WHO pinpoints origin of new SARS-like virus transmitted person-to-person

There have been deaths already from the newly-discovered virus rampant, the point of origin, or the point of emergence into public knowledge of the SARS-like virus has been the work of the World Health Organization (WHO), for which all Christians shoud thank the Lord.  The new virus seems to require person-to-person transmissionl.  But as Kate Kelland's article below tells us, we can't be sure what is in store for in the world population as such viruses mutate and produce new strains very rapidly.

— Albert Gedraitis  (yes, I'm still suffering from depression)


SunSentinel (Feb15,2k13)

New SARS-like virus shows 

person-to-person transmission

by Kate KellandReuters

2:41 p.m. EST, February 13, 2013

LONDON (Reuters) - A third patient in Britain has contracted a new SARS-like virus, becoming the second confirmed British case in a week and showing the deadly infection is being spread from person to person, health officials said on Wednesday.

The latest case, in a man from the same family as another patient, brings the worldwide number of confirmed infections with the new virus - known as novel coronavirus, or NCoV - to 11.

Of those, five have died. Most of the infected lived or had recently been in the Middle East. Three have been diagnosed in Britain.

NCoV was identified when the World Health Organisation (WHO) issued an international alert in September 2012 saying a virus previously unknown in humans had infected a Qatari man who had recently been in Saudi Arabia.

The virus belongs to the same family as SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome - a coronavirus that emerged in China in 2002 and killed about a tenth of the 8,000 people it infected worldwide. Symptoms common to both viruses include severe respiratory illness, fever, coughing and breathing difficulties.

Britain's Health Protection Agency (HPA) said the latest patient, who is a UK resident and does not have any recent travel history, is in intensive care at a hospital in central England.

"Confirmed novel coronavirus infection in a person without travel history to the Middle East suggests that person-to-person transmission has occurred, and that it occurred in the UK," said John Watson, the HPA's head of respiratory diseases.
He said the new case was a family member in close contact with another British case confirmed on Monday and who may have been at greater risk because of underlying health conditions.

The WHO said although this latest case shows evidence of person-to-person transmission, it still believes "the risk of sustained person-to-person transmission appears to be very low".

RISK VERY LOW, BUT VIRUSES CAN MUTATE

Coronaviruses are typically spread like other respiratory infections such as flu, travelling in airborne droplets when an infected person coughs or sneezes.

Yet since NCoV was identified in September, evidence of person-to-person transmission has been limited.

Watson said the fact it probably had taken place in the latest two cases in Britain gave no reason for increased alarm.

"If novel coronavirus were more infectious, we would have expected to have seen a larger number of cases than we have seen since the first case was reported three months ago.

Tom Wilkinson, a senior lecturer in respiratory medicine at Britain's University of Southampton, said that if NCoV turned out to be like the previous SARS outbreak, it may prove quite slow to spread from one human to another.

"But it's early days to make any definite statements because viruses can change and mutate very rapidly, so what is right today may be wrong tomorrow," he told Reuters.

Based on the current situation, the WHO said all member states should continue surveillance for severe acute respiratory infections and investigate any unusual patterns.

"Testing for the new coronavirus should be considered in patients with unexplained pneumonias, or in patients with unexplained severe, progressive or complicated respiratory illness not responding to treatment," it said in a statement.

The WHO said on Monday that the confirmation of a new British case did not alter its risk assessment but "does indicate that the virus is persistent".

The British patient confirmed on Monday had recently travelled to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and is in intensive care in a separate British hospital, the HPA said.

Among the 11 laboratory confirmed cases to date, five are in Saudi Arabia, with three deaths; two are in Jordan, where both patients died; three are in Britain, where all three are receiving treatment; and one was in Germany in a patient from Qatar who had since been discharged from medical care.

The WHO said at this stage there is no need for travel or trade restrictions, or for special screening at border points.

(Reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Michael Roddy)

New dissenter on research on depression experiences viral take-off

I'ved been out of commission due to medically-induced depression.

Today, I found this, which cheers me up a bit.  I thank the Lord.

— Albert Gedraitis



Academia.edu blog (Feb15,2k13)

A dissenting view on depression 

Sparking Discourse, Hooking Funding

SPOTLIGHT ON COLIN HENDRIE, UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS

by Courtney Quirin

53,192 document views and counting, Academia.edu may just help Colin Hendrie of the University of Leeds rekindle a public health concern in dire need of discussion: depression.

Long gone are the days when pharmaceutical companies and governments pour resources into helping the world’s 350 million people suffering from depression, but Hendrie has hope that his paper on female copulatory vocalizations, which was the most read paper on Academia.edu in 2012, could be the spark to reignite public discourse and hook the funding for depression research he’s been fishing for.

On this day one year ago, Hendrie looked at his Academia.edu analytics with shock. In a two-day span his document views soared from 304 to 12,220. “I thought that the analytics graph had broken because it suddenly shot off the scale,” laughed Hendrie.

Responsible for this sudden surge was the Cracked.com article, “Five Reasons Why Science Says We Have Sex,” which in 2 days attracted 11,510 interested parties to Hendrie’s infamous paper on female copulatory vocalizations and an additional 418 viewers to his paper on the evolution of kissing.

Unbeknownst to Hendrie, Cracked.com had referenced his two papers in their article, which subsequently went viral. Mesmerized readers wanting to learn more, clicked on the article’s citation links, which sent them straight to the source: Hendrie’s papers on Academia.edu.

Though Hendrie is still confronted by the long-standing mindset that research only really counts when other academics read it—“Is it going to lead to a citation?” is the common response—Hendrie can’t help but see the opportunities that so many document views could bring.

“I’m in the UK and a lot of our academic work is really only picked up by the UK. Obviously the internet helps, but typically our work stays fairly local. However, a lot of the hits I’m getting on Academia.edu are coming from America, from different parts of the globe. “

As a psychologist who examines human behavior through a zoological lens, Hendrie loves that his research has attracted youth and the everyday person to science. Two or three times a week Hendrie is contacted by people fascinated by his work and wanting to discuss various parts of his research.

“I get a lot of people contacting me out of the blue to say, ‘I’ve read your paper!’ Considering the paper is rather academic, these are people who wouldn’t have come into contact with it any other way,” says Hendrie.

As thousands of people peruse his Academia.edu profile, Hendrie hopes that this increased traffic will take a detour through other areas of his research, namely his peer-reviewed work on depression.

“I’m hoping to get some publicity for work that I’m passionate about. I have a particular theory of depression which I’m having serious problems getting funding for.”

To Hendrie, the topic of depression is a pressing issue in desperate need of attention. For over 60 years the pharmaceutical industry has been developing drugs for depression but has had little success— of the drugs that actually work, according to Hendrie, maybe only 40-50% of patients actually respond to them. Hendrie believes this low success rate is due to drug companies using incorrect theories on depression, something he hopes to remedy with his impending research.

“I’ve come up with a new theory, which leads directly to new predictions. Basically, my theory can be used to do more experiments, but I can’t get funding for it because nobody is interested in the area anymore. It’s a shame because it’s a real big problem,” says Hendrie.

Poor responses to depression drugs have caused large pharmaceutical companies worldwide to pull out of research, and, unfortunately, government funding has followed suit.

“This means that we’ve got drugs that don’t work very well and nobody is really doing any research into making new ones,” says Hendrie with deep concern.

“My hope is that somehow this paper will catch in the wind and someone with the appropriate authority will see it and think it’s a good idea and maybe think about contacting me.”

Though Hendrie also uses other forums to publicize his depression and human copulatory work, he’s investing most of his energy into his Academia.edu profile.

“A lot of these sites are popping up because people are realizing their worth. Obviously there is only one winner, and I would say Academia.edu will be it. What that will do is create some momentum for my research.”

Backed by high document traffic, Hendrie has high hopes. “I want to show people that my work is having an impact, that these are the hits I’ve been having. I suppose in the end I’m trying to show people who don’t know me that I have credibility.” As his credibility and visibility grow, Hendrie is hopeful that opportunities to help those suffering from depression will follow.

“If people start talking about depression, it will become part of the agenda, part of their focus. That is my hope with Academia.edu.”

Academic Bio:
Colin Hendrie is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Psychological Sciences, University of Leeds,  England, where he examines human behavior using ethological methods, techniques commonly employed in the field of animal behavior. His latest work, which is also closest to his heart, uses an ethological approach to show that depression is a cluster of defensive behaviors. In 2012, the Institute of Psychological Sciences at Leeds University awarded Hendrie Lecturer of the Year.

Hendrie’s work can be viewed here.http://blog.academia.edu/post/43084407006/sparking-discourse-hooking-funding

A superb essay about medicine and the Hmong people of farawy

Quite valuable is this article in The New Atlantis - a journal of technology and society.  -- Albert Gedraitis



The New Atlantis (Feb11,2k13)

Doctors within borders

by Caitrin Nicol

In 1982, a tiny baby girl was brought to a Merced, California emergency room with a murky complaint. Her parents spoke no English and no hospital staff spoke their language, Hmong. Not much seemed to be wrong with her except congestion, for which the resident on duty prescribed antibiotics and told the parents to bring her back in ten days for a follow-up appointment. They didn’t, as they had no idea they had been asked to do so; but in nineteen days, they were back in the ER with a similarly urgent but unknown concern, and the whole scenario played out again.

On their third such visit, the problem crystallized — the child arrived still in the throes of a grand mal seizure. The doctors sprang into action, as doctors do, to control the seizing (which they did), determine the cause (which they didn’t), and provide her family with anticonvulsants to prevent it from happening again (which they tried).

It happened again, dozens of times. With every new seizure there was an increased risk of progressive damage to the brain, as the critical flow of oxygen was impeded.

After a few months of treatment and multiple adjustments to the prescription, the doctors realized to their dismay that the patient was not responding to the medication because she was not taking it. How could this be? Her parents were clearly devoted to her, but perhaps they did not understand. A fleet of nurses, social workers, and other liaisons was dispatched to the family home to draw up charts and schedules, stick little suns and moons on pill bottles to indicate the time to be administered, mark liquid dispensers with the proper dosage, divvy out the medication day by day, tape samples to a calendar to show what had to happen when, and explain a hundred times the utmost importance all this had to restoring their daughter’s health.

Though a translator had not been present at the family’s first few encounters with American medicine, by this point there was usually a cousin or older sibling or interpreter provided by the county, which ostensibly was to allow for all parties to make themselves perfectly clear, and, presumably, arrive on the same page as to the care of the patient, whose best interests everybody had at heart. But it turned out that the lack of a translator was the least of their problems. For reasons of their own, which health care providers vaguely sensed related somehow to “spirits,” the parents balked at many therapies no matter how carefully, repeatedly, or urgently they were explained, preferring to sacrifice a cow or rub coins on the baby’s body than to give her Western medicines with their disturbing side effects.   

Read more ...

A paradigm shift possible in 'constructing the Medical Humanities gaze'?

I'm pleased to be able to present the formal abstract, which is in the public domain, for an important philosophically-rooted study in CROH, an important medical journal for cancer studies.  I don't want to exaggerate, but the study (yes, it has forerunners) holds promise of a new paradigm functioning in and for medicine.  First off, it doesn't dismiss the patient's story (see item iii in the abstract below).  In conjunction with this item and the other of the authors' four, we encounter the authors' call for an approach they name Medical Humanities.  Since I articulated my own cri de coeur that led to establishing this blog, Christian Medical Observations & Ruminations, I began narrativizing my own medical experience from the midst of controversy and keen disappointment, in the form of a a Complaint against the two chief medicos administering a medicine to me of a very different sort from Medical Humanities.  Rather than cancer and genetic testing, my presently focal malady is one involving diabetes.  Of course, now I have a different medico, a nurse practioner of considerable experience and largeness of heart.

I want to thank the medical researchers who have written the article (to which I don't have access), Dr Marco Annoni, Dr Giuseppe Schiavone, Dr Luca Chiapperino, and Dr Giovanni Ronilo.  But even a tidbit, a brief abstract in a medical journal can prove extremely valuable.  Such is the present contribution of the four doctors who authored the research.

-- Albert Gedraitis


Critical Reviews in Oncology Hematology (Feb2,2k13)

Constructing the Medical Humanities gaze

• Marco Annoni
, 
• Giuseppe Schiavone
, 
• Luca Chiapperino
, 
• Giovanni Boniolo

SEMM (European School of Molecular Medicine) & 

IEO (European Institute of Oncology), Via Adamello 16, 20139 Milan, Italy 

& Faculty of Medicine, University of Milan, Milan, Italy

Critical Reviews in Oncology / Hematology
Volume 84, Supplement 2 , Pages S5-S10, 31 December 2012

Abstract 

In the last few decades genomics has completely reshaped the way in which patients and physicians experience and make sense of illness. In this paper we build upon a real case – namely that of breast cancer genetic testing – in order to point to the shortcomings of the paradigm currently driving healthcare delivery. In particular, we put forward a viable analytical model for the construction of a proper decisional process broadening the scope of medical gaze onto human experience of illness. This model revolves around four main conceptual axes: 

(i) communicating information; 

(ii) informing decisions; 

(iii) respecting narratives; 

(iv) empowering decision-making. 

These four kernels, we argue, map precisely onto the main pitfalls of the model presently dealing with genetic testing provision. Medical Humanities, we conclude, ought to play a pivotal role in constructing the environment for competent decision-making, autonomous self-determination and respectful narrativization of one's own life.

Keywords:  Medical Humanities , Decision-making , Autonomy , Narrative medicine , Information provision , Empowerment , Breast cancer , Genetic susceptibility

 

PII: S1040-8428(13)70003-9

doi:10.1016/S1040-8428(13)70003-9

© 2012 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

World gears up to fight Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) to make the world — God's world an NTD free planet

17 culprits are busy every day and nite undermining the health of our world's — God's world's — people under the burden of sicknesses most of us can only imagine.  Oh, we may have heard the names of some of these life-takers and society-wreckers which entrench the cycle of poverty and neglect for millions of people today, but the cost of the immiseration of these people on the structures of family life and wellness are staggering beyond imagination.  A movement has been initiated and is active already since January of last year to control, eliminate, and eradicate 10 of the 17 by the year 2020.  Get more information on the London Declaration against NTDs.  Download the 1st Annual Report on the London Declaration on NTDs.  This fact-filled report that is good for use in Christian schools is available in several languages.  All the facts in this blog-entry, and most of the text, are derived / quoted from Business and Human Rights, and the unprecedented group of partners centered around the World Health Organization's leadership which has produced the download above.  Included are GlaxoSmithKline and 12 other global pharmaceutical companies along with the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other groups.   B&HR:  "The progress our coalition reports today includes that: We fully met requests for 1.12 billion treatments for NTDs…29 countries began receiving drugs to treat or prevent soil-transmitted helminthes, resulting in an almost six-fold increase in treatments….There was increased funding and collaboration to improve outcomes….Two NTD diagnostic tests received regulatory approval."

Perhaps best of all:  WHO's own Executive Board which just met in Geneva, Switzerland, on January 29, 2013, has taken heart and has recommended to the full World Health Assembly to meet in Geneva in May 2013, that all 17 of the 'negelected tropical diseases' (NTDs) — beyond the current and heroics-demanding 10 — come under the mandate of 'prevent, control, eliminate, eradicate' .... 

— Albert Gedraitis

Use this code to cut-and-paste, or go to refWrite Backpage where the video will embed directly.
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/952jT4GbTrQ?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>


World Health Organization’s roadmap: 

The path to a world free of Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs)

What does 'NTD-free' mean? 

WHO’s Roadmap for Implementation, put forward in January 2012, outlined bold targets for the control and elimination of 17 NTDs. In January 2013, WHO launched its second report (available at www.who.int/neglected_diseases) with updated information on the specific targets for each disease and what needs to be done to reach the 2020 goals. Below are the 10 NTDs targeted for control, elimination or eradication as part of the London Declaration on NTDs.

•  Blinding trachoma

•  Chagas disease

•  Guinea worm disease

•  Human African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness)

•  Lymphatic filariasis (LF or elephantiasis)

•  Leprosy

•  Onchocerciasis (river blindness)

•  Schistosomiasis (snail fever or bilharzia)

•  Soil-transmitted helminthiasis (STH or intestinal worms)

•  Visceral leishmaniasis (kala azar)



Over the past year, there has been exciting progress:

•  Pharmaceutical partners supplied 1.12 billion treatments
meeting the increased requests from endemic countries.

•  Donors committed funds to support integrated NTD
programs, scale up and expand existing programs,
increase resources available for mapping, improve
program strategies through research, and develop new
tools.

•  More than 40 endemic countries developed multi-year
integrated NTD plans, and Nigeria, Brazil, Cameroon,
Honduras and Burundi launched their plans.

•  Oman became the first previously endemic country to
verify the elimination of trachoma.

•  Partners developed a comprehensive London Declaration 
Scorecard, presented in this report and online, to
promote accountability, transparency and evidence
based prioritization. This scorecard tracks the delivery
of London Declaration commitments, highlights key
milestones and targets, and helps identify priority action 
areas to ensure that 2020 goals are met.

With these new drug supplies and integrated NTD plans,
programs are ready to scale up. Building on these
promising beginnings, new partners and resources are 
urgently needed to be on track toward achieving the WHO 
goals. By redoubling our efforts, together we can empower
communities to break the cycle of poverty and neglect by 
overcoming the burden of NTDs.

Health: Sitting can ill you: read the pattern that has become multi-national and worldwide

Think about how much of your daily time is spent sitting ... scary, huh?  Now give Kate Linau's analytic article some meditative time and journey with her into what she's learned about our major (in)activity, on our rear ends, sitting ...

-- Albert Gedraitis


Maclean's.ca (Jan20,2k13)

Sitting can ill you

It’s tied to obesity, diabetes and cancer–and exercise won’t make up for it

by Kate Lunau on Tuesday, January 8, 2013 1:36pm - 5 Comments

On Sept. 24, 2007, a Monday evening, Cathleen Renner sat down in her home office to tackle a project. Renner, 47, was a manager at AT&T, where she’d been for 25 years. It isn’t clear how many hours she spent at the computer that night, making a plan for a possible employee strike, but she did send an email to a colleague at 12:26 a.m. When her son got up at 7 a.m., she was at her desk. Renner took him to the bus a little later, and as she walked out the door, she clutched her leg and let out a cry of pain. Still, she returned to work. At 11:34, she called an ambulance. Renner was dead by the time she reached the hospital.

Like most of us, Renner spent long hours on the job seated at her computer; in a workers’ compensation claim filed after her death, her husband argued that sitting was what killed her. (Renner died of a pulmonary embolism after a blood clot formed in her leg.) The case was not exactly straightforward; AT&T called an expert who pointed out Renner was morbidly obese, weighing 304 lb., and had recently started taking new medication, birth control pills. But in 2011 a New Jersey judge ruled in James Renner’s favour, noting his wife’s job required her to “spend unusually long hours at her computer” and awarding him workers’ compensation benefits as a result. The decision was extremely unusual, the first of its kind legal observers could recall. But if a growing number of health experts are right about the dangers of sitting, it could be a harbinger of things to come.

Like obesity or smoking before it, sitting is the new plague, and not just because it can lead to deadly blood clots. Alarmingly, the latest research links it to obesity, diabetes and the major killers, heart disease and cancer. And exercising the recommended half-hour a day, while beneficial, isn’t enough to stave off the ill effects of sitting. “Thirty minutes is two per cent of your day,” says Mark Tremblay, director of the Healthy Active Living and Obesity Research Group (HALO) at the CHEO Research Institute in Ottawa. “What about the other 98 per cent?”

Read more ...

Fecal transplant is, for some patients, the only cure of Clostridium difficile

Liquifying the feces of a healthy person and then passing it via a nose tube into the intestines of a person who has contracted Clostridium difficile (you get C. difficile from hospitals mostly), can cure the ill person.  It's called a transplant.

— Albert Gedraitis


New York Times (Jan20,2k13)

When pills fail, 

this, er, option provides a cure

by DENISE GRADY

Published: January 16, 2013 290 Comments

The treatment may sound appalling, but it works.

Enlarge This Image

Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times

Melissa Cabral contracted an infection after taking an antibiotic for dental work. "If I didn't do it," she said of the fecal transplant, "I don't know where I'd be now."

Readers’ Comments

Readers shared their thoughts on this article.

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Picture left:  

The senior author of the new study, Dr. Josbert Keller.

Transplanting feces from a healthy person into the gut of one who is sick can quickly cure severe intestinal infections caused by a dangerous type of bacteria that antibiotics often cannot control.

A new study finds that such transplants cured 15 of 16 people who had recurring infections with Clostridium difficile bacteria, whereas antibiotics cured only 3 of 13 and 4 of 13 patients in two comparison groups. The treatment appears to work by restoring the gut’s normal balance of bacteria, which fight off C. difficile.

The study is the first to compare the transplants with standard antibiotic therapy. The research, conducted in the Netherlands, was published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Fecal transplants have been used sporadically for years as a last resort to fight this stubborn and debilitating infection, which kills 14,000 people a year in the United States. The infection is usually caused by antibiotics, which can predispose people to C. difficile by killing normal gut bacteria. If patients are then exposed to C. difficile, which is common in many hospitals, it can take hold.

The usual treatment involves more antibiotics, but about 20 percent of patients relapse, and many of them suffer repeated attacks, with severe diarrhea, vomiting and fever.

Researchers say that, worldwide, about 500 people with the infection have had fecal transplantation. It involves diluting stool with a liquid, like salt water, and then pumping it into the intestinal tract via an enema, a colonoscope or a tube run through the nose into the stomach or small intestine.

Stool can contain hundreds or even thousands of types of bacteria, and researchers do not yet know which ones have the curative powers. So for now, feces must be used pretty much intact.

Medical journals have reported high success rates and seemingly miraculous cures in patients who have suffered for months. But until now there was room for doubt, because no controlled experiments had compared the outlandish-sounding remedy with other treatments.

The new research is the first to provide the type of evidence that skeptics have demanded, and proponents say they hope the results will help bring fecal transplants into the medical mainstream, because for some patients nothing else works.

“Those of us who do fecal transplant know how effective it is,” said Dr. Colleen R. Kelly, a gastroenterologist with the Women’s Medicine Collaborative in Providence, R.I., who was not part of the Dutch study. “The tricky part has been convincing everybody else.”

She added, “This is an important paper, and hopefully it will encourage people to change their practice patterns and offer this treatment more.”

One of Dr. Kelly’s patients, Melissa Cabral, 34, of Dighton, Mass., was healthy until she contracted C. difficile in July after taking an antibiotic for dental work. She had profuse diarrhea, uncontrollable vomiting and high fevers that landed her in the hospital. She suffered repeated bouts, lost 12 pounds and missed months of work. Her young children would find her lying on the bathroom floor.

Initially, she rejected a fecal transplant because the idea disgusted her, but ultimately she became so desperate for relief that in November she tried it.

Within a day, her symptoms were gone.

“If I didn’t do it, I don’t know where I’d be now,” she said.

Dr. Lawrence J. Brandt, a professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, said that the Food and Drug Administration had recently begun to regard stool used for transplant as a drug, and to require doctors administering it to apply for permission, something that he said could hinder treatment.

A spokeswoman for the agency, Rita Chappelle, said officials could not respond in time for publication.

C. difficile is a global problem. Increasingly toxic strains have emerged in the past decade. In the United States, more than 300,000 patients in hospitals contract C. difficile each year, and researchers estimate that the total number of cases, in and out of hospitals, may be three million. Treatment costs exceed $1 billion a year.