Flooding disrupts US. Next Health Problem: Mold

There is a history of natural disasters that make people sick. Reports come from Valley fever after the Northridge earthquake in California in 1994 he dumped soil with spores of Coccidia bacteria in the air, in aspergillus infections caused by victims of the 2011 Japanese tsunami craving water-containing bacteria, for people living with HIV and being killed by The fungus picks up the garbage from Joplin, Missouri, Hurricane, and in 2011.

But it is difficult to tell whether a disease or an incident is related to mold in particular, since the damage caused by natural disasters exposes the sufferer to many things. “After this flood or hurricane, there is a lot going on: Not only are you holding a house full of mold, but you are tearing down the house, so there are dry and dusty and plaster and all kinds of things you do ‘We can breathe again,” says Tom. Chiller, physician and chief of the mycotic branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “It’s hard for us to blow the mold.”

That’s why researchers face a dilemma: Their medical opinion tells them that people are at risk, but they have a lot of experience to prove this. People with a strong immune system are always at risk of fungal and fungal infections; a lack of immunity makes them more susceptible to daily respiratory infections, leaving them at risk of pests such as aspergillus and dangerous yeast Candidate auris. CDC to compare that more than 75,000 people are hospitalized each year for early-stage illnesses, costing $ 4.5 billion a year.

Those most at risk are cutting patients who have donated organs or treated with leukemia, and taking antiretroviral drugs to recover. Those people, researchers say, should not be near a mold house, not allowed to work, and should not have flooding. But in research Of the 103 patients protected by the CDC and several Houston hospitals that took place after Hurricane Harvey, half of them admitted to returning to clean their flooded homes, and only two-fifths of them said they were wearing respirators.

The CDC has been working with some of these hospitals on Harvey’s hard-hitting project, which has not yet been released, which is reviewing medical records a year before and after the hurricane to determine whether people who were under stress had developed a fungal-related fungal infection. . There is no definitive information, says Mitsuru Toda, a gynecologist at the agency’s mycotic branch:, some hospitals have increased, and the numbers are low. ”

Adding to their discovery, he adds, is that some fungal and fungal infections have enough time that the symptoms would not appear in a hurricane year. In addition, Toda says, some doctors in Houston told the agency that they are urgently putting their immune-compromised patients on drugs — which protects those patients, but would interfere with any calculations that the storm is affecting their health.

Ostrosky-Zeichner was one of the physicians. “Ideally, we should be seeing a lot of fungal infections after the hurricane and hurricane, but we haven’t seen this yet,” he says.

Researchers are also concerned about the high prevalence of the disease, which is said to be as high as 40%, who are prone to allergies and can deal with mold and fungus growth in their homes – as well as the general public, who may develop new allergies once they appear. Felicia Rabito, an infectious disease specialist and fellow professor at Tulane’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, said: “For many people, our general health is at rest.” “Responding in kind is like breathing; not much reduction can be the same symptoms. If you have asthma, but mold causes it, you can cause asthma, which is very serious. ”