Lemierre’s Syndrome

I am watching a TV program on The Learning Channel about a disease that puzzles many doctors: Lemierre’s Disease or Lemierre’s Syndrome. It starts with a sore throat, fever, great lethargy, and bodily weakness; but that is followed by high fever, stiffness, swollen lymph nodes in the neck, and blood infection.

It’s called a “forgotten disease,” because it is now very rare: less than one case per million people. So it’s often not recognized.

Before antibiotics, Lemierre’s disease was fatal in about 90% of cases.

The cause is a bacterium, usually one of the genus Fusobacterium. The bacterium infects the throat but it causes an inflammation of the jugular vein. That causes a blood clot in the jugular. Pieces of the clot break off and take the bacterium to other places in the body, causing a variety of serious and mysterious symptoms.

The first patient developed a brain abscess in the left temporal lobe; she had to have brain surgery. Her head was held still by a frame while the surgeon did CAT scans to find the extent of the abscess and minimize the damage. At that point I remembered that I knew some technical writers who wrote the manuals for the probes and imaging software that are used in brain surgery. It’s nice to be helping out behind the scenes.

Friends can make you fat

Close friends gain weight together–even if they live apart. A new study shows that if a friend gains weight, you’re 57% more likely to gain weight. Family members have a similar, but lesser effect. Neighbours have none. And this isn’t a small study. It’s an analysis of more than 12,000 people over more than 30 years. Researchers knew who were spouses, who were siblings, who were neighbours, who were friends, and what they weighed.

The same seems to occur for weight loss, but fewer people lost weight.

The Twelve Kinds of Ads

According to Slate, there are only twelve kinds of ads in the world. This video is supposed to teach you to recognize and resist them all.