A special education teacher in the Glendale, Arizona’s Peoria Unified School District has recovered from a necrotizing fasciitis, better known as flesh-eating bacteria.
Dr. Kevin Foster, director of the Burn Center at Maricopa Integrated Health System, used an experimental skin spray called ReCell to improve the healing and reconstruction of the woman’s large open arm wound.
The World Health Organization has called antibiotic resistance “a global crisis we can’t ignore,” one that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate kills 23,000 people annually in the U.S. alone.
Now, honeybee research could offer clues as to how it spreads.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has to walk a fine line. Saving people from the nastiest infectious diseases and bioterror attacks requires that they study those same viruses and bacteria. But even in one of the most carefully controlled and well-equipped facilities on Earth, items are occasionally mishandled or misplaced.
What’s the worst that could happen? It’s not a rhetorical question when we take a tour of …
Accepting a transplant of someone else’s stool might sound extreme, but it might just be the next big thing in medicine, thanks in part to a potentially deadly stomach bug called Clostridium difficile.
C. diff, an emerging epidemic in hospitals and nursing homes that tears through the gut like Sherman through Georgia, has grown increasingly virulent and antibiotic-resistant in recent years. For many sufferers, fecal microbiota transplantation offers hope when all else fails. Can we get over the “ick factor” when our lives are on the line? You bet we can.