Zoonotic Infections News

Ted Eickhoff understood the intersection of public health and the infectious disease practitioner, effectively using his editorial pulpit at Infectious Disease News to promote dialogue and discourse on the rapidly changing circumstances that would dictate public health policy. He recognized the ever-evolving microbial world’s impact on not only the individual patient, but on the community at large, and remained at the forefront, ensuring that infectious disease practitioners received needed information in a timely manner so they could remain staunch public health partners. A profession is traditionally defined by its common body of knowledge. As with the 1910 Flexner Report that proved revolutionary for medical education in the United States, the 1915 Welch-Rose report presented to the General Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation outlined public health as a profession in which “Unity is to be found rather in the end to be accomplished. ... Public Health is not a single profession in the traditional sense and is best defined by its shared goals rather than its disparate means. Articulating who we are and what we do remains one of our greatest challenges.”

Antimicrobial stewardship efforts and infection control and prevention begin with surveillance. ASM Microbe 2018 featured updates from several major, global surveillance studies. As reported by SENTRY, the Canadian Ward Surveillance (CANWARD) study and Program to Assess Ceftolozane-Tazobactam Susceptibility (PACTS), the gram-negative bacteria Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Acinetobacter baumannii and Klebsiella pneumoniae were among the most common pathogens collected at medical centers worldwide, across eight Canadian provinces, in United States ICUs, and among hematology-oncology patients in Europe.

Dogs are man’s best friend, but recent reports served as a reminder that they carry bacteria in their saliva that can cause disease, and even death, in humans.

Douglas Jordan

To combat the risk of antimicrobial resistance in animals, the FDA announced that it is pushing for better antimicrobial stewardship in veterinary settings.

Changchun Changshen Life Sciences Ltd., a vaccine developer located in Changchun, China, has distributed approximately 250,000 substandard vaccines intended for the prevention of diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis in children, according to the Chinese state media outlet CGTN .

Yellow fever virus and its mosquito vector, Aedes aegypti, arrived in Barbados in 1647 from forests in Africa — where it still is endemic — via the slave trade and quickly spread to other Caribbean islands. Twenty-five major outbreaks subsequently occurred in the United States. Probably the most famous of these outbreaks happened in Philadelphia, which at that time was the U.S. capital. The first outbreak occurred there in 1793 and left 5,000 people dead out of a population of 50,000. Other significant outbreaks in the U.S. occurred over a nearly 100-year period: Savannah, Georgia, in 1820; New Orleans in 1853; Norfolk, Virginia, in 1855; Texas and Louisiana in 1867; and the Lower Mississippi Valley in 1878. That is ancient U.S. history, so why worry now?

The Angiostrongylus cantonensis parasite, otherwise known as rat lungworm, was found in an adult mother and son in China who consumed raw centipedes, according to study results recently published in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

Recent findings from a randomized controlled trial in Laos showed azithromycin is inferior to doxycycline as oral therapy for uncomplicated murine typhus.

At live bird markets, the risk for avian influenza is higher among workers at large retail markets, women workers, and workers who clean, slaughter, defeather and eviscerate poultry, according to results of a recent meta-analysis.