Fever, Friend or Foe?
The audio and slides for this SMACC talk are at the bottom of this blog post
Fever is so hot right now…
‘Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine and war; of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever’
— William Osler1
Fever is one of the cardinal signs of infection and — nearly 120 years after William Osler’s statement in his address to the 47th annual meeting of the American Medical Association on The Study of the Fevers of the South1 — infectious diseases remain a major cause of morbidity and mortality2. Despite this, it is unclear whether fever itself is truly the enemy or w...
Source: Life in the Fast Lane - July 10, 2013 Category: Emergency Medicine Doctors Authors: Paul Young Tags: Emergency Medicine Featured Infectious Disease Intensive Care critical care Fever Friend or Foe ICU paul young SEPSIS SMACC Source Type: blogs
Notifiable diseases in the US for 2011
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released a summary of notifiable diseases in the US for the year 2011. These statistics are collected and compiled from reports sent by state health departments and territories to the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS).
According to the CDC, a notifiable disease is one for which regular, frequent, and timely information regarding individual cases is considered necessary for the prevention and control of the disease. The list of nationally notifiable infectious diseases is dynamic, as new diseases are added and others deleted as incidence declines...
Source: virology blog - July 9, 2013 Category: Virology Authors: Vincent Racaniello Tags: Information CDC centers for disease control notifiable disease viral virology virus Source Type: blogs
VisualDx Mobile: a Quick App Review and a Q&A with Noah Craft, CMO of VisualDx
We had the chance to take a look at the VisualDx mobile app, the mobile version of VisualDx Health, a website that helps in clinical decision making of dermatologic, infectious, genetic, metabolic, nutritional and occupational diseases, benign and malignant growths, drug-induced conditions, and other injuries.
The app is available for iOS in the iTunes Store and through Google Play for Android devices. It features a trial period of 15 days, but requires a license after it’s over. This will cost you between $99.99 and $299.99 for one year, depending on which content you want access to. However, a cheaper license is av...
Source: Medgadget - July 9, 2013 Category: Technology Consultants Authors: Stanley Darma Tags: Dermatology Diagnostics Informatics Medgadget Exclusive Source Type: blogs
WHO Releases Global Report on Health Effects of Violence Against Women
This report unequivocally demonstrates that violence against women is pervasive globally and that it is a major contributing factor to women’s ill health. In combination, these findings send a powerful message that violence against women is not a small problem that only occurs in some pockets of society, but rather is a global public health problem of epidemic proportions, requiring urgent action. As recently endorsed by the Commission on the Status of Women, it is time for the world to take action: a life free of violence is a basic human right, one that every woman, man and child deserves. (Source: Our Bodies Our Blog)
Source: Our Bodies Our Blog - June 21, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Rachel Tags: Global News Research & Studies Violence & Abuse Source Type: blogs
Healing the Overwhelmed Physician - by Jerry Avorn
BOSTON — DURING an 1817 visit to Florence, the French author Marie-Henri Beyle, known by the pen name Stendhal, was seized by palpitations, dizziness and a feeling of being overwhelmed by the abundance of great art surrounding him; an Italian psychiatrist later coined the term Stendhal syndrome to describe this phenomenon.
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Sophia Martineck
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We physicians are susceptible to a kind of medical Stendhal syndrome as we confront the volumino...
Source: PharmaGossip - June 12, 2013 Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: insider Source Type: blogs
Wingnuttery kills
Among the sexually transmitted infections, Human Papilloma Virus (HPV, to its friends) is among the least glamorous. Everyone knows syphilis and gonorrhea, but for some reason HPV doesn't share their celebrity. It should, because some strains of it cause a very common and highly unpleasant problem, genital warts -- or warts wherever people's parts happen to interact, and you can use your imagination. Other strains cause cancer -- cervical, genital, anal, oral and pharyngeal. In fact, HPV is basically the cause of cervical cancer.So it doesn't take a sodomite to see that a vaccine which is highly effective in preventing tra...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 10, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Source Type: blogs
Sad, Mad, or Bad?*
Until the last century, and really to any large extent not until somewhere around the middle of it, people were lucky if their physicians did them more good than harm. But then medicine achieved great triumphs and claimed immense cultural authority and prestige. This happened when biological science enabled physicians to identify specific disease processes and offer targeted, effective treatment.The huge win was antibiotics, which became widely available and effective around the time of World War II. People can argue about whether streptococci or mycobateria are really the ultimate cause of disease, or if it isn't the stre...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 28, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Source Type: blogs
Happy Valentines Day! STI studies and sexual health resources
The studies reveal new infection data, some of it available for the first time, for the eight most common STIs — chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, herpes, human papillomavirus (HPV), hepatitis B, HIV, and trichomoniasis. The studies, which estimate infection rates and medical costs related to STIs, were published in the journal Sexually Transmitted Diseases.
To read an article about the studies: http://nbcnews.to/11Jf4Wr
The CDC has a website where you can learn more about STIs as well as search by zipcode for a clinic that offers STI testing as well as HIV testing the HPV vaccines. To search visit here: http://1.u...
Source: BHIC - February 14, 2013 Category: Databases & Libraries Authors: Monica Rogers Tags: General Health Information Literacy HIV/AIDS Public Health Websites Source Type: blogs
Happy Valentine’s Day – A Safer Sex Reminder
Hey, it’s Valentine’s Day! Seems like a good time to revisit the topic of safer sex and sexually transmitted infections!
The CDC just released a new fact sheet on STIs, indicating that there are about 20 million new infections each year, and that young people (ages 15-24) account for about half of these.
In its report, CDC provided the following recommendations for women for STI screening:
All adults and adolescents should be tested at least once for HIV.
Annual chlamydia screening for all sexually active women age 25 and under, as well as older women with risk factors such as new or multiple sex partners.
Ye...
Source: Our Bodies Our Blog - February 14, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Rachel Tags: Activism & Resources Sex Education STIs Youth Source Type: blogs
USMLE Questions – Characteristic Disease Findings
The United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) is designed to emphasize knowledge of clinical scenarios and clinical pearls, even on Step I. Listed below are some commonly encountered disease findings and characteristics.
Feature
Disease
45, X chromosome
Turner’s syndrome
5-HIAA increased in urine
Carcinoid syndrome
Aganglionic rectum
Hirschsrpung’s disease
Apple-core sign on barium enema
Colon cancer
Arched back (opisthotonos)
Tetanus
Argyll-Robertson pupil
Syphilis
Ash leaf on forehead
Tuberous sclerosis
Auer rods
Acute myelogenous leukemia
Austin Flint murmur
Aortic regurgitation...
Source: Inside Surgery - January 18, 2013 Category: Surgeons Authors: Editor Tags: Surgpedia USMLE diseases findings VMA water hammer pulse Source Type: blogs
Can You Be Addicted to Facebook or is it Just a Bad Habit?
Six questions that indicate when a Facebook habit (or any other habit) is getting out of control.
From my new book:
"We don't know her name, but her problem illustrates a new fear. According to a short case report in an academic journal, a 24-year-old woman presented herself to a psychiatric clinic in Athens, Greece. She had joined Facebook eight months previously, and since then, her life had taken a nosedive. She told doctors she had 400 online friends and spend five hours a day on her Facebook page. She recently lost her job as a waitress because she kept sneaking out to visit a nearby Internet cafe. She wasn't sleeping...
Source: PsyBlog | Psychology Blog - January 14, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Jeremy Dean Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs
Gonorrhea Tx Fails at High Rate
In a report from Canada and on the CDC website, Cefixime treatment failure occurred in 6.77% of patients who returned for a test of cure of Neisseria gonorrhoeae infection in a retrospective cohort study. Note that this study was performed in a single sexual health center that treats high-risk individuals. Of 133 patients who returned for a test of cure following cefixime treatment, 6.77% had a treatment failure, defined as infection with a Neisseria gonorrhoeae isolate identical to the pretreatment isolate and a denial of re-exposure through sexual contact, according to Vanessa Allen, MD, MPH, of Public Health Ontario Lab...
Source: Dr. Buttery's Public Health BLOG - January 10, 2013 Category: Epidemiologists Authors: cbuttery Tags: Community Health infectious diseases Prevention Surveillance Source Type: blogs
HeLa Cells and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
I had the pleasure of being one of the fact-checkers and proof reviewers on Rebecca Skloot's book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and I'm pleased to see that it is now on the NY Times Bestseller list and that Rebecca is well into her book tour. Rebecca retells the story of Henrietta Lacks and her family and masterfully weaves it into compelling story, that rivets your attention and illustrates just how far we've come in and how far yet we have to go in human subject experimentation. Here is a short excerpt to whet your appetite:[On January 29, 1951, David Lacks sat behind the wheel of his old...
Source: Women's Bioethics Blog - February 15, 2010 Category: Medical Ethics Tags: HeLa Cells Henrietta Lacks human subject experimentation Immortal Life Rebecca Skloot Source Type: blogs
