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The Cycle of Disease – It’s Just our Time
COMMENT: Sir,
It’s interesting, since your post on Madagascar and the pneumonic plague, I have Surveilled a site dealing with medical news once a week. What’s really interesting is the resurgence of older well-known entities such as cholera
Zambia has been hard hit with over 2000 cases of cholera with close to 50 deaths. The university is closed as well as other institutions. It has migrated from the urban areas to the suburban areas. The armed forces have been called out to help. Tanzania has shut its borders with Zambia due to this. Kenya has had 4 kid cases of hospitalization.
Influenza strains are hitting geographic regions. The H3n2 is has hit Australia very hard and is currently hitting the UK. The US is also being infected. India has the H1N1 variant hitting them hard.
When it rains…. it pours.
Keep up the good work
DK
REPLY: The influenza virus changes its genetic makeup every year and complies with guess what – cyclical analysis! This constantly changing virus presents a cyclical challenge to medical science, and consequently, this makes it impossible to create a single vaccine to prevent the disease for life. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) monitor each new strain of influenza virus as it appears. They gather data and then try to predict which may be the predominant virus in the following year’s flu season. Scientists then use this data to develop a vaccine each year against the specific virus they predict will predominate.
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Why Pandemics Are Our Own Damn Fault
Why Pandemics Are Our Own Damn Fault
A review of Sonia Shah’s brilliant new book on 21st century disease threats we all face.
Science writer Sonia Shah’s new book ‘Pandemic’ offers a critical warning. Photo by Glenford Nunez.
She has succeeded brilliantly. On page one, she describes her flight from Haiti to Florida, delayed because another passenger had come down with cholera just as he took his seat on the plane. By page two, I knew I was in good hands and I was not disappointed by the time I reached the extensive documentation. This is the best single book I have yet read about the disease threats we all face in the 21st century.
I say this as a blogger who since 2005 has posted over 45,000 times about disease outbreaks and the political and scientific responses to them. If nothing else, the experience has taught me that organizing information about diseases is a very tough job. That may be why so many outbreaks seem to come out of nowhere — we have no idea of their backstory.
Shah builds her book around the backstory of a single disease: cholera. But in explaining it, she takes us on a superbly guided tour of many other diseases. Each may have its own symptoms but all, she argues, rely on humans to spread them.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
