epidemiology

A new website lets you figure out how you might die, by sorting death data by cause of death, sex, and age. For American males ages 20-29, the most common cause of death is accidents (40.2 percent of deaths), followed by homicide (17.5 percent), and suicide (11.7 percent). Urinary tract infections? 0.3 percent.

This Little Piggie Had Ebola

In January, the Ebola virus leapt from pigs to farmers in the Philippines. Butdon't panic. Despite being a cousin of the deadly African strains, this one, Ebola-Reston, merely causes flu-like symptoms in humans, says Pierre Rollin, a biologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. To be safe, the Philippine government ordered farmers to euthanize 6,500 pigs from infected farms. Ebola-Reston was first seen in Philippine monkeys in 1989 and has since passed to other species. Scientists think contagious bats urinated in pigs' water supply, and the swine then coughed the virus onto humans.

When the words "Baltimore" and "rat" appear together, they usually involve a discussion of the fate of The Wire's Wallace or a DVD featuring Carmelo Anthony. However, unlike the alleged turncoats, it seems that actual rodents really do hold down their block. According to a new study in Molecular Ecology by a team of Johns Hopkins scientists, Norwegian rats are as neighborhood-oriented as any of the bipedal residents of Charm City.

A new map of the spread of HIV infection in Europe indicates that the virus traveled from major holiday destinations -- Greece, Portugal and Spain -- to northern European countries, New Scientist reports. A virologist determined how the virus evolved by sequencing parts of the virus genome from subjects throughout Europe -- 1,337 people from at least 11 countries. While a number of Mediterranean countries appeared to be sources for the virus, the UK, Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, Germany and Israel appeared to be hubs, through which the virus both came and went.

On May 5th, Konan Michel Yao was arrested for smuggling vials from a Canadian ebola research center into the United States. However, Mr. Yao wasn't a terrorist attempting to commit a biological weapon attack. Instead, Mr. Yao was a government scientist, en route to his new job studying biodefense at the National Institutes of Health. Additionally, he didn't even have any ebola in his possession.

So, despite some media hysteria last week, it looks like the swine flu won't be the death of us all. However, that does not mean the virus has stopped spreading, or that it won't reach pandemic levels and possibly cause significant economic damage.

More often than not, it’s the newer diseases, like HIV or Ebola, that grab all the headlines. But those Johnny-come-lately microbes have nothing on one of the most dangerous, and most ancient, viruses that afflicts mankind: influenza.

While health care professionals spent last week figuring out how to staunch the spread of swine flu, a team of Canadian scientists already knew how to handle the outbreak. In 2007, the researchers studied the spread and containment of a deadly virus in an area even more important than Mexico or Asia: the World of Warcraft.

The hardest part of writing about the swine flu outbreak has been striking the right tone. No doubt, this is a serious threat, as even a mild flu pandemic, on the order of the 1968 Hong Kong flu, would cause significant economic downturn at a time when the country already faces immense financial problems. On the other hand, hyping the threat does a disservice to the very public that the media intends to help.