Infectious Diseases Blog

We're looking for passionate and enthusiastic individual to be the Guide to the Infectious Diseases site on About.com!

What sort of information do we want the new Guide to provide?
Well, we're looking someone for who can help concerned users learn about various infectious diseases, particularly during a large outbreak.

What sort of person are we looking for to be the new Guide to Infectious Diseases?

• a health professional with extensive experience writing about health issues, particularly infectious diseases and travel health, for a consumer audience
• a journalist with extensive experience writing about health issues, particularly infectious diseases and travel health

If this sounds like you, and you've got excellent writing skills and the desire to reach and teach a broad audience through your writing, why not go over to our application site to learn more about our hiring program and submit an application?

Actually 26% of adult residents of New York City has herpes simplex virus 2, the kind that causes genital herpes according the New York Times citing a report from the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The figure for New York City is far above the national average of 19% of adults reported with genital herpes. Wearing a condom, avoiding sex during a herpes outbreak and taking antiviral drugs aimed at suppressing herpes outbreaks can all help avoid the transmission of genital herpes.

CBS news reports via WebMD that a particularly bad strain of Lyme disease bacteria is one of the most common strains found in the past 20 years. The good news is that Lyme disease, caught early, is fairly easy to cure with antibiotics. The bad news is that it is very easy to come into contact with the ticks that spread the disease. And the disease is difficult to treat past the first stage. 92% of the cases are reported in the Northeast, but the disease has been reported in almost every state and Europe.

Tuberculosis is a common complication of HIV/AIDS and the spread of TB among people with HIV/AIDS is making treatment of those patients more difficult, reports the New York Times. The combination of HIV and TB is a deadly one, but one that is increasingly common, especially in countries with high HIV/AIDS rates, such as in Africa. Some patients are treated for HIV/AIDS without even being tested for TB, resulting in the spread of all forms of TB, including extensively drug resistant TB, XDR TB.

Bird flu has returned to the island of Hong Kong after not appearing seriously since 1997 when the first human was found to be affected with the H5N1 virus, a small child, reports the Wall Street Journal. At that time, millions of fowl were culled. Since then, Hong Kong has rarely been affected with the virus, so health officials are busy investigating the origin of this recent outbreak.

Bird flu comes in many different strains with H5N1 being the most deadly to humans so far. The CDC reports though that other strains, H7N2 and H7N3 may be able to infect humans and spread from human to human. These strains are not associated with serious illness in humans, but have affected immune compromised individuals in the past.

McDonald's and other restaurants serving fresh red tomatoes are taking tomatoes off the menu as salmonella has already infected 145 people in the United States, according to NPR news. Florida is reported to produce half of the US's fresh tomato crop and the more than 30,000 workers associated with the tomato harvest are sitting idle as the FDA continues their investigations. Plum, Roma and round, red tomatoes are implemented in the salmonella scare while cherry, grape and homegrown tomatoes have not been associated with the contamination yet.

Xinhua news reports that the Chinese government plans to relocate 77,000 people from the Tibetan region of Aba by 2013 in order to avoid Kaschin-Beck disease. The cause of the degenerative bone disease is a mystery, but it may be caused by a fungus found in a strain of barley grown in the region, highland barley, combined with a deficiency of selenium and iodine. The current rate of the disease in that region of Tibet is 20%. The government will provide housing, clean drinking water and a monthly rice allowance to replace their staple food of barley.

UK newspapers tend to report infectious disease news trends faster than US papers. The Times Online reports a "playground superbug" which turns out to be a strain of MRSA that produces a toxin Panton-Valentine leukocidin (PVL). Apparently this type of MRSA more easily infects the bone, where it's hard for drug to reach and kill the infection. It does not seem like this type of MRSA is very common, but watch for MRSA-PVL to be making headlines in the US soon.

AP news reports that Indonesia is wrapping up a bird flu epidemic drill. Indonesia is the most likely site of a human-to-human bird flu epidemic, so quashing an epidemic and prohibiting the travel of passengers who are ill will be especially important in Indonesia. I lived in Indonesia for a bit over a year and from what I saw, controlling bird flu on the ground will be an extremely difficult task. There is a chronic lack of enforcement of nearly every kind of regulation and the possibility to overstep the law in many cases. Nevertheless, the running of a drill in the case of a human bird flu epidemic shows that someone in government is making an honest attempt to curb an international disaster waiting to happen.