Eideard

US health authorities on Friday urged all boys age 11-12 to get a routine vaccination against the most common sexually transmitted disease, human papillomavirus, or HPV.

Other changes as part of an annual update to US immunization schedules included a recommended hepatitis B vaccine to the protect the livers of adults up to age 60 who have diabetes and a vaccine against whooping cough for pregnant women…

The HPV vaccine has been approved for girls since 2006 but the CDC had not expressly urged it for boys, though boys were included among those who could receive it to prevent certain cancers and genital warts. Health experts have expressed hope that if pre-teen boys and girls are both encouraged to get the vaccine, the rate of infection will decrease in the general population.

About half of all sexually active adults will get HPV in their lifetime. There are more than 100 types of HPV, and most clear the body on their own, but some strains can linger and lead to cervical, anal or oral cancer…

The vaccine, currently recommended for girls age 11-26, has faced resistance from some parents over fears that immunizing young girls would encourage them to be promiscuous…

Which is about the dumbest piece of reasoning this side of legislation that says the Earth is flat.

I haven’t scoured it for details, yet – but, I imagine crap beliefs like this one is there in all its glory.

A migrant farm worker from Mexico who died in 2010 was the first human ever to die in the US of rabies transmitted by vampire bat, health officials say.

The 19-year-old died last August about three weeks after he was bitten on the heel by a vampire bat while sleeping in the Mexican state of Michoacan.

Doctors in the US state of Louisiana, where he went to work on a sugar cane farm after the bite, diagnosed rabies. He had no known vaccination against the disease, US health officials reported.

According to a report in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly, a publication of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the unnamed worker was bitten on the left heel by the bat on 15 July 2010. He departed for the US 10 days later, arriving at a sugar cane plantation in Louisiana on 29 July.

The next day he went to hospital, complaining of fatigue, pain in his left shoulder and numbness in his left hand, which he attributed to overwork. He was transferred to hospital in New Orleans, where his condition deteriorated rapidly until he died on 21 August.

A post-mortem examination showed that he had been infected with a variant of rabies that comes from vampire bats…

“This is the first reported death from a vampire bat rabies virus variant in the United States,” the CDC reported. But the study notes that vampire bats are the leading source of rabies infection in Latin America.

Two questions come to mind: As a matter of practice, was he here legally? How much bureaucratic make-work between Louisiana and the Feds at the CDC was there – that this took a year to make it into the Scientific literature much less the public eye?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is a big, serious government agency with a big, serious job: protecting public health from threats ranging from hurricanes to bird flu.

So when the good doctors of Atlanta warned people this week about how to prepare for a zombie apocalypse, the world took notice.

“That’s right, I said z-o-m-b-i-e a-p-o-c-a-l-y-p-s-e,” Dr. Ali S. Khan wrote on the CDC website this week, adding casually that “Resident Evil” is his “personal favorite” zombie movie.

As it happens, Khan, one of the nation’s top-ranking public health professionals (he’s a rear admiral and an assistant surgeon general), doesn’t actually believe the living dead are about to claw their way out of graves and start chewing on your brain.

But, he and his communications team recently noticed, what they’d want you to do if the world really did suddenly go “Night of the Living Dead” is pretty much the same thing they’d want you to do in case of a hurricane or a major pandemic…

The CDC got a question about zombies during an online chat about radiation leaks related to the meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in March, and they saw traffic spike.

Khan and his communications team knew they’d found a way to get the public interested in disaster preparedness, he said.

So they posted the advice on Monday. Their website crashed on Wednesday.

The advice is mostly stuff you should already know: Make an emergency plan. Stockpile food, water and medicine. Have a utility knife, duct tape and battery-powered radio handy, along with some changes of clothes and bedding…Have basic first aid supplies handy for a hurricane or a pandemic — although, Khan says, “you’re a goner if a zombie bites you.

Don’t be too quick to dismiss the common bedbug as merely a pestiferous six-legged blood-sucker. Think of it, rather, as Cimex lectularius, international arthropod of mystery.

In comparison to other insects that bite man, or even only walk across man’s food, nibble man’s crops or bite man’s farm animals, very little is known about the creature whose Latin name means — go figure — “bug of the bed.” Only a handful of entomologists specialize in it, and until recently it has been low on the government’s research agenda because it does not transmit disease. Most study grants come from the pesticide industry and ask only one question: What kills it?

But now that it’s The Bug That Ate New York, Not to Mention Other Shocked American Cities, that may change.

This month, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a joint statement on bedbug control. It was not, however, a declaration of war nor a plan of action. It was an acknowledgment that the problem is big, a reminder that federal agencies mostly give advice, plus some advice: try a mix of vacuuming, crevice-sealing, heat and chemicals to kill the things…

Ask any expert why the bugs disappeared for 40 years, why they came roaring back in the late 1990s, even why they do not spread disease, and you hear one answer: “Good question.”

“The first time I saw one that wasn’t dated 1957 and mounted on a microscope slide was in 2001,” said Dini M. Miller, a Virginia Tech cockroach expert who has added bedbugs to her repertoire.

The bugs have probably been biting our ancestors since they moved from trees to caves. The bugs are “nest parasites” that fed on bats and cave birds like swallows before man moved in.

That makes their disease-free status even more baffling…

Bedbugs, despite the ick factor, are clean.

RTFA and learn a lot more. Including the sad fact that we don’t really know a lot about these critters – including dealing with their presence.

If most new moms would breastfeed their babies for the first six months of life, it would save nearly 1,000 lives and billions of dollars each year, according to a new study published in the journal Pediatrics.

“The United States incurs $13 billion in excess costs annually and suffers 911 preventable deaths per year because our breastfeeding rates fall far below medical recommendations,” the report said.

The World Health Organization says infants should be exclusively breastfed for the first six months of life “to achieve optimal growth, development and health.” The WHO is not alone in its recommendations.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention all agree that breast milk alone is sufficient for newborns and infants until they are 6 months old.

However, a 2009 breastfeeding report card from the CDC found that only 74 percent of women start breastfeeding, only 33 percent were still exclusively breastfeeding at three months and only 14 percent were still exclusively breastfeeding at six months…

Dr. Melissa Bartick and her co-author Arnold Reinhold found that most of the excess costs are due to premature deaths. Nearly all, 95 percent of these deaths, are attributed to three causes: sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS); necrotizing enterocolitis, seen primarily in preterm babies and in which the lining of the intestinal wall dies; and lower respiratory infections such as pneumonia.

RTFA. Reflect upon science and common sense both surpassing fashion, convenience.

An unusual study done in 49 remote Hutterite farming colonies in western Canada has provided the surest proof yet that giving flu shots to schoolchildren protects a whole community from the disease.

Although previous studies have demonstrated what scientists call “herd immunity,” none have been so incontrovertible, because they were done in less isolated places with more sources of flu passing through. Also, only one other study, done 42 years ago, immunized over 80 percent of a community’s children, as this one did. Success repeated in many separate communities with very high vaccination rates implies that the shots themselves — rather than luck, viral mutations, hand-washing or any other factor — were the crucial protective element…

“Not only was that clearly needed to protect the kids, but they probably wound up protecting the older people, too,” Dr. Fauci said…

Although they frown on television and radio, Hutterites drive cars and modern tractors. More important from a medical point of view, they live in communities of up to 160 people, own everything jointly, attend their own schools, eat in one dining hall and have little contact with the outside world. Each community governs itself, but, in Dr. Loeb’s words, “after one very with-it Alberta bishop recognized the study’s benefit to the rest of the world and backed it,” almost 50 communities voted to participate.

Hutterites have no religious objections to Western medicine, that very “with-it” bishop, John K. Stahl, 76, said in a telephone interview. While deliberately cut off, they perform acts of generosity — for example, many donate blood frequently…

There was a 60 percent “protective effect” for the whole community, the study concluded. It implies, Dr. Bridges said, that giving flu shots only to schoolchildren would protect the elderly just as well as giving flu shots to the elderly themselves.

The C.D.C. would never recommend that, she cautioned, “because you still should vaccinate high-risk people.”

Anyone who ever worked in an office setting populated by folks with schoolkids in their family knows what happens even with the common cold – much less the flu. Everyone brings it to work after they catch something from their kids.

RTFA. The study was fortunate to connect with religious communities that aren’t anti-science from the gitgo. Down here in the lower 48, we’re still hampered by political winds blowing out the butts of pundits, demagogues and populists who use every excuse in the book to hinder ordinary medical science.

Poultry was the most commonly identified source of food poisoning in the United States in 2006, followed by leafy vegetables and fruits and nuts, according to a report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…

After a concerted campaign by the federal Department of Agriculture to improve the safety of chickens, the number of people sickened by contaminated poultry in 2006 declined compared with an average of the previous five years, according to C.D.C. researchers.

But problems persist. Most of the poultry-related illnesses, the centers found, were associated with Clostridium perfringens, a bacterium that commonly causes abdominal cramping and diarrhea usually within 10 to 12 hours after ingestion. The spores from this bacterium often survive cooking, so keeping poultry meat at temperatures low enough to prevent contamination during processing and storage is critical.

Researchers counted leafy vegetables, fungi, root vegetables, sprouts and vegetables from vines or stalks as separate categories. Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group, noted that if all of the produce categories were combined, outbreaks associated with vegetables would have far exceeded those in poultry…

While poultry is the most common source of illnesses among the 17 different foods tracked by federal officials, the C.D.C. found that two-thirds of all food-related illnesses traced to a lone ingredient were caused by viruses, which are often added to food by restaurant workers who fail to wash their hands. Such viruses often cause what many people refer to as a “stomach flu,” one to two days of nausea and vomiting that is unrelated to the flu virus.

Salmonella, the bacteria found in nationwide outbreaks of contaminated peanut butter, spinach and tomatoes, was the second-leading cause of sole-source food illnesses, the centers found.

Wonder if the Party of No will get off their rusty dusty and join in the legislation for food safety currently before Congress? Or will they maintain allegiance to their corporate masters.

No matter. The important task is – even though I think the U.S. does a better job than most other nations at safety through the food chain – let’s raise and codify better food standards while we have the chance.

[Sam] Silverman may feel like a vegetable vendor at a butchers’ convention, but about 367,000 other kids are in the same boat, according to a recent study that provides the government’s first estimate of how many children avoid meat. That’s about 1 in 200.

Other surveys suggest the rate could be four to six times that among older teens who have more control over what they eat than young children do.

Vegetarian diets exclude meat, but the name is sometimes loosely worn. Some self-described vegetarians eat fish or poultry on occasion, while others — called vegans — cut out animal products of any kind, including eggs and dairy products.

Anecdotally, adolescent vegetarianism seems to be rising, thanks in part to YouTube animal slaughter videos that shock the developing sensibilities of many U.S. children. But there isn’t enough long-term data to prove that, according to government researchers.

The new estimate of young vegetarians comes from a recent federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of alternative medicine based on a survey of thousands of Americans in 2007. Information on children’s diet habits was gleaned from about 9,000 parents and other adults speaking on the behalf of those under 18.

Look for everyone to react with his own slant to this simple study. I post it simply because I thought it was interesting that someone decided to do a count.

I just had an additional thought. The percentage struck me as low. Is that most likely because of an underestimate or because the phenomenon is blown out of proportion?