Public Health: Disease, Epidemic & Pandemic Threat (merged thread)

[AdamG]

(CNN)Experts say we are "due" for one. When it happens, they tell us,#it will probably have a greater impact on humanity than anything else currently happening in the world.

And yet, like with most people, it is probably something you haven't spent much time thinking about. After all, it is human nature to avoid being consumed by hypotheticals until they are staring us squarely in the face.
Such is the case with a highly lethal flu pandemic. And when it comes, it will affect every human alive today.

Pandemic flu is apolitical and does not discriminate between rich and poor. Geographical boundaries are meaningless, and it can circle the globe within hours. In terms of potential impact on mankind, the only thing that comes close is climate change. And, like climate change, pandemic flu is so vast, it can be challenging to wrap your head around it.

- Dr Sanjay Gupta
http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/07/health...-sanjay-gupta/

[davidbfpo]

Five threads have been merged today, following a review before posting the next article. The thread title has been amended to add Epidemic.

[davidbfpo]

Via The Conversation, an academic site, I found this article; which starts with:

During the fallout from the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, which killed more than 11,000 people, one of the questions asked of the World Health Organisation (WHO) was why it hadn’t reacted more quickly. The four-month delay in pinning down the cause of the disease that erupted in Guinea’s remote Guéckédou province in December 2013 allowed what might have been a localised event in a single village to turn into the biggest infectious disease crisis of recent times....Ebola was not a West African disease. So why would anybody suspect it had broken out there?

Link:https://theconversation.com/africas-...tbreaks-80301?

[AdamG]

In the past few years, there have been so many "superbugs" appearing in hospitals around the world that we here at Goats and Soda haven't had the time or resources to report on all of them.
But a new type of pneumonia emerging in China seems so important that we dropped what we were doing to write about it.
Doctors in Hangzhou in southeastern China have detected a a type of pneumonia that is both highly drug-resistant and very deadly. It also spreads easily.
The bacterium — a type of Klebsiella pneumoniae — killed five people in an intensive care unit in Hangzhou in 2016, researchers reported Tuesday in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases.

http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsand...and-contagious

Thinking music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPnc_RKjd-U

[AdamG]

While Canadian health officials have extensive plans to ensure people survive a future influenza pandemic, they’ve also made macabre recommendations for the nation’s funeral homes for those who don’t.

“In a pandemic, each individual funeral home could expect to handle about six months work within a six- to eight-week period,” the Public Health Agency of Canada warns on a web page about the management of mass fatalities during a pandemic flu.

https://globalnews.ca/news/3652652/c...-funeral-home/

[AdamG]

(CNN)The age-old killer scarlet fever is on the rise in England and East Asia, according to research published Monday in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal, and investigators don't know why.
"Whilst current rates (in England) are nowhere near those seen in the early 1900s, the magnitude of the recent upsurge is greater than any documented in the last century," said study author Theresa Lamagni of Public Health England, the agency that funded the analysis. "Whilst notifications so far for 2017 suggest a slight decrease in numbers, we continue to monitor the situation carefully ... and research continues to further investigate the rise."

http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/27/health...udy/index.html

[davidbfpo]

This stand alone thread started in 2008 and has today 64,182 views. The theme of public health and the threat from disease, epidemics and more also features in another thread - so I have merged them.

Adam G is the main contributor to both threads.