Thursday, October 29, 2009
The fact that it is almost Halloween is purely coincidental.
At an IDSA session on "What's hot in infectious disease," John Bartlett, MD, updated us on the risks of bat bites. Apparently (surprising as this sounds), it's easy to be bitten by a bat without noticing, and a fair number of bats are rabid.
Therefore, standard protocol (at least in Canada, I'm not sure if this also applies to the U.S.) was "If you wake up and see a bat in the bedroom, you should be considered for rabies prophylaxis." Some Canadian researchers were suspicious of the cost-effectiveness of this recommendation, so they did a study of 36,000 people. They asked how many of them had either had contact with a bat or seen one in a bedroom, and then calculated the cost of providing rabies prophylaxis.
Turns out that just the therapy--not even counting clinician time--would cost $2 billion per rabies case prevented if you treated all the bedroom encounters, and $48 million each if you treated just the people who had contact. Canadian policy was revised based on these calculations, and the results appear to confirm the projections, Dr. Bartlett said. "The epidemic of rabies has not been found."
Labels: infectious disease, rabies
posted by Stacey Butterfield at
6:38 PM
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American Journal of Medicine
Also known as the Green Journal, the American Journal of Medicine publishes original clinical articles of interest to physicians in internal medicine and its subspecialities, both in academia and community-based practice.
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A collaborative medical blog started by Neil Shapiro, ACP Member, associate program director at New York University Medical Center's internal medicine residency program. Faculty, residents and students contribute case studies, mystery quizzes, news, commentary and more.
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Robert M. Centor, FACP, contributes short essays contemplating medicine and the health care system.
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EverythingHealth is designed to address the rapid changes in science, medicine, health and healing in the 21st Century.
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Getting Better is the continuation of Dr. Val Jones' previous blog at Revolution Health. It is devoted to helping people understand health issues from a balanced, scientifically sound perspective.
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A roundup of health policy news drawn from a database of hundreds of Web sites.
Interact MD
Michael Benjamin, ACP member, doesn't accept industry money so he can create an independent, clinician-reviewed space on the Internet for physicians to report and comment on the medical news of the day.
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The alter ego of Kevin Pho, ACP Member, is the closest thing to royalty in the medical blog world.
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The Public Library of Science's open access materials include a blog.
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