Infectious disease thread.
 

Am I the only one that finds infectious disease exceedingly fascinating? I doubt it. I find diseases that could mutate into the next pandemic (or already have) interesting for some reason. Almost enough for you to boycott the use of antiviral hand sanitizer. Almost.

Heres some stuff I google'd and read. Read it and discuss ladies.

Ebola virus came from a cave?:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...olaorigin.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitum_Cave
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/...d.php?t=125259

I just got done watching season one of "The Walking Dead" which reignited an interest.

I agree. I masturbated to a poc of my frieds stye eerlirr today.

Pink eye kinda gives me a chubby.

In for T virus analysis.

Every ------- Saturday night.

Thanks for the thread, Dr. Ned.

No, really; It's just you.

I remember when someone posted a video fo "Krocodile" and all I could for the next few hours was read as much as I could about it.

I admitted a guy last night who was 30 minutes post op to remove Necrotizing fasciitis from his scrotom (Fournier's gangrene).

Necrotizing Fasciitis is pretty crazy, Jeff Hanneman from Slayer got it from a spider bite in Australia.

Unfortunately there are many infectious diseases that have become much more scary. For many reasons there is limited money being put into the more common and therefore more dangerous organisms. Bioterrorism threats(paper tigers so far at least) like plague and anthrax get money from political support same as HIV which has a big lobby and is spread through sex.
But wanna be really worried? Look up carbapenem resistant klebsiella pneumonia, Acinetobactr baumanii, Pseudomonas, Enterococcus, VRSA. Not to mention old problems like malaria and totally drug resistant TB.
In some cases and many areas the age of antibiotics is already over.
Why? lots of reasons expensive to develop, no big profit margin like chronic meds such as antidepressants or blood pressure meds. More chronically ill people and people with compromised immune systems.
Agriculture uses huge amounts, large numbers of inappropriate prescriptions take your pick.
This stuff scares me way more than the end of the world bird flu pandemic stuff that gets lots of press, because anyone could be an ICU patient tomorrow and get this stuff.

However, we still have linezolid.
It's just more complicated to choose nowadays.
The scariest so far (and with increasing prevalence) In my opinion is multiresistant TBC.
The joy of class disease may return.

I was expecting an STDs thread.

Instead all you got was this virus based nerd fest.

I'm totally nerd on this... BA Microbiology - hence the name GeneSplicer. But yeah, bench work is long over for me, but I still get to suit up to go into the BSL3 at one of the local Biotech companies here in town! Always cool to work on a freezer that shows it contains Y. Pestis, B. Anthracis, V. Major, H5N1 to name a few. *cough cough*

But yeah, it's only a matter of time before something bad comes out of the woods or mutates to something we have no defense against... imagine Ebola, with a very high virulence rate with longer gestation periods, transmitted via aerosol without being symptomatic? Super Flu anyone? Reminding me of The Stand

Ebola is a truly AMAZING disease.

I thought that was your name lol. You've got a cool job, do you work at the CDC?

NO WAY! ---- must be going around. We recently had a guy with most of his rear thigh removed. I touched his hamstring. We're not a trauma ICU, so it was interesting to see which nurses had the balls to shove his dressings around the wound.

I was also interested to know how they heal, from the inside out. So for months you have a gaping hole in your body, no skin grafts or sutures here.

Also, they were considering extubating him. WTF. Again, for those of you not in the field, too many pain meds make you stop breathing, hence the danger of OD'ing. So when you have a machine breathing for you, we can give you a ---- ton of pain meds while we shove dressings in your leg. How they were going to do that with him extubated and not screaming in pain is beyond me.

So true. That's my unit and we don't get too many VRE or TB patients thankfully, probably less than 10 VRE pts in the last year and I think 2 TB pts, but we get a huge number of MRSA and C-Diff pts, which make it apparent how easy it is to get a hospital acquired infection.

We've had SEVERAL people come in with VRE.

C-diff... "Ooooh that smell"

MRSA- We swab every patient who rolls into the doors. 30% or better are carriers.

Ok. Time to unsubscribe from this thread.

How does that work? Are you saying that 30% have the ability to transmit MRSA? Or are there different types of MRSA and 30% have some type that isn't too bad or something?