Just when you think you’ve got a handle on swine flu or E. coli, the medical community discovers a new bug. Great—something else to worry about!
New Disease: Progressive inflammatory neuropathy
Symptoms: Numbness, tingling, and/or burning in the arms and legs; fatigue; weakness in the limbs; temporary paralysis.
Discovery: In February 2008, a translator at a medical clinic in southeastern Minnesota noticed that three different Spanish-speaking workers at a nearby pig slaughterhouse had recently come in complaining of fatigue and strange sensations in their arms and legs. She told a doctor, and the resulting investigation found that 12 people at the slaughterhouse had similar symptoms, and a few others at a pig slaughterhouse in Indiana did as well. All of the victims worked in similar locations in the plants: near the “head table”…where the pigs’ brains are removed from the carcasses with high-pressure air hoses. (The brains are then sold to food markets in Asia.) Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta are still conducting studies on the disease, but they believe it may be a brand-new illness. How do they think people catch it? By inhaling tiny pieces of pig brain, like those floating in the air at slaughterhouses. The body produces antibodies against the foreign brain bits, and the antibodies then attack the body’s own nerve fibers—resulting in this neurological illness.
New Disease: Yet to be named
Symptoms: Fever, malaise, lack of appetite, muscle aches, headache, nausea, vomiting, stiff neck, joint pain, chest pain, testicular pain, propensity to infection, enlarged heart, bleeding in the brain, and death
Discovery: In December 2006, three people in two hospitals in Melbourne, Australia, received organ transplants from the same man, a 57-year-old who died of a brain hemorrhage after returning from a long stay in Europe. Within weeks, all three transplant patients were dead. Local testing found nothing linking the deaths of the three victims to the organ donor, so samples were sent to the Greene Infectious Disease Laboratory at Columbia University in New York. There, in 2007, using the latest in gene sequencing technology, researchers found a previously unknown virus in each of the transplanted organs. It’s related to a well-known virus called lymphocytic choreomeningitis (LCMV), which is tested for in organ transplant cases, but the new virus is genetically distinct enough that it had never been detected. The researchers say the virus may explain why many organ transplants have failed in the past, and the unfortunate deaths of the three Australians may help prevent more fatalities in the future.
New Disease: Chapare virus hemorrhagic fever
Symptoms: Fever, headache, muscle and joint pain, bleeding disorders, shock, and death
Discovery: In 2003 a young man in a small village in Bolivia became sick. Over the next few days, his condition worsened, and a few other people in the area came down with the same illness. Two weeks later, the man was dead. Every test for known diseases came up negative, so a local doctor, Simon Delgado, sent specimens from the man’s body to the CDC. Researchers in the CDC’s most secure lab studied them, and five years later they announced that the man had been killed by an arenavirus—a strain of virus that causes hemorrhagic fever (the Ebola virus is another). But it was one they’d never seen before. Only that one death occurred, and it’s still the only known outbreak of what came to be known as the Chapare virus illness (after the young victim’s home province), but CDC doctors say it’s probably only a matter of time before it spreads. “There are lot of arenaviruses we don’t know,” Dr. Pierre Rollin said. “Are they going to be the new pandemic virus that’s going to wipe out the planet? I don’t think so.” (How reassuring.)
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In July 2008, police in Tampa, Florida, arrested a man for selling cocaine within 1,000 feet of a church, a first-class felony. The man’s name: God Lucky Howard.
You are more likely to die on your way to buy a lottery ticket than you are to win the lottery.