epidemics
sgorman | August 29, 2013In Los Angeles in 1924, after a series of mysterious deaths, Yersinia pestis, or bubonic plague, was swiftly identified as the culprit. Immediate quarantine of exposed people in selected areas helped to make the outbreak less than a devastating epidemic. But some public officials and newspaper reporters, in a desperate attempt to explain the origins of the illness, began equating the disease with people of Mexican descent. Panic quickly struck the city. Hotels and restaurants fired thousands of Latino workers. Health officials destroyed houses in low-income neighborhoods deemed “public health…
carlyo | February 6, 2012Sitting elbow to elbow with strangers in the movie theatre is nothing new to the average American. However, when you are cramped in a packed theatre and you hear a cough every now and then while watching the movie Contagion, well that's another story. Even if you are viewing this movie in the comfort of your home, your mind will start to wonder about the thousands of hands that could have touched this disk you received in your mailbox this afternoon from Netflix. Then it begins..."What have I been exposed to?" My irrational fear as well as fascination about epidemics first grew after the…
sschoenbaum | July 9, 2010In this post I want to address disease control opportunities for EIS officers, many of which are detailed in "Inside the Outbreaks: One of the first things we learned about on joining the EIS was John Snow's determination that an outbreak of cholera in London was attributable to contamination of the water from the Broad St. pump and his stopping the epidemic by removing the pump handle. On reading "Inside the Outbreaks" one is struck with the number of EIS officers whose efforts have removed pump handles....
The efforts of Jeff Koplan, subsequently director of CDC, and Mark Rosenberg,…
sb admin | July 7, 2010Karen Starko writes: Several basic questions related to Reye's syndrome (RS) have come to me from readers of Mark's book, Inside the Outbreaks. These show the importance of continued education on health issues. (For example, some physicians thought that fever was essential to getting RS). Again, thanks to Mark Pendergrast for a wonderful addition to our public health knowledge.
Is an influenza or chickenpox infection necessary to acquire RS?
The answer is no. RS generally has two phases: the antecedent illness and usually, within a few days of this, the syndrome of vomiting and…
sb admin | July 6, 2010Liz Borkowski writes: I wrote last week about how federal agencies can solve the problems that create conditions for disease outbreaks - or fail to solve them, as is too often the case. This week, I wanted to focus on the role Congress plays in public health agencies' effectiveness, because that's another angle that crops up repeatedly in Inside the Outbreaks.
Congress's creation of federal agencies is clearly a huge achievement, and they've also periodically given new powers to already existing agencies. For instance, Mark Pendergrast tells the story of the Dalkon Shield, an IUD that turned…
sb admin | July 2, 2010Steve Schoenbaum writes: In his blog this week, Mark Pendergrast challenges someone/anyone to take on explaining the differences between case-control studies vs. cohort studies. As an EIS officer, back in late May/early June 1968, I did a case-control study as part of the investigation of a common source outbreak of hepatitis in Ogemaw County, Michigan, so I will try to pick up the challenge. I believe it was only the second time case-control methods were used in a CDC epidemic investigation. In using this method I learned about the power of comparison, not just that numerators need…
sb admin | June 30, 2010Karen Starko writes: When the "financial crisis" started and the news media started throwing around numbers in the trillions and projected fixes in the billions, I realized I just didn't get it. So I got a little yellow post-it, labeled it "understanding trillions," and started a list of examples. And when I learned that the US GDP in 2006 was 13T and the derivative market, estimated in June 2007, was valued at 500T, I quickly got a sense of the potential drain of the derivative market (in which money is spent on items without real value...my definition, please correct me if I am wrong). I…
sb admin | June 29, 2010Liz Borkowski writes: Mark Pendergrast wrote yesterday about how politics plays into the work of the EIS, and it's something that I kept noticing as I read Inside the Outbreaks. As he points out, my post last week highlighted the solution to the Reye's Syndrome puzzle - which was solved by Karen Starko, who's also one of the Book Club bloggers! - but didn't get into the larger issue: there can be a big difference between solving the puzzle and solving the problem. In yesterday's post, Mark writes:
Although Karen's and subsequent CDC studies clearly demonstrated that giving children aspirin…
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…