Plague

In early July 2021, an alert of a suspected outbreak was raised to the Health Division of Tshopo Province in the north-eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The initial alert followed an increase in deaths among people presenting with symptoms including fever, headache, and stiff neck, and some with bloody diarrhea. Samples of blood and stool were collected and tested for Ebola virus disease, shigellosis and salmonellosis. These tested negative on 19 August by the National Institute for Biomedical Research (INRB) lab in Kinshasa.  Meningitis was suspected and as of 16 September, a  total of 37 samples of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) were sent from the University Clinics Laboratory of Kisangani to INRB lab in Kinshasa. Of these, seven were sent to the Pasteur Institute in Paris on 1 September from Kinshasa, and were confirmed to be Neisseria meningitidis by reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) on 6 September. Addit...

Yeast infection discharge is usually white with an appearance that resembles cottage cheese. The discharge may also have a scent that vaguely smells like bread, because of the yeast. It may also come with symptoms like itching, redness, and a burning sensation. Visit Insider's Health Reference library for more advice. A yeast infection is caused by an overgr owth of naturally-occurring yeast in the vagina that often causes a white, clumpy, curd-like discharge.  Yeast infections are not contagious, and they're not a sexually transmitted infection (STI) either. Here's how to identify yeast infection discharge and how you can treat it with oral or topical medications. What does yeast infection discharge look like? The discharge from a yeast infecti...

October 21, 2021 Area(s) of Interest: Practice Management   Aetna recently announced it would begin to transition to an all-electronic payment and remittance process in September 2021. The payor said it plans to transition to the exclusive use of electronic remittance advices (ERA), electronic funds transfer(EFT) and electronic explanation of benefit (EOB) statements for all participating and non-participating providers by September 2022. For claims payment details, Aetna said providers have the option to either obtain electronic explanation of benefits (eEOBs) through the Availity web portal or to sign up to obtain electronic remittance advices (ERAs) from any of Aetna's directly connected vendors through Change Healthcare's payor enrollment services. Providers will have two options to receive electronic payments – via EFT or through a virtual credit card (VCC). Providers who do not enroll in EFT will automatically receive payments through th...

Tyson Bottenus once captained an 80-foot schooner called the Aquidneck . He sailed tourists off the coast of Newport, R.I., discussing the area's history and sites. In January 2018, he had finished another season at the schooner's helm and had recently gotten engaged to his partner of many years, Liza Burkin. To celebrate, the couple, avid cyclists who've ridden through New Zealand and Japan, set off for a bike tour of Costa Rica. "We were on this very, very dusty road for a long time," Bottenus remembers of a ride to Montezuma on the Nicoya Peninsula. "It was a dirty, sandy, hard-packed road." While going downhill, Bottenus crashed, badly scraping his elbow. The next morning, a doctor spent about an hour picking out little rocks and cleaning dirt from the wound before she bandaged it up. The injury kept him from swimming but otherwise didn't disrupt the trip. About a month after returning to Rhode Island, Bottenus started having head...

For all its application and importance during the COVID-19 pandemic, infection prevention and control remains a widely misunderstood endeavor, with physicians and health system administrators often focused on written standards—rather than the actions, systems and culture that bring them to life. A webinar, "Infection Control: Transmission and Prevention Standards," produced by the AMA and Project Firstline —the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's national training collaborative for infection prevention and control—provided a refresher on the basics of infection prevention and control. Among them: knowing how to translate policies, guidelines and regulations into concrete clinical processes. Some do it better than others Some do it better than others Infection prevention sounds like a straightforward concept—to prevent the spread of disease. But all too often, health professionals think it is driven by policies, guidelines and regula...

Veterinary parasitologists warn that multidrug-resistant hookworms are spreading in the U.S. and that veterinarians should watch for persistent infections. The Ancylostoma caninum bearing those genetic resistances likely emerged from retired racing Greyhounds and now appear to be spreading within the broader pet dog population, according to parasite researchers and representatives from the American Association of Veterinary Parasitologists. A rise in hookworm shedding also threatens human health because the larvae can infect people through skin contact, causing cutaneous larva migrans. Some hookworm isolates collected from dogs appear to be resistant to all three anthelmintic drug classes approved in the U.S. for treating hookworm infections. Researchers have found efficacy with emodepside, an anthelmintic approved in Europe for use in dogs, but administering it requires administering a product that is unapproved in the U.S. for use in dogs and that can be dangerous if a dog is co...

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