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Fall: Football, cooler temps, falling leaves, and gonorrhea


crash_davis

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https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/fall-time-for-gonorrhea/

According to a new article, published today in the journal PLoS Pathogens, all infectious diseases may be seasonal—and there’s at least one for every time of the year.

Study author Micaela Martinez, an infectious disease ecologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, presents a compendium of 69 infectious diseases that run the gamut from rare to common, neglected to notorious, innocuous to deadly. Despite their differences, all the syndromes have one thing in common: They rise and fall with changing seasons.

Martinez, a conservation ecologist by training, initially set out to track the seasonality of acute, or short-term, infections like influenza and chickenpox after noting similarities between the disease states of humans and wildlife. But as she began to compile a list of infectious diseases that tend to plague humans, Martinez found that the trend also held true for chronic, or long-term, diseases like gonorrhea and leprosy.

“There’s documented seasonality for all infectious diseases, which is not what I was expecting,” Martinez explains. “It’s an even more widespread phenomenon than we thought.”

A quick look at the infectious disease calendar paints quite the sobering picture. As autumn leaves turn from green to red, gonorrhea and yellow fever rear their ugly heads in some parts of the world. The winds of winter are famous for flu, but also bring bouts of pneumonia. Refreshing springtime blooms breathe new life into outbreaks of chickenpox and salmonella. And last but certainly not least, summer months pack the heat with spikes in Lyme disease, polio, syphilis, tetanus, tuberculosis, and more.

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7 minutes ago, crash_davis said:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/fall-time-for-gonorrhea/

According to a new article, published today in the journal PLoS Pathogens, all infectious diseases may be seasonal—and there’s at least one for every time of the year.

Study author Micaela Martinez, an infectious disease ecologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, presents a compendium of 69 infectious diseases that run the gamut from rare to common, neglected to notorious, innocuous to deadly. Despite their differences, all the syndromes have one thing in common: They rise and fall with changing seasons.

Martinez, a conservation ecologist by training, initially set out to track the seasonality of acute, or short-term, infections like influenza and chickenpox after noting similarities between the disease states of humans and wildlife. But as she began to compile a list of infectious diseases that tend to plague humans, Martinez found that the trend also held true for chronic, or long-term, diseases like gonorrhea and leprosy.

“There’s documented seasonality for all infectious diseases, which is not what I was expecting,” Martinez explains. “It’s an even more widespread phenomenon than we thought.”

A quick look at the infectious disease calendar paints quite the sobering picture. As autumn leaves turn from green to red, gonorrhea and yellow fever rear their ugly heads in some parts of the world. The winds of winter are famous for flu, but also bring bouts of pneumonia. Refreshing springtime blooms breathe new life into outbreaks of chickenpox and salmonella. And last but certainly not least, summer months pack the heat with spikes in Lyme disease, polio, syphilis, tetanus, tuberculosis, and more.

Probably has something to do with this.....

giphy.gif

 

  • Haha 2
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