Thursday, December 13, 2012

Despite Anti-Fungal Treatment, More Woes For Some Meningitis Patients | Essentials

Despite Anti-Fungal Treatment, More Woes For Some Meningitis Patients

Charlotte Stuart's alternative medical treatment center waiting room in Nelson, New Zealand
Charlotte Stuart's alternative medical treatment center waiting room in Nelson, New Zealand by Wonderlane
License (according to Flickr): Attribution License
Excerpt:

Now doctors are reporting two new spinal conditions among patients successfully treated for meningitis, a brain infection. One involves epidural abscesses, pus-filled sacs of fluid around the spine. A more serious condition is arachnoiditis — inflammation of tissue around the nerve roots coming out of the spine. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn't yet have a good handle on the number of these new complications, but there appear to be dozens so far. Most have been in Michiganand Tennessee, which together make up nearly half the 404 cases of fungal infections reported so far in 19 states. (Twenty-nine people have died. ) But cases of spinal infections have recently been seen in Virginia and Indiana, too. "What we're hearing is that patients have been treated for meningitis and improved. Then they returned with these complications," Dr. Tom Chiller of CDC told Shots.

People:

Dr. Tom Chiller

Overall Sentiment: 0.0906667

Relevance: 0.893005

SentimentQuote
0He says patients with these complications don't seem to be older or more immunocompromised, "so we're not able to predict who's going to develop this."
0Chiller says the situation is "an unprecedented event," ...
0"We think the last of these products were given around Oct. 1, so we're already a month out from that," Chiller says. ...
0.0443734"We think the last of these products were given around Oct. 1, so we're already a month out from that," Chiller says. "We've passed the peak of the mean incubation period – the period between injection and onset of symptoms – which is around 20 days."
Sentiment Stats:
  • Number of Quotes: 4
  • Aggregate Sentiment: 0.0443734
  • Mean: 0.01109335
  • Standard Deviation: 1.4142135623731

Key:

  • Aggregate Sentiment is meant to be an indicator of an individual's overall sentiment.
  • The Mean is meant to be an indicator of an individual's average comment sentiment.
  • The Standard Deviation, when there are enough quotes, will indicate an individual's consistency of sentiment (i.e. a Standard Deviation of 0 would mean they were very consistent in their sentiment and 1 would mean they were very inconsistent).

Note that quote stats are likely to be meaningless beyond the aggregate score due to the tiny sample size. However, they are always provided just in case you find something useful there.

Additional Info:

Organization: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Overall Sentiment: -0.182275

Relevance: 0.319834

HealthCondition: meningitis

Overall Sentiment: 0.158865

Relevance: 0.835133

HealthCondition: arachnoiditis

Overall Sentiment: -0.202158

Relevance: 0.592639

Disambiguation: DiseaseOrMedicalCondition | DiseaseReferences:

HealthCondition: chronic pain

Overall Sentiment: -0.355458

Relevance: 0.353161

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