A 15-year-old Australian girl is suffering from a rare form of narcolepsy after receiving a flu shot.
Chloe Glasson is one of 100 people confirmed worldwide to develop narcolepsy after being injected with the anti-swine flu vaccination Pandemrix.
“She has gone from being a bright, outgoing girl to one who cannot go out on her own,” Chloe’s mother, Rebecca Glasson, told News Limited. “She doesn’t doze for more than a couple of hours at a time, but she can have disturbing dreams.”
GlaxoSmithKline, manufacturer of Pandemrix, said they are researching why their drug is causing narcolepsy in some patients. GSK said they hope their ongoing research will provide more answers.
The CDC recommends flu shots for anyone older than 6 months.
The Centers for Disease Control is reporting that flu is now widespread in over half the United States.
The CDC says that a majority of the cases is the H1N1 virus that caused a worldwide pandemic in 2009.
The flu peaks in the United States between October and March. The CDC said that the spread this year is quick with at least 25 states having confirmed cases.
The CDC says at least six children in the United States have died from H1N1 and cannot say how many adults may have died from it as they do not track adult deaths from the flu. Texas has been particularly hard hit with 25 deaths this flu season.
Texas officials have told health care providers in the state to begin anti-viral treatments even if rapid flu tests come back negative and a patient is showing signs of the flu.
Although flu season is usually at its worst in January or February, health officials in Pennsylvania report flu outbreaks in at least half of the regions of the state.
There have been nearly 1,200 cases of influenza between September 29 and December 21 with the worst hit areas in western Pennsylvania according to the State Health Department.
Last year’s flu season put 381,000 people in the hospital nationwide, which is the most since
2005 according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control says that 2 million Americans have been sickened by some strain of drug-resistant bacteria and around 23,000 died because their infections could not be treated.
A deputy director for the CDC’s Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion says that the overuse of antibiotics contributes heavily to the problem.
“Very recently we looked at how good antibiotic prescriptions are in this country, and about half are unnecessary or the wrong antibiotic,” Dr. Michael Bell told CNBC. “That’s a lot of room for improvement.”
Federal officials are attempting to spur drug companies into creating new antibiotics. The Generating Antibiotic Incentives Now act, or GAIN, gives companies an additional five years of market-based exclusivity for drugs if they are produced for a “qualified infectious disease.”
“If you move to the post-antibiotic era, that means all of the advances of modern medicine could be reversed,” Cubist Pharmaceuticals’ Dr. Obi Umeh told CNBC. “Patients who had that infection in which there was no treatment option, they were in the post-antibiotic era.”
A USA Today study shows that the deadly MRSA bacteria are spreading far beyond hospitals.
The bacteria were commonly found in hospitals other health care facilities but did not impact the general population. Now, reports of the bacteria are being found in schools, workout clubs and even NFL locker rooms.
Researchers say MRSA’s ability to quickly develop immunity to drugs is hampering their ability to stop its spread. Despite a 30% decline in MRSA infections in health care facilities, there is little to no decline in community-based strains of the bacteria. Infections among children have jumped 10% a year because it can spread from two students simply bumping into each other in the hallway.
“We don’t really understand the origin of these [community based] strains,” Costi Sifri, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Virginia Health System., told the USA Today. “And we don’t really know how to contain them.”
Hospitals and doctors in most states are not required to report MRSA infections so groups like the CDC have had trouble monitoring outbreaks of the disease.
Researchers say the most effective way to stop MRSA is to develop a vaccine for staph infections. However, they say that a viable vaccine for the mass market is still years into the future.
The associate director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told PBS that the age of antibiotics has come to an end.
Dr. Arjun Srinivasan told PBS’s series Frontline that humans and livestock have been so overmedicated that bacteria have simply become resistant to the antibiotics currently on the market.
‘For a long time, there have been newspaper stories and covers of magazines that talked about “The end of antibiotics, question mark?”‘ Dr.Srinivasan said. ‘Well, now I would say you can change the title to “The end of antibiotics, period.”’
Dr. Srinivasan said that hospitals are now having patients admitted with infections that could be easily treated with antibiotics five years ago who have no effective treatment available. He also mentioned the increase in infections among places that in the past were not common places. For example, MRSA recently broke out in the locker room of the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Until about a decade ago, MRSA was mainly seen in hospitals.
The blame for the increase in antibiotic resistant bugs was attributed partially to overuse and abuse of antibiotics and drug manufacturers not creating new antibiotics because they are not a profitable line of research.
The Centers for Disease Control has conducted tests on the nine Alabama patients suffering from mysterious illnesses and has found that no single germ seems to be the cause. Continue reading →
A new report by the Centers for Disease Control shows 13 times as many Americans contracted a sexually transmitted infection in 2008 than obtained a college bachelor’s degree.
The rate of new infections in 2008 was 19.7 million, bringing the nation’s total to 110,197,000 total infections. By contract, the number of Americans who obtained a bachelor’s degree that year was 1,524,092. In the 15-to-24 age range, the ratio of infections to degrees was 6 to 1. Continue reading →
The Centers for Disease Control have confirmed the first cases of a completely drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis in South Africa. The CDC report is calling the infection “virtually untreatable.”
Tuberculosis is the second most fatal infectious disease worldwide after HIV. Continue reading →
A massive flu outbreak has hit the United States overwhelming hospitals to the point some have had to set up tents to handle the number of patients.
Lehigh Valley Cedar Crest Hospital has tents set up outside the emergency room because of the “increased number of people with flu-like symptoms” according to staff members. Continue reading →
