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A recent outbreak of whooping cough is now officially an epidemic in California. Almost 1,000 cases of it have been reported, five of them lethal. All five deaths were of infants, under the two-month vaccination age.
Though West Nile virus is a potentially deadly virus, thankfully incidences of cases are on the decline.
We often think of tuberculosis—if we think of it at all—as mostly eradicated. So much so that when a student in Silver Spring, MD recently came down with a confirmed case of active TB, it made national news.
This spring, over 300 people dining at the venerable Harvard Faculty Club became ill with a norovirus,. The infection can be transmitted directly from person to person, but it is far more often spread through food which has been contaminated with the germs of someone infected with the disease.
The odds a person will be diagnosed with tetanus in a year are 1 in 7,302,000. You’re more than twice as likely to die falling out of a tree (1 in 3,290,000).
In Germany circa 1812, a Dr. Justinus Kerner—a physician and poet—began to notice an unusual phenomenon. Dozens of villagers (76 by Kerner's count) in the town of Welzheim were coming down with a mysterious illness.
Meningitis outbreaks make headlines for two reasons. First, the disease can progress at breakneck speed. Some who catch it initially seem only mildly sick; hours later, they are hospitalized—often facing life-threatening complications like vein collapse, gangrene, and organ failure.
In the spring of 1981, physicians in California and New York City became alarmed at the sudden appearance of multiple infections and oddly weakened immune systems among a small group of previously healthy gay men. The median survival rate of those men was 12 months.
It’s annoying to hear the high, thin whine of a mosquito just as you’re falling asleep and realize that you may wake up scratching. On the upside, you have virtually no chance of contracting malaria—not if you live in the United States, anyway.
It was once a rite of childhood—like your first sleepover or learning to ride a bike. Children could virtually count on spending one miserable week at home with chickenpox.
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