by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure I’m just getting around to reading the Brief Report by Blachere et al., “Measurement of airborne influenza virus in a hospital emergency department” (Clinical Infectious Diseases 2009:48:483-440) but it’s quite interesting. We’ve noted fairly often here that we still don’t know for sure what the main modes of transmission […]
In today’s New York Times, columnist Nicholas Kristof turns his attention to a problem that’s been worrying the public health community for the past several years: MRSA, or methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus. The bacteria’s antibiotic resistance makes it hard to fight, and it’s responsible for a growing toll of deaths over the past year – including […]
by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure The scientific literature is full of specialized papers that on their face would seem to be of little interest. Here’s a title like that: “Prevalence and seasonality of influenza-like illness in children, Nicaragua, 2005-2007” (Gordon et al., Emerging Infectious Diseases 2009 Mar). Over 4000 Nicaraguan children, aged 2 to […]
by revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure The peanut butter/peanut paste ingredient based salmonella outbreak has been in the news lately and we’ve discussed it here (and here, here, here, here, here). There are now about 500 reported cases and six deaths. That’s a case fatality ratio of just over 1%. So what if there were […]
by revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure Every parent’s or grandparent’s nightmare is to have their darling little one suddenly carried off by illness. Flu isn’t on the radar screen of most parents but in recent years the public health community is taking notice. The first alarm occurred in the bad flu season of 2003 – […]
Rachel Nugent at Global Health Policy reminds us that itâs World TB Day. Sheâs got good news and bad news about tuberculosis around the globe. On the plus side, tuberculosis control funding has reached an all-time high, and the number of TB cases per capita has dropped. On the minus side, the number of cases is […]
Revere at Effect Measure addresses a troubling article, published in yesterdayâs Atlanta Journal-Constitution, about the Centers for Disease Control and Preventionâs handling of the Andrew Speaker tuberculosis case. You might remember the case, because it got a lot of media attention. Speaker was the Atlanta lawyer who was thought to have XDR TB and boarded […]
by Susan F. Wood, PhD Todayâs Washington Post writes about one more instance where womenâs health and childrenâs health were a lower priority than the interests of a powerful group. In this case, it was breastfeeding vs. the formula industry. Marc Kaufman and Christopher Lee write: In an attempt to raise the nation’s historically low rate […]
Infectious Diseases & Vaccines
Diseases Cross Borders? Administration Official Doesnât Want to Hear It
By Liz Borkowski After former U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona testified that White House officials tried to weaken or suppress important health reports for political purposes, Washington Post reporters Christopher Lee and Marc Kaufman followed up on the case of a 2006 surgeon generalâs report on global health (draft here) whose publication was blocked. Carmonaâs […]
Yesterday the Libyan Supreme Council commuted the death sentences of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian-Bulgarian doctor to life in prison. The Tripoli 6 became a cause célèbre in the scientific and diplomatic communities when Libyan courts, after holding them in prison for eight years, refused to hear solid scientific evidence exonerating them from a […]