Category: outbreak
Outbreak of Meningitis Causing Health Officials to Look Overseas for Help
By Thomas Clark, MD, MPH This time last year public health officials were grappling with a meningitis outbreak linked to fungus found in tainted medication. Now officials are trying to rein in a different outbreak of meningitis, more specifically meningococcal disease, popping up on a college campus, including Princeton University. Read More >
Posted on by 2 CommentsOutbreak Investigation: Meningitis
One Case Sparks National Action Imagine… A patient goes to the doctor for a routine steroid injection. A couple weeks later, the patient feels sick – headache, fever and suddenly uncomfortable in bright light. Within days, the patient is admitted to the local hospital’s intensive care unit. Doctors discover that the patient has a life-threatening Read More >
Posted on by 5 CommentsDisease Detection: Laboratories on the front lines
You can’t respond to threats if you don’t know what they are, which is one reason that laboratories play such an important role in public health. Public health laboratories have helped detect all kinds of threats to the public’s health; including anthrax, monkey pox, novel flu viruses, and foodborne disease outbreaks caused by germs like Read More >
Posted on by 8 CommentsPertussis: A known villain. Are you protected?
By Kara Stephens Current Status: Public Health Nemesis If you’ve been reading the news the past few weeks, you may have heard about the recent outbreak of pertussis that has reached epidemic levels in Washington. There have been 2,092 cases reported statewide through June 5, 2012, compared to 164 reported cases in 2011 during the same Read More >
Posted on by 12 CommentsMoney Well Spent: Public Health Dollars Save Lives
By Jean O’Connor, JD, DrPH, Deputy State Public Health Director, Oregon About a week and a half ago, the Oregon Public Health Division learned about a child with hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS), this sounds complicated but it’s essentially kidney failure brought on by an infection of the digestive system. In an otherwise healthy child, E. Read More >
Posted on by 3 CommentsReal-life Contagion: Part 2
By Tyler M. Sharp, PhD Before we left off in Part 1 I had just gotten on a boat to visit a small atoll in the Marshall Islands affected by the dengue outbreak… A few days earlier we had identified a small cluster of cases on Arno, a small atoll about 30 miles from Majuro. I Read More >
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