ProMED Internet-a-thon

Today is the last day to contribute to the ProMED-mail Internet-A-Thon.

Your financial support enables ProMED to continue providing you and 42,000 others in 170 countries worldwide with reliable, independent reporting of emerging infectious diseases and outbreaks as they happen.

Contagious Yawning

Via Gene Expression: Biology Letters reports "the disturbance of contagious yawning in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD)."

Yawning video clips elicited more yawns in TD [typically developing] children than in children with ASD, but the frequency of yawns did not differ between groups when they observed control video clips. Moreover, TD children yawned more during or after the yawn video clips than the control video clips, but the type of video clips did not affect the amount of yawning in children with ASD. Current results suggest that contagious yawning is impaired in ASD, which may relate to their impairment in empathy. It supports the claim that contagious yawning is based on the capacity for empathy.

The news has already made it into the Wikipedia section on contagious yawning.

Christmas Clusters

PlagueBlog apologizes for falling behind in bird flu reporting. The clusters were coming fast and furious last week, but without sustained transmission. Armageddon is postponed once again. Here's a cluster roundup, mostly via ProMED-mail, as usual:

The WHO washes its hands of the cluster question in China:

The World Health Organization said Friday it was impossible to say whether a case of bird flu in China involving a 52- year-old man was due to human-to-human transmission - but, even if it was, it was down to very close contact between the victims.

The Indonesian cluster has dissolved, at least in the opinion of the Indonesian government, that bastion of bird-flu responsiveness:

Two sets of laboratory tests showed the six admitted to a hospital in Jakarta on Friday did not have the H5N1 virus, said Nyoman Kandun, director-general of communicable disease control at Indonesia's health ministry.

Pakistan is double-checking the WHO's negative results for their erstwhile bird flu cluster:

"In their preliminary tests the WHO team excluded suspected human-to-human transmission, but we have sent the samples to Geneva for further confirmation," health ministry spokesman Oriya Maqbool Jan told AFP.

The WHO team was sent after the ministry announced the death of a man who was one of six people infected with the deadly H5N1 strain of the avian influenza virus in North West Frontier Province along the Afghanistan border.

A brother of the victim also died before being tested for the virus. Both had worked on a cull of infected poultry.

PlagueBlog finds it suspicious that the "first" bird flu case in Pakistan was a cluster of six, and also that the first report out of China in six months was a cluster of two.

Epilepsy Drugs and Asians

Via the About.com Rare Diseases Blog: the FDA has recommended that persons of Asian ancestry have a genetic test for the HLA-B*1502 gene before taking epilepsy drugs containing carbamazepine, because of the risk of rare skin reactions. Gory pictures are available in this PDF about SJS.

Boy Meets Bat

Via Universal Hub: boy meets bat in basement and may yet live to tell about it.

Please remember that bats are not our friends. Bats are blood-sucking, disease-bearing flying rats out of a Cthulhu Christmas Special where the lucky ones die early and the handsome brave ones die pathetically later, foaming at the mouth and biting their friends in order to spread the madness. Just keep away. If you happen to come into contact with a slow-moving bat, save it for testing and see a doctor. Likewise for squirrels.

Up to a hundred people die of rabies every day in Asia because they don't know enough to seek treatment. Here in civilization, bats are the up-and-coming culprit:

Recently, bat rabies has emerged as an important epidemiologic reservoir in some parts of the world (i.e. the Americas and Australia). In North America, most documented human rabies deaths occurred as a result of infection from the silver haired bat rabies virus variant and in Australia at least two human deaths have occurred from exposure to a previously unrecognized rabies virus. In South America, wildlife rabies, especially bat rabies is increasing. For the first time in 2003, more people died from rabies following bites from wildlife than from dogs in South America.

New Strain of Ebola

The Atlanta Journal Constitution, your source for up-to-the-minute CDC news, reports that the current Ebola outbreak in Uganda (51 cases and 16 deaths as of Wednesday, according to the WHO) is due to a new, fifth strain of the virus:

Samples arrived at CDC's Biosafety Level 4 labs in Atlanta on Monday. By Tuesday, Ksiazek said, it was apparent this was not a typical Ebola virus.
Dr. Stuart Nichol, a CDC special pathogens team leader, said some molecular tests for Ebola were coming back negative, when another type of test came back positive. The CDC lab was then able to extract a small fragment of the virus' genome.
"It looks, based on this, like it's a new species of Ebola," Nichol said Friday evening.
Previously, there were only four known types of Ebola. The Sudan and Zaire species were discovered in 1976. A strain called Reston was identified in 1989 among monkeys imported to a lab in Virginia. And in 1994, the Ivory Coast strain was identified.
Depending on the strain, the death rate varies. Ebola-Zaire kills about 80 percent of its victims, while the Sudan strain kills about 50 percent, Ksiazek said.

Hope for the Tree Man

Via Daring Fireball: the UK Telegraph reports some hope for the Indonesian tree man:

"The likelihood of having his deficiency is less than one in a million," Dr Gaspari told the Telegraph.
Dr Gaspari, who became involved in the case through a Discovery Channel documentary, believes that Dede's condition can be largely cleared up by a daily doses of a synthetic form of Vitamin A, which has been shown to arrest the growth of warts in severe cases of HPV.
"He won't have a perfectly normal body but the warts should reduce in size to the point where he could use his hands," Dr Gaspari said.
"Over the course of three to six months the warts should be come smaller and fewer in number. He will be living a more normal life."
The most resilient warts could then be frozen off and the growths on his hands and feet surgically removed.

Zombie Protest at City Hall

I was lucky to see the latest zombie protest at Boston City Hall on my way home from work last night. Personally, I'd think zombies would be happy to have snackable Ebola victims lurching about the city leaking sauce, but perhaps that's the point. I didn't want to stick around for the explanation via bullhorn, so I read it today in the BU Daily Free Press:

With Boston Police Department officers close behind, the horde of protesters began their menacing march at the corner of Albany and East Dedham Streets and snaked toward City Hall, moaning, "We have been infected by the BU biolab" and "The BU biolab has infected me with a terrible pathogen." During the march - the newest form of protest in a seemingly futile battle to stop construction of the biolab - the zombies stuffed anti-lab flyers under the doors of nearby businesses and into the palms of curious onlookers.
Local activists have protested the biolab, under construction at the BU Medical Campus in the South End, since the National Institutes of Health granted BU $128 million for the project in 2003. The site will house some of the world's deadliest pathogens, including anthrax and the Ebola virus.

Parasitic Twin Removed

Via Boston NOW: a team of thirty doctors at the Sparsh Hospital in Bangalore successfully removed a four-limbed parasitic twin from two-year-old Lakshmi Tatma. ABC News has more:

The surgery removed the extra body parts and unfused Lakshmi's spine from her twin's. To rebuild her pelvis, surgeons used tissue from the twin. And to save her kidney, doctors said, they had to remove it from the "parasitic abdomen" and move it into Lakshmi's own abdomen. She may still need more surgeries.

Germ Quiz

Via a sick friend:

2,426,760How Many Germs Live On Your Keyboard?

Salmonella Sushi

Via Universal Hub: Wicked Local Brookline reports on salmonella and vermin at Fugakyu:

Inspectors visited Fugakyu in late August after the Boston Department of Public Health told the town that one of the restaurant’s employees had contracted salmonella poisoning.
The restaurant, at 1280 Beacon St., reportedly had not told Brookline officials about the potential health danger. It was not clear from reports how Boston found out. [...]
Reports stated food handlers were also seen washing their hands with no soap for only five seconds. The worker with salmonella was allegedly handling food at the time of the visit, according to reports.

Let's hope Dice-K keeps away from his eponymous roll until the World Series is over.

Adenovirus on the Rise

Via ProMED-mail: Reuters reports on a rise in the prevalence and severity of adenovirus infection (one of several causes of the common cold).

Gray's team used the test on 2,200 samples from 22 U.S. medical facilities, including eight military sites. Military personnel are especially susceptible to outbreaks of all kinds of disease, including adenoviruses.
Adenovirus 21 was found in 1 percent of specimens in 2004, but in 2.4 percent in 2006. And it was making people much sicker than the other strains, killing 50 percent of bone marrow transplant patients, for instance.

Salmonella in Strange Places

Via an unnamed source: CBS reports on a recall of white chocolate.

Kraft Foods announced Thursday it is recalling white chocolate distributed in the United States because of possible salmonella contamination.
Kraft said consumers who purchased its six-ounce, Baker's Premium White Chocolate Baking Squares should immediately discard the product. The recalled product was distributed nationally and have the UPC Code 0043000252200 and best when used by dates of March 31, April 1, April 2 and April 3, 2008.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration detected the presence of salmonella in some packages of the white chocolate baking squares during tests, according to Kraft.

Salmonella in Space

Via GeekPress, among others: The AP reports on the B-movie salmonella that came back deadlier after its trip on the space shuttle:

After 25 days, 40 percent of the mice given the Earth-bound salmonella were still alive, compared with just 10 percent of those dosed with the germs from space. And the researchers found it took about one-third as much of the space germs to kill half the mice, compared with the germs that had been on Earth.
The researchers found 167 genes had changed in the salmonella that went to space.
Why?
"That's the 64 million dollar question," Nickerson said. "We do not know with 100 percent certainty what the mechanism is of space flight that's inducing these changes."
However, they think it's a force called fluid shear.

"Being cultured in microgravity means the force of the liquid passing over the cells is low." The cells "are responding not to microgravity, but indirectly to microgravity in the low fluid shear effects."

Toxoplasmosis and You

Today's featured parasite is the stealthy and adaptable protozoan, Toxoplasma gondii.

This is the cat-litter bug that causes miscarriages and birth defects. The cat-loving parasite that lures rats to their deaths and causes traffic accidents. The latest schizophrenia suspect and a possible cause of epilepsy, psychosis, and migraines.

T. gondii may be making society rigid and neurotic, men more masculine, stupider, or more surly, and women more promiscuous. And if you think things are bad in the northern hemisphere, you should see the Brazilian strains.

About 16% 11% 33% of Americans are infected; infection rates are much higher in tropical countries (and France). Wikipedia tells the sad tale of Louis Wain, English cat artist, late-onset schizophrenic, and poster-child for the toxoplasmosis-schizophrenia connection.

T. gondii has its own book, conference, mugs and a blog, The Anti-Toxo, where you can follow mankind's losing battle with our one-celled masters.

Image by kqedquest. Some rights reserved.

Ebola in the Congo

Via ProMED-mail: USA Today reports a total of nine confirmed cases of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

At least 167 people have died — though it is not clear how many of Ebola — in the affected region of Kasai Occidental over the past four months, and nearly 400 have fallen ill, according to Congolese health officials.
Christiana Salvi, a spokeswoman for the World Health Organization effort in Congo, said that the newest cases came from the same zone as the original confirmed samples.
She added that some of the 40-odd samples sent for testing have been negative for Ebola, but positive for other diseases like shigella — a diarrhea-like disease — or typhoid. Results from dozens more samples have yet to be released.

Bat Woman Found on Facebook

ProMED-mail reports that the mysterious woman who brought a rabid bat to the Toronto Wildlife Center has been found and inoculated:

Toronto Public Health has located the woman who had delivered an injured bat to the Toronto Wildlife Centre that later tested positive for rabies. Finding her proved to be very challenging as the Wildlife Centre did not have her updated demographic information. After several attempts to locate her, including a media release, proved to be unsuccessful, one of the communications staff at Toronto Public Health suggested using the website "Facebook.com".

If you come across an injured rodent of a populous and frequently rabid species, Plagueblog recommends that you walk away and let Darwin handle the situation.

Schizotypal Selection

Via John Hawks and the Four Stone Hearth Carnival of Anthropology: The Primate Diaries' explains Sapolsky's theory of selection for schizotypal personalities, possibly in shamans.

Several years ago Robert Sapolsky suggested that genes promoting schizophrenia may have been selected for in human evolution because some of them conferred benefits that outweighed the 1% of people worldwide that were disabled by the disorder. Like the sickle-cell trait that confers resistance to malaria (so long as you don’t receive two recessive alleles and develop full fledged sickle cell anemia) a partial schizophrenia may be beneficial in some way. He observed that relatives of schizophrenics have a high likelihood of “schizotypal personalities,” or a mild form of the disorder that just makes these people a little strange and allows them to see the world in a unique way. What if, he wondered, schizophrenia maintained itself in human populations because of selection for schizotypal personalites? As luck would have it, for a hundred years anthropologists had observed such individuals thriving in nearly every society they encountered: shamans.

Leishmaniasis endemic in North Texas

Via ProMED-mail: UT Southwestern reports that Leishmania mexicana should be considered endemic in North as well as South Texas.

North Texas doctors must have a high index of suspicion and understand that this organism must now be considered endemic in this area, said Dr. Kent Aftergut, a clinical instructor of dermatology at UT Southwestern and in private practice at Methodist Charlton Medical Center.
“Luckily, all of the leishmaniasis cases in North Texas that have been cultured have grown Leishmania mexicana, which is less dangerous than other forms of the parasite,” he said. “It makes skin sores, but the infection doesn’t spread and become a full body disease like some of the others species of Leishmania. Usually, if patients have a normal immune system, the sores will resolve in six to 12 months and won’t make the patients ill.”

Bird Flu Hits 200

Via ProMED-mail: AFP reports Indonesia's 85th bird flu fatality, for a total of 200 bird flu deaths worldwide.

The plantation worker died at 2:00 pm (0700 GMT), the doctor treating him at the state general hospital in the city of Pekanbaru, Azizman Daad, told AFP.
A health ministry official earlier confirmed that the man was infected with the deadly H5N1 virus, after two tests came back positive.
H5N1 is endemic in birds across nearly all of Indonesia.
The archipelago nation has now reported 106 cases overall, including the 85 deaths.
Daad said it was not clear whether the man had come into contact with infected poultry, but he had bought two live chickens at a local market.