Core Dump

“We are seeing infections caused by Acinetobacter and special bacteria called KPC Klebsiella that are literally resistant to every antibiotic that is F.D.A. approved,” Dr. Spellberg said. “These are untreatable infections. This is the first time since 1936, the year that sulfa hit the market in the U.S., that we have had this problem.”

The Infectious Diseases Society of America, an organization of doctors and scientists, has been bellowing alarms. It fears that we could slip back to a world in which we’re defenseless against bacterial diseases.

There’s broad agreement that doctors themselves overprescribe antibiotics — but also that a big part of the problem is factory farms. They feed low doses of antibiotics to hogs, cattle and poultry to make them grow faster.

A study by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that in the United States, 70 percent of antibiotics are used to feed healthy livestock, with 14 percent more used to treat sick livestock. Only about 16 percent are used to treat humans and their pets, the study found.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, health

Labels: health

Studies in China show a "frightening" increase in antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as staphylococcus aureus bacteria, also know as MRSA . There are warnings that new strains of antibiotic-resistant bugs will spread quickly through international air travel and internation food sourcing.

"We have a lot of data from Chinese hospitals and it shows a very frightening picture of high-level antibiotic resistance," said Dr Andreas Heddini of the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control.

"Doctors are daily finding there is nothing they can do, even third and fourth-line antibiotics are not working.

"There is a real risk that globally we will return to a pre-antibiotic era of medicine, where we face a situation where a number of medical treatment options would no longer be there. What happens in China matters for the rest of the world."

Labels: Another thing to worry about, health

Let's consider yet another cancer Z and a test for it that satisfies the following three conditions:

1.) The probability a person has cancer Z is 1 percent.
2.) If the person has Z, the test is positive 95 percent of the time.
3.) If the person doesn't, the test is still positive 3 percent of the time.

Presented as frequencies the conditions are:

1.) On average 1 out of 100 people have Z.
2.) Of 100 people with Z, 95 will test positive.
3.) Of 100 people who are Z-free, 3 of them will test positive.

However these conditions are presented, the crucial question is what fraction of those people who test positive for Z actually have it. The surprising answer (see below) is about 24 percent, a calculation that studies show many doctors are unable to perform.

Labels: health, science

Labels: health, reference

For instance, most have fallen for the “preexisting conditions” bit, that the new plan is better because it forces insurers to cover those with preexisting conditinos. Well first, if you recall, insurers have used the failure to report ANY preexisting condition, no matter how trivial, as a reason to deny coverage when someone gets a costly illness. So health insurers will be permitted to charge those with “preexisting conditions,” again even if trivial, a 50% premium to the rest of the population. This not only defeats the idea of enlarging the pool, but also continues the abusive use of the notion of “preexsiting condition”. And before you argue that including all those people is costly and needs to be recouped somehow, every other advanced economy has a form of government-supported medicine that covers all citizens, is cheaper than ours, and delivers no worse, and in many cases, better health outcomes. Covering these people is not the problem; the problem is the system we now have.

Labels: economics and finance, health

For example, a group of students and researchers at the University of Toronto is currently working on an iPhone application called TimbreMap. It is designed to give users audible information about their surroundings to help them differentiate between surfaces, such as park grounds or sidewalks.

“As you touch the phone's surface, different elements have different sounds,” explained Jing Su, one of the graduate students working on the project. “We try to give it a different texture and a different sound. Even though the phone's glass surface is smooth, with the right kind of sound, you can trick the brain into giving you tactile feedback.”

TimbreMap's designers also hope to give it functionality in indoor locations – where the phone can't access GPS data which rely on direct access to satellites – by checking building blueprints. If successful, an application initially designed for users with visual disabilities may well become popular with any smart-phone user who simply wants to navigate a sprawling shopping mall.

Labels: health, technology

Labels: health, technology

It started as a cough. It wasn’t the kind of cough where something is temporarily stuck in your throat. It wasn’t the kind of cough where simply clearing your throat would’ve been adequate. This was the kind of cough that hurts when you do it. A stinging pain that makes you wince and guard and hope that you don’t have to cough again any time soon. I thought I might have a fever, but of course, I was in the middle of covering a war in Afghanistan, and the conditions were… well, hot. So, maybe it was that. Problem was, the next day I wasn’t feeling any better – in fact, I was worse. I woke up in my dusty desert tent and tried to step out of my sleeping bag. Two steps later, I almost hit the deck. Incoming. Except this wasn’t due to any sirens going off, this was due to my own body simply being unable to hold myself up. I was lightheaded and freezing cold – even though it was over 100 degrees outside at that early hour of the morning.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, health

* Don’t share towels. Use paper towels to dry your hands after washing them, or use a cloth towel that isn’t shared with anyone else. If each person has a towel of a different color, you’re less likely to get mixed up.

* Clean common surfaces. Influenza viruses, including the H1N1 virus, are spread mainly through uncovered coughs and sneezes. Respiratory droplets containing the virus can end up on doorknobs, keyboards, and other surfaces. A person may become sick through touching a contaminated surface, and then touching his or her eyes, mouth, or nose.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, health

The flu blog is one of 16 he maintains. A prolific writer, the retired college instructor has published novels, historical fantasies, a critique of the education system, a thriller set in Antarctica, and a terrific history of pioneering black settlement in British Columbia ( Go Do Some Great Thing , reissued last fall in a revised edition by Commodore Books).

Self-Counsel Press will issue his latest book in September, Write Your Non-Fiction Book Online .

He has yet to publish in print what may be his most compelling tale – life as a Red Diaper Baby in the midst of a Red scare.

Born in Manhattan in 1941, he graduated from Columbia University with an English degree, then completed two years as a clerk in the U.S. Army before becoming a technical writer at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, Calif. In 1966, Mr. Kilian saw on a magazine cover a photograph of the man who drilled him, Master Sergeant Donald Duncan, “one of the coolest guys I'd ever met in the army.” The cover line read, “I quit” with the tease, “The whole thing was a lie” The next year, Mr. Kilian abandoned the Bay Area to start a new life in Vancouver. Although he had fulfilled his military obligation, he'd had enough of the Vietnam War.

Mr. Kilian became a college instructor and, 40 years later, retired as the last original hire from what is now Capilano University.

Labels: health

The technique is the brainchild of Professor John Marshall, an ophthalmologist at King's College London who pioneered laser surgery to correct shortsightedness.

Professor Marshall, who hopes the treatment could be available in a couple of years, said: 'It is really exciting news. It won't bring back damaged eyesight but it may prevent AMD.'

The technique rejuvenates the 'Bruch's membrane' - a thin layer that lies behind the retina.

This provides the retina's light-sensitive cells with nutrients and removes waste created as a by-product of the way retina cells renew themselves.

But the membrane's cells eventually lose the ability to take waste away, allowing deposits to build up.

It can then become so damaged that the retina's lightsensitive cells start to die off. In a trial involving more than 100 diabetics, Professor Marshall found that using a laser stimulated the membrane's tired, ageing cells into action.

After the cells were ' energised' by the laser, they began to clean up the waste again.

Labels: health

Myth: Canada's health care system is a cumbersome bureaucracy.

The U.S. has the most bureaucratic health care system in the world. More than 31 percent of every dollar spent on health care in the U.S. goes to paperwork, overhead, CEO salaries, profits, etc. The provincial single-payer system in Canada operates with just a 1 percent overhead. Think about it. It is not necessary to spend a huge amount of money to decide who gets care and who doesn't when everybody is covered.

Myth: The Canadian system is significantly more expensive than that of the U.S.

Ten percent of Canada's GDP is spent on health care for 100 percent of the population. The U.S. spends 17 percent of its GDP but 15 percent of its population has no coverage whatsoever and millions of others have inadequate coverage. In essence, the U.S. system is considerably more expensive than Canada's. Part of the reason for this is uninsured and underinsured people in the U.S. still get sick and eventually seek care. People who cannot afford care wait until advanced stages of an illness to see a doctor and then do so through emergency rooms, which cost considerably more than primary care services.

What the American taxpayer may not realize is that such care costs about $45 billion per year, and someone has to pay it. This is why insurance premiums increase every year for insured patients while co-pays and deductibles also rise rapidly.

Labels: health, politics, society

In children, signs that need urgent medical attention include fast breathing or trouble breathing; blueish or gray skin color; not drinking enough fluids; severe, persistent vomiting; not waking up or not interacting.; being so irritable that the child doesn't want to be held; and flu-like symptoms improve, but then return later with a fever and a worse cough. Those are warning signs we physicians think about all the time, with respiratory infections. And they're good to have in mind with this new influenza-like illness caused by the novel H1N1 strain. Just good things for parents to have in the back of their mind.

In adults, we look at another set of warning signs that suggest the need for urgent medical attention: difficulty breathing or shortness of breath; pain or pressure in the chest or abdomen; sudden dizziness, confusion, persistent or severe vomiting that doesn't go away; and flu-like symptoms that improve, but then come back again with a fever or worsening of cough. (Statement by Dr. Anne Schuchat, CDC Press Briefing, May 28, 2009)

Labels: health

Labels: health

The Egyptian government is scared to death that H1N1 will come around and reassort with H5N1, which they believe to possibly be endemic in their pig population. And if you look at the continuing increase in suspected and confirmed Egyptian H5N1 human bird flu cases, I think you'd agree there is much to be concerned about.

Likewise, the situation in Indonesia and in China also involoves informed speculation on behalf of animal and human influenza researchers that H5N1 may have made a small foothold in the hog populations there. Especially Indonesia, which remains Bird Flu Central for human cases and potential pandemic explosion, despite the competition from ongoing Egyptian human infections. Researchers already know that some 20% of the stray cat population in Indonesia has H5N1 antibodies. Likewise, some hogs in Indonesia have tested positive for H5N! antibodies.

Bird flu kills more than 60 per cent of its human victims, but it doesn't easily pass from person to person.

Swine flu can be spread with a sneeze or a handshake, but it kills only a small fraction of the people it infects.

So what happens if they mix?

The scenario is a concern for scientists: The two viruses meet — possibly in Asia, where bird flu is endemic — and combine into a new bug that is both highly contagious and lethal and can spread around the world. Experts are unsure how likely this possibility is, but many note that the new swine flu strain — a never-before-seen mixture of pig, human and bird viruses — has shown itself to be especially adept at snatching evolutionarily advantageous genetic material from other flu viruses.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, health

As a retired educator, I'm embarrassed for my own profession. We have failed, as badly as our own teachers did in the Cold War, to teach critical thinking and logic.

It seems very likely to me, after following H5N1 for four years and H1N1 for eight days, that we could have an official pandemic declared in the next few days.

Big deal. It won't mean everyone dies, except for marauding motorcycle gangs and zombies shambling around in search of human flesh.

If you're over 50, you've already lived through two flu pandemics, those of 1957 and 1968, not to mention the ongoing pandemics of HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. With the exception of small, vulnerable communities, almost everyone survives a pandemic. As bad as 1918-19 was, it didn't end the Jazz Age or the Bolshevik Revolution.

If Dr. Chan moves us to phase 6 on Saturday, the sun will still come up again on Sunday. A few more people will contract H1N1 on Sunday, and a few will die. But life will continue.

Labels: health

Labels: health

Asian stock markets retreated Monday as investors worried the outbreak of swine flu in North America could grow into a worldwide pandemic that deepens the global recession.

Fears over a virus that has already sickened hundreds, and possibly killed more than 100 in Mexico, led investors to buy drug makers and dump airlines like Qantas Airways and Cathay Pacific. Oil prices and the dollar both fell.

Labels: economics and finance, health

I'm a specialist doctor in respiratory diseases and intensive care at the Mexican National Institute of Health. There is a severe emergency over the swine flu here. More and more patients are being admitted to the intensive care unit. Despite the heroic efforts of all staff (doctors, nurses, specialists, etc) patients continue to inevitably die. The truth is that anti-viral treatments and vaccines are not expected to have any effect, even at high doses. It is a great fear among the staff. The infection risk is very high among the doctors and health staff.

There is a sense of chaos in the other hospitals and we do not know what to do. Staff are starting to leave and many are opting to retire or apply for holidays. The truth is that mortality is even higher than what is being reported by the authorities, at least in the hospital where I work it. It is killing three to four patients daily, and it has been going on for more than three weeks. It is a shame and there is great fear here. Increasingly younger patients aged 20 to 30 years are dying before our helpless eyes and there is great sadness among health professionals here.

Labels: health

The treatment involves replacing a layer of degenerated cells with new ones created from embryonic stem cells. It was pioneered by scientists and surgeons from the Institute of Ophthalmology at University College London and Moorfields eye hospital.

This week Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical research company, will announce its financial backing to bring the therapy to patients.

The treatment will tackle age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the most common cause of blindness. It affects more than 500,000 Britons and the number is forecast to increase significantly as people live longer. The disease involves the loss of eye cells.

Labels: health

The prosthetic telescope, together with the cornea, acts as a telephoto system to enlarge images 3X or 2.2X, depending on the device model used. The telephoto effect allows images in the central visual field ('straight ahead vision') to not be focused directly on the damaged macula, but over other healthy areas of the central and peripheral retina. This generally helps reduce the 'blind spot' impairing vision in patients with AMD, hopefully improving their ability to recognize images that were either difficult or impossible to see.

The prosthetic telescope is implanted by an ophthalmic surgeon in an outpatient surgical procedure. The device is implanted in one eye, which provides central vision as described above, while the non-implanted eye provides peripheral vision for mobility and navigation. After the surgical procedure, the patient participates in a structured vision rehabilitation program to maximize their ability to perform daily activities. Situated in the eye, the device allows patients to use natural eye movements to scan the environment and reading materials.

Labels: health

But bird flu, it seems, is back. This year, China has already recorded eight human cases of the disease. Last month five people died in locations as far removed from each other as Beijing in the north, Xinjiang in the west, Guangxi in the south, Hunan in the center and Shandong in the east — and one of the highest tallies of bird flu deaths China has ever recorded in a month. "From a disease-control perspective, the increase in cases in China is notable — as is the wide geographic spread," says Dr. Hans Troedsson, the World Health Organization's representative in China. There is still no evidence that the virus has mutated to spread easily between humans, he says. But while such a nightmare scenario, which could set off a global flu pandemic that could kill millions, has shown no signs of being an immediate threat, serious concerns remain. "The fact that this is the highest number for a single month in China reminds us that the virus is entrenched and circulating in the environment," Troedsson says. See pictures of the resurgence of bird flu.(

Labels: Another thing to worry about, health

Well, mine are rather dull by comparison. I don't see any images. I tend to see things like capital letters and numbers all jumbled up and moving rapidly. It's almost like a sort of Rosetta Stone. I can't actually read anything. All I see are isolated letters and sometimes strings of letters. These flicker and are faint and easily ignored.... They're black and white. I also see chessboards, which again are black and white.... Geometrical patterns go with activity [in] the primary visual cortex.

I also have a sort of "filling in." In my right eye there's something like a huge black inkblot, which occupies most of the visual field there. But if I look up at the ceiling, within two second I can no longer see a black inkblot because it has taken on the white color of the ceiling. And if I look at the carpet, which has a design, within about 20 seconds the carpet fills in [the space of the inkblot].... Incidentally with people with Charles Bonnet Syndrome, 10 or 15 percent of them have images; 80 percent, at least, have geometrical hallucinations. So it is much commoner to get this low-level hallucination in the primary visual cortex, and only in a minority of people does it spread up to the higher levels and give you faces and buildings and birds.

Labels: health, science

If we are producing, either through vaccine boo-boos or via natural selection (or both) an H5N1 virus that no longer causes chickens to die in staggering numbers but still continues to shed H5N1 virus, now that is scary news.

So what if, suddenly, we have lost our most important sentinels in the fight against pandemic H5N1? What if the virus has not changed, but the conditions for infection have? I am saying that if it is true that we have asymptomatic fowl in China and in other parts of Asia, and possibly Egypt, and as a result it is becoming easier for humans to get infected simply because fowl are not doing their duty and dying to warn us, then perhaps it is time to reassess that threat level once again.

When you lose a major source of intelligence when fighting a deadly foe, what do you do? When intelligence experts lose their eyes and ears, they ratchet up the threat level to compensate while they regroup and re-establish their eyes and ears.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, health

Labels: Another thing to worry about, health, politics

Labels: health

When doctors here in Armenia said they would introduce me to XDR patients, I figured we would all be swathed in protective clothing and chat in muffled voices in a secure ward of a hospital. Instead, they simply led me outside to a public park, where Mr. Hakobyan sat on a bench with me.

“It’s pretty safe outside, because his coughs are dispersed,” one doctor explained, “but you wouldn’t want to be in a room or vehicle with him.” Then I asked Mr. Hakobyan how he had gotten to the park.

“A public bus,” he said.

He saw my look and added: “I have to take buses. I don’t have my own Lincoln Continental.” To his great credit, Mr. Hakobyan is trying to minimize his contact with others and doesn’t date, but he inevitably ends up mixing with people.

Afterward, I asked one of his doctors if Mr. Hakobyan could have spread his lethal infection to other bus passengers. “Yes,” she said thoughtfully. “There was one study that found that a single TB patient can infect 14 other people in the course of a single bus ride.”

Labels: Another thing to worry about, health

All I could think of was another sick person, a man from Guangdong province in southern China, who spent the night of February 21, 2003, at the Metropole Hotel in Hong Kong, an upscale establishment with a swimming pool, fitness center, restaurants, a bar, and all kinds of areas where visitors could socialize and connect. The man stayed a single night in room 911. Unfortunately for him and for many other people, he had picked up severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS—perhaps directly from an infected bat or from a small, arboreal mammal called a civet, common in one of Guangdong’s famous “wet markets” that sell wild animals for food, or else from a person or chain of people ultimately infected from one of those animal sources.

n Venezuela today, the Ministry of Health keeps a lookout for the appearance of unusual numbers of dead wild monkeys, such as howler monkeys. Because the monkeys are so susceptible to yellow fever and can act as a reservoir from which the virus leaps to the human population, an explosion of monkey deaths serves as an advance warning system, signaling the need to vaccinate humans in the vicinity.

This pattern of cross-infection from animals to humans is par for the course in emerging infectious disease. In fact, the big killer diseases of history all came to us from microbes living in other species, overwhelmingly from other warm-blooded mammals and, to a lesser extent, from birds.

On reflection, this all makes sense. Each new animal host to which a microbe adapts represents a new habitat. It is easiest for a microbe to jump between closely related habitats, from an animal species with one sort of body chemistry to a closely related animal species with very similar body chemistry.

By connecting distant places, meanwhile, globalization permits the long-distance transfer of microbes along with their insect vectors and their human victims, as evidenced not only by the spread of HIV around the world, but also by North American cases of cholera and SARS brought by infected passengers on jet flights from South America and Asia, respectively. Indeed, when a flight from Buenos Aires to Los Angeles stopped in Lima in 1992, it picked up some seafood infected with the cholera then making the rounds in Peru. As a result, dozens of passengers who arrived in Los Angeles, some of whom then changed planes and flew on to Nevada and even as far as Japan, found that they had contracted cholera. Within days that single airplane spread cholera 10,000 miles around the whole rim of the Pacific Basin.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, health

I have posterior cortical atrophy or PCA. They say, rather ingenuously, that if you have Alzheimer’s it’s the best form of Alzheimer’s to have. This is a moot point, but what it does do, while gradually robbing you of memory, visual acuity and other things you didn’t know you had until you miss them, is leave you more or less as fluent and coherent as you always have been.

I spoke to a fellow sufferer recently (or as I prefer to say, ‘a person who is thoroughly annoyed with the fact they have dementia’) who talked in the tones of a university lecturer and in every respect was quite capable of taking part in an animated conversation.

Nevertheless, he could not see the teacup in front of him. His eyes knew that the cup was there; his brain was not passing along the information. This disease slips you away a little bit at a time and lets you watch it happen.

Labels: health, SF

In late autumn of 2000, in addition to pneumonia patients began contracting urinary-tract and bloodstream infections from Klebsiella. The latter are often lethal, since once Klebsiella infects the bloodstream it can spread to every organ in the body. Wetherbee reviewed procedures in the I.C.U. again and discovered that the Foley catheters, used to drain urine from the bladder, had become a common source of contamination; when emptying the urine bags, staff members inadvertently splashed infected urine onto their gloves and onto nearby machinery. “They were very effectively moving the organism from one bed to the next,” Wetherbee said. He ordered all the I.C.U.s to be decontaminated; the patients were temporarily moved out, supplies discarded, curtains changed, and each room was cleaned from floor to ceiling with a bleach solution. Even so, of the thirty-four patients with infections that year, nearly half died. The outbreak subsided in October, 2003, after even more stringent procedures for decontamination and hygiene were instituted: patients kept in isolation, and staff and visitors required to wear gloves, masks, and gowns at all times.

“My basic premise,” Wetherbee said, “is that you take a capable microörganism like Klebsiella and you put it through the gruelling test of being exposed to a broad spectrum of antibiotics and it will eventually defeat your efforts, as this one did.” Although Tisch Hospital has not had another outbreak, the bacteria appeared soon after at several hospitals in Brooklyn and one in Queens. When I spoke to infectious-disease experts this spring, I was told that the resistant Klebsiella had also appeared at Mt. Sinai Medical Center, in Manhattan, and in hospitals in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Cleveland, and St. Louis.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, health

1. Make A List! Shopping lists top every saving strategy we offer, and for good reason. Lists make for routinized, disciplined shopping.
2. Don't Fear An Empty Fridge: Food grows mold, not interest. An empty fridge is a strong sign that your buying matches your consumption.
3. Approach Deals Skeptically: Just because an item screams "Two for One!" doesn't mean that you need two. Make sure the item is something that you'll use, and something that won't expire quickly.
4. Avoid Supermarkets For Perishables: Buy your vegetables, meats, and fish at local establishments. You'll spend less per visit, while honing your comparison shopping skills. In our neighborhood, the Korean vegetable stand is usually 30% cheaper than the supermarket around the corner.
5. Buy Non-Perishables In Bulk: If you can store them, buy your pasta and rice in bulk. Just don't try to buy more than one bag at a time.

Labels: health, society

Need I note that Bangladesh and Egypt are both hot-zone countries, as are other riot-prone countries like Indonesia and China?

When millions of people have no source of protein besides poultry, and H5N1 breaks out in that poultry, we can't expect that culls will go smoothly. We can't expect that culls will happen at all.

Nor can we expect to drive to work in bio-fuelled cars, listening with a clear conscience to the sad news from Asia and Africa.

Labels: environment, health, politics

A simple procedure of placing a gel inside the nose could hold the key to eradicating the superbug responsible for the deaths of more than 1,600 patients in the UK every year.

A British research firm yesterday claimed that their discovery represented a "major breakthrough" in the battle against MRSA. The firm, Destiny Pharma, is already carrying out human trials on the drug.

The compound, codenamed XF-73, destroys the five most common strains of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteria in laboratory tests in a peer-reviewed study. It works in a different way from antibiotics, which are becoming increasingly ineffective, as MRSA builds up resistance to them.

Labels: health

A spore that can live and infect people for months! A CFR of nearly ten percent! Infections disgnosed and confirmed in 38 states (see map at left)! The possibility that if you try to calculate the number of unreported or undiagnosed cases, the total number of infected could reach half a million!

I am reminded of a line from the recent and groundbreaking film "Cloverfield." In the scene in question, youthful adults are fleeing from some incredible monster that is trashing Manhattan. They run straight into an Army patrol in a department store that has been turned into a command post.

One of the young adults blurts out, "What is that thing?"

The soldier replies, "Whatever it is, it's winning."

Labels: Another thing to worry about, health

Doctors fear a pandemic of a lethal hospital superbug that is even more drug resistant than MRSA.

Staff battling outbreaks of acinetobacter are having to resort to antibiotics sidelined 20 years ago because of fears about their safety.

Even these do not always work, raising fears that the bacterium commonly found in soil and water could become uncontrollable.

Acinetobacter expert Professor Matthew Falagas said: "In some cases we have simply run out of treatments and we could be facing a pandemic with important public health implications."

Labels: Another thing to worry about, health

Newspaper accounts vary as to the source(s) of the illness. Some call it flu, while others still refer to the malady as "flu-like". At any rate, this illness is now accompanied by another, possibly even more frightening disease: Encephalitis. The most recent HK death was a seven-year-old boy who died yesterday of encephalitis associated with flu-like symptoms. The mention of the very word "encephalitis" among flubies strikes severe apprehension at the best and outright horror at the worst. Encephalitis Lethargica, as you recall, was the "secondary pandemic" to the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19. Think "Awakenings" with DeNiro and Robin Williams. Encephalitis Lethargica existed from 1917 to 1928, when it mysteriously vanished from the planet.

Now here's the interesting latest item: The nation's leading SARS and respiratory distress experts are being called in, apparently in an effort to pin down the origin(s) of the illness. It makes one wonder: If the BBC is saying (as recently as this morning) that this is a "mystery" flu, and the SARS gang is being called in, what in Sam Hill is going on in Hong Kong?

Labels: health

Labels: health

The one cool part of the whole process is that my endodontist was using a Windows-based digital X-ray system. Instead of placing a small piece of film in my mouth, he positioned a plastic paddle about the size of a small spatula so that the sensor on its end was in the right place, had me hold it steady, and pressed the X-ray button (”Bzzzztttt!”). Almost instantly (literally under a second), there was a response from the Dell notebook on the countertop behind him (”Ding!”) and the image was displayed in a window on the screen.

As a result he was able to snap images repeatedly throughout the procedure (”Bzzzztttt!” “Ding!”), see the results of his work nearly in real time, and make any necessary course corrections. (”Oh, look. There’s a fourth nerve in there. Hmmm, we’ll need to get to that.”)

Labels: health, Microsoft, technology

In a pandemic, everything will be constrained and in short supply. This especially means spare parts and replacement equipment for IT, since so much of it comes from overseas (Asia). It is difficult to get some networking equipment delivered quickly on a good day, let alone in the middle of an influenza pandemic. In fact, Michael Dell told me personally in 2006 that the SARS experience has fueled Dell's initiative to try and develop a Singapore-to-Ireland revolving door of manufacturing during a pandemic. The theory is that while one area is savaged, the other might be on the path to recovery. The company is making the best assumption it can; namely, that it must find a way to continue operations, or perish. Dell will also try and maintain larger inventories of certain parts, although those components change so quickly that it is an egregious violation of Dell's own business model to store anything in too much quantity for too long.

Labels: health, society

However, Hong Kong has thrown far more resources into making sure this doesn't happen again. The former British colony has gone as far as performing different full-scale drills throughout the city involving 100 players and hired actors to assist in the emergency scenarios.

"The first lesson is pretty simple. It's be prepared and set up for avian flu, SARS, Dengue fever, the plague, so that next time something nasty comes up we have a plan to work on," said Tsang.

Something that Toronto doesn't have is a new $500 million infectious disease centre, like the one that opened this year at Hong Kong's Princess Margaret Hospital. The one-stop facility has 16 floors, 108 isolation beds complete with negative pressure rooms.

Labels: health

Labels: health

Labels: health, Internet

Labels: health, Internet