Whooping Cough – the disease that takes your breath away

Bordetella pertussis is the bacteria responsible for Pertussis, more commonly known as Whooping Cough and recently responsible for keeping a good proportion of my in-laws quarantined.

Tetanus – the eternal struggle between Man and Rusty Nail

This article has been published previously in a 2006 edition of On Dit (the University of Adelaide student magazine), but like the media bastards they are, they edited and gutted it to nothing. Here’s the full article as intended. Also, I did write it as an undergrad so please forgive any mistakes, factual, grammatical or otherwise.

Picture taken by Thomas Tu

Holy stinking faeces, Batman!

You might wonder why you need to get a tetanus shot whenever you impale yourself with a stick or rub manure into your newly-acquired open wound. It’s because ~100 000 people die every year from tetanus every year, you dirty coprophiliac! OK, that’s misleading; most deaths are newly-born babies due to unsanitary birthing conditions, but even healthy adults can still die if left untreated.

Our First Real Post! – Robert Koch

Who is this man on the left our header art? That is Robert Koch, one of the most important people in the history of microbiology and exactly the kind of person who is deserving of the first post in a blog on infectious disease.