Posted on 05/11/2012 11:54:34 AM PDT by mojito
A young research associate killed by a highly virulent strain of meningococcal disease is believed to have contracted the bacteria from the San Francisco lab where he was working on a vaccine against it, public health officials said on Thursday.
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention experts are seeking to confirm what they already suspect: that Richard Din, 25, died Saturday in an unusual case of a scientist being fatally infected with an agent from his own laboratory.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Sounds like a 60s Late Show (black&white) scenario — the intrepid researcher working on a vaccine tests it on himself.. (Except in the movie version, the scientist survives, and gets the girl - cue theramin ‘music’ and credits...)
Seriously, though - if this bug is ‘highly virulent’, then how long was he out in public before succumbing?? Was he a good little sheeple and take the bus to work??
This one is definitely on my Watch List....
Did he know something about the Breitbart killing?
A little GLP would have gone a long way.
But there's hundreds of others whom he came in contact with at the grocery store, the gas station, the library, the parking lot, the mall, the local Starbucks and McDonald's where he ate lunch, his neighbors, the post office, and all those they've been in contact with. Yeah, another worry out there.
Thu May 3, 2012 10:48pm EDT is the time of the report.
He died one day after becomming ill. Seems like we should have heard about more infections by a week later.
” Seems like we should have heard about more infections by a week later. “
Don’t know — the article only describes the time from diagnosis of gross, critial, symptoms until death..
It does not say -
1) when was he infected??
2) what is the gestation period of this bacterial strain in the host?? (this information is also not readily discernible from the Wikipedia article I skimmed just now..)
3) since meningococcal disease initially presents as flu-like symptoms, how long was he feeling mildly ill before going critical/septic and being diagnosed?? And 3a) how contagious is the disease during the mild-symptom phase?? (Wikipedia was also not forthcoming on this aspect..)
There are too many unknowns, especially in timeline and virulence, to justify the assumption that ‘we should have heard by now’....
As a point of interest, the thread posted immediately after this one,
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2882669/posts
” Time magazine cover — forget the breast, what about the boy? “
has, at the time I’m typing this, 40 ‘reply’ posts, where this one, which has some pretty serious public health implications, has — six..
I despair for my fellow FReepers, sometimes....
Maybe more FReepers feel qualified to comment on mammaries than on megabugs. One, we may handle every day, the other, not so much.
ping
Oh, don’t despair - we are reading.
And it is not time to head for the bunker, yet.
Now, had he taken an airplane flight...that would be another story.
I always find it interesting that our “news organizations” are far too busy reporting on Romney’s high school escapades, and women who breastfeed their children until they are old enough to make their own peanut butter sandwiches, to bother with news such as this : |
Bread and Circuses.
Dear Lord, please guide our course out of this mess.
Tatt
The son of a neighbor had aspirations of going to work at the Centers for Disease Control. He studied hard and then went to college and got his degree in microbiology. He then applied to the CDC and got accepted. Six months after he left for his dream job, I was driving by and he was mowing the grass at his parents house. I stopped to say hello and he told me he was back home. When I asked him about his job at the CDC, his comment was that he didn’t know that it was that dangerous before he started work. Now he says, you can get killed with only a single mistake.
He now works for a pharmaceutical company.
They don’t know how people get it. It’s not something new nor a concern for most people. He must have been a young adult. It is generally a disease of teenagers and they do show up in clusters.
It's not really cause for alarm. I have handled it and been exposed to it 3 or 4 times in my career and never gotten it.
Or this
If ‘this’ was an incident to worry about, you would never have known about it.
Probably was texting.
The problem with “superbugs” is that the deadlier they are and the quicker they kill, the quicker the bug dies without getting transmitted. Organisms that can’t transmit/reproduce are an evolutionary dead end.
It's true. Sex sells, especially kinky sex.
Nasty diseases, not so much.
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