med-hints

  In season one, episode one of the TNT series The Cleaning Lady, a woman is accosted by a man and she strikes him in the trachea.   He falls and can’t breathe.   Something has happened to his larynx.   If he was in an operating room a skilled surgeon could have performed a tracheostomy.   It’s an operation where a surgeon creates a hole through the neck, below the vocal chords.   It allows air to enter the bronchus.   In The Cleaning Lady episode there wasn’t time for a tracheostomy—so the cleaning lady performed a crico-thyrotomy. An onlooker asks:   what did she do?   How did she do that? A friend answers: she’s a doctor. The cleaning lady is a Cambodian doctor.   Her son has a rare medical condition and doctors in her country don’t know how to fix him.   The woman doctor brought her son to the U.S. illegally in the hope that she can get him medical care here.   The operation she performed, the cricothyrotomy i...

  Hepatitis E is caused by a positive-stranded RNA virus and is the most common cause of acute viral hepatitis world-wide. A n estimated 20 million infections occur annually with approximately 3.3 million acute HEV cases, resulting in about 56,600 deaths per year ( Lozano et al. 2012 ;  Rein et al. 2012 ).   F our genotypes of HEV are endemic in different regions in the world.   (HEV-1 and HEV-2) infect humans only or both humans and animal species. In developed countries the virus is a zoonosis—HEV3 and HEV4, mainly transmitted to humans through consumption of contaminated, not-properly-cooked pork or game meat or other meat products, but also through shellfish or contaminated vegetables.   In developing countries the fecal-oral route predominates (HEV-1). Over the last 10 years, human hepatitis E cases have been increasingly reported in Europe where genotype 3 (HEV-3) is common and mostly responsible for human hepatitis E virus infections. The main rese...

  In 1977 an Italian immunologist named Mario Rizzetto discovered a distinct immunological antigen-antibody system in the nuclei of the liver cells, in a patient with hepatitis B.   He decided it was a distinct virus and named it delta hepatitis.   Delta, it turned out, is the smallest viral pathogen that infects humans .   It’s genome is a circular, single-strand of 1700 RNA nucleotides. . "The combination of HDV and HBV infection often causes a severe form of chronic viral hepatitis, and can cause liver-related death and hepatocellular carcinoma ." In the 25 years since it was recognized, eight genotypes have been identified.   Genotype 1, the most widely distributed, predominates in Europe and North America. Genotype 3, present only in the Amazon basin, has been associated with outbreaks of fulminant hepatitis D, and the disease caused genotype 5 in Africa tends to be more benign and responds better to interferon than genotype 1. ” Worldwide the v...