chronic fatigue syndrome
mpendergrast | June 21, 2010Mark Pendergrast writes: To kick off this book club discussion of Inside the Outbreaks, I thought I would explain briefly how I came to write the book and then suggest some possible topics for discussion.
The origin of the book goes back to an email I got in 2004 from my old high school and college friend, Andy Vernon, who wrote that I should consider writing the history of the EIS. I emailed back to say that I was honored, but what was the EIS? I had never heard of it. I knew Andy worked on tuberculosis at the CDC, but I didn't know that he had been a state-based EIS officer from 1978…
tsmith | April 26, 2010Student guest post by Jay Watson
Tired again? Perhaps it's the crappy weather, because you're sure that you've been getting enough sleep. After all, you can't remember the last time you spent less than ten hours in bed per night. Hopefully it's not mono; one of your friends had it a few months ago and it's all but knocked her out. However, you soon realize that you've only talked to her on the phone since she got engaged, so there's no way that's it. It's strange, even everyday activities like running errands has turned into something utterly exhausting. As you consider the reasons as…
edyong | October 8, 2009Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a disease that afflicts people with extreme and debilitating tiredness that lasts for many years and isn't relieved by rest. Some estimates suggest that it affects up to 1% of the world's population. We don't know what causes it. Prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers in the world and kills around 221,000 people every year. Its causes too are largely unknown. What do these two diseases have in common? They have both been recently linked to a virus called XMRV (or xenotropic MulV-related virus in full).
This doesn't mean that you can 'catch' either…