Health

An antibacterial impregnated in a toy or in some other consumer product must be registered with the Environmental Protection Agency. Companies that manufacture such things have correctly perceived that germs on cutting boards and in children’s toys are among those people worry most about, and they’ve come to the rescue with antibacterial products they claim … Read more

The company that makes Lysol announced in a television commercial that they are now selling a kind of paper towel soaked in liquid disinfectant, “kills 99.9 percent of germs”, the same percentage that Tide with Bleach claims to wipe out. There are all sorts of products, hundreds of them, that are advertised as antibacterial, including … Read more

A tattoo parlor doesn’t seem like a particularly salubrious place, and having someone stick a needle through your skin seems obviously to carry some risk, but the risk of getting any blood-borne disease by getting a tattoo are extremely low, at least in the United States. Although it is of course theoretically possible to transmit … Read more

What happens when you spend six or eight hours in an airplane with 300 other people, breathing recirculated air? People sometimes believe they’ve been made sick by flying in an airplane, but in fact it’s difficult to prove that anyone is any more likely to contract an infectious disease spending three hours in an airplane … Read more

The Contaminant Candidate List sounds like it might be a registry of anti-environmental office seekers published by the Sierra Club. But it’s actually a list of the contaminants in public drinking water that may require regulation, and the Environmental Protection Agency is required to issue such a list every five years. The last one came … Read more

Since we know how you get colds, we also know how you can prevent them, or at least minimize their number. Stay away from people with colds; wash your hands after touching someone who has a cold or something they’ve touched; keep your hands away from your face. If you have a cold, cover your … Read more

If we want to search for something good to come out of the 1918 disaster, perhaps we can find it in the spur to research in virology that it provoked. In the 10 years after 1918, thousands of books and articles were published about the flu. One large problem posed by the flu virus is … Read more

How do we find out about new strains in time to develop new vaccines against them? The World Health Organization, in cooperation with dozens of other national and international health groups, maintains the Global Outbreak Alert and Response program to provide continuous surveillance of infectious disease outbreaks around the world. This program covers all kinds … Read more

Although you might not think of the flu as a killer disease, an average of 20,000 Americans die of it every year, that’s about four times as many people as die from the diarrheal illnesses caused by eating contaminated food. Yet many people who are sure they are going to suffer an agonizing death from … Read more

On September 3, 1999, 10 children in counties near Albany, New York, were hospitalized with bloody diarrhea, and everyone wanted to know why. Health officials quickly discovered two facts: they were all infected with E. coli O157:H7, the most deadly form of the E. coli bacterium, and they had all attended the Washington County Fair, … Read more

If the bottle label reads “well water,” “artesian well water,” “spring water,” or “mineral water,” that certainly sounds healthful, and may even be healthful, but such sources can be polluted with cryptosporidium, too. There is a large variety of water brands, and an almost equally large variety of sources from which the water comes. A … Read more

Giardia lamblia is the other common protozoan parasite that infests drinking water. During the 1990s, reports of giardiasis increased all over the country. In 1997–1998, the latest years for which the CDC has published statistics, New York State, including New York City, had the largest number of cases, 3,673. But before you conclude from this … Read more

Rubbing on insect repellent and slapping at mosquitoes is a summertime tradition. Just the smell of a spritz of Off! gives some people Proustian recollections of fun-filled days at summer camp. But until the 1920s, mosquitoes were a cause of deadly epidemics in the United States, and everyone now knows that they’re back again carrying … Read more

Malaria is not the only insect-borne disease now afflicting Americans. Lyme disease, named after the city in Connecticut where it was first identified, comes from the bite of a tick infected with a spirochetal bacterium. Two species of tick, Ixodes scapularis and I. pacificus, are the primary villains. I. scapularis lives in the East and … Read more

In late August 1999, the New York City Department of Health discovered an unusual outbreak of encephalitis (inflammation of the brain) concentrated among a group of elderly people living not far from La Guardia Airport in the northern part of Queens, one of New York City’s five boroughs. The Department of Health, in cooperation with … Read more

Why do they print directions on the back of your liquid antibacterial hand soap bottle? Do you really need “directions” on how to use soap? Antibacterial products used to clean bathrooms or kitchen sinks are not drugs, and therefore their labeling is regulated by the Federal Trade Commission. Same for ordinary (i.e., non-antibacterial) soap. But … Read more

Although the FTC doesn’t regulate the production or labeling of over the counter drugs, it does have a say in the way they are advertised. And they can be just as fussy as the FDA when it comes to making claims about antibacterial products. A complaint the FTC filed against Unilever in 1999 is illustrative. … Read more

Suffolk County, New York, has beautiful beaches and beautiful people. Rich New Yorkers own elaborate summer houses there, in different neighborhoods from the local year-rounders who serve them, of course. Those who don’t own can rent them, rentals at $20,000 a month and more are common. Some people commute to jobs in Manhattan from Suffolk. … Read more

If you’re worried about your own drinking water, you can have it tested. E. coli, shigella, cryptosporidium, and giardia don’t have any taste and they’re invisible, so you can’t tell if they’re in your water by looking or drinking. If your water comes from a municipal system, it is tested on a regular basis anyway, … Read more

E. coli is usually transmitted in food, but it sometimes turns up in drinking water, too. In Wyoming in 1997, 157 people were infected with E. coli O157:H7 when a community water system supplied by a spring and two wells became contaminated. The water in this system is usually safely used untreated, but this time … Read more

Rats, mice, flies, cockroaches, these are just things you can run into at almost any restaurant at one time or another. Every time you go out, you’re exposing yourself to something. In fact, those dollar bills in your wallet, the ones you plan to spend for the taxi ride downtown before you even do anything, … Read more

We all know it’s healthy to go to the gym regularly, but did you ever wonder what’s in the sweat of the guy who used the exercise machine just before you? Sure, he wipes off the machine with that towel, but that’s not exactly sterilizing, is it? Are you supposed to touch that stuff, and … Read more

Ever get your nails done at a nail salon? A lot of people do: nail care is a $6 billion a year industry in the United States, and there are tens of thousands of nail salons all across the country, 7,500 in California alone. One day in 2001 a dermatologist called the health department and … Read more

You go to a hospital to get well, but you have to remember that a hospital is one public place that’s bound to be filled with germs, after all, it’s people with germs who wind up there, all kept close together with a staff of caretakers who are almost inevitably going to transmit germs from … Read more

A lot of people worry about “picking up something” while they’re using public transportation. In New York City, the most feared location for mysophobes is undoubtedly the subway. Everyone squashed together, sneezing, coughing, wiping their noses, and then grabbing those poles to keep from falling over every time the train stops, starts, or lurches. The … Read more

Here’s a word we hope you’ve never heard before: myiasis. Myiasis refers to diseases caused by the deposition of insects or insect larvae in living tissue. And this happens in real life, in both animals and man, and not just in horror movies. One Indian boy, it was reported in 2001, actually had a wound … Read more

Some people love mice and rats and keep them as pets. The white ones with the pink eyes are nice, very soft and furry, and many people love them as much as they love their dogs. And they may be man’s best friend in another sense as well: they are by far the most common … Read more

You’re relaxed, sipping your wine, waiting for your appetizer, looking forward to a nice quiet dinner: broiled lamb chops provençal, your favorite. The people at the next table have just left, and their dirty dishes are being collected by the busboy, who was rubbing his cheek, or was it his nose?, on his way over … Read more

Everyone’s afraid of rabies, but almost no one in the United States ever gets it. Even a hundred years ago, it was very rare, about 100 people a year got it in the early twentieth century, and today, thanks to widespread vaccination of domestic animals, the average yearly number of human cases is 2 or … Read more

There are lots of rumors and frightening stories that go around, but some of them just aren’t true. You can’t get syphilis from a toilet seat, no matter what you may have heard, and HIV is not transmitted by contact with environmental surfaces in public bathrooms. You can’t get herpes from contact with toilet seats, … Read more

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek loved to look at stuff through his microscope. One day in 1681, he was closely examining a sample of his own feces and described a parasite that was probably the one we now know as Giardia lamblia. It got its name, however, in 1859 from a biologist named Lambl. It is the … Read more

Being bitten by infected ticks and mosquitoes, alas, is not the only germ danger you face while enjoying the great outdoors. In fact, just going for a swim can make you sick, even if you never get near an insect. Cryptosporidium, Giardia, and Shigella are out to get you, and they’re lurking where you swim, … Read more

The group of viruses that are transmitted by insects are called (and this is not a technical term) “arboviruses.” The term is a coinage based on “ARthropod BOrne Virus.” West Nile, transmitted by a mosquito, is one of these. There are several other viruses transmitted by insects to humans, all of them quite rare in … Read more

You may have heard that you can get something called toxoplasmosis from your cat. Toxoplasma gondii, the organism that causes the disease is a protozoan parasite that infects most species of warm blooded animals. It has a fairly complex life cycle consisting of three different stages. The first is the tachyzoite, the form that causes … Read more

On July 15, 1994, the New Jersey State Department of Health reported to the CDC that six people who had traveled to Bermuda on the cruise ship Horizon had come down with pneumonia. The CDC quickly discovered that 14 people on the ship had been infected with Legionnaire’s disease. It was pretty clear that the … Read more

There are dozens of different species of cockroach, and the one probably most familiar in restaurants is the German cockroach. Many people believe that cockroach infestation is one of the burdens of living in a crowded city, but in fact the insects can and do live in the wide open spaces of rural areas just … Read more

Some people never learn. In October 1996, a three-week-old boy was brought into a hospital emergency room in Arizona suffering from a fever of 103.6, plus vomiting and bloody diarrhea that had been going on for more than two weeks. Why it took two weeks for the parents to bring him in is almost certainly … Read more

On August 12 and 13, 1994, three kids from Pompano Beach came into the emergency room of the same hospital in Broward County, Florida, with a sudden onset of seizures, coma, and respiratory depression. Each of them needed a breathing tube to stay alive. All three, they were 5, 6, and 11 years old, had … Read more

Swenson’s Wild Midwest Exotic Petting Zoo is apparently a popular attraction in Clermont, Iowa, and in August 1999 they featured a bear cub. It was really cute, and it let people touch it and wrestle with it. Occasionally it would nip at people, but it never really hurt anyone. The cub was also brought to … Read more

You may remember Chlamydia trachomatis, it’s the bacterium that causes the most common sexually transmitted disease in the United States, chlamydia. A closely related species, Chlamydia psittaci, infects pet birds (and more rarely certain wild birds as well) and can be transmitted to humans, who can get flu-like symptoms from it, and sometimes more serious … Read more

We often speak of the possibility and desirability of eradicating diseases, and it does seem that it should be possible to eradicate at least those whose causes we know and for which we have good and effective treatments. This would seem to apply to most of the sexually transmitted diseases. But in all of history, … Read more

Botulism is extremely rare in adults, is somewhat more common in infants (there are about 80 or so cases a year, while 2 or 3 cases of adult botulism per year would be about average). The effects of the disease in infants can range from fairly mild to death, in fact, it is one of … Read more

While resistant strains of the potentially deadly S. aureus bacterium have been known for some years to occur in hospitals, it is only recently that these strains have made their way into the community at large. In 1997, a seven-year-old girl from an urban area of Minnesota was admitted to a hospital with a temperature … Read more

Shigellosis is another disease kids risk contracting in day care centers and passing on to their families. In 1991 there was an outbreak of Shigella sonnei infection in Lexington-Fayette County, Kentucky, that involved 14 licensed day care centers, making a lot of people sick but, every cloud has a silver lining, giving researchers a chance … Read more

The most common cause of serious respiratory tract infections, pneumonia and bronchiolitis (infection of the small vessels in the lungs called bronchioles), in infants and children is a germ called respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. This is another very common virus, so common that by the age of three almost every kid has been infected … Read more

Rotavirus is a good example of the kind of disease that is easily transmitted in child care settings. There are others as well, most of them considerably less serious in their effects than rotavirus, but nevertheless things to watch out for. Among them is hepatitis A (HAV). Although there is a vaccine for it, hepatitis … Read more

Well, okay, so I can get plenty of diseases from those pets, but at least I can’t catch anything from my tropical fish, right? Not so fast. It would be absurd to tell you that keeping pet fish is a big risk for human illness, it isn’t, but that doesn’t mean they can’t make you … Read more

The Internet can be a significant source of misinformation about vaccines. There are numerous sites that gather scare stories about vaccination based on little more than anecdotal reports from parents, and many chat rooms discussing vaccination in hysterical voices and without benefit of scientific information. This doesn’t mean that vaccines are without dangers, there are … Read more

Viruses are parasitic. They can only live and reproduce inside the cells of other animals or plants, in scientific terms, they are called obligate survive in one environment (if a germ can survive in more than one environment, it is called facultative); they are intracellular because they must live inside cells; they are molecular parasites … Read more

In 1918, the flu season came on a bit early, in April, but a few weeks before that 84,000 additional American troops had set out for Europe to fight the Germans, so there were more important things to worry about than the “grippe.” That some people died during the spring was unremarkable, before there were … Read more

E. coli O157:H7 is a threat with young children not only because it can make them quite ill, but also because they can shed it in their feces for up to two weeks after their illness resolves, giving them plenty of opportunity to pass the disease on to others. Older children don’t usually carry the … Read more

In July 1989, Minnesota held a three-week statewide wrestling camp and 175 high school wrestlers aged 14 to 18 came to participate. Everything went fine until the final week, when many of them started breaking out in rashes around their heads and necks or on their extremities. Several had eye infections. Some had swollen lymph … Read more

The Italians call it the French disease; the French call it the English disease. Russians blamed the Poles, the Poles blamed the Germans. At least since the sixteenth century, Europeans have been blaming each other, if it isn’t English, French, Polish, Russian, or German, then it’s Venetian or Neapolitan. Some believe Columbus brought it back … Read more

In 1998, 355,642 cases of gonorrhea were reported to the CDC. This was an 8.9 percent increase from the 1997 rate and the first increase since 1985. In 1999, the latest year for which complete figures are available, 360,076 cases of gonorrhea were reported, a 9.2 percent increase over the 1997 rate and a 1.2 … Read more

Chlamydia is probably the most common sexually transmitted disease in the United States, even more common than herpes-2. There were more than 640,000 new cases of chlamydia reported in 2000 and more than 290,000 through the first six months of 2001. Since all diseases are underreported, and since most people with chlamydia are not even … Read more

You may think that sexually transmitted infections are someone else’s problem, but in fact 55 million Americans have at least one sexually transmitted disease (STD). More than 45 million Americans have HSV-2, the sexually transmitted form of the herpes simplex virus, and a million more get it every year. There’s no cure for it. Two … Read more

Alliance, Ohio, is a town of about 25,000 people southeast of Akron. It is famous, if we use the word loosely, as the site of a yearly carnation festival every August and the home of the particular variety of carnation that President William McKinley favored as a lapel decoration. But one day in June 2001, … Read more

In May 2001, a Swedish researcher named Carl Erik Nord made news by announcing at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology that the bacteria that causes severe acne, Propionibacterium acnes, were developing resistance to the antibiotics used to treat the affliction. This may have been news to the reporter who wrote the … Read more

Warts, the kind that appear on the skin, often of older children, are common and benign. There are various treatments that can get rid of them, but most of them go away by themselves after a year or two. Yet there are many viruses, probably 60 or more, that cause warts, and the warts these … Read more

Seafood is good for you, and many health-conscious people make it an important part of their diet. But some seafood is really bad for you, and we’re not just talking about contaminated shellfish. There are certain kinds of food poisoning you can get from fish that can’t be prevented even if you wash your hands … Read more

On November 8, 1999, a company in Anchorage, Alaska, threw a party for their 500 employees, a nice catered lunch. On November 10, employees started calling in sick, not just a few, but hundreds of them. On the same day, the company notified the Alaska Division of Public Health that they had some kind of … Read more

Bacillus cereus is a rod-shaped aerobic organism that comes in two different forms, neither one of which is fun to have. The one that causes diarrhea doesn’t cause vomiting, but the one that causes vomiting also causes diarrhea. The only good news is that either way, you get sick and get well fast: symptoms can … Read more

If some evil genius wanted to create a really virulent and versatile bacterium, he might model his creation on Staphylococcus aureus, a spherical gram-positive organism that grows in clusters that under a microscope look like bunches of grapes. This is a germ that really has what it takes. It can grow in temperatures ranging from … Read more

In the late summer and fall of 1998 Listeria monocytogenes, a gram-positive bacterium that lives everywhere in the world except Antarctica, caused about 40 illnesses in ten different U.S. states. The CDC in cooperation with state health departments in Connecticut, New York, Ohio, and Tennessee determined that all these cases came from a single strain … Read more

Syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes, papillomavirus, chlamydia, you’d think that would be enough bacteria and viruses to worry about, especially at a moment when you’re preoccupied with something more pressing. But there’s more. The cause of trichomoniasis is neither a bacterium nor a virus. It’s the cause of a microscopic parasite, a protozoan called Trichomonis vaginalis that … Read more

Kids are unquestionably messy, and the younger they are the messier they seem to be. Growing up involves an incessant series of encounters with germs of all kinds. Babies begin by fouling themselves with germ-laden feces, then as soon as they’re able to they start putting everything they can lift into their mouths. Next they … Read more

Children in day care probably get more antibiotics prescribed for them than children who stay at home. A May 2001 Danish study followed children from birth in 1997 to the age of two years and found that enrollment in a day care center doubled a child’s likelihood of being prescribed an antibiotic. Whether this is … Read more

Never eat oysters in a month that does not contain the letter R. Or so they say, and they may be right, at least partly. In the summer of 1997, a lot of people ignored this advice, and a lot of people got sick. It began in July in British Columbia, where the British Columbia … Read more

The CDC couldn’t figure out why, but in June and July 1982, almost 900 people in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas came down with diarrhea, abdominal pain, and in most cases fever from an infection of Yersinia enterocolitica. The best guess was that it came from a single milk plant in Memphis that distributed a large … Read more

It may be some time before Mr. Lynn’s clean-hands identification mechanism is in widespread use, but in the meantime, you might want to wash your hands more often anyway, whether you can be caught at it or not. There is indisputable evidence that washing hands, we’re talking about the general public here, not surgical personnel, … Read more

A new infectious agent, a protozoan parasite called Cyclospora cayetanensis, was first identified and named in 1979. It was previously thought to be a kind of cyanobacterium. By 1993, it had been found in the United States. The first U.S. report of a diarrheal outbreak caused by the organism didn’t appear until 1995. Then in … Read more

Hand washing is unquestionably a good idea, and we’ll have more to say about that below, but at the same time, personal hygiene may not be all it’s cracked up to be. Bathing and showering, for example, are generally pleasant activities, but as far as infection control is concerned, they probably don’t do much good. … Read more

Since 1989, when it surpassed the number of outbreaks caused by salmonella, Campylobacter has been the most common cause of bacterial gastroenteritis in the United States. An estimated 2.4 million people get infected with it every year. It’s a gram-negative rod-shaped bacterium, and there are three species of it that cause human disease. C. coli … Read more

More common than C. botulinum, and perhaps as notorious, is the bacterium Escherichia coli. There are hundreds of different serotypes of this gram-negative bacterium, any one of which can cause disease, and many of them are part of the normal bacterial fauna of the intestines. They can get into other parts of the body and … Read more

So much for hand washing and bathing. Now what about those porcelain facilities? What microbiological horrors lurk in the toilet bowl, the sink, and the bathtub, and what are you supposed to do about them? There are plenty of germs that accumulate in those places, but as far as your health is concerned, your kitchen … Read more

On June 30, 1994, a 47-year-old man was admitted to a hospital in Arkansas. He was nauseated and his vision was blurry. His speech was slurred, and he was having difficulty swallowing. His gag reflex was impaired. His eyelids were drooping and his face muscles weren’t working properly, he seemed to have some sort of … Read more

Shocking but true: your toothbrush is dirtier than your toilet seat. It is hard to predict exactly which germs are on your toothbrush right now, but staphylococci, coliforms, pseudomonads, streptococci, and at least one fungus, candida, have all been cultured from used toothbrushes. In one Australian study, staphylococci and streptococci were the most commonly found … Read more

A chemist at the University of California, Davis named Gang Sun apparently felt that the smelly sock was a neglected area of research, so he set about finding a solution to this problem. According to a press release dated October 3, 2000, textiles are a great place for bacteria to grow, and bacteria and yeasts … Read more

In 1999, the CDC tracked nine different food-borne illnesses caused by bacteria, and confirmed by laboratory analysis 10,697 cases. Salmonella infection accounted for 4,533 of these, a little more than 42 percent. Salmonellosis is actually caused by a group of bacteria. The most common serotypes in the United States are called Salmonella enteriditis and Salmonella … Read more

Dirty laundry, as you might have guessed, certainly contains plenty of germs, including many that are pathogenic. Any cloth that touches your body is likely to become contaminated with whatever organisms are on your skin, and we know what can happen in the special case of underwear. But the Centers for Disease Control agrees with … Read more

Many consumer products are advertised as having been treated with antimicrobial chemicals. These include not only clothing, but pens, cutting boards, toys, household cleaners, hand lotions, cat litter, soap, cotton swabs, toothbrushes, and various cosmetics. There are children’s pajamas, mattresses, and bed linens for sale that make such claims. The CDC is unequivocal about the … Read more

Bacteriologists are quite proud when their name becomes attached to a disease causing organism. This is not true of other people, American Legion members are not at all happy about having Legionnaire’s disease named after them, and homeowners and real estate agents in Lyme, Connecticut, could have done without having their city’s name permanently attached … Read more

Laundry rooms and wet clothes are famous locations for molds and mildew. What are these things? They’re fungi, plants without chlorophyll, microscopic members of the same family of plants as mushrooms. And there are lots of them: they make up about a quarter of the earth’s biomass. The fungi can be roughly divided by their … Read more

So your kitchen is full of germs. What are you supposed to do about it? Most people probably do little except keep the place clean, they wipe up surfaces so that things look neat, put leftovers in the refrigerator, and get the garbage out of the house so it doesn’t start to stink. In a … Read more

John Lynn, of Austin, Texas, thinks people don’t wash their hands often enough, and he thinks it’s about time someone did something about it. According to Patent Number 6,147,607, Mr. Lynn has designed a way of preventing people from slipping away from the bathroom without washing. He proposes a mechanism attached to a toilet handle … Read more

This is actually a more common OCD experience than people would think: You saw a story on the news about a hit-and-run accident in the town next to yours. You called the police to tell them you might have done it, and they came to your house and questioned you. When you told them you … Read more

Yes, this is an irrational thought, but there are things you can do to challenge it. First, look at this fear from a rational perspective: How many people do you know who have contracted hepatitis? Second, how many people have contracted any disease from a garbage can? Third, how many people have contracted hepatitis from … Read more

Yes, it is possible to be hospitalized for OCD. This can occur for several reasons. First, it may be a way to help stabilize someone whose rituals have become so problematic that all he or she does all day long is perform rituals. Often in these cases family members will bring someone in to a … Read more

Pyromania is, according to the DSM-IV-TR (2000), “deliberate and purposeful fire setting on more than one occasion.” Prior to the act of fire setting, there is an increase in tension, and there is a long-held fascination with fire. Once the fire is set, there is a sense of relief or joy. Fires set by people … Read more