Category Archives: healthcare

Ebola Is Surging in Places It Had Been Beaten Back – ABC News

“The epidemic is now so vast and so extensive that one should consider that in the three (hardest-hit) countries, everybody is now at risk and it won’t be over until the last case has survived and six weeks have passed,” said Piot, who runs London’s School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

via Ebola Is Surging in Places It Had Been Beaten Back – ABC News.

Avian Flu Diary: WHO Statement: Consultation On Potential Use of Ebola Therapies & Vaccines

There was consensus that the use of whole blood therapies and convalescent blood serums needs to be considered as a matter of priority. {From people who have survived ebola, since antibodies that help to fight off the virus are present in the blood and serum}

via Avian Flu Diary: WHO Statement: Consultation On Potential Use of Ebola Therapies & Vaccines.

Imperial researcher to lead Ebola vaccine trial in the Gambia

{The university ought to think about changing its name but beyond that – this confirms pretty well that pharmaceutical firms are not really interested in helping humanity, just in making a profit – even though nearly all of them get funds from governments/taxes, as well as foundations and investors}

The incentive for pharmaceutical companies to develop a product are therefore very low, as product development, testing and in particular the licensure procedures are expensive and the profit will be small, if any at all.

via Imperial researcher to lead Ebola vaccine trial in the Gambia.

Cynical? Me? Yep. The latest American doctor infected with Ebola is heading to Nebraska for treatment – The Washington Post

{The reason for transferring him from Massachusetts to Nebraska? So University of Nebraska Medical Center could get some publicity – aka: create public “currency” for same or more funding from governments (tax payers) and foundations. If just to give “better” care, why have a press conference}

The Nebraska hospital expects Sacra to arrive Friday morning. The Biocontainment Patient Care Unit is one of four of its kind in the United States, according to the hospital, and is the country’s largest. “We have been preparing for this type of event for a long time,” Jeffrey Gold, chancellor of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, said during a Thursday news conference. “It is not a surprise we are being called to serve in this way.”

Phil Smith, head of the special isolation unit at the Nebraska Medical Center, said that Sacra is in “reasonably stable shape, and able to get on the plane under his own power.”

Sacra, the medical director of the organization’s ELWA Hospital in Monrovia, decided to return to Liberia after another missionary doctor and another volunteer became ill with Ebola, Johnson said. Sacra had been working in the hospital for about a month, most recently caring for pregnant women.

via The latest American doctor infected with Ebola is heading to Nebraska for treatment – The Washington Post.

Stock price promo – Johnson & Johnson to Quicken Development of Ebola Virus Vaccine – WSJ

Will do nothing for this outbreak but they are hoping it will up their stock prices – profiting from a virus that most in advanced economies had ignored since 1970’s with first outbreak.

“Johnson & Johnson said the vaccine program is being accelerated to allow for clinical trials in humans in early 2015, after promising results in preclinical studies. The company previously had planned to conduct human trials nearly a year later in 2016. The company said the collaboration between Crucell and Bavarian Nordic would enable faster production of the doses necessary to start larger clinical trials.”

via Johnson & Johnson to Quicken Development of Ebola Virus Vaccine – WSJ.

In 2014 UK – Shame on Cameron! Rickets returns as poor families find healthy diets unaffordable | Society | The Guardian

Dr John Middleton, from the FPH, said the calls would come in the faculty’s manifesto to be published next month and warned that ill-health arising from poor diets was worsening throughout Britain “through extreme poverty and the use of food banks”.

He saidthat obesity remained the biggest problem of food poverty as families are forced into choosing cheap, processed high fat foods just to survive. “It’s getting worse because people can’t afford good quality food,” he said. “Malnutrition, rickets and other manifestations of extreme poor diet are becoming apparent. GPs are reporting rickets anecdotally in Manchester, the East End of London, Birmingham and the West Midlands. It is a condition we believed should have died out.

“The vitamin deficiency states of gout, malnutrition being seen in hospital admission statistics are extreme manifestations of specific dietary deficiencies or excesses, but they are markers of a national diet which is poor. Food prices up 12%, fuel prices up double-figure percentages and wages down is a toxic combination, forcing more people to eat unhealthily.”

via Rickets returns as poor families find healthy diets unaffordable | Society | The Guardian.

Avian Flu Diary: Kansas City Outbreak Identified As HEV 68

Avian Flu Diary: Kansas City Outbreak Identified As HEV 68.

Local media reports (see Unusual respiratory virus strikes metro kids) from Kansas City, Mo. indicate that a rarely seen – and not yet well understood – respiratory virus called HEV 68 (Human Enterovirus 68) has sickened hundreds of kids in the region this week, and that the local Children’s Hospital is unusually at full census in late August.

Without specifying the pathogen, Children’s Mercy Hospitalposted the following notice yesterday on their website: Viruses in the Community Prompt Inpatient Visiting Restrictions.

Ebola outbreak ‘worse than we’d feared,’ CDC chief says on… | www.ajc.com

Frieden, in his WSB Radio interview, warned that failure to control the outbreak could be catastrophic.

“This isn’t just a risk to Liberia and West Africa,” Frieden said. “With this kind of transmission, every day it goes on, it increases the risk of spread to other countries in Africa, other countries in the region.

“The impact not just from Ebola but on the delivery of healthcare, on economies, on families and societies. It’s huge. It’s absolutely an emergency.”

via Ebola outbreak ‘worse than we’d feared,’ CDC chief says on… | www.ajc.com.

Do the Taco or Beer Challenge

“You find yourself a fucking taco, or a fucking beer, or a fucking taco and a beer, then you eat the fucking taco or drink the fucking beer or eat and drink both the fucking taco and the beer, and then you donate some money to an abortion fund. You fucking film yourself doing this shit and then you send us the fucking video and we put it on the fucking internet.”

Andrea Grimes started the challenge as a bit of a joke, after seeing the “ice bucket challenge” take off. Tacos and beers have about as much to do with abortion as ice buckets have to do with ALS — but they’re much, much more enjoyable.

And actually, you can make the challenge even more simple. You can skip the filming part and even the eating/drinking part (although I can’t imagine why you’d want to pass on that) and just donate to an abortion fund. As Grimes writes, “The Taco or Beer Challenge is about doing what’s right for your own taco and beverage needs, just like having an abortion—or not—is about doing what’s right for yourself and your family.”

As we remind you pretty regularly around these parts, access to abortion in this country is treated as a privilege, not a right — and abortion funds play a critical role in filling that gap and helping to ensure that everyone who needs an abortion can afford to get one.

You can find an abortion fund serving your community here.

via Do the Taco or Beer Challenge.

Avian Flu Diary: PNAS: A Vaccine Evading Variant Poliovirus

For those born after 1960, it is probably difficult to understand the kind of fear that Polio generated in the United States and around the world during the 1950s.  While only one infection in a hundred resulted in paralysis or death, polio was extremely infectious, and the United States routinely saw between 18,000 and 25,000 paralytic cases each year – mostly among young children.

 

Hospital wards were filled with paralyzed children trapped in iron lungs (a grim technology many younger adults have no memory of), which were used to keep them alive. The following short film clip may be hard for some to look at, but is a reminder of how things were . . . not so very long ago.

 

 

 

In 1954  the first major field trials of the Salk vaccine took place, and the following year – after review of the data – a national vaccination campaign was launched. By 1957, after two years of vaccination – the number of new polio cases in the United States dropped to under 6,000, and by 1964 that number had dropped to just 121 cases.

via Avian Flu Diary: PNAS: A Vaccine Evading Variant Poliovirus.