A mystery virus that is causing polio-like symptoms in children has spread to southern California.
Lucian Olivera, 2, is the latest child to be confirmed to have the illness. Lucian was 11 months old when he had an ear infection before suddenly being unable to stand or use his legs.
Stanford University confirmed on Friday it was the mysterious virus.
Now, doctors are trying to determine if the weakness in the child’s legs is permanent.
“Really, it’s unknown the severity of this for each individual. The thought is that it is permanent, but we don’t know all the things that will happen to every patient,” Dr. John Dingilian said.
Olivera is wearing a brace on his legs and his parents are preparing that he may never be able to walk on his own.
The recent outbreak of measles in New York City appears to have a very unlikely source.
Hospitals.
The Department has confirmed their investigators are looking into the possibility that virus was spreading through waiting rooms packed with people waiting for the ER to become available to see them. Because the virus can be spread easily when someone coughs, a person infected with the virus could potentially expose hundreds while waiting for a doctor.
“Sometimes the doctors are not quick to recognize that it is measles and therefore before you know it that patient has been sitting in a waiting room with 20 or 30 people around them and now they are exposed because these types of diseases are very infectious,” said Dr. Manny Alvarez of Fox News Channel.
Emails were sent to staff at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center giving instructions to help staff better recognize the signs of measles and encouraging them to act quickly and appropriately.
A rare bacterium has been discovered at fish markets in multiple New York boroughs and has been confirmed to have infected at least 30 people.
Health officials say they do not know the source of the outbreak. The bacterium, Mycobacterium marinum, is common in fish but does not normally infect humans. Markets in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan have been found to have the bacterium.
The infection causes bumps under the skin or tender lesions. Once the bumps turn into open wounds, they won’t heal on their own. If the infections are not cleared at that point, they can go deeper into the skin and require surgery.
Dr. Jay Varma, deputy commissioner for disease control, said a part of the problem in finding the source is that the infection can take weeks to show even the most mild symptoms.
A doctor in the Chinatown section of New York said that many patients who came to him said they were infected at a site where they were cut by a fish bone. One victim said they had cut themselves on a lobster.
I have shared on the show how I am dealing with the fallout of some wild and crazy years when I was younger. This situation I now face with my health is requiring treatment that makes me physically ill – but will, in the long run, rid my body of this condition that is trespassing on God’s temple!
If you have watched our show, you know that Jim and I are not “religious” about the things of God, and we don’t put God in a box based on a certain way of thinking. That’s why we’re okay with however God chooses to deal with this affliction. God could heal me in a split second, but if He chooses the medicinal route, who am I to question His wisdom? He knows best in all things, and I trust Him with every aspect of my life, both now and forever.
I have always loved and trusted God, even in the crazy years. I know that sounds weird, but it’s true. God never left me, though I left Him for a season. He never stopped wooing me back, and He never stopped showing me that the path I was on was not what He intended for me. The prayers of my Mother and others came before the Lord constantly. Continue reading →
A hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina is apologizing for potentially exposing 18 patients to a rare and fatal disease.
Officials with Novant Health Forsyth Medical Center said Monday at a press conference that brain surgery patients have been exposed to Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease which kills 90 percent of patients within a year of showing symptoms.
“While the CDC categorizes such risks [of transmission] as ‘very low’, any risk of transmission is simply unacceptable,” Jeff Lindsay, president of the hospital, told reporters. “On behalf of the entire team, I apologize to the patients and their families for this anxiety.”
The instruments used in the brain surgery were sterilized using normal sterilization techniques but not the specialized procedures used for Cruetzfeldt-Jakob.
Amanda Morin, who had back surgery at the hospital and is one of the 18 potentally infected, told Fox News that she was “very, very angry something so little could cost me my life.”
The state Department of Health and Human Services said they are monitoring the situation.
It sounds like the plot of a thriller movie but it’s reality.
A “ghost ship” has been floating loose in the upper Atlantic Ocean and is believed to be heading to the British coast filled with aggressive, disease-ridden, cannibalistic rats.
The Lyubov Orlova was being towed by a second ship after it was seized from its previous owner because of unpaid debts. During the towing process, the boat broke free from the moorings and disappeared into the Atlantic. It has only been spotted from the air a few times and has sent out signals twice in March 2013 but then went silent.
Experts are now warning that the recent wave of severe storms throughout the region could be driving the ship directly into the British coast.
The belief comes from the fact the lifeboats attached to the ship have not activated indicating they have touched down in the ocean. If the ship had sunk, all the lifeboats would have had an emergency beacon activate.
If the ship were to make landfall, the disease infested rats could devastate the local rat population and be a major risk to humans for diseases like bubonic plague.
A new scientific report says that the toxic pollutants causing massive levels of smog in China has the ability to cross the Pacific Ocean and create air quality problems for the western United States.
The study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is the first time scientists have been able to quantify the amount of Chinese pollution making its way across the ocean. The study said that anywhere from 12% to 24% of the daily sulfate concentrations around Los Angeles is directly attributed to Chinese pollution related to exports.
The researchers say one of the biggest hazards is “black carbon.” Unlike other forms of air pollution, black carbon is not removed from the air by rain. The carbon has been found in valleys and holes in California. Black carbon is connected to asthma as well as cancer, emphysema and heart & lung disease.
Smog in China has reached levels that in parts of Beijing officials had to turn electronic billboards into replicas of the sun so that residents would know when dawn and sunset were happening around them.
The first death from the H5N1 Avian Flu in North America has been confirmed in Canada.
Canadian public health officials did not release the identity of the victim but said they had been in China before flying to Vancouver on December 27th. They had reported being ill when they were on the flight from Beijing.
The patient was admitted to the hospital on New Year’s Day and died two days later.
Officials have contacted everyone on the Beijing to Vancouver flight for immediate testing for H5N1 but believe there is a very low risk to the flight passengers because of the rarity of human-to-human transmission.
“The risk of getting H5N1 is very low,” Health Minister Rona Ambrose said. “This case is not part of the seasonal flu, which circulates in Canada every year.”
In addition to the flight passengers, close contacts of the victim and the healthcare workers that treated them are also being screened for the virus.
The Centers for Disease Control is focusing on a hospital in the Chicago suburbs were an outbreak of a deadly bacteria seems to be spreading.
The bacterium, called a “nightmare bacteria” by doctors, contains a special rare enzyme that allows it to break down antibiotics.
The bacteria is known as carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae. The superbug lives in the intestines and can be spread by fecal matter.
The CDC reports they have only been able to document 97 cases of infection by the bacteria since 2009…but 44 have been connected over the last year to this one Chicago area hospital.
Officials say that as many as 250 patients were potentially exposed to the bacteria during an endoscopy procedure. Only 114 of the patients returned to be tested for the disease.
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.
