Common Source Outbreak Research Paper

The first step to identifying the unknown bacteria residing on the blood agar plate sent in from Khokana was to do a Gram stain on it. This is an important first step because it dictates further testing that will be necessary to arrive at a final conclusive result. Viewing the fixed and stained slide under the microscope revealed round chains of bacteria in a purple color signaling Gram-positive streptococci. A catalase test was performed with no bubbling present indicating a negative result. This further confirmed the shape and arrangement seen under microscopy. With this mind, the coagulase test was not done, as it would be of no use since that specifies for staphylococcus, specifically for Staphylococcus aureus. For streptococcus, an examination of hemolysis was necessary at this point. Shifting attention back to the original blood agar plate, gamma hemolysis was noted, thus narrowing the field down to two choices left. The unknown bacteria was either Streptococcus bovis or Entercoccus faecalis. This also means the Optochin and Bacitracin sensitivity tests would not be needed as those pinpoint alpha- and

An investigation was necessary to find the cause of the outbreak, and how to stop it from continuing to spread. The campus clinic was interested in testing the following nine patients: Sue, Jill, Anthony, Wanda, Maggie, Maria, Arnie, Marco, and Alvin. All of the students have similar symptoms and agreed to being tested except for Alvin.

In August of last year, an adult in Pueblo County, Colorado succumbed to the bubonic plague. The Health Department did not specify who it was, just saying that it was an adult. This was the first case of someone contracting the plague in Pueblo County since 2004. It is thought that the person caught the disease from fleas on a dead animal. According to the CDC, about seven people every year contract the plague in the United States.

The Plague or ¨Black Death¨ was a virus that spread across Europe killing about 60% of the population. The plague's origin was at the time unknown and this brought about many questions. At this time, people did not have basic necessities such as proper hygiene and medicine. Therefore there was fear, superstitions as well as conspiracy, and there were also some who realized that they could gain from the deaths of those around them.

The curve on Figure 1 told that the peak of the laboratory-confirmed cases of Cryptosporidiosis outbreak in Utah occurred in the middle of August with the highest number of cases in a day was about 58 cases. The outbreak started to develop in the end of June which had the average cases in a day was about 5 cases. The cases significantly disappeared and start forming an endemic curve again in the late of September with the average cases was less than 5 cases in a day.

Cryptosporidium parvum is a protozoan intestinal parasite causing a short-term enteric illness in individuals with functioning immune systems, and can cause a potentially fatal infection in immunosuppressed individuals. Because of C. parvum’s resistance to many of the procedures used to process drinking water and food, and the parasite’s extremely high fecundity, the potential for a large scale outbreak is very high. In fact, C. parvum was responsible for an outbreak in Milwaukee in 1993 when an estimated 403,000 people became ill. This was the largest waterborne outbreak of disease in United States history. This paper will cover some aspects of C. parvum’s life cycle, human sickness

Some factors that could have influenced the outbreaks of diseases such as smallpox, influenza, tuberculosis, dysentery, and cholera are poor sanitation, a general lack of medical facilities, and a poor diet. In the article “Sickness and Madness” it is said that the poor sanitation practices led to contamination of the water sources for the camps (mainly rivers). Poor medical facilities often led to the spread of disease as patients were often returned to their tents, not placed in a hospital. A poor diet caused a lack in vitamins and minerals for the miners, weakening the immune system, making disease spread faster.

The strangest thing happened on the island the other day; I noticed two different vessels had washed ashore. However, one vessel contained a Japanese samurai, and the other contained a Chinese bureaucrat. With nothing to do but wait for help, the two men got to know each other fairly well over the course of their time on the island. The two strangers talked about how they came into their professions, their everyday life, and what was happening in their respective nations.

The attempted attack by an armed individual on a high-speed train in Europe has concerned the United States about vulnerability of rail passengers and whether present security measures are acceptable. Airports are guarded with several layers of security including airport police and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) personnel using metal detectors and full-body scanners, but a lot of railroad stations have nominal scrutiny for passengers boarding trains. Bigger stations have armed Amtrak officers and bomb-sniffing dogs. Passengers and baggage are randomly searched at a few of the chief rail centers, like Union Station in Washington and Pennsylvania Station in New York. Even so, these measures would hardly

Outbreaks of cholera were not isolated to the European and Asian continents, as several major cases within the United States have been recorded back to colonial times. As trade increased with the old world, infected sailors bringing the disease to major port cities, spreading it even further as products became distributed across the nation. Famously documented as one of the most vital turning points for public health medicine within the US, the city of Chicago mirrored what was unfolding in the 1854 London outbreak. Congruent to Snow’s findings, entire families suddenly became severely ill and dying off. As an effort to combat the pestilence, Ellis Chesbrough, an already established railroad engineer, designed a series of sewer systems modeled

I worked on the explanatory summary of Anatomy of an Epidemic assignment with Maria Cortes and Gustavo Martinez. We shared a positive attitude and environment and cooperated with one another. We all had done reading assignments given by our professor and had information about the topic to some extent. However, I felt that we did not have good communication between us. We had different perspective and our ideas of what the text said were different. Because of it, it was difficult for us to go to a conclusion and write a particular thing on our summary. I think Gustavo did a really good job because he was trying to find ways which could combine all of our concepts. He also seemed confident about what he read and was working together with us to

Considering that these hills and uplands are the main areas from where water catchment is made, sheep has been inferred as a source of waterborne Cryptosporidium spp. outbreaks in England (Nichols et al., 2006; McLauchlin et al., 2000). Furthermore, C. parvum was the hazardous microorganism in 84 per cent of sporadic cases detected in Scotland, supporting sheep faecal pollution of water sources as the leading cause of sporadic cryptosporidiosis (McLauchlin et al., 2000). These cases could be imply by the fact that sheep population increases every year, and so nowadays 22.9 million sheep are recorded in the UK (DEFRA, 2015), becoming a potential risk for hosting and later contagion of the parasite. Besides, sheep are widely distributed in higher hills than other livestock, managed differently with flock grazing large enclosures rather than being kept indoors. At the same time, a seasonal pattern with spring and autumn peaks of human cryptosporidiosis cases was observed, with the spring peak concurring with the lambing season (Cacció and Widmer, 2014, pp. 170-172; Mueller-Doblies et al., 2008; Pritchard et al., 2007). The evidence supports a link between the infections in humans and the contact with infected faeces of sheep (Hashim et al., 2006). Nevertheless; Cryptosporidium species have been isolated from cattle, goats, water buffalos and other livestock (Cacció and Widmer, 2014, pp. 170-172), thus not even removing sheep from grazing ground where water drinking is collected would eliminate the zoonosis. There is to consider that 9.8 million cattle are distributed in the UK (DEFRA, 2015), and such other livestock; representing a risk factor as well. Additionally, the protozoan may not be uniformly distributed through all sheep populations, thus specific ages, classes or

Cryptosporidiosis is one of the most known gastrointestinal illness caused by the genus of Cryptosporidium. Cryptosporidiosis, according to the CDC, has become one of the most common causes of waterborne diseases in the United States, with outbreaks increasing annually. An outbreak of Cryptosporidiosis, in Milwaukee in 1993 affected around 400,000 people and was traced to the city 's water supply (NFID, 2008). The most common symptom associated with this disease is Diarrhea.

Cryptosporidium species are intestinal protozoan parasites with a worldwide distribution, responsible for diarrheal disease in a large number of vertebrate hosts including humans, and zoonotic infection has long been acknowledged, as it is life-threatening in immunocompromised patients (Current et al., 1983). The disease has a faecal-oral cycle, occurring with the ingestion of infecting oocystes, which have environmental resistance. Separate anthroponotic and zoonotic transmission cycles have been identified (Casemore and Jackson, 1984) and infection is maintained by several routes: direct person-to-person transmission, animal-to-person contact either directly or indirectly and by ingestion of contaminated food, fomites and especially drinking and recreational water (Atherton et al., 1995; Casemore, 1990; Gallaher et al., 1989; Joce et al., 1991; Meinhardt et al., 1996). To date it is considered one of the most difficult to control waterborne microorganism and contaminated water represents the major source of human infection (Fayer, 2004; Ramirez et al., 2004). Waterborne outbreaks in human from agricultural sources have long been ascribed to cattle due the high prevalence of C. parvum in calves, however it is still debated whether sheep might have an epidemiological role for zoonotic transmission (Robertson, 2009).

Of the many diseases spread by insects, none are actually caused by the insects themselves but by other organisms passed on when they feed or bite. Insects are capable of spreading diseases caused by many different types of microorganisms including bacteria, viruses, protozoan and others. Mosquitoes have earned the title of "the most deadly creature on earth." This is due to the fact that they spread serious epidemic diseases such as Malaria, Yellow Fever, African Sleeping Sickness, and West Nile Virus.