Reading Room
The reading room includes articles and videos of potential interest to consumers and medical professionals. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the NC Medical Board, its members and staff. Note: Some links may require subscriptions.
Fall is approaching, but mosquito season isn’t over
NBC News
September 19, 2024
Jennifer White, a New York state epidemiologist, has a reminder as summer’s end approaches: “It may be pumpkin spice season, but it’s not the end of mosquito season.”
August and September are the peak months for mosquito-borne illnesses in the U.S. That’s because populations of the insects — which prefer warm temperatures and high humidity — have had time to grow and transmit more virus by the end of the summer.
Indeed, new cases of the three most common diseases spread locally by mosquitoes within the U.S. — dengue fever, eastern equine encephalitis and West Nile virus — are still being reported in many states. This week, California health officials issued a warning about three locally acquired dengue cases in Los Angeles County, two of which were announced Wednesday.
Read More…Exhausted? Irritable? It could be undiagnosed iron deficiency
NPR
September 15, 2024
About three years ago, Soumya Rangarajan struggled day after day with exhaustion, headaches, and heart palpitations. As a front-line hospital doctor during the COVID-19 pandemic, she first attributed her symptoms to the demands of an unprecedented health care crisis.
But a social media post got Rangarajan thinking about the possibility that she might actually be the victim of something more mundane: an iron deficiency. She requested a blood test from her doctor, and the results determined she had anemia, a condition caused by lower-than-normal levels of iron in the blood.
It was the first step toward relief, recalled Rangarajan, who is a geriatrician at the University of Michigan. Her symptoms, she added, had made it so she “had difficulty getting through a full week at work.”
Read More…Which vaccines should you get and recommend this Fall?
MedPageToday
September 7, 2024
The goal of the COVID vaccine is to keep people out of the hospital and out of the intensive care unit. So the critical question then is: who’s getting hospitalized? Who’s getting hospitalized with COVID? And the answer is, it generally falls into four high-risk groups. One are people who are elderly, which is to say those over 75. Two are people who are immune compromised either because they were born with certain immune deficiencies or they’re taking drugs that suppress their immune system because of cancers or rheumatologic disease. Three are people who are pregnant. And four are people who have high-risk medical conditions like obesity, diabetes, chronic lung disease, chronic heart disease. So that’s who you’re trying to keep out of the hospital.
Why mosquitoes are so dangerous right now
Time
September 4, 2024
Mosquito-borne diseases seem to be everywhere this year. Towns in Massachusetts are shutting down public parks and other outdoor areas after officials learned that mosquitoes in the region are carrying eastern equine encephalitis, a rare but deadly virus. And Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former top infectious-disease expert in the U.S., recently was hospitalized with West Nile virus that he allegedly acquired from a mosquito buzzing through his backyard. Is this a particularly bad year for disease-spreading mosquitoes in the U.S.? And what can we expect in the future?
