back? (iStockphoto.com )
Take, for instance, Joshua Hirsch, an interventional radiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who tells the Boston Globe, "I bow at the altar of evidence-based medicine."
Yet, he still recommends vertebroplasty, an injection of glue to relieve pain from cracked backbones, despite recent studies that showed the minimally invasive procedure was no better than a shot of Novocain.
Continue reading "Who Says How Much Evidence Is Enough?" >
categories: Infectious disease, Personal Health
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By Richard Knox
What killed Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at the age of 35?
German stamp marking 200th anniversary of Mozart's death. (Wikimedia Commons )
Historians and medical experts have debated the question for nearly 218 years. A European group now has evidence the prodigious composer was the victim of a strep outbreak.
The researchers looked at causes of death in Vienna in the winter of 1791 -- Mozart died on December 5 of that year -- and during the same period in the adjacent years.
In the year of Mozart's death, there was a sudden spike in deaths from edema, or abnormal fluid buildup. At the time, about a quarter of the deaths in younger Viennese men were from this cause.
Continue reading "Strep Infection May Have Felled Mozart" >
categories: Infectious disease
