Categories: Foodborne
July 24th, 2009 3:44 pm ET - Steven Stroika
The road to last month’s cookie dough recall started when CDC scientists reviewed information collected through PulseNet, a national network of laboratories that perform DNA “fingerprinting” of foodborne bacteria like E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella, and Listeria. These fingerprints are plugged into a database that CDC and its state partners routinely scan. I’m a PulseNet database manager at CDC and one of my jobs is to identify “clusters” - groups of illnesses that share the same fingerprint.
Categories: General
July 22nd, 2009 2:47 pm ET - Ali S. Khan
Workshop participants developed several alternative designs before agreeing a layout.
I work in CDC’s Special Pathogens Branch (SPB) where we study highly infectious viruses. My job is health communications and I’ve just returned from Uganda. I was there to work with the Ministry of Health and health educators from Uganda’s Western Districts to create materials that would help keep people there safe from Ebola and Marburg hemorrhagic fevers. Unfortunately, Uganda has seen more than its share of these diseases since the first cases were diagnosed in 1967.
Categories: General
July 15th, 2009 2:17 pm ET - JD Blanton
In the U.S., human rabies is rare, thanks mostly to the availability of rabies vaccination and the elimination of dog rabies. But in many other countries around the world, dog rabies is very common and people are at greater risk. When a person travels or immigrates from an area of higher risk (like Mexico) to an area of lower risk (like the United States), they may encounter obstacles in getting diagnosed correctly if they have rabies. A recent human rabies case from California demonstrates the challenges that can arise when attempting to administer care to a person from another country.
Categories: Foodborne
July 9th, 2009 1:27 pm ET - Mark Sotir
Under a very high magnification of 12000X, this colorized scanning electron micrograph (SEM) revealed the presence of a large grouping of Gram-negative Salmonella Typhimurium bacteria that had been isolated from a pure culture.
Foodborne illnesses occur throughout the year and summers tend to be busy with outbreaks. I work in CDC’s Enteric Diseases Epidemiology Branch and we just spent a few busy weeks on an investigation linking E. coli 0157 illnesses to raw cookie dough. See Karen Neil’s blog about that process.
Still, even in our busiest times, we don’t generally find ourselves spending entire weekends working on outbreaks. But on Saturday and Sunday, March 28 and 29, 2009, our branch found itself tracking the investigations of seven Salmonella outbreaks concurrently – six in the United States and one in Uganda. I was Acting OutbreakNet Team Lead that weekend.
