My new story for the Medical Post/Canadian Healthcare Network. #Doctors and #pharmacists in Canada can log on for free. Here are a few paragraphs.
Could a century old treatment be an answer to antibiotic resistance?
In a first in Canada, a patient with an #antibiotic resistant artificial joint infection has received treatment with phage therapy and is showing promising early responses.
“This is cutting edge stuff, and a potentially new technology,” said Dr. Marisa Azad, the infectious diseases physician who treated the patient. She is also an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Ottawa.
The patient presented with severe periprosthetic joint infection (PJI) in the summer of 2023. She had already undergone multiple surgeries and had experienced several relapses and infections with the same persistent bacteria.
“She’d been on multiple very prolonged courses of antibiotics and had a severe drug allergy to two major drug classes of antibiotics. I was extremely limited in what I could use to treat her,” Dr. Azad told the Medical Post in an interview.
That’s when the idea arose of trying an experimental treatment course with phage therapy. The team got approval for doing the experimental treatment from Health Canada, and worked with Winnipeg-based Cytophage, which supplied the phages.
“We developed a protocol and gave her therapy over two weeks while she was admitted to hospital. She’s completed her therapy. Now we’re monitoring her closely and giving her adjunctive antibiotics,” she said.
The idea didn’t come out of the blue. In the medical literature, a study from just last year in Clinical #Infectious Diseases provided a review of 33 previously published cases of patients with end-stage, refractory bone and joint infections (BJI) who underwent treatment with phage therapy. The authors found that from those case reports, “29 (87%) achieved microbiological or clinical success, two (5.9%) relapsed with the same organisms, and two (5.9%) with a different organism” with no serious adverse events.
The conclusions of that paper stated there were “important advantages, disadvantages, and barriers to the implementation of phage therapy for BJIs.” Yet, at the same time, the authors added they, “believe that if phage therapy were to be used earlier in the clinical course, fewer cumulative antibiotics may be needed in an individual treatment course.”
The word phage is short for #bacteriophage, a word coined in 1917—literally meaning bacteria-eater. They are viruses whose lifecycle depends on certain types of bacteria.
“They latch on to specific types of bacteria and inject their genetic material into the bacterial cell." Dr. Azad explained. "They take over the bacterial cells’ machinery to produce more little viruses inside and explode or burst open the bacteria,” releasing viral particles that can go and infect other cells of the same type of bacteria.
Intriguingly, each #phage targets a specific type of #bacteria...
The story of phages started over 100 years ago. They were independently discovered, first in 1915 by a British pathologist, Frederick Twort, and then again in 1917 by French-Canadian microbiologist Felix d’Herelle. And...
Yikes. "data released under Freedom of Information laws last year revealed 5,614 people were suspected to have caught #COVID in Victorian public hospitals between 2020 and April 2023, with more than one in 10 confirmed or suspected to have died as a result of their infection. In Queensland, similar data shows an average of 13 people caught COVID in hospital every day in the 18 months to June last year, with one patient dying every two days."
#Infection_Prevention_Control
Risk of acquiring, or spreading, #infectious diseases should be as close to zero as possible in hospitals, care homes, GP surgeries, schools, and all workplaces.
Aerosol expertise vital, since pathogens like #SARSCoV2 and flu are airborne. @Adsquires
UNMC Global Center for Health Security newsletter is always fun to read (mystery outbreaks, disease, etc. etc.). Not for hypochondriacs, LOL. Still following this since they were one of the first to start following COVID-19 when it was first detected. #infectious#disease#outbreakshttps://www.unmc.edu/healthsecurity/transmission/
Back in 2013 I developed an outreach program to address #misinformation about infectious diseases, prevention and #vaccines. It combined history, theatre and science. I took it to over a dozen street festivals. Local medical, bioscience, public health students and the odd doctor and public health professional put on historic costumes, and were each given an historic story based on the pre-vaccine era they time-traveled from. The histories gave the passersby we talked to an idea of what life was like pre-vaccines. The fact these costumed people were experts meant visitors could have really informed conversations. Each festival day, we talked to 300-500 individuals. Then COVID happened.
While we faced the odd angry antivaxxer pre-pandemic, I fear that if we were to do these events now there could be more serious trouble.
It was also difficult getting public funding for it as I refused any support from pharmaceutical companies -- and there are costs with putting this sort of event on.
I'm not sure what I can do with this program in future, but I haven't forgotten about it.
Toilets have lids because when you flush a toilet it creates a torrent of micro droplets that settle on all of the surfaces in the bathroom. It's important to shut the lid before flushing.
Many people are unaware of this.
(I'm all for trying new and different things, but sometimes "you never see x" because x is a terrible idea.)
We have many public and school toilets (in #Ireland) with no toilet lid, presumably because lidless toilets are quicker to clean and cheaper to maintain. They need lids before the next #pandemic.
It's important #evidence the virus has been killing provincial residents in multiple ways, according to #infectious#disease#epidemiologist and University of Toronto professor Colin Furness, although New Brunswick #health officials still are reluctant to endorse that view.
New standard on cutting risk of #infectious#aerosol spread sets high bar for building ventilation but is work in progress
>The first-ever ASHRAE standard on reducing the risk of indoor infectious aerosol transmission sets new targets for building operators in terms of air system design, installation, operation, and maintenance.
This is big news. ProMED is hugely important in tracking the occurrences of #infectious#diseases around the world -- both human and in #agriculture. ProMED is on the verge of collapsing. Info from ProMED is used by international public health agencies. It's an important disease surveillance system run largely by volunteers from around the globe. It serves as a pre-warning system. It shows where the first signs of outbreaks that could be dangerous and need attention are happening. Or whether diseases are transferring from animals to humans.
Ebola, new strains of #flu, diphtheria, SARS, diseases in livestock, etc..
Details in this article by @HelenBranswell
in the very informative @statnews
#introduction I'm a Post-doc working on mathematical and statistical model of malaria and COVID-19. I was actually trained as field marine ecologist, and only started picking up on my quantitative skills during my PhD in 2016, in which I drifted towards #infectious disease. Nevertheless, I love both #epidemiology and #ecology word, and hope to contribute to both domains using my #computational and #quantitative skills. I am #rstats enthusiast, but also speak #python and #cpp if I have to 😅