Salon.com > Disease

North America’s forgotten plague

Sat, 04 May 2013 18:00:00 +0000

A LEAN FIGURE cast in bronze kneels beside a child, a tiny lancet in his hand poised to strike at the girl’s left shoulder. Another patient waits her turn, upper arm revealed. The memorial, outside the World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva, celebrates the global conquest of smallpox in 1980, a milestone that belongs on any list of reasons to be cheerful: Variola major gorged on our species for thousands of years, blazing a trail of hideous pustules that disfigured victims’ bodies and faces and wiped out communities. Children and the elderly were especially vulnerable, and those not felled by the disease were sometimes blinded by it.

The Geneva memorial honours the physician as warrior in the eradication of smallpox. On a Pfizer campus in Pennsylvania, a twin statue tells a different story, positioning Big Pharma as the hero. Neither monument, however, recalls the many casualties of smallpox, and this says a great deal about what we choose to remember.

Could cancer be contagious?

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 21:33:00 +0000

Venezuelan officials announced this week that they would investigate whether enemies could have deliberately infected late President Hugo Chávez with cancer. Chávez died on March 5, apparently of a heart attack, after battling cancer for two years.

When I parented my father

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 23:57:00 +0000

My father’s urologist projected the CAT scan on his computer screen, pointing out the major organs like battle sites on a Civil War map. My father’s body, my homeland. Bladder. Liver. Intestine. Spleen. “Here’s the right kidney,” he said, using his pen to mark the perimeter. “You can see its recognizable shape, a healthy shape and size.” We nodded, my mother, my father, and me. We knew pointing out normalities meant an abnormality was coming. Dr. Petroski inhaled. “And now here’s the left kidney,” he said, moving his pen to a dark area that did not mirror its right-hand counterpart. It was as large as my father’s liver, but misshapen, a bulge in the center like a football. “You see the difference in the shape? That’s a tumor. That’s the problem.”

Can magic mushrooms help cancer patients?

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 21:21:00 +0000

  Psilocybin, the hallucinogen found in “magic” mushrooms, may have the power to help cancer patients deal with the psychological suffering associated with cancer, claims new research from the New York University College of Dentistry (NYUCD). Previous studies have suggested that psilocybin may help ease depression and increase "openness." And according to Anthony Bossis, PhD, a clinical assistant professor at NYUCD and Langone Medical Center, it may also relieve cancer patients of some of the "existential distress" that can accompany a life-threatening diagnosis. "The emotional, spiritual and existential distress that can often accompany a diagnosis of cancer often goes unidentified and untreated," says Bossis. He notes that cancer sufferers often experience side effects from the physical pain of illness and chemotherapy—such as anxiety, depression, anger, denial, social isolation, hopelessness, and loss of independence—which the hallucinogenic drug could help alleviate.

Why the “war on fat” is a scam to peddle drugs

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 20:19:00 +0000

For many years now, I’ve been talking to Dr. X about weight and health. Dr. X, who is one of the nation’s most distinguished medical researchers, is employed by the federal government, and isn’t allowed to make on-the-record comments regarding government health policy without getting those comments cleared first by Dr. X’s administrative superiors.

Dr. X has a theory about the government’s anti-fat crusade, which is that the public health establishment has been duped by Big Pharma into becoming unknowing participants in the following money-making venture:

Step 1: Convince Americans that not being thin is a disease that needs to be cured.

Step 2: Encourage the government to implement public health programs that, through lifestyle interventions, will purportedly make people thinner, and, by hypothesis, healthier.

Step 3: Document the complete failure of these programs in the medical literature.

Step 4: Get the government to approve a host of new diet drugs, since it’s now been demonstrated that lifestyle interventions don’t do anything to help reverse this deadly epidemic.

Step 5: Profit!

Before meningitis outbreak, pharmacy avoided sanctions

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 16:50:00 +0000

BOSTON (AP) — New state documents detail problems found in 2006 by an outside firm hired to do an assessment at the company at the center of a deadly meningitis outbreak.

The state documents, obtained by The Associated Press under a public records request, say investigators in 2006 found inadequate contamination control and no written standard operating procedures for using equipment, among other problems, at the New England Compounding Center. The problems were corrected that year, and a state inspection in May 2011 as the company prepared to update its facilities found no such issues.

The outbreak of meningitis, an inflammation of the lining of the brain and spinal cord, has sickened nearly 300 people, including 23 who died, in more than a dozen states. Each victim had received a steroid shot, mostly for back pain. Federal health officials matched the shots produced by the company to the outbreak after finding a deadly fungus in more than 50 unopened vials there but have not said how the shots were contaminated.

A congressional committee on Monday sought a decade's worth of records from the company.

Meningitis outbreak shows why we need regulation

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 20:50:00 +0000

If the Democrats needed an opportunity to show voters what a deregulated market really looks like, the New England Compounding Center, the company responsible for the current meningitis outbreak, has served one up.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Framingham, Mass., center made as many as “17,676 potentially tainted steroid injections, which were then shipped to 75 clinics in 23 states.” So far 14 people have died and 170 have fallen ill from the contaminated shots. The questions on everybody’s mind now are: How could this happen? And where was the Food and Drug Administration, the federal agency that's supposed to oversee the pharmaceutical industry?

How could it happen? Simple: There are almost no laws regulating pharmaceutical compounding, the process of making made-to-order prescriptions tailored to the unique needs of individual clients. This process used to take place on a small scale. But in the past 20 years, changes in the pharmaceuticals market allowed compounding to explode into a new industry of below-the-radar, unregulated mass drug production.

Meningitis outbreak toll: 119 cases, 11 deaths

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 18:46:00 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) — The number of people sickened by a deadly meningitis outbreak has now reached 119 cases, including 11 deaths.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated the count on Tuesday.

New Jersey is the tenth state to report at least one illness. The other states involved in the outbreak are Tennessee, Michigan, Virginia, Indiana, Florida, Maryland, Minnesota, North Carolina and Ohio.

Officials have tied the outbreak of rare fungal meningitis to steroid shots for back pain. The steroid was made by a specialty pharmacy in Massachusetts. At least one contaminated vial was found at the company.

The company recalled the steroid that was sent to clinics in 23 states, and later recalled everything it makes.

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Online:

CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/HAI/outbreaks/meningitis.html

“Fever Season”: Revelations of a plague year

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 11:00:00 +0000

"The panic is fearful today," wrote an Episcopal nun from Memphis, Tenn., in the summer of 1878. "Eighty deaths reported and half the doctors refuse to report at all. We found one of our nurses lying on the floor in her patient's room down with the fever, another is sickening. I really believe that Dr. Harris and I and the two negro nurses are the only well persons anywhere near here."

With more than half the city's population fled and most of those remaining stricken by the virus known as Yellow Jack, Bronze John and "the Stranger's Disease" — yellow fever — Memphis resembled a post-apocalyptic landscape to rival that in any zombie film. At the peak of the epidemic, corpses lay in the streets as overburdened work crews struggled to convey them to mass graves. Looters rampaged through the posher homes in the only major urban center between St. Louis and New Orleans, guzzling their victims' liquor and collapsing with the fever at the scene of their crimes. At one point, a single man remained of the staff at the Western Union telegraph office, which was the sole, fragile information conduit between the quarantined city and an outside world looking on in horror and pity.

Should the terminally ill control their deaths?

Sat, 22 Sep 2012 13:00:00 +0000

If you’re dying and don’t care to wait around for death, you can always book your own appointment. One simple way to do this would be to stop eating and drinking; another would be to stop life-sustaining medicine or devices. Assuming you can decide on your own, both of these methods are good and kosher as far as the law goes. A third approach, however, ventures into a grayer area of legal and ethical terrain—quaffing a lethal cocktail. In the business of ending your life, the means matter a lot more than the final result.

These were three things my mother, Ann Krieger, was pondering when she reached the final leg of her terminal illness last year, a month before Mother’s Day. After several years of fighting colon cancer, her doctor broke the news that the cancer had spread and the treatment was no longer working. There was no more they could do.

“You’ve got months, not weeks,” he said.

“What should I do?” she asked. “Should I end it now?”

“No,” he said. “You don’t want to do that.”

An epidemic of absence

Sun, 09 Sep 2012 13:00:00 +0000

When I was eleven, my hair began falling out. My grandmother first noticed it. I was visiting my grandparents at their beach house that summer when, one afternoon, she called me over, examined the back of my head, and proclaimed that I had a nickel-sized bald spot. Then we all promptly forgot about it. With the sand, waves, and sun beckoning, it just didn’t seem that important.

But by the time school started a few months later, the bald patch had grown. A dermatologist diagnosed alopecia areata, an autoimmune disorder. My immune system, normally tasked with protecting against invaders, had inexplicably mistaken friend for foe, and attacked my hair follicles. Scientists didn’t know what, exactly, triggered alopecia, but stress was thought to play a role. And at first glance, that made sense. My parents were in the middle of a messy, drawn-out divorce. I was also beginning at a new junior high school that fall; I had, it seemed, much to worry about.

Seven signs you’re dating a sex addict

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 14:31:00 +0000

He likes a little porn, so do you. Maybe you even like to watch it together. Maybe she wasn’t exactly single when you met. He doesn’t care how many partners you’ve had; it’s all in the past. Or is it? To find out the answer, fall back to the fundamentals: identifying the addict is the first step. And when it comes to sex addiction, that first step is a doozy.

The list of behaviors associated with a sexual addict is so mundane, practically anyone can tick off at least a couple. Consistent use of pornography. Unsafe sex. Phone or chat-room sex. One-night stands, extra-marital affairs, GPS hook-ups, obsessive online dating. The list is long and gets darker the further down you go: compulsive masturbation, exhibitionism, voyeurism, prostitutes.

"If you’re married, your acceptable sexual behavior may be defined differently than if you’re single,” says Mike Weiss, a certified addiction therapist and founder of The Sexual Recovery Institute. “Sexual addiction follows a certain repetitive pattern; if you’d rather ask forgiveness than permission, that’s abusive."

Rick Scott’s TB scandal

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 16:38:00 +0000

On March 26 this year, Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott signed a bill that slashed the state Department of Health's budget and closed a state hospital where bad cases of tuberculosis were treated. Nine days later, the federal Center for Disease Control (CDC) detailed in a report that Florida was experiencing its worst TB outbreak in 20 years in Jacksonville. Since then, the governor’s office has either ignored or suppressed news of the outbreak, and it rushed ahead with plans to close the TB hospital as local officials kept information about the outbreak from the public. This, all according to an excellent investigation by the Palm Beach Post’s Stacey Singer, who was stymied by state officials at every turn when she tried to learn more about the outbreak and about why the state hadn’t responded to it in a concerted way.

Cambodia’s mystery disease

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 18:55:00 +0000

A mysterious disease is killing scores of Cambodian children - and both local and international disease experts are unsure what's causing the respiratory and neurological symptom-causing affliction.

Sixty-four of 66 children brought into Cambodian hospitals since April 2012 have died from the unknown disease, which, according to a report on the World Health Organization website "causes high fever, followed by respiratory and/or neurologic symptoms with rapid deterioration of respiratory functions." Devastating lung malfunction appears to kill the young sufferers disturbingly quickly, often within 24 hours.

Thus far only affecting youngsters under the age of 7, World Health Organization officials are scrambling to discover what the causes of the ailment are, and how it might be prevented from killing more children in this impoverished Southeast Asian nation. Bird flu, not unknown in Cambodia, has already been ruled out as a possible cause, while well-known tropical diseases dengue fever and Chikungunya are "unlikely" according to the WHO's Dr Nima Asgari.