Category Archives: Epidemiology

Swine Flu forces city officials to close 5 more schools in Queens

From the NY Daily News:

From Erin Einhorn and Meredith Kolodner Swine Flu forces city officials to close 5 more schools in Queens :

Five more schools inside three buildings in Queens will be closed Monday after dozens more students came down with flu symptoms, officials said Sunday.

The closures by the city’s Department of Health bring the total number of schools currently shuttered because of swine flu to 11, meaning thousands of kids will miss class this week.

None of the newly announced schools have confirmed cases of the illness, but enough students were feeling sick that officials thought closures were necessary to halt the spread.

In other words, this isn’t over yet.

Swine Flu Outbreak coverage

For the  lion’s share of urgent posts here – reports about contemporaneous threats – I;m lucky to have good access to a  number of physicians, medical  personnel epidemiologists and other informants. cynthia-rowley-cdc-photo-influenza-10072

But the single most useful resource is the blog The Pump Handle What’s more, Liz Borkowski and  Celeste Monforton, two of the Pump Handle Posse,  have been generous to us,answering questions and helping us out.

Ms. Borkowski is recommending Effect Measure’s coverage of the current influenza outbreak. We may yet be able to add some detail as things develop –  but if you want to stay on top of the issue – get on over to Effect Measure’.

Google to track disease outbreaks

Alexis Madrigal of ABCNews reports that Google – and its nonprofit branch, Google.org, will start tracking disease outbreaks.

A new website, HealthMap, addresses that challenge by siphoning up text from Google News, the World Health Organization and online discussion groups, then filtering it and boiling it down into mapped data that researchers — and the public — can use to track new disease outbreaks, region by region.

“There is so much information on the web about disease outbreaks but it’s obscured by garbage and noise,” said John Brownstein, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and co-founder of HealthMap.org. “The idea of HealthMap is to get filtered, valuable information to the public and public health community in one freely available resource.”

The site’s free accessibility could be particularly important in the developing world, where poor public health infrastructure and lack of money has handicapped epidemiological efforts. That’s a problem because those regions are exactly where scientists predict new and dangerous diseases are likely to emerge.

HealthMap goes beyond the standard mashup and is more like a small-scale implementation of the long-awaited semantic web. The site, which the researchers describe in the latest issue of open access PLoS Medicine, creates machine-readable public health information from the text indexed by Google News, World Health Organization updates and online listserv discussions

Researchers Track Disease With Google News, Google.org Money

Cholera in Iraq

In mid-2003, the World Health organization reported on cholera in Iraq:

rom 28 April to 4 June 2003, a total of 73 laboratory-confirmed cholera cases have been reported in Iraq : 68 in Basra governorate, 4 in Missan governorate, 1 in Muthana governorate. No deaths have been reported.

From 17 May to 4 June 2003, the daily surveillance system of diarrhoeal disease cases in the four main hospitals of Basra reported a total of 1549 cases of acute watery diarrhea. Among these cases, 25.6 % occurred in patients aged 5 years and above.

Link.

Continue reading →

Hantavirus (Ebola, Marburg) Outbreaks in Africa; WHO response; vaccine development

David Axe has an excellent piece on the Wired blog Danger Room, summarizing reporting on recent Ebola and Marburg outbreaks in Congo  and Uganda, respectively. The Ebola is not only affecting humans – it’s hitting the gorilla population, already endangered. At the risk of starting an animal-rights discussion, or worse, one about evolution – one imagines that gorillas are sufficiently sentient to experience pain qua pain – and grief qua

grief.

Link here.  I’m certain that I’ll do damage to this piece in summarizing it; what’s more, like all of Axe’s work, it’s well-written and concise.