health

horrifying-screwworm-infection-confirmed-in-us-traveler-after-overseas-trip

Horrifying screwworm infection confirmed in US traveler after overseas trip

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Flesh-eating screwworm larvae poised to invade the US have snuck into Maryland via the flesh of a person who had recently traveled to El Salvador, upping anxiety about the ghastly—and economically costly—parasite.

Reuters was first to report the case early Monday, quoting Andrew Nixon, spokesperson for the US Department of Health and Human Services, who said in an email that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had confirmed the case on August 4 in a person who had returned from a trip to El Salvador.

While other outlets have since reported that the screwworm case found in Maryland is the first human case in the US, or first travel-related case in the US, or the first case in years—none of those things are true. Screwworms are endemic in parts of South America and the Caribbean and travel-related cases have always been a threat and occasionally pop up in the US. While the CDC doesn’t keep a public tally of the cases, experts at the agency have noted several travel-related human cases in the US in recent years, including one as recent as last year.

The new case in Maryland doesn’t change anything in the US. “The risk to public health in the United States from this introduction is very low,” Nixon wrote to Reuters. But, what has changed is that the risk of an incursion at the US-Mexico border is no longer low—in fact it’s rather high currently.

Savage parasites

Screwworms were once endemic to the US before a massive eradication effort that began in the 1950s drove the population out of the US and Central America. The flies were held at bay with a biological barrier of constant releases of sterile male flies along the Darién Gap at the border of Panama and Colombia. The flies were declared eradicated from Panama in 2006. But, in 2022, the barrier was breached and the flies have worked their way back up through Central America, including El Salvador, since then. Now they are merely 370 miles or less from the Texas border, and state and federal agencies are preparing for an invasion, including with plans to build a sterile fly facility in the state.

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Two men fell gravely ill last year; their infections link to deaths in the ’80s

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Doctors soon discovered they were infected with the rare soil bacterium, which causes a disease called melioidosis.

Dangerous infection

Generally, melioidosis can be difficult to diagnose and tricky to treat, as it is naturally resistant to some antibiotics. It can infect people if they breathe it in or get it into open cuts. Sometimes the infection can stay localized, like a lung infection or a skin ulcer. But it can also get into the blood and become a systemic infection, spreading to various organs, including the brain. Fatality rates can be as high as 90 percent in people who are not treated but fall to less than 40 percent in people who receive prompt, proper care.

Both men in 2024 were quickly hospitalized and diagnosed with sepsis. Both were treated with heavy antibiotic regimens and recovered, though patient 2 relapsed in November, requiring another hospital stay. He ultimately recovered again.

According to the CDC, about a dozen melioidosis cases are identified each year in the US on average, but most occur in people who have traveled to areas known to harbor the bacterium. Neither of the men infected last year had recently traveled to any such places. So the researchers turned to genetic sequencing, which revealed the link to two cases in the 1980s.

In those cases, both men died from the infection. The man dubbed Patient 3 died in October of 1989. He was a veteran who fought in Vietnam—where the bacterium is endemic—two decades prior to his infection. The researchers note that such a long latency period for a B. pseudomallei infection is not entirely out of the question, but it would be rare to have such a large gap between an exposure and an infection. More suspiciously, the researchers note that in the month prior to Patient 3’s death, Hurricane Hugo made landfall in Georgia as a Category 4 storm, dumping three to five inches of rain.

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America’s fragile drug supply chain is extremely vulnerable to climate change

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Vulnerabilities

Using data from the Food and Drug Administration, the researchers identified 10,861 drug facilities that were active for at least one year between 2019 and 2024. These facilities represent the array of manufacturing stages of a drug, from analyzing raw drug materials, to manufacturing active ingredients, to packaging drug products. The researchers then looked at the county location of each of these facilities and whether any federally declared weather emergencies occurred in those counties during the period. Weather-related emergencies included those from fires, hurricanes, storms, tornadoes, and floods.

During the six-year span, 6,819 facilities (63 percent) faced at least one weather-related emergency. Per year, an average of 2,146 facilities (33 percent) experienced such an emergency.

The researchers noted that there was no statistically significant difference in the likelihood that counties with or without a drug facility would experience a weather-related emergency. That is, it’s not the case that drug facilities have been built in areas uniquely vulnerable to climate-related disasters.

Still, with a third of US facilities at risk of weather disasters each year, the study clearly shows how fraught it is to have flimsy supply chains—like having a single plant produce 60 percent of the country’s supply of an essential drug product.

“These findings underscore the importance of recognizing climate-related vulnerabilities and the urgent need for supply chain transparency, for strategic allocation of production, and for disaster risk management strategies to prevent health care disruptions in the US,” the authors conclude.

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Top pediatricians buck RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine meddling on COVID shot guidance

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“It’s clear that we’re in a different place in the pandemic than we were four or five years ago in terms of risks to healthy older kids,” Sean O’Leary, chair of the AAP Committee on Infectious Diseases (COID), said in a statement. However, “the risk of hospitalization for young children and those with high-risk conditions remains pretty high.”

According to CDC data, the rate of COVID-19 hospitalization in children under 2 is the highest among any pediatric group. Further, the rate of hospitalization among children 6 months to 23 months is comparable to that of adults ages 50 to 64. Critically, more than half of children ages 6 months to 23 months who are hospitalized for COVID-19 have no underlying medical condition that puts them at high risk for severe infection.

For children 2 to 18, the AAP recommends COVID-19 shots for children who have a medical condition that puts them at high risk, are residents of care facilities, have never been vaccinated, or have household contacts who are at high risk of severe COVID-19. All other children and teens should also have access to updated seasonal shots if they desire them, the AAP says.

“The AAP will continue to provide recommendations for immunizations that are rooted in science and are in the best interest of the health of infants, children, and adolescents,” Kressly said. “Pediatricians know how important routine childhood immunizations are in keeping children, families, and their communities healthy and thriving.”

Coverage questions

With school starting, COVID-19 cases ticking up around the country, and cold-weather respiratory virus season looming, the question now is how the conflicting recommendations will be interpreted by insurance companies. Insurers are required to cover vaccines recommended by the CDC. But there is no such obligation for recommendations from medical groups.

AAP has been holding meetings with insurers to press for continued coverage of evidence-based vaccine recommendations.

O’Leary told The Washington Post that insurers are “signaling that they are committed to covering our recommendations.” The Post also noted that AHIP, the major insurance lobby, released a statement in June saying its members are committed to “ongoing coverage of vaccines to ensure access and affordability for this respiratory virus season.”

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The West Texas measles outbreak has ended

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A large measles outbreak in Texas that has affected 762 people has now ended, according to an announcement Monday by the Texas Department of State Health Services. The agency says it has been more than 42 days since a new case was reported in any of the counties that previously showed evidence of ongoing transmission.

The outbreak has contributed to the worst year for measles cases in the United States in more than 30 years. As of August 5, the most recent update from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a total of 1,356 confirmed measles cases have been reported across the country this year. For comparison, there were just 285 measles cases in 2024.

The Texas outbreak began in January in a rural Mennonite community with low vaccination rates. More than two-thirds of the state’s reported cases were in children, and two children in Texas died of the virus. Both were unvaccinated and had no known underlying conditions. Over the course of the outbreak, a total of 99 people were hospitalized, representing 13 percent of cases.

Measles is a highly contagious respiratory illness that can temporarily weaken the immune system, leaving individuals vulnerable to secondary infections such as pneumonia. In rare cases, it can also lead to swelling of the brain and long-term neurological damage. It can also cause pregnancy complications, such as premature birth and babies with low birth weight. The best way to prevent the disease is the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. One dose of the vaccine is 93 percent effective against measles while two doses is 97 percent effective.

The West Texas measles outbreak has ended Read More »

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RFK Jr.’s Wi-Fi and 5G conspiracies appear to make it into MAHA report draft

5G, health, MAHA, robert f kennedy jr, trump administration, vaccines, wi-fi / /

The Trump administration’s plans to improve Americans’ health will include a push to review the safety of electromagnetic radiation, echoing long-held conspiracy theories and falsehoods about Wi-Fi and 5G touted by health secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

On Friday, Politico obtained a draft version of the “Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy,” a highly anticipated report from the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission intended to steer the administration’s health policy. The report, which has not been adopted by the White House, is being viewed as friendly to industry, and it contains little to no policy recommendations or proposed regulations. For instance, it includes no proposed restrictions on pesticides or ultra-processed foods, which are top priorities of the MAHA movement.

Otherwise, the document mainly rehashes the talking points and priorities of Kennedy’s health crusades. That includes attacking water fluoridation, casting doubt on the safety of childhood vaccines, pushing for more physical activity in children to reduce chronic diseases, getting rid of synthetic food dyes, and claiming that children are being overprescribed medications.

Notably, the report does not mention the leading causes of death for American children, which are firearms and motor vehicle accidents. Cancer, another top killer, is only mentioned in the context of pushing new AI technologies at the National Institutes of Health. Poisonings, another top killer, are also not mentioned explicitly.

While the importance of water quality is raised in the report, it’s only in the context of fluoride and not of any other key contaminants, such as lead or PFAS. And although the draft strategy will prioritize “whole, minimally processed foods,” it offers no strategy for reducing the proportion of ultra-processed food (UPF) in Americans’ diets. The strategy merely aims to come up with a “government-wide definition” for UPF to guide future research and policies.

RFK Jr.’s Wi-Fi and 5G conspiracies appear to make it into MAHA report draft Read More »

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Anti-vaccine RFK Jr. creates vaccine panel of anti-vaccine group’s dreams

anti-vaccine, childhood vaccines, health, mRNA, robert f kennedy jr, vaccines / /

Immediate concern

It’s possible that Kennedy did not immediately set up the task force because the necessary leadership was not in place. The 1986 law says the task force “shall consist of consist of the Director of the National Institutes of Health, the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and the Director of the Centers for Disease Control [and Prevention].” But a CDC director was only confirmed and sworn in at the end of July.

With Susan Monarez now at the helm at CDC, the Department of Health and Human Services said Thursday that the task force is being revived, though it will be led by the NIH.

“By reinstating this Task Force, we are reaffirming our commitment to rigorous science, continuous improvement, and the trust of American families,” NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya said in the announcement. “NIH is proud to lead this effort to advance vaccine safety and support innovation that protects children without compromise.”

Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group cheered the move on social media, saying it was “grateful” that Kennedy was fulfilling his duty.

Outside health experts were immediately concerned by the move.

“What I am concerned about is making sure that we don’t overemphasize very small risks [of vaccines] and underestimate the real risk of infectious diseases and cancers that these vaccines help prevent,” Anne Zink, Alaska’s former chief medical officer, told The Washington Post.

David Higgins, a pediatrician and preventive medicine specialist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, worried about eroding trust in vaccines, telling the Post, “I am concerned that bringing this committee back implies to the public that we have not been looking at vaccine safety. The reality is, we evaluate the safety of vaccines more than any other medication, medical intervention, or supplements available.”

Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, worried about a more direct attack on vaccines, telling CNN, “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an anti-vaccine activist who has these fixed, immutable, science-resistant beliefs that vaccines are dangerous. He is in a position now to be able to set up task forces like this one [that] will find some way to support his notion that vaccines are doing more harm than good.”

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Bat colony checks in to hotel; 200 guests check out, unaware of rabies scare

bats, Exposure, health, infectious, rabies, risk, wyoming / /

Health officials in Wyoming are sinking their teeth into a meaty task.

Over 200 people who stayed in a hotel in Grand Teton National Park between May and July may have unknowingly been exposed to rabies, according to Wyoming Public Radio.

In an announcement on Friday, the National Park Service reported finding evidence of a bat colony in the attic. The discovery was made after there had been at least eight incidents in which guests encountered winged mammals inside the hotel.

Now, the Wyoming Health Department is trying to contact all guests who stayed in a block of rooms under the bat’s lair. Specifically, they’re reaching out to the over 200 who stayed in rooms 516, 518, 520, 522, 524, 526, 528, and 530 at the Jackson Lake Lodge between May 15 and July 27. It was on July 27 that the eighth bat run-in occurred and the hotel closed the eight rooms.

“Although there were a lot of people exposed in this incident, one positive about it is that we know who 100 percent of those people are,” Travis Riddell, director of the Teton County Public Health Department, told Wyoming Public Radio.

In Wyoming, bats are one of the two main carriers of rabies, the other being skunks. But bats are of particular concern because—unlike an extremely obvious skunk attack—people might not be aware of bat exposures.

Inconspicuous risk

The rabies virus generally transmits through saliva via bites and scratches, and bat bites and scratches are easy to miss. The most common bat in Wyoming is the small brown bat, which weighs less than half an ounce on average—though they can look larger due to their wide wings. These teeny bats, with their wee teeth, can leave bites and scratches that are not visible, do not bleed, and are not painful.

Bat colony checks in to hotel; 200 guests check out, unaware of rabies scare Read More »

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Worm invades man’s eyeball, leading doctors to suck out his eye jelly

eyeball, eyes, health, infection, parasites, worms / /

For eight months, a 35-year-old man in India was bothered by his left eye. It was red and blurry. When he finally visited an ophthalmology clinic, it didn’t take long for doctors to unearth the cause.

In a case report in the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors report that they first noted that the eye was bloodshot and inflamed, and the pupil was dilated and fixed. The man’s vision in the eye was 20/80. A quick look inside his eye revealed it was all due to a small worm, which they watched “moving sluggishly” in the back of his eyeball.

To gouge out the parasitic pillager, the doctors performed a pars plana vitrectomy—a procedure that involves sucking out some of the jelly-like vitreous inside the eye. This procedure can be used in the treatment of a variety of eye conditions, but using it to hoover up worms is rare. In order to get in, the doctors make tiny incisions in the white parts of the eye (the sclera) and use a hollow needle-like device with suction. They replace extracted eye jelly with things like saline.

In this case, the device was able to suck in part of the worm’s tail and drag it out—still squirming. Under the microscope, they quickly identified the peeper creeper. With a bulbous head, well-formed intestines, and a thick outer layer, it perfectly fit the description of Gnathostoma spinigerum, a known bodily marauder that can sometimes wiggle its way into eyeballs.

Panel A shows the pars plana vitrectomy removing the worm; Panel B shows the worm under light microscopy, revealing a larval-stage nematode with a cephalic bulb, thick cuticle, and well-developed intestine. Credit: New England Journal of Medicine, 2025

Stomach-churning cycle

G. spinigerum are endemic parasites in India that infect carnivorous mammals, particularly wild and domestic cats and dogs. In these primary hosts, adult worms form tumor-like masses on the walls of the animals’ intestinal tracts. There, the adults mate, and the mass erupts like an infernal, infectious volcano, spewing out eggs. The eggs are passed in the animals’ feces and can then spread to intermediate hosts. These include freshwater plankton, which get eaten by fish and amphibians, which then get eaten by the cats and dogs to complete the cycle. The young parasites can also be taken up by dead-end hosts like birds, including chickens, and snakes—these are called paratenic hosts.

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Boar’s Head to reopen plant as mold and funky meat problems pop up elsewhere

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Boar’s Head plans to reopen the Jarratt, Virginia, facility at the center of a deadly Listeria outbreak last year despite federal inspections continuing to find sanitation violations at three of the food company’s other facilities, according to federal records obtained by The Associated Press.

The AP obtained 35 pages of inspection reports via a Freedom of Information Act Request. Those reports cover inspections between January 1 and July 23 at three other Boar’s Head facilities: Forrest City, Arkansas; New Castle, Indiana; and Petersburg, Virginia. Overall, the reports reveal a suite of violations, including mold, condensation dripping over food areas, overflowing trash, meat and fat residue built up on walls and equipment, drains blocked with meat scraps, and pooling meat juice. The reports also recorded staff who didn’t wear the proper protective hairnets and aprons—and didn’t wash their hands.

In one violation, reported in the Petersburg facility, inspectors found meat waste collecting under equipment, including “5-6 hams, 4 large pieces of meat and a large quantity of pooling meat juice.”

The problems echo the sanitation violations recorded at the Jarratt plant before contamination with Listeria—particularly linked to the company’s liverwurst—caused an outbreak that led officials to shut it down. That outbreak spanned July to November of last year and sickened 61 people across 19 states, hospitalizing 60 and killing 10. Inspection reports revealed problems with mold, water leaks, dirty equipment and rooms, meat debris stuck on walls and equipment, various bugs, and, at one point, puddles of blood on the floor.

Amid the outbreak response, Boar’s Head vowed to make big changes to improve its food safety systems. Those included setting up a panel of food safety advisers, which included Frank Yiannas, a former Food and Drug Administration official, and Mindy Brashears, who served as the US Department of Agriculture undersecretary for food safety during Trump’s first term and has been nominated for the position again in Trump’s second.

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Texas prepares for war as invasion of flesh-eating flies appears imminent

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Past success

As the flies’ host and geographic range expand, pressure is intensifying to control the flies—something many countries have managed to do in the past.

Decades ago, screwworms were endemic throughout Central America and the southern US. However, governments across the regions used intensive, coordinated control efforts to push the flies southward. Screwworms were eliminated from the US around 1966, and were pushed downward through Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. They were eventually declared eliminated from Panama in 2006, with the population held at bay by a biological barrier at the Darién Gap, at the border of Panama and Colombia. However, in 2022, the barrier was breached, and the flies began advancing northward, primarily through unmonitored livestock movements. The latest surveillance suggests the flies are now about 370 miles south of Texas.

The main method to wipe out screwworms is the sterile insect technique (SIT), which exploits a weakness in the fly’s life cycle since they tend to only mate once. In the 1950s, researchers at the US Department of Agriculture figured out they could use gamma radiation to sterilize male flies without affecting their ability to find mates. They then bred massive amounts of male flies, sterilized them, and carpet-bombed infested areas with aerial releases, which tanked the population.

Panama, in partnership with the US, maintained the biological barrier at the Colombian border with continual sterile-fly bombings for years. But as the flies approached this year, the USDA shifted its aerial deliveries to Mexico. In June, the USDA announced plans to set up a new sterile fly facility in Texas for aerial deliveries to northern Mexico. And last month, the USDA halted livestock trade from southern entry points.

Miller said in the announcement today that SIT is no longer enough, and Texas is taking its own steps. Those include the new bait, insecticides, and new feed for livestock and deer laced with the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin. Miller also said that the state aims to develop a vaccine for cattle that could kill larvae, but such a shot is still in development.

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After using ChatGPT, man swaps his salt for sodium bromide—and suffers psychosis

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After seeking advice on health topics from ChatGPT, a 60-year-old man who had a “history of studying nutrition in college” decided to try a health experiment: He would eliminate all chlorine from his diet, which for him meant eliminating even table salt (sodium chloride). His ChatGPT conversations led him to believe that he could replace his sodium chloride with sodium bromide, which he obtained over the Internet.

Three months later, the man showed up at his local emergency room. His neighbor, he said, was trying to poison him. Though extremely thirsty, the man was paranoid about accepting the water that the hospital offered him, telling doctors that he had begun distilling his own water at home and that he was on an extremely restrictive vegetarian diet. He did not mention the sodium bromide or the ChatGPT discussions.

His distress, coupled with the odd behavior, led the doctors to run a broad set of lab tests, revealing multiple micronutrient deficiencies, especially in key vitamins. But the bigger problem was that the man appeared to be suffering from a serious case of “bromism.” That is, an excess amount of the element bromine had built up in his body.

A century ago, somewhere around 8–10 percent of all psychiatric admissions in the US were caused by bromism. That’s because, then as now, people wanted sedatives to calm their anxieties, to blot out a cruel world, or simply to get a good night’s sleep. Bromine-containing salts—things like potassium bromide—were once drugs of choice for this sort of thing.

Unfortunately, bromide can easily build up in the human body, where too much of it impairs nerve function. This causes a wide variety of problems, including grotesque skin rashes (warning: the link is exactly what it sounds like) and significant mental problems, which are all grouped under the name of “bromism.”

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