Infectious Diseases

Diseases reported to the Los Angeles County Department of Health: Year to Year to August, 1987 August, 1986 Date, 1987 Date, 1986 Intestinal Infections Amebiasis 34 62 293 307 Campylobacteriosis 95 122 729 745 Giardiasis 105 152 906 942 Salmonellosis 143 165 1,144 900 Shigellosis 120 179 739 720 Year to Year to August, 1987 August, 1986 Date, 1987 Date, 1986 Childhood diseases Mumps 3 6 42 43 Measles 2 2 17 37 German measles 3 6 35 29 Whooping cough 8 0 37 18 Scarlet fever 9 12 305 282 Year to

Duct tape – is there no end to its usefulness? Apparently not. Now we learn that using duct tape in hospitals could be a tool in the fight against infectious disease. Call it a handyman’s quarantine. An infection-prevention team at Trinity Medical Center in the Quad Cities along the Illinois and Iowa border, wanted to create safe zones in which healthcare workers could talk to patients with infectious diseases. So they used 3-foot squares of red duct tape to indicate where precisely that zone was located.

Life expectancy soared over the last part of the 20th century as treatments for major diseases improved and infectious diseases were quelled by vaccines and better treatment. The most recent data, however, hint that life expectancy is no longer growing. And, according to a new study, we may spend more years sick than we did even a decade ago. In a fascinating paper published Monday in the Journal of Gerontology , noted gerontologist Eileen Crimmins and her colleague Hiram Beltran-Sanchez, both of USC, suggest that the goal of a long life marked by mostly healthy years may not be possible for most of humanity.

Peering up into tree branches 100 feet above the floor of the jungle, Angela Maldonado spots a family of monkeys where someone with a less practiced eye would see nothing but a maze of brown and green foliage. "They're intelligent, charismatic creatures that express happiness, pain and grief. They make you feel what they are feeling," Maldonado said, squinting up at the rain forest canopy outside this sweltering Amazon port city. "They're a lot like us." Such empathy explains why Maldonado, a 36-year-old primate conservationist, has sought, as her lifework, to keep Colombia's night monkeys out of the hands of indigenous hunters who sell them to medical laboratories for infectious disease research.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has ordered state health and environmental agencies to continue to investigate a rash of birth defects that occurred in the small San Joaquin Valley town of Kettleman City. Five of 20 babies born in Kettleman City over a 14-month period had cleft lips or cleft palates, an unusually high rate compared with what's considered normal. Worldwide, cleft deformities occur in about 1 in every 700 live births, according to a November study in the journal the Lancet.

The current wave of pandemic H1N1 appears to have peaked, with four weeks of declines in several key indicators, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday. Despite the decrease, the outbreak is continuing to take a heavy toll of hospitalizations and deaths, especially among children. Widespread activity of H1N1, also called swine flu, was reported in 32 states -- including California -- in the week ending Nov. 21, down from 43 states the week before and 48 a month ago. Influenza-like illnesses accounted for 4.3% of all visits to doctors' offices during the week, down from nearly double that proportion in October.

Between 1.8 million and 5.7 million Americans caught pandemic H1N1 influenza this spring, as many as 21,000 were hospitalized, and perhaps 800 died, according to new estimates by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The revised numbers suggest that even larger numbers will become infected during this flu season. Estimates, as opposed to specific numbers, are the best data available. Many cases are not reported to public health authorities, and the CDC stopped requiring laboratory confirmation of new cases when labs were becoming overwhelmed.

Television news shows and newspaper headlines scream about the potential dangers of H1N1, also known as swine flu, and there you are, contemplating a trip for the upcoming holidays. So, you ask yourself: Am I safe from airborne germs in the confined cabin of a crowded passenger jet? The topic of air quality on airplanes has come up repeatedly this year, most noticeably when Vice President Joe Biden told a television audience last spring that he was advising family members to avoid confined spaces such as airplanes for fear of contracting the flu from a sneezing passenger.

U.S. troops set up a field hospital Tuesday and rerouted ships to aid victims of a powerful earthquake that left hundreds of thousands homeless, in their largest relief operation in Muslim-majority Indonesia since the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The expansion of the U.S. mission comes as efforts shifted from searching for survivors amid the rubble to providing relief to villages that have been cut off by massive landslides generated by last week's magnitude 7.6 quake. Aid workers from at least 20 countries focused on caring for the homeless, who huddled in makeshift shelters and cooked meager meals of rice and noodles over open fires or ate vegetables from their fields.

Nearly 2 million Americans could be hospitalized during this winter's novel H1N1 influenza pandemic, with as many as 300,000 clogging intensive care units in heavily affected regions, according to a report released Monday by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Overall, 20% to 40% of the population could develop symptoms of the strain commonly known as swine flu, and 30,000 to 90,000 could die, according to the report. During a normal flu season, the virus kills about 35,000 Americans.

In a sign of heightened concern that the upcoming flu season could be severe, top national and local health officials warned Wednesday that employers should brace for worker absences and cautioned the public that as many as three shots this season may be needed to protect against the H1N1 strain and seasonal flu. In Washington, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke urged that common sense take precedence over "the Puritan work ethic." He joined two other Cabinet secretaries to tell business owners to prepare for losing key employees to swine flu for days at a time.