Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report
 |
|
|
Abbreviated title (ISO 4)
|
Morb. Mortal. Wkly. Rep. |
|---|---|
| Discipline | Epidemiology |
| Language | English |
| Edited by | Sonja Rasmussen |
| Publication details | |
| Publisher |
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (United States)
|
| Frequency | Weekly |
| Indexing | |
| ISSN |
0149-2195 (print) 1545-861X (web) |
| Links | |
The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report is a weekly epidemiological digest for the United States published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It is the main vehicle for publishing public health information and recommendations that have been received by the CDC from state health departments. Material published in the report is in the public domain and may be reprinted without permission. As of 2015[update], the journal's editor-in-chief is Sonja Rasmussen.
As noted in the sequel, some single reports have evoked media interest also outside health and medical contexts. However, many reports are parts of series, providing consistent long-terms statistics, and also indicating trend changes. Such a standing report section is the "Notifiable Diseases and Mortality Tables", which reports deaths by disease and state, and city for city, for 122 large cities. As another example, there are more than a hundred items about West Nile virus infections, since the 1999 outbreak of the disease in the US. In the years 2001-2005, there were weekly updates of the WNV situation, during the warm seasons.
Five cases of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) were reported in what turned out to be the first reporting of AIDS in the medical literature (June 5, 1981). Los Angeles-based general practitioner Joel Weisman and immunologist Michael S. Gottlieb of the UCLA Medical Center had encountered a series of gay male patients with symptoms that appeared to be immune system disorders including significant loss of weight and swollen lymph nodes, accompanied by fever and rashes, in addition to two patients with chronic diarrhea, depressed white blood cell counts and fungal infections. Gottlieb diagnosed these and a number of his other patients as having pneumocystis pneumonia. A report they jointly wrote and published in the June 5, 1981, issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, described their patients as "5 young men, all active homosexuals, [who] were treated for biopsy-confirmed Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia at 3 different hospitals in Los Angeles, California" of which "[t]wo of the patients died" by the time of the original report. This notice has been recognized as the first published report marking the official start of the AIDS pandemic and as "the first report on AIDS in the medical literature".
...
Wikipedia