infection

Filariasis

By |2017-02-10T09:50:10-07:00September 5th, 2013|General, Preparedness, Prevention|

I thought I’d do a series on some interesting tropical diseases over the next few weeks.  Let’s start with a disease called filariasis- which can cause something called elephantiasis.  You’ve probably heard of a disease in dogs called heartworm.  It’s caused by tiny thread-like worms called microfilariae.  Like many diseases, there’s a similar disease that [...]

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SARS… A 10-Year Retrospective

By |2017-02-10T09:50:26-07:00May 10th, 2013|Preparedness|

This Spring marks 10 years since Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) arrived on the global public health scene.  It started as a mystery illness in SE Asia- without name, origin, or cure in February of 2003.  The CDC immediately began working with the World Health Organization to investigate the outbreak.  Public health scientists across the globe [...]

The Coronavirus

By |2017-02-10T09:50:36-07:00March 21st, 2013|General|

There’s never a dull day in public health! Things are changing all the time– from new interventions to help folks stay or be more healthy to the discovery of a new virus. Recently, folks on the other side of the world documented a new Coronavirus that can be transmitted person to person. It was first [...]

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Preventing Hospital Associated Infections in AZ: New Performance Data

By |2017-02-10T09:50:41-07:00February 15th, 2013|Prevention|

A new CDC report released this week gave a status update on the national Winnable Battle to reduce hospital associated infections.   Not all medical procedures carry the same risk of infection, so the report uses something called a standardized infection ratio to compare infection rates among hospitals. It’s a complicated statistic, but basically, it divides [...]

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RSV on the Upswing in AZ

By |2012-12-12T08:27:20-07:00December 12th, 2012|Preparedness, Prevention|

We're off to an early start with the flu and RSV season this year with more cases reported in November than in previous seasons. Respiratory syncytial virus (or RSV) is a respiratory virus that mainly affects little kids and circulates during the winter. There’s no vaccine for RSV- but for those babies that are at highest [...]

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Breastfeeding & Cannabis

By |2017-02-10T09:51:01-07:00September 4th, 2012|General|

Some AZ health care providers and parents have asked questions about whether medical marijuana is safe for use while breastfeeding.  The short answer is no, because the active chemical in marijuana is passed to the baby through breast milk. For this reason, most experts, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the CDC advise moms not to use marijuana [...]

Guess the Culprit

By |2017-02-10T09:51:15-07:00March 12th, 2012|Prevention|

Guess which organism killed 14,000 people last year- quadrupling in number in the last 10 years, and costing $1B extra in health care.  Almost all the cases happen among people who recently received medical care.  Ironically, antibiotics are making the problem worse, because when a person takes antibiotics, good germs that protect against infection are [...]

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Who is John Snow?

By |2017-02-10T09:51:46-07:00May 25th, 2011|General, Prevention|

He’s a guy that’s often thought of as the founder of modern day epidemiology because of his work in tracing the source of a cholera outbreak in England in the mid 1800s.  At the time, scientists and the public believed that diseases like cholera were spread by “miasma”- basically that diseases like cholera were spread [...]

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