Between May and October 2006, nurses in a mid-sized town in British Columbia saw a public health threat on the horizon. The number of tuberculosis cases was steadily increasing. Without intervention, the infectious disease was primed to overtake a community already facing an above-average number of homeless and pervasive drug and alcohol abuse. Similar outbreaks like this had happened before in British Columbia, but the size of this one was worrying. So during its investigation, the Tuberculosis/Mycobacteriology Program at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control, led by Patrick ... Read More
Teaming with Technology to Fight TB and HIV
November 24, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Tuberculosis — already infecting the global population about one new case a second — is considered one of the most dangerous opportunistic infections attacking people with HIV. The STOP TB Partnership reports that TB is the leading cause of death among persons infected with HIV in Africa. Worldwide, 1 in 4 TB deaths is HIV-related. While the calculus seems straightforward — get HIV, see your immune system falter, then get TB — the tangled tango between the two deadly diseases is more complex. According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health Division of Acquired ... Read More
Ebola — Yes, Ebola — Found in Livestock
December 26, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
World health community invited to observe handling of outbreak of a dreaded disease. Scientific and health experts have been invited to the Philippines to investigate its government's first-ever findings of the dreaded Ebola virus in swine, discovered in four hog farms in Luzon two weeks ago. Pigs showing signs of illness were tested, and samples were sent to New York's USDA Plum Island facility where tests for the Ebola-Reston strain came back positive. This is the first time that this strain of Ebola — one that is not harmful to humans — has been in discovered in swine in the ... Read More
