The Real Charlie

Typhus and the Mumps

No, don't worry, I don't have either. But good old Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report has news on both of these diseases, in a nice break from "all flu all the time."

Murine typhus: a nasty flea-borne disease, usually treatable with antibiotics, related to but different than epidemic typhus, which is lice borne, and was what killed Anne Frank. This outbreak is from Austin, Texas, where people caught it from cats that caught it from opossums. Beware the marsupial!

Mumps: an outbreak of an old scourge that is becoming more common because of people not getting the full MMR series for their kids. The neat feature of this particular mumps outbreak: it occurred among an unnamed Orthodox Jewish community and its spread basically maps out Orthodox life in the northeast: brought to camp in the Catskills by a kid from the UK, spread to Borough Park, Monsey, Kiryas Joel and Ocean County, NJ (Lakewood) once camp was over and school started, then to Quebec over Sukkot.

MMWR always leaves us with a moral or two, in this case I suggest, once more, that you and your kids get shots, and that you stay away from opossums. The overriding moral, as always, is that MMWR is a fine example of our tax dollars at work. And I mean that in all sincereity, sarcastic libertarian though I may be.

Various Updates on All and Sundry

Time to catch up on things here at the old blog, much neglected now that I am a Facebooker. I'm noticing my Facebook updates getting a bit too wordy, which probably means I need the longer format of the blog again. Can I shoot to be on here once or twice a week? I should try.

1. The chickens were a lot of fun. Roxanne helped me put them into their coop at night, and Stella joined me to let them out in the morning. They liked eating yogurt and tearing up my lawn. But over two weeks, I got precisely zero eggs. I suspect that my neighborhood was not fancy enough for these birds, used to life in swanky Weston, Massachusetts. I saw some chickens at another house last week and it made me miss my poultry.
2. The new home office is coming along very slowly. Much more cleaning out is needed, especially of books. I need to get rid of a lot of books, and am actually considering bringing a box of them to work, letting colleagues take what they want, and then giving the rest to the town library for their book sale. Downside: my colleagues will see some of the crap that I read. Can I say that all the bad and obscure military history books were Abby's?
3. MMWR is very focused on the Swine Flu (or novel H1N1 influenza as they call it) but still occasionally shares some information on more esoteric sources of human death and injury. Like farmers getting killed by their own cows. And people giving themselves hepatitis by taking herbal remedies for suspected parasites. Your tax dollars at work. And I mean that as a good thing.

I'll leave the assortment there for tonight. I think I owe my few remaining readers an investment update, perhaps I'll post that tomorrow night.

Mostly Not About Swine Flu

So it's been far too long. Facebook has proven to be a major suck of personal computing time away from this blog, and my hesitancy about blogging on a few topics that might be vaguely work related has also kept me away. But it is time to get back here and get back in touch with the oversharing diarist and pseudo-journalist inside of me.

Back in the day I used to blog quite a bit about Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a truly charming CDC publication chock full of disease, injury and accident related news you can use. Right now, not surprisingly, it is a lot of swine flu updates. But there are some other good tidbits, like this report on the "fun" that results when you have a day camp at a petting zoo. Because sometimes frequent handwashing just isn't enough...

And as if flu from a pig or diarrhea from the farm animals isn't enough, there was this report on pet related injuries a weeks back. Best statistic: 2/3 of cat-related injuries occur when people trip over their cats. This is why I have houseplants, and prefer my "domestic ruminants" well-done.

Strep and Mexican Cheese

Last Friday I started to feel really run down at work. I thought that I was having a Lyme disease relapse - I get this from time to time - but I powered on through the day and got home. We celebrated Stella's birthday (yay two years!) and after that I collapsed. I didn't even eat dinner. I woke up on Saturday with a 102 temperature and a sore throat. My sister spent most of her childhood with strep or recovering from it (and eventually got her tonsils out, which ended the problem forever), so I knew the signs. I went to urgent care (my doctor doesn't swab on Shabbos), got the throat culture and the penicillin, and went home. I am 80% better today, but bizarrely, my culture came back negative! The doctor said to keep taking the penicillin, the test was probably incorrect. Maybe I have stealth strep? As usual, I blame my two little petri dishes for bringing me this little gift from one of their play dates.

In other news, MMWR warns us, again, of the dangers of unpasteurized cheese. This time, drug-resistant salmonella from Mexican-style cheese. Not cheddar. But eating cheese from your local corner market is still safer than eating a dead beached whale. In the same issue: fishing fatalities. To the fisherman, not the fish. That wouldn't be news.

Guinea Worm, Bad Tuna and Abby

A good MMWR this week. The lead story talks about the effort to eradicate the truly disgusting disease of dracunculiasis, or Guinea Worm Disease. It is disgusting (think meter long worms in the skin) and totally preventable. It still exists because it is a difficult to treat disease of poor African people. If people in Brookline caught it it'd have been cured 100 years ago. We seem to be slowly getting rid of it, and not a moment too soon. Another piece talks about scombroid, a kind of food poisoning that one gets from tuna or mackerel that has gotten too warm. Also gross, and easily preventable by keeping fish cold after it is caught. My years working at Harvard School of Public Health taught me that prevention is the key to good health so often as in these cases. Or as my old t-shirt from HSPH says, what didn't you die from today?

And on a happier, less wormy note, congratulations to my darling Abby, whose work in a group exhibit at the Three Graces Gallery in Portsmouth, New Hampshire (Live Free Or Die!) is featured in the local paper this week. Check it out here, and check out the show if you have a chance. And buy, please, so I can be supported by my wife's art in an opulent lifestyle to which I will rapidly become accustomed. It's that or Stella becomes a starting pitcher, or Roxanne starts a successful hedge fund. Um, scratch that last idea. I better keep my day job.

Save me from the wee turtles!

Classic MMWR article this week. It combines a dangerous disease, an unusual vector, illegality and good old fashioned hectoring. The disease? Salmonellosis. The vector? Small pet turtles. Illegality? You're not supposed to sell small turtles as pets, but they are easily purchased at flea markets, etc. Hectoring? Dig in.

The best part about the article is that I get to quote Groundskeeper Willie.

Antibiotics

Three recent readings/events have me thinking about antibiotics:

1) This article on WBUR (via Universal Hub) about the easy and illegal access to antibiotics over the counter in grocery stores in many immigrant communities.

2) This week's MMWR article on gonorrhea, which has grown so resistant to antibiotics that only one widely available drug is effective against it in the United States.

3) My recent visit to the pediatrician with Roxanne for her third (!) ear infection of the winter. She is sort of allergic to one antibiotic, another we just used and may or may not have worked, and there is only one other that they can use anymore due to resistance.

Very scary. Anytime my categories are MMWR and Real Real Daddy it is not a good scene.

Springtime, Drivetime, Salmonella Time

Spring is coming. It is definitely not here. In New England, there is a long period that is not really spring, but not winter anymore either. We are in it right now. So today was fairly warm, but tonight is quite chilly, for example. I track it with birds, too, and it was nicely illustrated on my drive into the office this morning.

Winter: I saw Juncos in my yard this morning. Classic winter bird. Once they're gone, it is spring.
Spring: The song sparrows are singing up a storm behind my office.

Winter: There is nothing to eat in the woods, so the wild turkeys in Chestnut Hill were marching along on the newly capped ash dump off Hammond Pond Parkway today, eating something in the grass.
Spring: There are robins everywhere, pulling worms out of the damp, thawing lawns.

You get the picture.

In other avian news, MMWR has a nice report this week on salmonella outbreaks caused by handling baby chicks. This is not a new problem, it is a well known problem, yet it seems to persist. The article describes three outbreaks. In one, the reason why people bought the chicks is not described. In another, most of the people bought the chicks as a source of food or eggs (a reasonable enough reason to buy chickens, I reckon). In the third case, some person brought baby chicks to a daycare for the children to play with and nine kids got sick. My daughter would love to play with baby chicks, and she'd have a blast, and it would be adorable, but I'd love to fly an F-22, break the sound barrier and fire off a few missiles, and that isn't happening either, for the same reason: the Man won't let me. Wait, that has nothing to do with baby chicks. What was I talking about again? Oh, baby chicks. Don't touch 'em.

Dirty Milk and Dirty Work

Last week's MMWR (I promised a weekend update, I know, but Roxanne was all out of sorts over Purim and her upcoming birthday and just sort of suck the wind out of my sails) had a good piece on people getting e. coli infections from milk. The milk in question is unpasteurized milk bought from a "cow share" program on an unlicensed and uninspected farm. There are like five kinds of wrong going on here. While I am not so foolish as to assume that all of my industrial food is pure and clean, I do like knowing that some of the basics of modern animal husbandry and food chain management, like pasteurization, are going on, especially in the milk that I feed to my children. Why take the chance, especially with milk, which is basically just cow juice anyway?

In related news, my workplace is experiencing an outbreak of a gastrointestinal illness among our patients and clinical staff. I'll be vague about the details due to Ground Rule #2 and the delicate stomachs of you, the reading public. Suffice to say: not a good scene. It is oddly quiet on the halls, with most people confined to their rooms or floors, few visitors and most events canceled. And I. like most of my colleagues, have become an obsessive hand washer. I don't even touch the elevator buttons with my hands - perversely, I use a spare black yarmulke that I keep in my briefcase in the not rare event that I need to attend a funeral on short notice as a prophylactic -  and I have a big canister of Clorox wipes on my desk, leftovers from Roxanne's days on the little potty. Just charming. 

Lions Rampant

One nice things about having a very bright, very inquisitive young child is that her interests make me do things and see things that I would not ordinarily do or so. Two examples this weekend: on Saturday morning Roxanne and I visited the library in search of books on Hopi Katsinas. I have several in my house and she is just obsessed with them: she knows their names in Hopi and English, makes up stories about them and loves to look at pictures of other Katsinas as well. Feeling like it was all a bit decontextualized and vaguely culturally imperialistic (see that Amherst education at work?) I wanted her to learn about the people who made the Katsinas and their way of life. The nice children's librarian helped us find some great books, a little above her level but  appropriate and interesting.

Later, we went to temple for an end of Shabbat Havdalah service and at one point Roxanne pointed up and squealed "Look, daddy, dere day are! Lions rampant!" Sure enough, a silver menorah displayed in a case by the coat room was graced with a pair of lions rampant. Roxanne knows that lions rampant "stand up and say roar" while lions passant "just walk by." Maybe this is all about what I've chosen to teach my child, actually.

In other news, a friend of The Real Charlie has suggested (in so many words) that on weak MMWR weeks (such as this one) I run "clips shows" of classics from the past - people getting staph from weights at the gym, trichnosis from eating raw bear liver, anything about getting sick from eating whales or fermented seal flipper, etc. I am undecided. Meanwhile, let me note that norovirus (aka "winter vomiting") is rampant ("roar!") in Boston these days, so hit the Purell, folks.