Even though this is a public health site, it seems that more people have been led here by the formerly freakishly thin-waisted,

Head, thorax, abdomen...

animal-loving,

buck-toothed,

From an appearance on Hii-Hâ

and proud  hate-speech spewer (several times arrested and fined)

In her defense, she did say: "Apart from my husband—who maybe will cross over one day as well—I am entirely surrounded by homos. For years, they have been my support, my friends, my adopted children, my confidants."

than by any other source.

WE KNOW that it would be mean-spirited and even provincially gringoish to disparage a great cultural icon and source of pride to the Gallic heart. We just want to give our readers more of what they want, with the ulterior motive of promoting public health.

With that in mind, we provide this link to an article on the movement to address Neglected Tropical Diseases.

Assassin Bugs on the Beach

And now, …

http://themetabug.com/2012/02/09/jews-we-wish-were-gentile-volume-iia/

> 10^3 Words

For the rest of the photo essay from Foreign Policy, click here.

So can a big one, if it's a body louse and not a head louse.

There are few very important things to know about lice.

First of all, lice are very species specific. Cattle lice (there are 4 common kinds in the United States) do not infect sheep. Sheep lice do not infect hogs. And what ever Rick Santorum’s current anxieties are, no species of animal lice infects people. I am sure that he will sleep better knowing this.

Secondly, lice are often quite specific to an area of the body. Human head lice (Pediculis capitis humanus) stay on the head. They do not like moving towards the torso. They like to lay their eggs on hair.

Picture from Wikimedia Commons

Body lice–Pediculus humanus humanus, or sometimes Pediculus humanis corporis–are indistinguishable from head lice, yet except in the laboratory, they will not breed with head lice. They prefer to lay eggs in clothing, especially along the seams. (Bad infestations, therefore, can be prevented by avoiding clothing.)

Thirdly, there is an  important distinction between head lice and body lice from an epidemiological point of view. Head lice really don’t cause any serious problems. Kids get sent home from school, squeamish parents lose it and stay up all night itching–even though they are not infested–and the washing machine and vacuum cleaner do overtime. However, other than the chaos and the irrational panic, there is little to worry about.

Body lice, on the other hand, are the vector for some rather serious diseases.

Epidemic typhus

Spread in the feces of lice (like Chagas’ Disease), epidemic typhus is caused by infection with the bacteria Rickettsia prowazekii. Typhus is one of the reasons that, at least until our last couple of wars, more death to soldiers and civilians during conflicts has been caused  by germs and disease than by bullets, cannonballs, spears, arrows, bayonets, bombs…..

Trench Fever

Caused by the bacteria Bartonella quintana, trench fever is described as a “moderately serious” disease, and though rarely lethal, was responsible for yet another of the epidemics that plagued soldiers during the War to End All Wars. It is not to be confused with Trench Mouth or Trench Foot, both of which also plagued soldiers in the First World War.

Louse-Borne Relapsing Fever

Caused by Borrelia recurrentis, relapsing fever occurs epidemically in areas of poverty and deprivation. It is currently prevalent in Sudan. If left untreated, mortality rates can reach 30%-70%

Take home message: Head lice don’t cause disease, and war, poverty, and deprivation are bad for your health.

Keep Smiling!

I WAS LIVING in South Carolina when I escaped the  first invasion of  head lice. I was working as a relief veterinarian (9th inning, generally, extra if it was all tied up) all over Georgia and the Carolinas, when my then-girlfriend discovered the wages of volunteering to work with minors, which she did regularly (no good deed goes unpunished).  I laughed from wherever it was on the coast I was spaying kitties and giving dogs vaccinations they actually needed, while back in our Appalachian mountain home my dutiful live-in girlfriend and KB, our boarder, shampooed, picked, vacuumed and did the wash. (Was my absence during this period of duress a critical factor in the eventual demise of our relationship? I can only wonder. Note to self: breakups can be achieved by liberally sprinkling pillowcases with lice and nits, then leaving for a week. Avoids uncomfortable talk about not being communicative and leaving toilet seat up.) By the time I came back from yet another marathon session of animal care,  once again brain-softened from the smell of disinfectant and exhausted and grouchy from sleepless nights in motels,  there was nary a nit nor a louse to be found.

We are talking about head lice here, causative agent Pediculus capitis humanus. Over the years I have devised a scale of  the relative disgust caused by various infectious agents. It’s not really very useful for anything medically, except it does have some social utility. For example, you may discuss a Lyme disease infection at the dinner table, but talks of your child’s pinworms, however benign they may seem to you, will cause people to put down their forkfuls of vermicelli, no matter how tasty.

In any case, the general rule of  the Disgust Scale is that infections go in the following order of rising disgust:

1. Viral infections, such as a cold or influenza

2.Bacterial infections, such as Lyme disease or bacterial pneumonia

3.Fungal infections, such as ringworm or athlete’s foot.

4. Parasitic infections, such as Guinea worm or intestinal roundworms.

Obviously, this is just a general rule, and has nothing to do with the alarm provoked by a disease, or by its actual seriousness. A case of flesh-eating bacteria is clearly both more serious and more off-putting than a case of ringworm (which is neither ringed nor a worm, cf. Cavius porcellus, or the Guinea pig). A case of herpes labialis vs. strep throat? You be the judge.

Also obvious is that there is variation within each of these categories, even with the type of parasite. For example, while head lice infestations are disturbing, body lice infestations are downright gross. And crab lice? I haven’t heard these brought up at afternoon tea since I was in college.

TO BE CONTINUED….

ALSO:

On our New Year’s Day post we failed to identify, the lovely Sharmila Tagore, a Bollywood queen of the ’60s, shone here in a picture from her film Evening in Paris,  waterskiing down the Champs-Élysées.

May your year be…

As I mentioned, I support the Occupy movements for the most part. There does exist anti-Zionist faction that drives me to distraction, but my hopes are that domestic solidarity will suffice for most, and that we will abandon the need to identify with every group that we perceive as downtrodden. If we do have to pick a nation upon which to lavish our sympathy, my vote will be for the Congo.

Politics, however, are the purview of the Meta-Bug, and here we try to stay focused on health matters (and drinks and dishes). And the health matter at Occupy Boston that has me grinding my (unstained nonsmoker’s) teeth is the high rate of smoking that is going on at Dewey Square. Of course, if someone wants to fill his or her lungs with a foul and loathsome gas chock full o’ carcinogens, that is more or less that person’s right. However,  second-hand smoke is so noxious that even outdoors it is capable of causing damage, irritating the airways of asthmatics and exposing others to its risks.

Alas, Occupy Boston has been unable to designate a separate area for smokers, at least by the time of my last visit. “That would be segregation,” complained one  fuzzy young smoker, obviously quite annoyed that someone would suggest segregation at an Occupy campsite. I tried to engage the smoker, explaining that separating people by behaviors which they could control, behaviors that could harm others, was not the same as segregating people by the color of their skin or the gods to whom they prayed.

In the end I think it came down to smokers just not wanting to give up their smokes. Now I can understand that living for days at a time on what is essentially a traffic island, attending General Assemblies for hours at a time, and eating cold donated food for a few weeks could engender an enormous desire to light up. But saying that smokers while smoking shouldn’t be kept at a distance from non-smokers is anti-science, and turns a back on the hard-fought and enormous gains made in public health by working to restrict smoking.

It reflects poorly on the Occupy movement not that they smoke, but that Occupy smokers believe that it is there right to put out second-hand smoke without restriction. The Occupy smokers should just admit that they are addicts and that they need their fix. What’s really at issue is the ability to reflect on one’s own behavior, and be as critical of it as one is of the behavior of others.

On Aug. 8th, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) hosted a ceremony at its headquarters in Rome to officially announce that the rinderpest virus had been eradicated. This marked the resolution of decades of coordinated effort to combat what had been, for centuries and possibly millenia, the most devastating and dreaded bovine virus. It now goes down in history as the only the second virus to ever be successfully eradicated.

Rinderpest had imposed a horrific toll on both animals and the communities reliant on them for commerce and sustenance. The most recent major outbreak in the early 1980s spread across much of Africa and cost at least $500 million in direct losses. Rinderpest, like many similar diseases, disproportionately ravaged less developed nations which depend more heavily on animals for food and draft power. While much of the recent history of rinderpest outbreaks can be measured in chiefly financial terms, the virus has contributed to extraordinary human suffering.

When it was introduced to Africa by Italians importing Indian cattle, the resulting outbreak killed an estimated 90 percent of the local cattle population. It also contributed to the Great Ethiopian Famine of 1892, which resulted in fatalities estimated to be as high as one-third of the country’s population. Local communities lost not only the animals they depended on for meat and dairy products for sale and consumption, but also the beasts of burden necessary for the tilling of fields and transportation of crops and goods. The huge number of cattle and oxen carcasses also helped provide the unsanitary conditions that fostered one of the worst regional outbreaks of cholera and small pox.

The eradication of rinderpest removes one more source of poverty and misery in the world. Of equal importance, it establishes that the eradication of small pox was not a one-off event, and that eradication efforts against other diseases can be successful. The campaign against small pox had been extraordinary, warranted by the extraordinary costs it had imposed on humanity throughout history. Edward Jenner, the man who discovered the first small pox vaccine, called it “the most dreadful scourge of the human species,” and with good reason. It was responsible for 300 million deaths in the 20th century alone, and as late as 18th century killed one of every seven children born in Russia, and one of every ten born in France or Sweden. It is responsible for more human deaths than any other virus, and far more than all human wars combined. As late as 1967, when the global initiative to eradicate it was restructured under the World Health Organization, it threatened 60 percent of the global population.

Today, the first time the average American student will encounter it is in an immunology class at their university or the OpenCourseWare of an online school. It is academic, or a curiosity, rather than a real threat. The eradication of both rinderpest and small pox was made possible due to successful regional elimination efforts combined with international coordination. The fact remains, however, that a live strain anywhere is a threat to everyone everywhere. In 1976, rinderpest had been contained to just three countries. The resulting complacency allowed for a massive spread of rinderpest throughout Africa and East and South Asia, including the aforementioned 1984 outbreak. This is a strong reminder of the importance of the total eradication of a virus in comparison to simple elimination. It also highlights the severe obstacles posed to eradication effort by regional underdevelopment and conflicts.

In 1998, Sir Gordon R. Scott of the Center for Tropical Veterinary Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, who was a longtime leader in the effort, gave a bleak appraisal of the prospects for rinderpest eradication based on a concern that still resonates today:

The major obstacle is man’s inhumanity to man. Rinderpest thrives in a milieu of armed conflict and fleeing refugee masses. Until world peace is secured, the nays win the argument.

Even though rinderpest was successfully eradicated, and the last naturally occurring case was only three years after Scott’s assessment, rinderpest repeatedly defied prior eradication efforts and had rebounded after being isolated in regions were people suffered from deprivation and violence. So had small pox. So does polio today. While polio cases are extremely rare and present in just a handful of countries, even a handful of cases can turn into a fresh epidemic if proper care is not taken. The decade of observation from the last case of rinderpest in 2001 to the announcement of eradication in 2011 was justified because as an eradication initiative winds down, so does the production of vaccines and the sense of urgency by governments and NGOs. During this period, a renewed outbreak poses an even greater risk because the resources to manage it have been dramatically reduced. This makes conflict zones and persistent humanitarian disaster areas a very real threat to the welfare of the rest of the world. Ignoring them is both a strategic and moral failing.

It’s important to look back on both our prior victories and our prior hardships. For the former, we are reminded of how severely and utterly devastating a viral outbreak can be, and by extension we are encouraged to be more vigilant. For the latter, we are reminded of what we have accomplished, through cooperation, coordination, and extraordinary effort and sacrifice. Small pox plagued our species, and claimed lives so routinely that it became a fact of life for much of the world. Today, its absence is just as taken for granted. With any luck, polio will soon be just as forgotten, as will many other formerly devastating diseases, once they are truly eradicated.

This question has been bandied about for a more than a decade now. The problem with the test is that is doesn’t seem to predict who is at risk for dying of prostate cancer. On the other hand, a test can cause a man to undergo unnecessary diagnostics and surgery, and result in impotence and incontinence. (This is bad because men like sex, and don’t like peeing in their pants.)

Is this the whole story?

BY THE WAY, HAITI IS STILL REELING FROM CHOLERA

Doctors with Borders reports that cases of cholera are increasing in Port-au-Prince.

HAVING A HEART ATTACK WHILE WEARING MY PINK BUSTIER

My son’s Sports Illustrated:Kids arrived the past week, with an NFL player resplendent in a pink football uniform. The latest edition of our local weekly newspaper was tinted pink. Products from hand cream to gloves are being marketed in pink, in order that we increase our awareness of breast cancer. Which makes me wonder: Is there any way, other than the government mandating an hourly pledge of allegiance to the war on breast cancer, that we could increase our awareness of breast cancer?

Don’t get me wrong–breast cancer is a scourge that afflicts an enormous number of women, and therefore requires attention and vigilance. However, heart disease is the number one killer of women, and there are three times as many non-breast cancer  conditions that sicken and kill women as breast cancer . At this point in our history,  is there really a lack of awareness of breast cancer? Off the top of your head, can you tell me what is the third major cause of death in US females?

Didn’t think so.

IT’S TIME TO GET YOUR FLU VACCINE