Group items tagged

The strategy worked so well, Dr. Hopkins said, that Sierra Leone was smallpox-free in less than two years.

When programs are well run, he said, progress can be rapid; Ghana went from 501 cases to none in 18 months.

Rogobo, you make a welcome and important point. But reality is that this topic seems to give rise to insult because it has high stakes (precious cargo on board! kids! death and disease). If you think it's hard to hear a message while people are shouting insults, what's it like being deaf because your mummy got rubella while pregnant? I would put it like this: Notion 1: A world without effective serious infection vaccine is uglier and less pleasant than the alternative (polio, anyone?).  Notion 2: At a population level, vaccines improve outcomes more than they harm them.  Notion 3: At a population level, improved outcomes and the prospect of eradication is dependent on high individual participation. Notion 4: At an individual level, there is some risk associated with vaccination. Notion 5: Healthy people not taking the risks of vaccination are: (a) free riding on those who are taking the risks; (b) reducing the prospect of eradication; (c) increasing the prospect of passing infection to those medically incapable of taking the risk Notion 6: Individual liberty and freedom to choose might sometimes be trumped by requirements of public welfare Happy to have any of those notions challenged and discussed

is actually one of the last Guinea worms on earth.

Instead of trying to vaccinate the whole country, teams would race to new outbreaks, vaccinating around each in widening circles until it died out.

In a roundabout way, the C.I.A. has been blamed for the Pakistan killings.

The killings, with eerie echoes of attacks that killed nine female polio workers in Pakistan in December, represented another serious setback for the global effort to eradicate polio.

Since the vaccine ruse in Pakistan, she said, “Frankly, now, I can’t go to them and say, ‘The C.I.A. isn’t involved.’ ”

susceptibilities of the multiple-drug resistant strain of S. aureus to deuteroporphyrin and to hemin were tested. The effect of the addition of porphyrins, separately and together, to a logarithmic culture was determined from the viable count of S. aureus over an 8 h period.

This work confirmed that a deuteroporphyrin-hemin complex is a potent killer of a multiple-antibiotic resistant S. aureus in culture

This complex was able to reduce the number of bacteria by six orders of magnitude within 8 h. By using this complex, which is light independent, we have overcome the problem of light penetration to the subeschar space.

But in the first procedure of its kind, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, managed to pinpoint the cause of Joshua’s problem — within 48 hours. He had been infected with an obscure species of bacteria. Once identified, it was eradicated within days.