Three Things Thursday highlights three things I am paying attention to as an epidemiologist each week. We are in the dog days of summer. And while many students are already back in the classroom, our kids are still on their summer schedule. Here in northwestern Pennsylvania, we do not start school until the county fair is over.
Our county fair begins tomorrow.
If you are planning to go to The Fair — here is my best advice for staying healthy and safe at the county fair.
This week’s Three Things Thursday focuses on the current state of affairs in the world of health. Specifically, what is spreading, what we should be paying attention to as we head into the new school year, and why knowing about the mpox global health emergency is important.
Hoping this post helps to educate and empower you
to be healthy and create healthy communities.
What Diseases Are Spreading?
In the United States, COVID-19 and Parvovirus B19 (aka “slapped cheek” virus) are spreading throughout most communities.
The summer surge of COVID has been unrelenting. The FLiRT variants have been causing illnesses around the world, including in the Olympic Village and here at home. The number of positive tests, emergency room visits, hospitalizations, and deaths from COVID-19 continues to increase from week to week. Most surprising is that the case positivity (percentage of COVID tests that are positive) is higher now than it was a year ago or during the surge this past winter.
A lot of people are testing positive for COVID. And while the rate of hospitalizations and deaths this summer is below the rates a year ago (or even during the winter surge), a lot of people are getting sick.
The amount of SARS-CoV-2 virus in the wastewater is also continuing to increase.
Truth be told… wastewater surveillance has a host of limitations and is nowhere near a perfect surveillance tool or predictive model for increases/decreases in the number of COVID cases. That said — if we look at the trends over time, we can see there is a lot more virus in the wastewater now than in April, May, and June. We can also see that the amount of virus in the wastewater is increasing. While not perfect, it is an indicator that we are still in the middle of a (dog days of) summer COVID surge. And there is a lot of virus out there in our communities.
COVID has not gone away. It is still here. And it is still making people sick.
Also making people, especially children, sick is Parvovirus B19. Just yesterday, the CDC issued a message to its Health Alert Network stating that there has been —
“Increases in human parvovirus B19 activity in the United States. Parvovirus B19 is a seasonal respiratory virus that is transmitted through respiratory droplets by people with symptomatic or asymptomatic infection.”
Paravirus B19 aka “slapped cheek virus” is usually a mild virus in children that causes a symptom that looks like the child has been slapped repeatedly across their cheeks.
The virus can cause serious illnesses in individuals with compromised immune systems. And infection during the first trimester of pregnancy has been associated with an increased risk of miscarriage.
Like many viral infections, the best course of treatment is rest and staying hydrated.
On a personal note — I have a kid down and out with strep throat this week. He’s been wiped out for a few days now. So clearly — bacterial infections, like strep, are also spreading in our communities.
What Should We Be Paying Attention To…?
We know that when kids head back to school, people are going to get sick. As we head back to school and the inevitable cold-flu-COVID-RSV season is upon us — there are a handful of things we should each be paying attention to to keep our families and communities safe.
First — know when vaccines are available and which ones you need to get. Most seasonal vaccines, flu and COVID, will be available in Sept/Oct. Everyone who is 6 months of age or older should be getting both shots. More details and recommendations to come. But pay attention to vaccine availability.
Second — pay attention to what is spreading in your community. Ask questions… when you visit your doctor or the local pharmacy for your vaccines, ask them what illnesses they are seeing in their practice. When you are talking with other parents, ask them what they’re hearing about who is sick and with what diseases. Ask the college professors and teachers what their students are experiencing in terms of illness. Get a pulse on what is going on in your community.
Third — if you need to follow the public health data, look at trends over time. Just like I mentioned above regarding wastewater, we do NOT have perfect predictive measures for health surveillance; most of our metrics report data from the previous week (so we know what happened in the past, NOT what will happen in the future). But trends over time show us when things are increasing or decreasing — they can give us a heads-up on what to expect. In the case of COVID-19, we see from the wastewater trends that the summer surge has not ended. The amount of virus in the wastewater continues to increase. That is good to know; though it cannot predict whether or not you will get sick. It’s a forecast.
Finally — ignore the sensational headlines and read the fine print. As I discussed in my post about Taylor Swift’s new album,
“We cannot fully appreciate or understand the scale, scope, or severity of a problem at the speed of TikTok. Take H5N1, for example… in the past week, USDA has mandated that sick cows be tested for influenza, milk (both raw and pasteurized) be tested for live virus, more cows have become sick, cats have become sick, and there are reports of additional human cases (that are unconfirmed). At least 400 news articles have been published in the past 96 hours on H5N1 (according to a quick Google search for ‘H5N1 2024’).
To fully understand or to “get one’s arms around” H5N1, demands time.
To fully understand, the safety of our milk supply, the dangers of raw milk, the risks (health and financial) dairy farmers are facing, models being developed depicting the worst-case scenario, or to understand why avian influenza vaccines will be available very soon, one needs to spend hours each day reading the news, taking notes, critiquing what has been reported, asking questions, seeking answers, and then synthesizing what information is available.
It is a full-time job.
Understanding health threats and
working to create healthy communities demands time.”
Take the time to understand.
Ask questions.
Rely on experts (remember what Olympic medalist Ilona Maher taught us about using experts to be healthy!).
Do NOT read a headline and assume you understand or know what is going on.
WHO Declares Mpox a Public Health Emergency
Yesterday WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared the mpox (formerly monkeypox) outbreak in Africa a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. According to the WHO, there have been more than 14,000 cases and 524 deaths from mpox this year in Africa, which exceeds last year’s totals.
I am hoping that the WHO declaration will bring attention and resources (VACCINES) to the African continent, especially the Democratic Republic of the Congo — where the majority of cases are occurring.
You might be wondering —
why is it important that we know about the mpox situation in Africa?
The answer is simple —
We are just a quick plane ride (or two) away from Africa. And the diseases that are spreading there could easily be a problem here tomorrow.
Our world is widely connected. And we need to recognize that there is no “other” or “over there” when it comes to health. We are all connected. My health is tied to yours and yours to mine.
As I drafted this post, Sweden announced that it is the first country outside of Africa to have a case of mpox caused by the novel clade 1 (which is the variant of mpox causing the outbreak in Africa). The disease is spreading…
We cannot ignore the outbreak in Africa.
We should also not fear the mpox outbreak (at this point).
We need to recognize that there is NO over there when it comes to health.
We are a global community.
Happy County Fair Week to all. Be safe!
And please let me know if you have questions. Or comments —
And please share all this information with your friends and family. It is how we start to build healthy communities —