Food-Borne Illnesses

A food-borne illness, as the name indicates, is caused by eating contaminated food. Some people call it food poisoning. Usually, you have to eat food that is contaminated with large amounts of certain germs, generally bacteria but also viruses or parasites. Food poisoning is likely one of the most common causes of acute illness.

Bacteria that commonly cause food-borne illnesses are Salmonella, Staphylococcus, Campylobacter, Clostridium perfringens, and Shigella. Clostridium botulinum (botulism), and Listeria cause the most serious food-borne illnesses Read the rest of this entry »

Influenza

“My eyeballs felt hot. My throat was sore. My head ached. Climbing the stairs, I felt like an old, old woman. I had end-of-the-world images. The ozone hole. Overpopulation. Toxic waste. Death of the manatee. It was . . . the flu laying waste New York City,” wrote Anne Raver in The New York Times when describing her flu in a February 1992 column.

Not every cold you catch is the flu, although many people including doctors use “flu” as a catch-all term for colds, stomach upsets, and so forth. These maladies are caused by viruses, bacteria, or food poisoning—they are not the flu, which is caused by a specific influenza virus. Read the rest of this entry »

Fifth Disease

If it weren’t for fifth disease, I would never have become a coauthor of a lead article in The New England Journal of Medicine.

While investigating the outbreak of this infection among some of our nursing staff in 1988, I learned that the illness is caused by parvovirus B19 and is a common, mild childhood illness. It got the name fifth disease in 1899 because it was the fifth of six common childhood illnesses found that caused a rash.

The virus was discovaered in 1975 by scientists in England; however, they still didn’t know what diseases it caused. In Read the rest of this entry »