Last week’s Washington Post had a very sad, haunting story about the death of a twelve year old girl from flu-related causes.  Her mother had tried for ten years to have her, and finally succeeded using in vitro fertilization.  Then her daughter developed flu, organ failure and died, in rapid succession, last January. It was…

Saturday, January 30, 2016 NY Times’ penetrating look at the heroin epidemic gets the cause and solution all wrong On October 30, 2015 the NY Times published an in-depth article on the heroin epidemic, focused on New Hampshire, which saw the greatest increase in deaths from drug overdoses (74%) in the US between 2013 and 2014.  New Hampshire…

Government Corruption beats Terrorism and Fears of Economic Collapse by a mile.  Little wonder, with two presidential candidates who each have crooked foundations (used at a minimum for money-laundering and apparent foreign policy ‘quid pro quo’s’ for the Clinton Foundation). Hillary stole White House furniture and gifts when she left in 2000, while Trump used…

FDA Adds Boxed Warning to Hepatitis C Drugs, Warns of Hepatitis B Reactivation Risk  Posted 04 October 2016By Zachary Brennan The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Tuesday warned of serious risks for some patients who have been infected with the hepatitis B virus (HBV) and are being treated with certain direct-acting antiviral (DAA) medicines for…

A NYT editorial discussed healthcare costs last week using two simple graphs. In case you still have good insurance, take a look at what has happened to the rest of us.  Over seventeen years, the cost of insurance premiums has risen at 6 times the rate of inflation.  Over ten years, deductibles rose at 16…

NPR tells us influenza vaccine comes in twelve flavors this year.  You can pick 3 antigens or 4.  With or without a squalene adjuvant? (Fluad is the first US vaccine to use the MF59 squalene adjuvant, though its manufacturer worked to get it into the US market for almost 2 decades.)  High dose or regular strength? Made in…

From Dr. Mandrola at Medscape, a compilation of recent events in medical “science” that make one wonder whether the practice of medicine is going to last much longer, given the amount of corruption now woven into it:   Cynic: A person who believes that people are motivated purely by self-interest rather than acting for honorable or…

Developed under the direction and sponsorship of Merck. Helpful information when talking to parents about HPV vaccination Prescribing Information     Patient Information When talking to parents about the HPV vaccine… Focus clearly on cancer prevention The CDC suggests:Consider telling parents that HPV vaccination is about cancer prevention: cervical, vaginal, vulvar, and anal1 Example: “HPV can cause certain cancers,…

Remember when we kept on hearing that the next big disaster was going to be avian (bird) flu?  Well, bird flu petered out and instead of jumping to humans jumped into a black hole.  The lack of flu vaccinations for farmed chickens and ducks in North America may be key.  The following excerpts come from…

Political Corruption comes in many forms.  Here is just one of them–Meryl Leaks Show DNC Asked White House to Reward Donors With Slots on Boards and Commissions by Alec Goodwin, Center for Responsive Politics Email exchanges involving top officials at the Democratic National Committee released along with private documents by WikiLeaks show that DNC officials hoped to…

I wrote an Op-Ed for the Portland, Maine Sunday Telegram about my bizarre journey trying to get a prescription filled.  It was published August 7, 2016. Here it is. http://www.pressherald.com/2016/08/07/maine-voices-drug-costs-should-make-you-blink/ ELLSWORTH — Pricing of and access to medication are handled in an insane manner in the United States. It has been said that between 20…

 After the dizzying disclosures of the Panama Papers, Madeline Ashby writing in the Ottawa Citizen asks: But what does all this mean? It means that the austerity measures proposed in Britain and elsewhere are complete nonsense. If the people “hiding their piggy banks” in the islands would simply pay their fair share, their countries could…

Today, CDC admits a lab worker got ill from a salmonella strain being studied. But I cannot tell what the disease was.  Salmonella gastroenteritis?  Typhoid fever?  A complicated bloodborne infection that may affect the heart, joints, etc.? How long was the worker ill? Was this person spreading the infection via the oral-fecal route,  as did…

I wonder how these 61 people were selected to have the President commute their sentences? I’d have expected him to start with jailed drug users, not dealers.  Some of these people were jailed for selling kilos of cocaine, for example.  Today’s WaPo lists the names and charges of every one of these 61 lucky people.

On March 29, 2016 the White House issued a press release on its new heroin initiative.  The Washington Post described how much Obama proposed to do.  The long list of fixes and new public-private partnerships address addiction treatment almost exclusively, with a sop to law enforcement.  The 1 billion dollars spent, Obama said, will treat…

Why is oil so cheap these days?  Maybe part of the answer is that the US government absolutely had to stop fracking– because it finally admitted the resulting earthquakes could not be tolerated, nor could the poisoned water be ignored any longer. Like so much else in our modern USA, the profits derived from fracking…

Can you be sickened any more by the us role in Syria?  how many sides has the us government supplied?  how much must the syrian people pay for our recklessness?   how many us troops are shooting at each other in syria? Below is verbatim from the March 27 Los Angeles times:  read it and…

An interview with my favorite scientist, Dr John Ioannidis (excerpts below), discusses the problem of bogus medical and scientific findings, which are now ubiquitous– as the standards are low and the funders have come to view many of the studies they fund as marketing. John Ioannidis is perhaps best known for a 2005 paper “Why Most…

Here is the first half of a wonderful piece by Professor Donald Light on the mess at FDA, which misguides the process of drug evaluation and approval.  The entire piece can be found here: A forthcoming article for the special issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics (JLME), edited by Marc Rodwin and supported by the Edmond J….

Growing numbers of yearly pertussis cases have been recorded over the past few years in the US:  more than at any time since 1959.   Yet additional doses of the vaccine (for diptheria, tetanus and pertussis, or DTaP) have come to be recommended by CDC: 1.  Many states have added a booster dose in 7th…

Finally, putting Iran’s aggression in context: 

It is interesting… in the days when Americans paid for vaccines ourselves,  in cash, we were allowed to choose them for ourselves.  We did so, judiciously and appropriately. No, I’m putting the wrong slant on this:  there was no “allowed” about it.  Back then, who ever imagined a future US government inserting itself into our…

The NY Times had a comprehensive article about NYC’s preschool flu shot mandate last January 2015. I blogged about the issue here; and now, in December, a judge has thrown out the mandate. Children aged 6 months to 5 years and who attended any preschool program licensed by NY City were required to receive a…

Over 1,300 people who received the Pandemrix swine flu vaccine in 2009-10 developed narcolepsy.  Demographically,  adolescents were hardest hit. The vaccination caused profound neurologic disability and frequent personality changes in those affected.    All governments that gave out swine flu vaccines were required (by manufacturers, the World Health Organization and pre-existing contracts that had been…

I blogged (here and here) about how the Inspector General System, set up by Congress to provide independent oversight of the 70 plus executive branch federal agencies, has been prevented from doing its job during the Obama administration.  In this post I discuss another way 3 federal health agencies (FDA, CDC, NIH) have been redirected…

The story about the NIH funding for concussion research is confusing, because neither NIH nor the NFL will say exactly what transpired.  But the NFL gave (or merely promised) $30 million to the NIH Foundation in 2012.  But it seems there were strings attached.  NFL was unhappy with a researcher given the NIH grant, and…

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm64e1218a1.htm?s_cid=mm64e1218a1_w FIGURE 2. Drug overdose deaths* involving opioids,†,§ by type of opioid¶ — United States, 2000–2014 Source: National Vital Statistics System, Mortality file. * Age-adjusted death rates were calculated by applying age-specific death rates to the 2000 U.S. standard population age distribution. † Drug overdose deaths involving opioids are identified using International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision underlying cause-of-death codes…

See the blog post below this one (from the NYT) on how Inspector Generals from over 70 federal agencies have been (illegally) (and continue to be) denied information by the agencies they are supposed to oversee. This thwarts the Inspector Generals from doing their jobs to root out corruption and mismanagement.  This denial of information…

Just in case you still think the US government has a functioning system of checks and balances, the following article in yesterday’s NY Times’ by Eric Lichtblau should disabuse you of such a quaint notion. As the article explains, the Inspector General (IG) watchdog system was instituted in the wake of Watergate to provide independent…

Written by Alan Cassels, a British Columbia drug policy researcher, via Lown Institute Weekly: “Normally, the flu vaccine is between 50 to 60 percent effective”— Dr. Tom Frieden, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) How effective is the flu shot?    That’s an important question that generates many headlines across North America…

Several Republican Presidential candidates (Donald Trump, Dr. Ben Carson and Dr. Rand Paul) were asked in the debate September 16 about their opinion of whether vaccines are linked to autism.  Trump said yes, vaccines cause autism.  He gave examples of his employees whose normal children regressed into autism shortly after a vaccination. Dr. Ben Carson,…

UPDATE:  From the Oct 11 WaPo: The AC-130U plane, circling above in the dark, raked the medical compound with bursts of cannon fire, potentially even using high explosive incendiary munitions, for more than an hour. The assault left at least 22 people dead, some of them burned to death. A US airstrike on Kuduz repeatedly…

We Can’t Trust Companies To Do The Right Thing, But We Trust Their Voting Machines?  by David Yee at IVN: The VW case of tampering with the computing in their automobiles for emission tests once again highlights just how easy it is for a computer to “do” whatever it’s programmed to do — even if…

Drugs and devices licensed in the US often rely on data generated overseas for FDA approval.  It should come as no surprise that FDA oversight of foreign clinical trials may be weak or nonexistent, and that drug/device approvals today seem more and more likely to be based on data whose reliability is far from assured…especially…

Recently I worked in another Maine city and was astonished at the number of patients I encountered who were using heroin. I had never seen anything like it, during a lifetime practicing medicine. In New Hampshire, it was said, deaths from heroin now exceed deaths from car accidents. Massachusetts (population under 7 million) had 1,000 deaths related to (all) opioids…

Vaccine injuries are real.  They can be serious and often fail to respond to treatment. The most serious injuries are usually to the brain. Vaccine injuries may cause death. The US’ federal vaccine injury compensation program has paid out $3.18 billion dollars in compensation for vaccine injuries since the program was established in 1988.  Yet with…

       UPDATE:   575 shipments, 192 total labs received live, incompletely irradiated Dugway anthrax.  Congressional hearing held 7/28/15. (The subjects in my Cheer! below are among those mentioned by USAT on July 21, 2015–Nass) The CDC Cheer  When anthrax spores are flying through its halls, whaddaya do? You know what to do:  It’s a…

The 21st Century Cures Act was passed (unanimously) out of Committee on July 7, 2015 and passed by the House on July 10, by a vote of 344 to 77.   It could have been called the Stealth Act:  There was very little preceding discussion of this bill, despite its potentially huge effects on US…

Another giveaway to health industries (and woe to patients) is embodied in the so-called 21st Century Cures Act.   It passed the House of Representatives this week before you knew it existed. Usually industry’s best friend, the NY Times surprisingly editorialized against this shameful bill today.  Here is what the Times wrote: “A bill passed by…

DHHS tells Bloomberg/WaPo it made a mistake about giving that Ebola drug contract to the anthrax vaccine manufacturer. Crayton HarrisonJul 16, 2015 4:40 pm ET (Source retracts statement cited in July 15 story.) “This release was sent in error as the contract has not been signed by all parties,” the agency said in a separate…

Recall that the current anthrax vaccine manufacturer has never developed and brought to market a single drug.  The anthrax vaccine was developed by the US army.  The company has purchased other companies, such as Cangene, that do have a few marketable products, though the market for them is small. It is also marketing a nerve gas decontamination skin…

What information exactly does the NSA (and its Five Eyes partners) have access to?  At least as much as noted below.  How long is the information stored?  Maybe that is a function of the storage available, which we know is increasing rapidly. From The Intercept: One of the National Security Agency’s most powerful tools of…

From USA Today:  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — which has publicly disclosed three serious laboratory accidents during the past year involving Ebola, anthrax and a deadly strain of bird flu — says it will take three more years before it will release copies of all incident reports for the agency’s labs in Atlanta and Fort…

Hepatitis B is a serious disease.  It is highly prevalent in many countries in Asia (nearly 10% of Chinese carried the illness in 1992), but fortunately is of low prevalence in the US.  Per CDC, the overall reported US incidence rate for 2013 was 1.0 case per 100,000 population. After adjusting for under-ascertainment and under-reporting,…

USA Today reported that a CDC study found that anthrax spore killing had not been standardized using control spore samples at Dugway.  Tests of different spore concentrations and volumes had not been tested against different radiation doses to ascertain the degree of lethality of the process under varying conditions. It seems remarkable to me that…

From the Washington Times: Last week, Republicans and Democrats in Congress joined President Obama in congratulating themselves for taming the National Security Agency’s voracious appetite for spying. By permitting one section of the Patriot Act to expire and by replacing it with the USA Freedom Act, the federal government is taking credit for taming beasts of its own…

On June 9, two weeks since this story first burst forth, we are up to 68 labs that likely got some live anthrax from Dugway.  And another country has been added, the UK. If the story is accurate as told so far, what probably happened is that there was incomplete inactivation due to inadequate doses…

I will be writing more about the US DoD assertion that up to 66 laboratories in 19 states, the District of Columbia and three countries  (Australia, South Korea and Canada) received live anthrax spores by mistake from an Army lab at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. The June 4 WSJ (behind a paywall) says the problem…

Wow!  Who saw that coming?  The Constitution did not specify that medical care was a federal responsibility, so for over 200 years it has been left to the states.  Yes, fifty years ago we got Medicare and Medicaid, and now the Affordable (for whom?) Care Act, but the specifics of what drugs and vaccines people…

In the last few days there have been multiple news articles and testimonies in the Maine and Vermont legislatures about the need to impose vaccine mandates to protect immunocompromised children.[1] [2]  I attended the vaccine bills’ hearing in Augusta, Maine on May 11, which lasted into the night. I also attended the Vermont Senate hearing…

My maternal grandfather died in 1968 of what was almost certainly a fulminant Hepatitis B infection (causing rapid liver failure, occurring in just 1% of acute cases). He probably acquired it working part-time in a deli, slicing meat. In med school a few years later, I learned that butchers had increased risk. You get Hepatitis…

Let’s start with tetanus, the disease we think of when scratched with something rusty or dirty, and develop an abscess. This is a terrible illness, because tetanus bacteria produce a nerve toxin that takes months to recover from.   First, how much tetanus disease is there is the US?  Second, does it spread from person-to-person? There are…

Pharmaceutical companies conduct pre-clinical (without people) and clinical research (utilizing human subjects) to understand the effects of drugs they are developing. Until now, even though the research often involves human voluntary subjects who may not be compensated for their participation, the findings of the research have been considered proprietary, or owned by the research sponsor….

JAMA Intern Med. 2015 Apr 1;175(4):567-77. doi: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2014.7774. Research Misconduct Identified by the US Food and Drug Administration: Out of Sight, Out of Mind, Out of the Peer-Reviewed Literature. Seife C1. Author information Abstract IMPORTANCE: Every year, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspects several hundred clinical sites performing biomedical research on human participants and…

In that same panel on vaccines, another panelist alleged that vaccines are a low-margin product and a low profit industry.  It was said that many companies left the market. That was true once.  This is now.  There are few companies due to tremendous market consolidation in pharmaceutical companies overall. Prices of vaccines have gone crazy….

Yesterday I was in a televised panel discussion about vaccines, and I suggested that Merck might influence CDC by donating to CDC’s foundation and by having hired CDC’s former Director, Julie Gerberding, as President of Merck Vaccines.  After NJ’s Health Director Eddie Bresnitz mandated Merck’s HPV vaccine in NJ, he too was given a job…

Here is the Complaint, filed on April 2, 2015 alleging gross mishandling of the case on many levels, and concealment of evidence exonerating Bruce Ivins: http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1714250-former-fbi-special-agent-in-charge-richard.html   Here is the story in the NY Times of April 8. Here is the story in Courthouse News. And here are some extraordinary excerpts from the complaint that validate things…

Lots of babies get measles in Africa and India, and it is a significant cause of death there.  A great deal of work has gone into developing measles vaccines that can be given to children at younger and younger ages, especially in Africa, for this reason.  But in the United States, endemic measles has been…

Marcia Angell (Harvard professor, writer and former NEJM editor) has penned another excellent book review for the NY Review of Books.  This time, she discusses Stephen Brill’s new book on Obamacare, “America’s Bitter Pill”.  Two excerpts follow: … Practically every serious economic analysis of the American health system has concluded that the most efficient way…

Pakistan jails 471 parents who refused to give polio vaccine to children–The Guardian Parents in north-west of country were imprisoned under government orders on charges of endangering public security A health worker gives a polio vaccine to a child in Peshawar, Pakistan. Photograph: Mohammad Sajjad/AP Endemic polio was eliminated in the US by 1980.  Nearly…

This graph comes from the Washington Post.  Before 1993 there were many US measles cases, mainly due to waning of vaccine-induced immunity. Then an additional MMR dose was added to the vaccine schedule in the US, and measles immunity improved. There is no endemic measles in the US, helped by the fact there is no…

And another story about an inexplicable contracting decision regarding a biodefense product, in today’s WaPo: Last year, a Silicon Valley start-up came close to producing what government scientists considered a breakthrough technology — a device the size of a ski boot that could test for tiny microorganisms at rapid speed, helping to safeguard the nation…

As discussed in this blog last October and November, Ebola transmission by air is likely, but also likely not a major form of spread. The WaPo comments on an academic piece written by several experts in the field: … As evidence, the research notes that Ebola virus has been found on the outside of face masks…

A few facts about measles need to be told.  Measles is not rapidly expanding in the US or internationally, and CDC says the rate of vaccination for measles has been stable since 1994. (However, in some states, like Oregon, the number of vaccine waivers has tripled to 6% in about 10 years.  In response, last March…

I’ve been asked to contrast the risk from the disease measles with the risk from the measles vaccine, usually the MMR.  MMR stands for Measles, Mumps, Rubella (rubella is german measles) and so the MMR vaccine contains 3 live, attenuated (weakened) viruses that reproduce in the body of the person receiving the vaccine. Live vaccines…

Measles is uncomfortable. I remember having it, and it was the worst of all my childhood diseases. It was very painful to eat and drink. Still, I was better in about a week. And then I had life-long immunity.   What is the death rate from measles?  By the time I had measles, in 1959, only…

The son has been treated for leukemia and is still immune-compromised, has not received the live measles vaccine, as it might be dangerous for him. So the dad wants his child protected by forcing everyone else in the school to be vaccinated, to create a safe cocoon (at least while in school) for his child….

From the AP: GENEVA — The World Health Organization is debating how to reform itself after botching the response to the Ebola outbreak, a sluggish performance that experts say cost thousands of lives. On Sunday, WHO’s executive board planned to discuss proposals that could radically transform the United Nations health agency in response to sharp…

Pertussis (whooping cough) epidemics continue to increase in the US, with 50,000 recorded cases this year. Most people who got pertussis have been fully vaccinated.  Thanks to investigative journalist Sharyl Atkisson for pointing out the baboon research, discussed in the NY Times and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year.  FDA’s Office of Vaccines…

Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is investigating a laboratory mistake that has potentially exposed workers to the Ebola virus. From the NYT:  A laboratory mistake at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may have exposed a technician to the deadly Ebola virus, federal officials said on…

Email Share Tweet Save More Dick Cheney. CreditWin McNamee/Getty Images From the Sunday NY Times of December 21: Since the day President Obama took office, he has failed to bring to justice anyone responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects — an official government program conceived and carried out in the years after the attacks of…

The UK is paying out about $1.7 million dollars per victim.  Although the media rarely reported on the severity of narcolepsy cases, vaccine-induced narcolepsy patients are much sicker than most people with narcolepsy.  It isn’t only a matter of falling asleep; there is additional brain damage, including personality changes. Now scientists in Finland, where the…

I chose the following short AP report from the WaPo because it gets right to the point: NATIONWIDE (AP) – The Government Accountability Office says the science the Federal Bureau of Investigations used to investigate the 2001 anthrax attacks was flawed. The GAO released a report Friday on its findings. The agency didn’t take a position on the FBI’s…

Here is the GAO report released today, two years in the making, a study done for unnamed “congressional requesters.” In past years, the requesters have been listed, but in this case, they are not. This most likely reflects the sensitivity of this matter. Why so sensitive? Because the FBI botched its investigation, never had even…

CDC has created a litany of excuses for why it recommends flu vaccines for kids despite poor protection against the majority of this year’s influenza strains (H1N1 and H3N2). See below for the data on the poor vaccine match this year. Below are the reasons CDC says parents should still give the current vaccine to their children….

NYC’s unelected health department demanded last December that children aged 6 months to 5 years receive yearly flu vaccinations. This was one of outgoing mayor (and newly minted health expert) Michael Bloomberg’s gifts to the city, along with the banning of extra large soft drinks. Are soft drinks a threat to others?  What right has any…

Yesterday, authors from the NIH, NY and Toronto published a paper describing their screening system for compounds against Ebola.  The method has identified a large number of approved substances with potential benefits. Many of them have been mentioned in this blog previously, such as clomifene, antimalarials and antiarrhythmics.  Ninety-five additional compounds were also found to…

I wrote about the fact there was a “post-Ebola syndrome” here, which might include visual problems (usually due to uveitis), joint pains, and psychological issues.  It was not well defined due to the small size of previous epidemics and small number of survivors. Now Al Jazeera has written about several people whose post-Ebola survival is complicated…

The NEJM published a piece written primarily by Medicins Sans Frontieres clinicians who have worked in Liberia, describing the clinical course of Ebola patients, and concluding with the paragraph below, acknowledging the need to provide more comprehensive care than MSF was able to provide earlier in the outbreak. I believe we are now arriving at a…

Just out as a provisional pdf (final version is in production), 3 scientists have reviewed the totality of the published data on Ebola therapeutics, and come up with a framework for combining the use of drugs for their potential synergistic effects.  For me, this put many disparate facts about Ebola into focus, providing much of…

The following story describes this year’s publication of the famed Corruption Perception Index by Transparency International. This annual country metric gets widely discussed. The new index shows that most governments (2/3) “show very high levels of corruption.”  Corruption is criminal, it keeps the criminals in power, it leaves little room for meaningful change and advancement…

I have been talking about how one might improve clinical care of Ebola patients, and the need for trials to identify the best treatments, best empiric iv fluids, etc.  This is necessary both to improve survival rates and also to give Ebola patients a reason to come to Ebola treatment centers, which many perceive to be…

I guess 53 beds (located in 35 hospitals) is progress, but not a lot of progress… when you consider that in Africa there have been more than 53 cases from a single town. From the WaPo: … The 35 designated hospitals will have total treatment capacity of 53 beds.In trying to establish a network of…

The WaPo explores which hospitals will be approved by CDC to treat Ebola patients, and whether hospitals will lose or gain from such a designation. Treating an Ebola patient scares other patients away, puts staff at risk, and demands extraordinary levels of intensive care that exceed what can be reimbursed by insurers, and sometimes what can…

I have been desperately seeking ideas to get us to that sweet spot: where medical providers will know how to manage Ebola in Africa, and their treatments will keep most Ebola victims alive, while not costing a million dollars per patient, or more. I envision patients having access to lab tests, iv fluids, convalescent serum, automatic…

The Tampa Bay Times (see below) reported today that two Florida children had died of flu. Which is odd, because if you scroll down to the current CDC charts below you will see a) that the mortality from flu and pneumonia is about as low as it gets, right now, and b) only one flu-associated child…

From Gallup:  Americans’ Ratings of CDC Down After Ebola Crisis No other agencies measured showed a decline in ratings PRINCETON, N.J. — Americans’ ratings of the job being done by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) are down significantly from last year, from 60% saying it is doing an “excellent” or “good” job to 50%….

From NBC News: … Although the CDC initially said any U.S. hospital should be able to care for an Ebola patient, Gold (Chancellor of the University of Nebraska Medical School, where 3 victims were treated) argued that it really often does require a special biocontainment unit. There are only four in the country: at Nebraska,…

A woman arrived in NY 3 weeks ago from Guinea and was being monitored (presumably by phone) daily and allegedly had no Ebola symptoms.  But she just died.  No one seems to know why. And so, yes, they will test her remains for Ebola… but only out of an ‘abundance of caution.’  What happens to…

US media have been silent about this elephant in the room: those who recover from Ebola are likely to have positive PCR tests of semen, vaginal fluid, breast milk, urine and skin (including sweat) for one to several months after recovery.  There are several anecdotes describing disease transmission to a partner following recovery. Because it…

Click here for the full, free text.  Ideas and Opinions | online 16 October 2014 Caring for Patients with Ebola: A challenge in Any Care Facility Mark G. Kortepeter, MD, MPH; Philip W. Smith, MD; Angela Hewlett, MD; and Theodore J. Cieslak, MD The largest outbreak of Ebola virus continues unabated in West Africa. With the recent death of a…

Admittedly, I am biased about how I think clinical trials should be conducted.  I believe they necessitate the very finest care of patients, meticulous ethical conduct, and collection of the most complete data possible.  Most importantly, data obtained from human subjects, who have taken on some risk to advance medical knowledge, should imho never be…

Ten months into the out-of-control Ebola epidemic, and 38 years since the first Ebola epidemic, the DHHS Assistant Secretary of Health for Preparedness, Nicole Lurie, had a workshop convened by IOM with NIH, CDC, NIOSH, academics, etc. to discuss what needs to be learned about Ebola, and how research can address these questions. Here is…

Let me start this piece with the bottom line: I want to be clear that patients with Ebola virus disease are sicker, in general, than patients with any other medical condition, in the US or anywhere else. They are subject to many more serious complications than other patients. They require more care, more lab tests, more procedures,…

I previously recommended alcohol hand rub (usually 70% ethyl or isopropyl alcohol) to kill Ebola on hands and gloves, which CDC recommends, along with soap and water. From more reading, I no longer feel this is adequate, as it appears alcohol has not been tested on Ebola, and because other environmental tests have found Ebola…

According to the Washington Post, NY’s Bellevue Hospital plans to discharge Dr. Craig Spencer tomorrow. This is great news.  Everyone who has been treated in the US, with the exception of Eric Duncan, has survived Ebola.  All those we know about (9 people) were diagnosed and treated early, except Mr. Duncan. This is an 89%…