NPR had this neat animation explaining the microbiome. Take a look!
Category: Health (page 7 of 27)
Part of a 2 ft long blood clot
A team of doctors a UCLA vacuumed a 2 foot long blood clot out of a patient’s heart. The clot extended from his leg to the entry of his heart. The doctors used a machine called AngioVac to perform the procedure. According to the UCLA press release here’s how it worked:
A team of UCLA interventional radiologists and cardiovascular surgeons slid a tiny camera down Dunlap’s esophagus to visually monitor his heart. Next, they guided a coiled hose through his neck artery and plugged one end into his heart, against the clot. They threaded the other end through a vein at the groin and hooked the hose up to a powerful heart-bypass device in the operating room to create suction.“Once in place, the AngioVac quickly sucked the deadly clot out of Mr. Dunlap’s heart and filtered out the solid tissue,” said Moriarty, a UCLA interventional radiologist with expertise in clot removal and cardiovascular imaging. “The system then restored the cleansed blood through a blood vessel near the groin, eliminating the need for a blood transfusion.”The procedure lasted three hours. Doctors observed Dunlap for three days in intensive care before transferring him to the hospital’s cardiac ward and then discharging him four days later.
The procedure is an faster and less invasive alternative to open heart surgery.
The New York Times editoriaizes on the CDC study that found 23,000 people a year die each year due to infections from drug resistant bacteria:
The new report, for the first time, puts 17 drug-resistant bacteria and a dangerous fungus into three categories based on how big a threat they pose. Three were deemed “urgent threats,” including a bacterium, known as CRE, that is resistant to most drugs and kills a high percentage of people who become infected with it. Though it is rare, causing 600 deaths a year, it has been identified in health facilities in 44 states. Further spread of the germ or transfer of its resistance genes to other germs could lead to a “nightmare scenario,” the agency said. Twelve drug-resistant strains, including such common germs as salmonella, tuberculosis and MRSA, were classified as “serious threats.”
Scientific American also covers a paper published in JAMA Internal Medicine that links pig manure fertilizer to MRSA (methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus infections in humans. From Scientific American:
The team analyzed cases of two different types of MRSA — community-associated MRSA (CA-MRSA), which affected 1,539 patients, and health-care-associated MRSA (HA-MRSA), which affected 1,335 patients. (The two categories refer to where patients acquire the infection as well as the bacteria’s genetic lineages, but the distinction has grown fuzzier as more patients bring MRSA in and out of the hospital.) Then the researchers examined whether infected people lived near pig farms or agricultural land where pig manure was spread. They found that people who had the highest exposure to manure — calculated on the basis of how close they lived to farms, how large the farms were and how much manure was used — were 38% more likely to get CA-MRSA and 30% more likely to get HA-MRSA.
Expect to hear about this more and more.