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Casey Finnerty

What Happens When Parents Are Rude in the Hospital - The New York Times - 0 views

  • “All the collaborative mechanisms and things that make a team a team, rather than four individuals working separately, were damaged by the exposure to rudeness.”
  • After such a comment, the teams performed significantly worse in the simulated patient emergencies. Their diagnostic skills deteriorated, and so did their technical procedural abilities, from ventilating and resuscitating the artificial babies properly to ordering and giving the right medications. Both doctors and nurses tended to perform worse individually. They also worked less effectively as teams, as far as communicating and helping one another take care of the sick “patient.”
Casey Finnerty

Disappearing Seagrass Protects Against Pathogens, Even Climate Change, Scientists Find ... - 0 views

  • Seagrass meadows, among the most endangered ecosystems on Earth, play an outsize role in the health of the oceans.
  • The plants also fight disease, it turns out. A team of scientists reported on Thursday that seagrasses can purge pathogens from the ocean that threaten humans and coral reefs alike.
  • But the meadows are vanishing at a rate of a football field every 30 minutes.
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  • In one survey, they collected seawater and put it in petri dishes to see if colonies of disease-causing bacteria known as Enterococcus grew from the samples.
  • In a second search, the scientists grabbed fragments of DNA floating in seawater.
  • Water from the seagrass meadows had only half the level of this DNA, compared with water collected at other sites.
  • Reefs next to seagrass meadows, they found, were half as diseased as those without meadows.
  • Seagrass meadows can release so much oxygen that the surrounding water fizzes like champagne. That oxygen might be able to kill pathogens, Dr. Lamb realized. The plants also host fungi, which are known to producing bacteria-killing compounds.
  • Their research points to two main culprits. Eroded dirt washes into the Chesapeake, making the water cloudy. Seagrass get so little sunlight that the resulting dimming can be deadly.
  • Seagrass is also being pummeled by climate change. Warmer summer temperatures in Chesapeake Bay cause the plants to lose much of their oxygen through their leaves. With less oxygen to pump into their roots, they are poisoned by toxic sediments.
Casey Finnerty

Flawed herpes testing leads to false positives, and needless suffering - 0 views

  • Up to 1 in 2 positive tests could be false, according to the USPSTF’s most recent guidelines.
Casey Finnerty

HEALTH - Healing Treatment, 4,000 Years Old, Is Revived - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    A good story on the treatment of packing infected wounds with sugar
Casey Finnerty

H. Boyd Woodruff, Microbiologist Who Paved Way for Antibiotics, Dies at 99 - The New Yo... - 0 views

  • In high school, he considered becoming an architect but, he later recalled, decided he wanted to be a chemist after taking an experimental course that encouraged “unexpected smells and disruptions of nearby classes,” he wrote in the Annual Review of Microbiology in 1981.
  • During that suit, Dr. Waksman said that in isolating streptothricin, Dr. Woodruff had contributed “as much as 20 times” more than Dr. Schatz to the later discovery of streptomycin,
  • “The studies of Albert Schatz in his discovery of streptomycin,” he said, “were dependent on the initial antibiotic demonstration by Boyd Woodruff that one could isolate soil microorganisms, culture them and recover inhibitory compounds from them.”
Casey Finnerty

Resistance to the Antibiotic of Last Resort Is Silently Spreading - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • farmers started using it by the tons in animals, where low doses of antibiotics can promote growth.
  • November 18, 2015, scientists published a report in the British medical journal The Lancet: A single, easily spreadable gene makes the bacteria that carry it resistant to colistin, our antibiotic of last resort.
  • Chinese scientists had found this gene, called mcr-1, in pig farms and on meat in supermarkets.
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  • By the time anyone had figured out mcr-1’s existence, it had already spread around the world.  
Casey Finnerty

We Will Miss Antibiotics When They're Gone - The New York Times - 0 views

  • more than 23,000 people in the United States are estimated to die every year from resistant bacteria.
  • Yet few new antibiotics are in development. Most large drug companies have fled the field. The reason is simple: To conserve their effectiveness, new antibiotics are put on the shelf to be used only when older antibiotics stop working. That makes perfect sense for public health, but companies can’t make a profit on what they can’t sell.
Casey Finnerty

A superbug that resisted 26 antibiotics | Minnesota Public Radio News - 0 views

  • a woman in Nevada who died of an incurable infection, resistant to all 26 antibiotics available in the U.S. to treat infection.
  • as people cross borders and board airplanes, the bacteria spread in the same way that brought CRE to Reno.
  • all hospitals should double down on preventive efforts, including a travel history.
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  • But in this case, there was no effective antibiotic. "And we're going to see more of these, from a drip, drip, drip of cases to a steady drizzle to a rainstorm," predicts Johnson. "It's scary, but it's good to get scared if that motivates action."
  • The action needed is to use antibiotics wisely, in people and in animals, so strains of bacteria don't get a chance to develop resistance, says Johnson. And to continue research into development of new antibiotics.
Casey Finnerty

First criminal trial in deadly fungal meningitis outbreak begins Monday - 0 views

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    "First criminal trial in deadly fungal meningitis outbreak begins Monday"
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