Drug Resistant Staph Could Become An Epidemic

Drug resistant Staphylococcus aureus could represent the world’s next epidemic. This superbug dubbed MRSA ST398, was first identified in humans in the Netherlands in 1994 and traced to livestock. Infection rates are now up in Denmark and the Netherlands and may be the beginning of an epidemic. The transmission mechanism for the disease in currently unknown. Infections can cause skin and tissue infections, respiratory tract infections like pneumonia, bacteremia (bacteria in the blood) and endocarditis (inflammation of the heart) Cooking kills most Staph aureus but food handling and cross-contamination can still cause infection. It is responsible for more deaths in the USA than HIV.

Read More at Scientific American

Posted by Astrojenny

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Microbes Use Wind Power To Travel The World

Computer models of Earth's atmosphere have been used to demonstrate how microbes can use the winds to be widely dispersed between continents, enabling them to colonise new lands and potentially spread diseases. The smallest microbes can easily travel between continents and achieve extensive within-hemisphere distribution, although there is almost no dispersal between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres during the year-long time-scale of the simulations. It was discovered to be less easy for larger microbes to travel between continents.

Read More at Physorg.com

Posted by Astrojenny

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HealthMap: Using The Web To Track Deadly Diseases In Real Time

Today we can circle the world in a day, but low cost, fast global travel comes at a price. Whereas in the past the spread of disease was slowed by the limits of travel, today we, and the viruses and diseases we carry can travel the globe at an alarming speed. However this interconnectedness is the very tool we can use to fight the spread of such pandemics. Five years ago John Brownstein, a digital epidemiologist at the Children's Hospital in Boston developed HealthMap. This project automatically trawls the web identifying news stories, government data & wildlife disease reports to identify trends & plot them on a clickable map. The project has now been relaunched & refocused to include social networks like Twitter & Facebook, making use of tweets about food poisoning or flu outbreaks. There is even a mobile app - HealthMap: Outbreaks Near Me, which gives news, & allows users to report information of public health issues based on location.

Read More at Time Magazine

Posted by Astrojenny

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Superbug Super-Villains!

Here are the top ten public enemies. The drug resistant superbugs that threaten public health globally. Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis kills at least 150,000 people every year. MRSA kills more people in America annually than AIDS, tuberculosis and hepatitis B combined. Of the 781,000 deaths each year from drug-resistant malaria, the majority are young children. Shigella is responsible for 165 million cases of severe dysentery and more than 1 million deaths each year. We may be facing an era of untreatable gonorrhoea as its resistance to drugs increases. Pneumonia does have a highly successful vaccine but continues to evolve. Drug-resistant strains of E. coli are popping up, particularly in the developing world. VRE is also a menace in our hospitals and particularly scary because it can share its resistance genes with MRSA, creating the potential for a new superbug – VRSA. CRKP infection is fatal in around half of cases. P. aeruginosa has the worrying ability to develop several immunities at once.

Read More & View Gallery at New Scientist

Posted by Astrojenny

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How Contagious Are Bedbugs?

In the past bedbugs have been accused of spreading everything from cholera to polio to bubonic plague, though there is no evidence to support the idea that they spread disease. The current resurgence of the pest in America and talk of a 'Bedbug Apocalypse' has experts looking for answers. Three factors determine whether a plague spreads or dies: the rate people come into contact with the pathogen, how long an infection remains contagious and how easily the contagion is spread. These factors, multiplied together give you the basic reproduction number of an infection, the average number of people who will be infected by a single case. If the number is below 1, the contagion dies out, if it is greater than 1 then the contagion spreads.

Read More at Slate

Posted by Astrojenny

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Video - How The Flu Virus Invades Your Body

With the flu season upon us here is a timely animation by NPR’s Robert Krulwich and medical animator David Bolinsky that shows how flu viruses invade your body and trick a single cell into making a million more viruses, and how your immune system then goes into action to defeat the invaders.

Watch Video on You Tube

Posted by Astrojenny

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The Battle Against The Common Cold

October hails the peak of the UK's 'winter remedies' season as we rush to the chemist shops to stock up on decongestants, cough sweets and hot lemon drinks. The average adult in the UK can suffer two to five colds each year so remedies are big business, but a cure remains elusive for a number of reasons. The common cold is caused by up to 200 different viruses and by the time the symptoms appear it is too late for an antivirus. Any cure would have to be extremely safe with no side effects, as it would be used by so many people and if it was widely used the cold viruses would soon build up an immunity in the same way that bacteria have to antibiotics. The BBC has outlined some of the more popular remedies that have been tried throughout history to alleviate the misery, from chicken soup to Mrs Beeton's homemade cold remedy.

Read More at BBC News

Posted by Astrojenny

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