Contaminated Cantaloupes Responsible for Listeria Outbreak

My regular readers know I have a bit of an obsession with food-borne illness. Why? Because it’s such a difficult and old problem. (Obviously germs have been contaminating food and sickening animals long before people were around.) Modern sanitation and farming have made our food much safer, but occasional outbreaks remind us that our current methods are still imperfect. This week an outbreak of the bacterium Listeria has sickened over 20 people in seven states. (California has not been affected...
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A Revolution in Atrial Fibrillation Treatment

Atrial fibrillation is an irregular heart rhythm affecting about 3 million Americans. The most serious risk of atrial fibrillation is stroke, caused by a blood clot forming in the abnormally beating heart chambers and traveling to a blood vessel in the brain. For over 50 years the mainstay of atrial fibrillation treatment has been the anticoagulant warfarin (better known by the brand name Coumadin) which effectively decreases the risk of stroke by preventing blood clots. By the way, medicines t...
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Vaccines Are Much Safer than the Diseases They Prevent

A child develops a fever of 104 ⁰F, cough, runny nose and red eyes. A few days later she develops a red bumpy itchy rash as in this photo. Any guesses as to the diagnosis? Many of us would be stumped, having never seen this disease. This is the classic presentation of measles, which prior to the development of the measles vaccine in the 1960s affected hundreds of thousands of U.S. children annually. There is no treatment. Complications from measles caused 3 fatalities for every one thousand ca...
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A New Species of Tick-Borne Bacteria Identified in Minnesota and Wisconsin

[Lunch warning: Parts of this post are kind of gross. If you’re reading this over a meal, you have been warned.] What a depressing week. The debt ceiling debate postponed all difficult decisions, second quarter economic growth was revised so low that you need to squint to see it, and yesterday the stock market jumped off the balcony, losing all the gains it’s made over the year. We need some happy news to...
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When the Stool Hits the Sprouts

... or Technology Phobia Can Be Fatal [This post is perfectly safe for work, but may not be safe for lunch, as it mentions poop more frequently than you may find appetizing.] This post is an update about the E. coli food poisoning outbreak in Germany that I posted about two weeks ago (link 1 below). If you didn’t read that post, please do, as it explains some important terms like hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) and shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC). Using these phrases at ...
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FDA Warns of Risk of Highest Zocor Dose

What’s the difference between a medication’s intended effect and its side effects? Is there some physiologic difference between the beneficial effects of a medicine and the annoying or even toxic things that it does? Not really. All medications have lots of different effects on the body. The intended effect is simply the one that the patient (or doctor) hopes to achieve. The rest of the effects are by definition side effects. The difference lies purely in the intention of the patient and physici...
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Germany Struck by Major Food Poisoning Outbreak

Since May Germany has been plagued with a particularly nasty outbreak of food poisoning. There have been almost 3,000 people who have become sick so far and 27 deaths, with a small number of cases in other countries. The bacterium causing the outbreak has been identified, but the name of the bacterium is so convoluted that it needs explaining. The outbreak is caused by shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli O104:H4 (or STEC O104:H4). Got that? Please let me ‘splain. Escherichia co...
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Niacin Does Not Prevent Strokes or Heart Attacks

In the last decades we’ve made major strides in heart attack prevention through the use of blood pressure medications, smoking cessation, and statins – a family of cholesterol-lowering medications that have been proven to prevent heart attacks and strokes. Despite these advances, heart attacks remain the leading cause of death in the US. New medications to further decrease heart attack risk are being eagerly sought. Allow me a brief digression to explain three important fat molecules in your bl...
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