Airport Security Bins – Full of Germs

 

Finnish and British researchers swabbed trays at the Helsinki Airport and discovered that half of the samples were contaminated with rhinovirus or adenovirus—two categories of common viruses that can trigger cold-like symptoms.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/556466/bins-at-airport-security-are-incredibly-dirty-germs

This type of news is provocative, but it needs to be put in perspective. Anything that lots of people touch all day, and isn’t regularly cleaned, is like this. Door handles. Pay phones. Fuel pumps at gas stations. It is just the nature of things.

And they’ll say “worse than public toilets”. That’s because public toilets get cleaned a lot.

These germs are not airborne. You need to ingest them to potentially get sick. When someone sneezes or coughs into the air, and you are close by, that is how.

Otherwise, feel free to touch all of those germ-riddled surfaces, just don’t put your fingers in your mouth, or on food, without washing them first. Basic stuff.

 

THE NINE VIRUSES OF THE APOCALYPSE

No need for commentary, these are the ones to worry about, from New Scientist, republished here.
These are the diseases the World Health Organization thinks we should find remedies for, fast. The first six are its highest priority.

Lassa fever

This West African virus, carried by the common Natal multimammate rat, infects 300,000 people a year. Most have no symptoms, but it can cause diarrhoea and vomiting, then internal fluid accumulation, bleeding from orifices, shock, seizure and coma. It kills some 5000 people annually. Initial symptoms resemble other local diseases, making diagnosis tricky – one reason West Africa was slow to spot Ebola.

Nipah

This bat virus started killing people in 1999 in Malaysia after pig farms were built near fruit bats, which dropped half-eaten fruit into pigsties. People get it from pigs and bats, but it can also spread between humans. Nipah breaks out sporadically in and around densely populated Bangladesh, causes inflammation of the brain and has a high fatality rate.

Rift Valley fever

Widespread across Africa, this virus invaded the Arabian Peninsula in 2000, and could go further. It mainly infects cattle and is spread by mosquitoes; people can get it from mosquito bites or by eating infected beef. Symptoms are usually mild but it can cause haemorrhagic fever, which kills in half of cases.

SARS, MERS and emerging coronaviruses

These related bat viruses infect a range of mammals and have already emerged in humans twice, resulting in severe pneumonia: SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2014. Both spread from human to human.

Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever

Found across Africa, Asia and south-east Europe, the virus is invading new territory as its tick hosts capitalise on global warming. It appeared in western Europe in 2010. Infected people generally have a mild fever but some strains cause severe haemorrhagic disease, with bleeding internally and from orifices, from which 30 per cent of people die.

Chikungunya

A virus spread by Aedes mosquitoes between monkeys and small mammals in East Africa, Chikungunya started causing large epidemics around 2000 and exploded into Asia in 2005, after mutations made it better adapted to a new mosquito host. In 2014, it invaded the Americas and has occurred in Europe. It rarely kills but causes debilitating joint pains, which can persist for months.

Zika

A monkey virus that has infected humans in Africa and Asia for decades, Zika suddenly entered the Americas in 2013. In 2015, it was linked to a wave of severe birth defects including microcephaly. Companies are already working on vaccines but the WHO wants extra research into the virus’s effects on fetal brains.

Severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome

Flies under the radar – possibly because of its name. The virus, discovered in 2011, can cause fever and multi-organ failure, killing 12 per cent of people it infects. It has been found in east Asia, seems to be carried by farm animals, and is spread by ticks. A nearly identical virus, called heartland, has turned up in the US.

Novel agent

Given the rate at which previously unknown or obscure infections have suddenly emerged in humans and other animals, the WHO is leaving a slot on its list for a germ we don’t yet know. Research here may include looking for agents that might explode.

Antibiotic Failure Makes Newsweek Cover Story

The article starts off with the tragic story of a young girl who survives a staph infection – but only just and she will always need medical help. Ten years ago she would have survived without a scratch… but today there is only one product left that can treat this infection, and it has nasty side-effects.

As recently as a decade ago, Addie’s story would have been a shocking anomaly, the kind of case that comes along once in any doctor’s life.

But after years of futile warnings from scientists that overuse of antibiotics was causing bacteria to evolve into strains resistant to drugs, experts in the field say we have reached a tipping point, and some deadly pathogens are becoming incurable. “We are confronting one of the gravest threats to public health that we have ever faced,” said Dr. Lance Price, a professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services who specializes in studying resistant bacteria. “We are entering a place we don’t want to be, with people dying of infections that could have treated in the past.”

There are many anecdotes shared, all about people who would have been successfully treated until recently:

A few months ago, she consulted on a case of a woman suffering from a resistant bacterial infection of her gall bladder. There were no antibiotics that could treat her; with no options, the patient was sent to hospice so she could die comfortably. A plastic surgeon she knows also had a horrifying case: A knee replacement implant in a patient had collected untreatable bacteria. Doctors were forced to amputate the leg to prevent the infection from spreading any further.

It isn’t just when infections are the primary problem. Some medical procedures will become to difficult unless antibiotics can be trusted to work. It is looking like heart transplants will no longer be tenable. And worse, no more chemotherapy.