Diseases

FARMINGTON -- Disease surveillance reporting capabilities, which could have assisted the Davis County Health Department in 2007 to track statewide cryptosporidium cases had the reporting been available, has been given a one-year extension.

At first, Phil Patterson, 69, thought it was an insect bite he got from working in the yard. But by the next day, he and his wife, Sandra, a retired nurse, knew it was more serious. The one raised, itchy bump had spread into a patch of bumps.

"It was all over the right side of his trunk, front and back," Sandra Patterson, 67, said.

The Newbury Park, Calif., couple soon learned that he was suffering from shingles, a viral infection that causes a painful rash that can flare up in anybody who has ever had chickenpox -- more than 95 percent of the population, according to medical experts.

Although there is a shingles vaccine, approved in 2006 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, only about 10 percent of people who should get it are being vaccinated, according to a federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey released in late 2010.

The CDC estimates that about 1 million Americans each year develop shingles. The severity varies, but the pain can be so great that it can be life-altering, according to Dr. Bill Schaffner, president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases.

LOS ANGELES -- There's a new forecast of the cost to treat heart disease in the U.S. over the next 20 years -- and it isn't pretty.

According to a study published Monday in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association, the annual cost to treat heart disease -- including high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, heart failure, stroke and other conditions -- will triple by 2030, from $273 billion to $818 billion (in 2008 dollars).

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A cholera epidemic has spread into Haiti's capital, imperiling nearly 3 million people living in Port-au-Prince, nearly half of them in unsanitary tent camps for the homeless from the Jan. 12 earthquake.