“You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know.”
— William Wilberforce
Little Women, the 19th century coming of age movie directed by Greta Gerwig currently showing in theaters nationwide, has moviegoers searching for information about scarlet fever. Beth, the youngest of the four March sisters, dies of complications of the infection at the climax of the movie. Scarlet fever is a bacterial infection caused by the […]
Alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), the delayed, potentially fatal red meat allergy acquired through tick bites, has increased dramatically in the United States, and cases have also been reported in Sweden, Germany and Australia.1 As of 2013, more than 5,000 people in the Southwest U.S. have been diagnosed with the condition.2 In 2007, Scott Commins, MD, an […]
Harvard Medical School graduate and pediatric oncologist Stephanie Taylor, MD once took care of children with cancer at a teaching hospital. She wondered why many of her young patients contracted infections, such as influenza, despite the hospital’s heavy emphasis on prevention. Taylor began to suspect increased susceptibility to contracting infections might have something to do […]
On Dec. 5, 2019, the Samoan government reportedly arrested a “vocal antivaccination campaigner” and charged him with “incitement” as the government widens a mass measles vaccination campaign in the small South Pacific island nation of about 200,000 people. More than 4,300 measles cases with 63 deaths have been reported since the measles outbreak began in […]
Story Highlights The elimination of religious exemptions to vaccination in some states like New York are forcing parents to make the untenable choice between violating their deeply held religious or spiritual beliefs or uprooting their lives and either homeschooling their children or moving to another state. With the focus on a number of measles cases […]
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned on May 30, 2019 that, if the current measles outbreak continues, the U.S. could lose its measles elimination status that has been in effect since 2000. According to the agency: “If these outbreaks continue through summer and fall, the United States may lose its measles elimination […]
There have been at least two reported cases of children with measles in the United States this year that have turned out not to have been wild-type measles after all. The two cases involve children in Oakland County and Washtenaw County, Michigan. Both children had exhibited symptoms of measles and initially tested positive for the […]
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is facing mounting criticism for its handling of the growing number of cases of acute flaccid myelitis (AFM), also referred to as acute flaccid paralysis (AFP). The federal health agency has been accused by some doctors of moving too slowly to identify a virus as the cause […]
The confirmed cases of acute flaccid myelitis (AFM) in the United States this year have now spiked to 62 cases in 22 states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This is up from early-October when the CDC had confirmed 38 cases of AFM in 16 states.1 2 3 The CDC is […]
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported 38 confirmed cases of a severe polio-like disease in children known as acute flaccid myelitis (AFM) in the United States from January through September of this year. A total of 16 states have reported cases of the condition, also referred to as acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) […]