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?

30% go into contact isolation just as soon as they walk into the door..... meaning what we put into contact isolation is the same thing you sit next to on the bus.

If your in prison, add VRE to the list.

Are you looking for pictures or becoming scared of how prevalent highly infectious diseases are?

That'd be one hell of an account to have! But, no - most my work is done at local Universities and Biotech - like UAB (which is huge research) and Southern Research. I do go MSU and Huntsville regularily, and some hospitals doing NIST calibrations on bone/tissue freezers and blood banking units to keep Joint Commision off their backs.

C. Diff - man - NEVER will forget culturing those plates out - just like days old roadkill that's been baking in 100F sun. Clostridia = stench from hell

I would never have thought MRSA was that widespread, that stuff is pretty dangerous right? What does it take for a person to go from being a carrier to being sick? I take it most come in for something else and y'all find that they are a carrier.

I had to collect and take a sample to lab last night.... :barf:

Its more of an opportunistic infection.... It LOVES sterile tissue!

So what's the "walking-dead" have to do with the Ebola virus?

Should I prepare myself for a zombie epidemic? lol

No I wouldn't worry about it, there are viruses that are both real and could turn into epidemics, not unlike the Spanish Flu Black Plague, or H5N1. I was watching "The Walking Dead", which is a TV show, and part of the episode was centered on the CDC doctor who was trying to learn about the disease that caused people to quickly die and then for their brain stem to be reactivated. This reignited my interest in the more deadly diseases, and the Ebola virus is a very deadly and particularly interesting disease because of its mortality rate and how breakouts seem to happen and then go away very quickly making it hard to trace. :party:

They are usually as virulent as normal s.aureus.
That means asymptomatic carriers are common, and that you can cure yourself over time. However, it gets complicated if you get it in a wound infection, or if you infect some poor immunodeficient patient (who can then get sepsis, lung abcess or something similar not-so-very-fun).

A multiresistant streptococcus group A would also be a beast, why that hasn't happened yet is a real mystery.

Oh yeah. Shearhead, check out nodding disease. Thats some wierd stuff.

I'm never leaving my house again.

I read about that.

Its too bad there isn't more funding for these things, someday we could really benefit from gaining a greater understanding of infectious disease

I wish I could: :inout:

Unfortunetly it's one of the things I'm allowed to do. Scrap poop up with a Popsicle stick.

You need to get into the nursing program. I am allowed to do anything but call doctors, do ART lines, or write TO orders. I personally refuse removing PICC lines and ignore nurses who say I "can do" trach care.

If you guys want to see sick, do trach care.... But don't stand in front of it, especially when they cough. They'll shoot wads out they will go across the room and stick to the wall....

I love TWD, but in that Zombie sense, it's biologically impossible - dead cells don't work. IF some zombie outbreak where to happen, it'd be more along the lines of I Am Legend - but the zombies would still die in the end if cells got no nutrition+fluid - whether it be from blood or whatever. I could see some horrifically mutated strand of Bovine spongiform encephalitis (mad cow) or the human form Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, there's also Rabies (Lyssavirus) - trust me, I still use wiki-pedia, me ain't as smart as I was. Reason is, because these can have LONG incubation periods before symptoms develop, which then may be too late for the victim... IF transmission were to go aerosol, man, we'd be having a problem!

I this is a good quote regarding Mad Cow from emedicinehealth.com... Prions are the brain-attacking protiens that causes Mad Cow.

Fun detail. Alcohol doesn't get rid of prions. Neither does normal autoclaves.
No problem for surgical equipment washers nowadays though.
This is fun, what are we gonna be scared of next?
Seriously though, just watch out for the resistant gonococci, hear they are common on the other side of the pond ;)

....---- that.

I am now paranoid.

Here are some really cool books mildly related to this topic:

Parasite Rex:

Survival of the Sickest:

I probably wouldn't read the first one because I'm thsuper thsared of thspidersss :noes:

And heights.

And whirlpools.

Nothing to do with spiders, everything to do with MUCH MORE DISGUSTING STUFF like this PARASITE THAT LIVES IN YOUR EYE:

THE EYEWORM!!!

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1332965416