In the weird news section of the day, comes this one: child falls sick with lethal salmonella infection after consuming rattlesnake pills. Yeah, you got that right. Someone was feeding a child rattlesnake meat, all dried up and powdered, in the form of pills, hoping something miraculous woould happen. This media release from the CDC … Continue reading
Category Archives: Infectious Diseases
Leptospirosis Hits Puerto Rico in the Aftermath of Hurricane Maria
As expected, the news of rising numbers of leptospirosis cases are trickling in from Puerto Rico. Since Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, there have been areas which have experienced over 30 inches of rain, which, subsequently, led to flooding. As has been often observed, following the exposure to potentially contaminated water, the reported number of … Continue reading
Clinical Research in Times of Ebola… and other Epidemics
As the news trickles in about the raging cholera outbreak in Yemen, and an emerging outbreak is being dealt with urgently in North-Eastern Nigeria, we are more frequently being confronted with the uncomfortable question of leveraging these situations to conduct clinical research activities. The National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) have come out … Continue reading
#VisualAbstracts: Humans, Bats, Trees, Culture and Nipah Virus Transmission
A recent publication in the CDC’s Emerging Infectious Diseases journal talks about the factors related to the emergence of zoonotic infections. They have studied Nipah virus infections in man. This is another effort to bring visual abstracts for infectious disease publications of interest to me. The abstract of the paper: Preventing emergence of new zoonotic … Continue reading
Comparing the Rotavirus Vaccines in India
Comparisons of different rotavirus vaccines are difficult to make with a lot of precision because of the differing populations, protocols, attack rates, and study procedures which have been employed to assess the efficacy of the vaccines. Given the rather recent deployment of the vaccines, there are very limited evidence on their effectiveness in the population/community-setting. … Continue reading
Turning to the “Infected Jelly” to Treat Ebola
The NEJM has come out with a very interesting paper: Evaluation of Convalescent Plasma for Ebola Virus Disease in Guinea. The explosive outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease in West Africa last year had hijacked the headlines and media space in a big way. Multiple solutions were touted, including the vaccine trial STRIVE. Few articles, however, looked … Continue reading
If Carbapenems Go, Can Colistin be Far Behind?
I wrote about the disaster-in-the-making discovery of transmissible resistance to colistin, a last resort antibiotic, when the Lancet Infectious Diseases published a paper based on data coming out from surveillance in China. At that point of time, the isolation of the transmissible gene providing resistance (mcr1 gene) gained a lot of attention. Maryn McKenna’s blog post went … Continue reading
