Unless you’ve been strictly limiting your media consumption to reviews of the midseason finale of The Walking Dead, you’ve probably heard of a novel coronavirus that is causing a bit of bother among public health officials. In this post I’ll try to summarize and explain the evolving situation and highlight the current advice for the US public.
In December, a coronavirus that had never before been detected in humans began making people sick in Wuhan City, China. Since that time More
Largest Study Ever Finds No Link Between MMR Vaccine and Autism
“A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on.” -- C. H. Spurgeon
In 1998 Andrew Wakefield, a British gastroenterologist, published a study in The Lancet reporting on 12 (remember that number) children with developmental delay, 8 of whom were diagnosed with autism within 4 weeks of receiving the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine. The study proposed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Other researchers were unable to reproduce ...Symptom Relief for Your Common Cold
Lots of my patients have been struck by a miserable cold in the last few weeks. My phone is ringing off the hook (is that a meaningful idiom anymore?) with woeful tales of coughs and runny noses and fatigue and despair. I thought it would be a perfect time to do a little teaching about the common cold, how to treat it, and other diagnoses that it can be mistaken for. But it turns out I already wrote that pos...
More
Last Year’s Flu Season Was Worst in Decades
“Oh, a storm is threat'ning My very life today If I don't get some shelter Oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away”
Gimme Shelter by The Rolling Stones
By any measure, last year’s flu season (2017-2018) was very bad. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report last month estimating that influenza killed about 80,000 people in the US last season. That’s the highest number since 1976. How much worse is that than u...What to Know Before Taking Cipro or Levaquin
Fluoroquinolones are the third most commonly prescribed family of antibiotics in the U.S. for adults, and, in my opinion, the second most fun to say (right behind aminoglycosides). Fluoroquinolones include levofloxacin (Levaquin), ciprofloxacin (Cipro), moxifloxacin (Avelox), ofloxacin, and delafloxacin. Their popularity is well earned; they’re very effective at treating certain bacterial infections. But since their discovery in the late 1970s, increasing concern has been raised about their ...
More
What You Need to Know About Shingrix
Shingrix is a new vaccine approved to prevent shingles. What’s shingles? Should you get this vaccine? What if you already had a vaccine for shingles? Good questions. Read on.
To understand shingles, we have to understand chicken pox. Chicken pox was an extremely common childhood illness before 1995, when routine vaccination for chicken pox began. Before that, an average of 4 million people got chicken pox each year in the U.S. and about 100 people died. Chicken pox is caused by the varice...
More
It’s Norovirus Season
My longtime readers know that I love to inform you about ways that Mother Nature tries to hurt us. Since it’s winter, norovirus deserves our attention as it wreaks its seasonal havoc and occasionally closes down schools.
Norovirus causes inflammation of the stomach and intestines. It’s commonly referred to as a “stomach virus” or “stomach flu”. (But it’s not related to the influenza virus. So let’s stop calling it the stomach flu. It just confuses people and makes them think that the flu ...
More
Top Ten Reasons to Have a Flu Shot
Every year I write a post in the late summer letting you know that flu season is approaching and to get a flu shot. I try to keep my posts informative and evidence-based, but I don’t have anything new to tell you about that.
Actually, I do have one bit of news. Some of you may have heard of FluMist, the flu vaccine given by nasal spray. It’s especially popular with children and with patients with needle phobias because it’s not injected. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC...
More
Zika Virus Gains a Foothold in Florida
Which animal has killed more people than any other?
Sharks? Sharks are terrifying, right? Nah. They’re not even in the top ten people-killers. They kill about 10 people per year worldwide. Lions? They do a little better with about 100 deaths per year. Snakes are in third place, killing about 50,000 annually.
The number one animal killer of humans is the lowly mosquito which racks up a stagg...
More
Prolonged Antibiotics Don’t Help in Lyme Disease
Lyme disease is a bacterial illness transmitted by tick bites. It is treated with antibiotics, and most guidelines suggest a two to four week course of treatment. Most patients’ symptoms resolve at that point, but 10 to 20% of patients continue to have fatigue, joint and muscle pain, sleep problems, and difficulty concentrating. These patients can be quite debilitated and no specific effective treatment has been found for them.
A patient advocacy group has recommended treatment with antib...
More