When is it safe to stop vaccinating against measles? Or against other rare and infectious diseases? In short, vaccinating against them can cease once the threat of future transmission is deemed sufficiently low.
infectious disease
Compared to warm winters, cold winters are likelier to land more people in the hospital, particularly the emergency room.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) just announced they are temporarily suspending work by lab scientists in BSL-4 (aka biosafety level 4) facilities. They recently learned their current stock of air hoses that attach to the protective suits worn by staff have not been certified for breathing air.
"Every night on the television news now is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation," lamented the former vice president in his opening remarks for the Climate & Health Meeting. After all these years, he still has a warped penchant for apocalyptic exaggeration.
There's little doubt why the CDC shelved the meeting. The Trump Administration is skeptical of anthropogenic climate change, so somebody – perhaps President Trump himself – made a call and that was that. Journalists will surely go berserk, but they shouldn't, because climate change falls well outside the CDC's area of expertise.
One method widely used to control malaria is providing families with insecticide-treated bed nets. Overall, this strategy is very successful, having halting hundreds of millions of cases over the past 15 years. In some parts of the world, however, mosquitoes "learn" to avoid bed nets by biting people earlier in the day.
Necrotizing fasciitis, which literally translated means "inflammation of the fascia (connective tissue) causing cell death," is the medical term for what's known as "flesh-eating" disease. A recent case that made national headlines involved a man who died four days after becoming infected with the ocean-dwelling microbe Vibrio vulnificus.
As the anti-vaccine movement garnered Hollywood momentum, science stood largely silent. However, Dr. Paul Offit, inventor of the Rotavirus vaccine, took to the helm to fight for children's health and safety. Here's an informative conversation with a true expert in the field.
The American Academy of Pediatrics wants to guide clinicians on “Countering Vaccine Hesitancy” among parents. This policy statement, published in the journal Pediatrics, rightly champions vaccination as "one of the greatest public health achievements of the last century." There is just one problem; pediatricians actually don't need more guidelines and protocols.
An emerging infectious disease that has killed several elderly people in the U.S. Midwest is caused by the bacterium Elizabethkingia anophelis. A genomic analysis of strains isolated from hospitalized babies in Africa show that they are related to strains in Asia and from mosquitoes. This ubiquitous environmental bacterium is resistant to multiple antibiotics and appears to survive in hospitals.
In today s Probably Obvious entry, a group from McMaster University in Ontario tells you something that you probably already know, but still ignore.
The group, led by David Earn, Ph.D., a professor of infectious disease and mathematics, reports that when you are sick with a fever from a cold or flu and take medications that lower the fever and make you feel better, you will go to work too soon and infect others.
Several societies concerned with countering the spread of infectious diseases issued a call for mandatory immunization of all healthcare workers. They outlined their reasons, but those are quite obvious and this mandate is long overdue, as we here at ACSH have been saying for years.