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 [...]
This week the WHO announced that several people in eastern China are infected with a newly mutated bird influenza virus called H7N9. All are in critical condition and some have died... but importantly the cases don't appear to be linked- meaning it's probably not from human to human transmission (that's good). The World Health Organization website has more detail [...]
Just as our influenza season winds down (and it is), it's time to plan for the next one. Every February the World Health Organization convenes a panel of experts to look at the most current data on the circulating flu strains from around the world and makes recommendations for the next season’s Northern Hemisphere flu vaccine. [...]
The Southern Hemisphere has its flu season during our Summer- so every year around now we watch influenza activity “down under” to get an idea of what we might expect for our upcoming flu season. Here’s the scoop right now. Flu south of the equator has already peaked and continues to decline. There’s been a [...]
The first thing that you learn in a Toxicology 101 class is the old saying coined by the Renaissance German scientist Paracelsus that: "All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; only the dose permits something not to be poisonous." We've shortened that to: 'the dose makes the poison". Anyway... a key question for [...]
The FDA approved the 2011-2012 influenza vaccine this week. The strains in this year’s vaccine were recommended by the CDC and the World Healthy Organization after studying virus samples collected from around the world to find the influenza viruses that are the most likely to cause illness during the upcoming flu season. The strains selected [...]
The World Health Organization International Agency for Research on Cancer met this week in Lyon, France to analyze health-risk data regarding the electromagnetic fields generated by cell phones. Their initial report was published this week, concluding that the chronic use of cell phones could be “possibly carcinogenic to humans”. The group didn’t do any primary [...]
We kicked off an initiative this month to increase the percentage of mom’s that choose to breastfeed their newborn. The real key to success turns out to be the first couple of days after the baby is born (actually the first few hours are the most important). Our new program is called Baby Steps to Breastfeeding. [...]
