Epidemic disease is part of the human experience. Even after 2009's H1N1 Flu pandemic, infectious epidemic disease is still the subject of frequent news articles. The purpose of this class blog is to encourage online communication and conversations around epidemic disease related stories in the news so as to make connections between current issues and class topics.
The article I read was called “New swine, drug-resistant flu strains tracked.” The article was written on January 7, 2012 by Erin Allday. This article was published in the San Francisco Chronicle. In this article “public health and infectious disease experts have upped their surveillance of new flu strains, and they're paying close attention to what's happening worldwide in hopes of being better prepared for the type of flu season that will hit here.”
Few cases of influenza have been reported statewide and one person has died from the flu. While these numbers are low public health and infectious disease experts must understand what it going on so they can be better prepared if something like the Swine flu were to happen again. The experts say that they “haven’t seen the emergence of, say, a new pandemic strain on influenza but we’ve been getting these worrisome trickles or reports. And these little stories are all reminders that influenza still poses a big threat, a global threat.”
In recent years the avian flu, found primarily in Asia, has been the focus. However, 12 cases of a new type of Swine flu have been recorded. This new type of Swine fly is H3N2 instead of H1N1. None of these people have died yet but experts are paying close attention to the strain just in case.
This article proves that infectious epidemic diseases are still prevalent in today’s society. In class we cover diseases from the Black Plaque to the Swine flu. There will be another global pandemic whether it is this year or 20 years from now. This article really opened my eyes because I did not know that there was a second strand of Swine flu. Being sick right now really opens my eyes that the flu is a universal threat. I do not want to be sick again and I will go get a flu shot to protect myself this flu season.
The article that I chose to blog about was called "Boston aid group thinks it has tracked down first case in Haiti’s deadly cholera epidemic" It tells us about the first case of cholera in haiti and how it spread. "A mentally ill man who bathed in and drank from a contaminated river most likely was the first person to be infected in the Caribbean country’s deadly cholera outbreak, a Boston humanitarian group said Monday."
This whole article interested me, seeing that we can track down the roots of the problem. With the knowledge that we can track down the sources of the problem, we could potentially stop things like this from happening in the first place. It comes down to what our parents have told us since we were young, it stinks that it happened, but we are learning the hard way. With every new outbreak of these diseases, new things are being discovered that will help us in the future to postpone or even stop these atrocities. Haiti now has the highest Cholera infection rate in the world right now. Hopefully this is the last times that we have to deal with cholera, and we have learned from our mistakes. And hopefully this process can be applied to many other epidemic diseases, not just Cholera.
This was written by the Washington Post on Monday, January 9th, 2012.
In the article Whooping cough hits epidemic levels in county by Sharon Salyer, a new outbreak of whooping cough found in Washington is discussed. Whooping cough is also known as pertussis and is a highly contagious respiratory disease. It is known to cause violent coughing which affects a person’s ability to breathe.
The article says that there were at least 220 cases of whooping cough in Snohomish, Washington last year, while there were only 25 in 2010. Young infants under the age of two months are most likely to contract the disease because at that age they have not been vaccinated. Older adults are also more susceptible to the disease because the immunity begins to lessen over time. Doctors recommend that children receive the vaccination at two months, four months, six months, 17 months, and when they are between the ages of four and six.
For those who cannot afford the vaccine, the Snohomish Health District is planning a day-long event where 430 free doses of the vaccine will be given to pregnant women and adults who are around small children. The article also says that the best way to protect infants under the age of two months is to surround them by people who have been vaccinated and cannot contract the disease.
This article does not directly relate to one particular unit we have studied, but it relates to the lessons about vaccination. Vaccination is extremely important and helps stop the diseases from spreading, so when people are not getting vaccinated it is much is easier for the disease to infect a lot of people. It also relates to the actions taken against cholera by the World Health Organization. The WHO sent people around the world and vaccinated many people in an area so that people who had not been vaccinated would be less likely to contract the disease. This idea is found in the article when it says that the best way to protect young infants is to surround them with vaccinated people. I think it is important for everyone to get vaccinated so that other people have a better chance of not contracting the disease. It is also important that people are informed about how the disease is spread and what symptoms are so that as few people as possible become infected with whooping cough.
This article is called How Hard Would It Be for Avian Flu to Spread? written by Donald G. McNeil Jr. and Denise Grady. It was written in The New York Times on January 2, 2012.
Recently, it was reported that two teams of scientists had altered a deadly flu virus to make it more contagious.Biosecurity advisers to the American government have urged that details not be published for fear that terrorists may use them. Some scientists believe that this should not have done because if the virus slipped out of the lab it could set off a lethal epidemic.But the research could help with creating antiviral drugs and vaccines.
The virus that was made more contagious was the avian flu or more commonly, the bird flu. It has only infected about 600 people since it has been discovered but it killed more than half of them.It is rare for humans to transmit this virus to one another but if that changes it could become a terrible pandemic.
Bird flu viruses live best in the lower lungs of humans and that makes it harder for it to be spread to others.Dr. Fouchier, a scientist in Rotterdam, stated “In humans, bird flu viruses live best in the lower lungs, which makes it harder for them to escape in sneezes and coughs.” This shows that the virus is seldom spread from human to human. In birds, the flu is spread through feces unlike in humans where the virus is living in the lungs.People working at a chicken farm or a live bird market are more at risk for getting the virus. Reassuringly this new virus appears to be weak against existing vaccines and flu drugs.
This article relates to a couple of the things we have learned about during class. It shows how disease is sometimes used as a biological weapon and how the government does not want to give information about it out because of how it might be used.The article also discusses the ways in which the virus can be spread.It stated that the rare cases of human-to-human transmissions have involved long, close contact.We have learned of a couple diseases that also involve human contact but in this case it is very rare to be spread that way.
In some ways I do believe it is important to do research and maybe alter viruses to help with future epidemics or to help with vaccination. But scientists do have to be careful because if the diseases ever got out of the lab they could start an epidemic.
“Human health, wildlife health and domestic animal health are all interconnected within the context of the environment. And changes in environmental quality will have negative impacts in all 3 groups." - Sleeman
Zulima Palacio of Washington published an article titled “Animal-Related Diseases Concern Scientists on January 4, 2012.
In his article, he talks about how the number of infectious diseases spread from animals to humans has been increasing. Scientists believe the increase may be a result of more frequent contact between humans and wild animals, as well as the growing trade in wild animals, both legal and illegal. Towards the end of the 1990s, several Asian countries were faced new, highly pathogenic, strain of Avian Influenza known as H5N1, which killed hundreds of people. As a result, more than 9-million chickens were destroyed in an effort to stop the epidemic. Scientists believe the H5N1 virus was transmitted from wild birds to domestic poultry and pigs, which then passed it to humans. H5N1 is the latest variety of the influenza strain that has killed up to 100 million people over the last century.
The concern of pathogens spreading from animals to humans is not a new problem. The AIDS virus, HIV, is now known to have originated from a similar virus in African chimpanzees. An estimated 30-million people have died of AIDS since the early 1980s. Other human diseases with animal origins include SARS, Ebola hemorrhagic fever and West Nile encephalitis.
With a rise in trade, exotic animals are more likely to escape or be released into local ecosystems. These animals will often disrupt native ecologies, out-compete native species and potentially spread new diseases. Therefore, more attention must be paid to the human disruption of wildlife and ecosystems to avoid the emergence of other infectious diseases with deeper and even more severe consequences.
I agree that more attention should be placed on how humans interact with wildlife considering the rise of infectious diseases. This reminds me of the Black Death unit, since this epidemic was spread due to the fleas on rodents. The reason it swept through Asia and Europe was by trade, just as diseases are spread today. A modern example of this would be AIDs, since it originated from African monkeys and being highly contagious, has continued to spread. I think this article was very informative in that this is a serious problem that not enough people seem to be educated about. Epidemic Diseases could be controlled better if people were more cautious when interacting with animals since this is an issue of human health and wildlife conservation.
China attempts to allay fears of bird flu epidemic
CLIFFORD COONAN
CHINESE HEALTH authorities have tried to calm anxieties about a bird flu epidemic after a 39-year-old bus driver in Shenzhen in the south of the country died of complications from the H5N1 virus on Saturday.
The man’s death, surnamed Chen, was China’s first reported human case of the deadly disease in 18 months. After genetic analysis, health officials said the strain contracted by Mr Chen cannot spread from person to person.
“It is still not transmissible between people,” the Shenzhen Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said.
“The virus found in the patient was 90 per cent similar to H5N1 viruses previously isolated in ducks in China, which suggested that the man was very likely to have been infected through direct contact with a bird.”
Bird flu could potentially cause a deadly pandemic, health officials at the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention say. Since 2003, more than 500 people have been infected with the strain worldwide and about 60 per cent have died, according to the Atlanta-based agency.
The virus is normally found in birds but can jump to people. And the big fear is that it could mutate and spread between humans.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) recently issued a stern warning to scientists who said they had engineered ways to make H5N1 into an easily transmissible form capable of causing lethal human pandemics.
The WHO says their work carries significant risks and must be tightly controlled.
The work, by two leading flu research teams in the Netherlands and the United States, prompted US security advisers to call for the research to be suppressed. They feared that publishing details could give terrorists the capacity to make a bio-terror weapon.
Fears of a pandemic are particularly prevalent in Asia, where there are heavily concentrated population centres, especially in places like Hong Kong.
China is a major risk as it has the world’s biggest poultry population and chickens in rural areas are often kept close to humans.
The victim, who lived in Shenzhen just across the border from Hong Kong, died from multi-organ failure a week after being admitted to hospital with a fever brought on by the virus, state media reported.
Hong Kong’s Centre for Health Protection has said the strain found in the deceased was similar to that recently found in wild birds in Hong Kong. An genetic analysis also found that the virus can be treated by amantadine, a common anti-viral drug.
While he had no direct contact with poultry in the month before being taken ill, there were reports he liked to jog in a nature reserve populated by numerous migrating birds.
Hong Kong culled 17,000 chickens at a wholesale poultry market two weeks ago after a dead chicken tested positive for H5N1 avian virus. It also suspended imports of live chickens from the mainland for 21 days in an attempt to prevent the disease spreading.
In December, thousands of chickens were culled in Shenzhen after three birds tested positive for the H5N1 virus.
In my opinion I think this article related a lot to what we have been learning this year in Epidemic Disease. At the beginning of the article it says the man died of the bird flu disease which was 90 % related to the h1n1 disease. I feel like diseases are getting worse in worse as time moves forward. When we watched the movie in class about the man walking around in New York looking for germs it reminded me of this. People are getting closer and closer to animals and a lot of these animals can make people get deadly diseases. This article really helped me learn the dangers of animal contact and spreading different diseases. Also I learned that you really have to be careful while dealing with nature. The birds that could have possibly gave this man the disease were all killed and later found out that three of them tested has the H1N1 disease.
Here in Massachusetts a man, unidentified to the public, lays in critical condition after unknowingly contracting rabies. The man was not treated for the potentially fatal disease because he was unaware that he had even come in close enough contact with the carrier. The family came fourth telling the media that their had been a bat in the house but they did not think to be vaccinated. The bite from a bat can appear so small that it is not even vi sable to the eye.
The Myotis bat, responsible for the bite, is one of the most common varities in North America. Jennifer Manley, a spokeswoman from the Department of Health can only confirm that, "it was a little brown bat." The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have not confirmed the species of bat yet but thanks to Jennifer Manley, we know it's brown! Most cases of rabies in the United States have been linked to bats but in other countries the main carrier of the disease differs.
The rabies virus is carried in the saliva of infected animals, and mostly transmitted through a bite, or even just close contact. The virus infects the central nervous system and ultimately is fatal almost 100% of the time. Early symptoms of rabies are similar to common illnesses since they include fever, headache and general weakness or discomfort. But, in the end, the results could not differ any more.
Rabies can be prevented by administering a vaccine, but the vaccine can not cure you. In most cases, by the time symptoms show, it's too late. Only you know if you have been exposed to rabies. If you have in anyway, vaccination is your only answer. Had this man been vaccinated, he would not be in the condition he is in today. But it's not just him. One to three rabies cases are reported annually in the United States. Although the rate is so low here, about 55,000 people die of rabies every year around the world. Around the world, the main carrier would be rabid dogs instead of bats. But no matter how the disease is contracted, it can always be prevented. So why isn't it? Should the rabies vaccine be administered to all, or only those who believe they have come in contact?
