Most people expect to return from vacation with fond memories of a relaxing or exciting time and perhaps photos to document it. That wasn’t exactly the case for one 25-year-old man who took a trip to a Brazilian beach. Five weeks after returning to his home in Spain, he began to itch. He itched everywhere, intensely, and especially at night, which made sleep almost impossible.
After two months of this torment, with pimples and the sores from scratching them on his abdomen, buttocks and genitals, he sought help from a dermatologist. The diagnosis was scabies, an infestation of tiny mites he had most likely contracted from a sexual encounter during his vacation.
In describing this case in the July issue of The Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine, Sergio Vano-Galvan and Paula Moreno-Martin of Madrid called medical attention to a worldwide public health problem that each year affects more than 300 million people.
Scabies is frequently misdiagnosed and mistreated, partly because most physicians are unfamiliar with it and partly because its symptoms mimic so many other skin diseases.
A correct diagnosis is further complicated by the fact that symptoms can often appear six to eight weeks after a person becomes infested with the microscopic arthropod, making it seem as if the problem came from nowhere. But unlike other skin diseases, scabies is usually accompanied by a tell-tale sign: one or more burrows in the skin where female mites lay their eggs.
Scabies is easily cured, but only if patients and their close contacts conscientiously follow directions for medical treatment and environmental cleanup. However, even after a person is rid of the mites and their eggs, itching can persist for up to four weeks.
THE CULPRIT
The scabies mite, Sarcoptes scabiei, can afflict a number of animals. In dogs and sheep, the infestation is commonly called mange. Each species of animal has a specific variant of the mite, which cannot reproduce in other hosts. If your dog gets mange, as mine once did, you may be itchy for a while if the mites get into your skin, but the condition will cure itself when the adult mites die.
It’s not so easy if you acquire the human scabies mite. At 0.4mm in length, the mite is barely visible to the naked eye. But just 10 adult females breeding in a person’s skin are enough to cause bodywide torment, as they defecate and lay eggs that then hatch into larvae and develop into more adult mites. The itching is due to an allergic reaction to the mite, its excrement and burrows, though an antihistamine alone is rarely enough to squelch the desire to scratch.
Scratching, however, can cause sores that become infected with bacteria like Staphylococcus or Streptococcus, prompting a diagnosis of impetigo and perhaps missing the underlying cause.
Scabies spreads most often through direct, prolonged skin-to-skin contact, like that between sexual partners and members of a household. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put it in a fact sheet on scabies, “A quick handshake or hug will usually not spread infestation.” But the mite can also be acquired from contaminated bedding, clothing or towels recently used by a person with scabies. Although an adult female mite can live on a person for up to a month, the mite rarely survives more than three days apart from a living body.
According to the American Academy of Dermatology, scabies has become a common problem among elderly people living in nursing homes and extended care facilities, where it can spread easily to attendants who in turn spread it to other residents. In the elderly, scabies is often mistaken for senile pruritus, itching caused by degenerative changes in aging skin.
Although taking a shower or bath soon after contact with live mites can wash them away, an attack of scabies is not a symptom of poor hygiene. Literally anyone can get it, regardless of age, sex or social class. The mites can neither fly nor jump but rather crawl at a rate of 2.5cm a minute on warm skin, Olivier Chosidow of the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris reported in The New England Journal of Medicine in April 2006.
THE DIAGNOSIS
In the Cleveland Clinic journal article, the Spanish dermatologists wrote that every patient with intense itching should be suspected of having scabies, especially if a family member reports similar symptoms.
When a doctor is familiar with scabies, as most dermatologists should be, the diagnosis is relatively simple. The scabies mite has favored sites in which it lives, generally areas on the body that are warm or where clothing is tight: between fingers and under nails; in the folds of the wrist, elbow and knee; on the buttocks; around the belt line and nipples; and on the penis.
When children get scabies, the lesions tend to appear bodywide, including the scalp, palms and soles. A particularly severe, highly contagious form called crusted, or Norwegian, scabies can affect the elderly, AIDS patients and people on immunosuppressants. While people with ordinary scabies usually have no more than five to 15 live female mites on their bodies, those with crusted scabies can harbor hundreds, even millions, of adult mites.
To confirm the diagnosis, the doctor may take a scraping of a lesion and examine it under a microscope to look for the mite, its eggs or fecal matter.
TREATMENTS
The usual treatment is to apply a 5 percent permethrin cream to cool, dry skin from the neck to the bottom of the feet. The cream must be applied everywhere, including the groin, palms and soles and between fingers and toes. The medication, an insecticide, should be left on for eight to 14 hours, with a possible second application a week or two later in case some eggs survived and had hatched.
Permethrin, a synthetic form of pyrethrin, a natural insect-killing plant chemical, is considered safe for infants and pregnant women, though a 10 percent sulfur ointment and crotamiton cream may be used for infants. To treat the crusted form, an oral medication, ivermectin, is usually prescribed, with a second dose given two weeks later.
In addition to mite-killing medicine, antihistamines and calamine lotion are commonly used to relieve the itching.
To ensure successful eradication of the mites, all members of the household, close friends and sexual contacts must be treated simultaneously. In institutional settings like nursing homes or day care centers, all residents and workers must be treated at the same time. All bedding, towels and clothing used by those infested or potentially infested within three days before treatment must be washed in hot water and dried on high heat or dry-cleaned.
Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) and the New Taipei City Government in May last year agreed to allow the activation of a spent fuel storage facility for the Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant in Shihmen District (石門). The deal ended eleven years of legal wrangling. According to the Taipower announcement, the city government engaged in repeated delays, failing to approve water and soil conservation plans. Taipower said at the time that plans for another dry storage facility for the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Wanli District (萬里) remained stuck in legal limbo. Later that year an agreement was reached
What does the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in the Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) era stand for? What sets it apart from their allies, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)? With some shifts in tone and emphasis, the KMT’s stances have not changed significantly since the late 2000s and the era of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) current platform formed in the mid-2010s under the guidance of Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), and current President William Lai (賴清德) campaigned on continuity. Though their ideological stances may be a bit stale, they have the advantage of being broadly understood by the voters.
In a high-rise office building in Taipei’s government district, the primary agency for maintaining links to Thailand’s 108 Yunnan villages — which are home to a population of around 200,000 descendants of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies stranded in Thailand following the Chinese Civil War — is the Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC). Established in China in 1926, the OCAC was born of a mandate to support Chinese education, culture and economic development in far flung Chinese diaspora communities, which, especially in southeast Asia, had underwritten the military insurgencies against the Qing Dynasty that led to the founding of
Artifacts found at archeological sites in France and Spain along the Bay of Biscay shoreline show that humans have been crafting tools from whale bones since more than 20,000 years ago, illustrating anew the resourcefulness of prehistoric people. The tools, primarily hunting implements such as projectile points, were fashioned from the bones of at least five species of large whales, the researchers said. Bones from sperm whales were the most abundant, followed by fin whales, gray whales, right or bowhead whales — two species indistinguishable with the analytical method used in the study — and blue whales. With seafaring capabilities by humans
RSS