Disease Ecology

Send in the cats

2012-01-28T22:26:00.000-08:00

I was idly wondering whether any other disease outbreaks had been solved by airlifting cats when I came across this strangely parallel story from Borneo - at catdrop.com of course.

The story is that in 1959 DDT was being sprayed to reduce malaria in Borneo. This caused the death of cats in some areas where DDT was sprayed indoors. This then led to local outbreaks of bubonic plague. A “cat drop” occurred to replenish the local cat population and solve the bubonic plague problem by having them kill the booming rat population.

The website examines the truth behind this tale and digs up an actual Operations Record Book from the Royal Air Force which did indeed carry out at least one cat drop in a remote region. In this case twenty cats were dropped in special baskets. The record book notes that a reply was received saying “all cats safe and much appreciated.”

Actually if you look at the log book it says something much better:

That question mark is intriguing. Is there a chance that the locals were mystified as to why the RAF had just dropped a load of cats on them?

The Illustrious Dead

2012-01-27T15:57:00.000-08:00

If you'd like to read more about how Typhus fever destroyed Napoleon's ambition then there's a recent book that makes the case - Stephan Talty's 'The illustrious dead':

When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, typhus ravaged his army, killing hundreds of thousands and ensuring his defeat, according to this breathless combination of military and medical history. After summarizing the havoc this disease wreaked on earlier armies and sketching Napoleon's career, the book describes his invasion of Russia with more than 600,000 men. Almost immediately typhus struck. Infected lice excrete the microbe in their feces, and victims acquire the disease by scratching the itchy bite. Talty describes the effects in graphic detail: severe headache, high fever, delirium, generalized pain and a spotty rash. Death may take weeks, and fatalities approached 100% among NapoleonÖs increasingly debilitated, filthy, half-starved soldiers. Talty makes a good case that it was typhus, not General Winter, that crushed Napoleon. Readers should look elsewhere for authoritative histories of NapoleonÖs wars and of infectious diseases, but Talty delivers a breezy, popular account of a gruesome campaign, emphasizing the equally gruesome epidemic that accompanied it. (Publisher's Weekly review).

I haven't read this one but I think I'll add it to my reading list.

for something a little more immediately accessible you can read Insects,disease, and military history: the Napoleonic campaigns and historical perception. The version online is adapted from a paper of the same name in the American Entomologist. (1995) 41:147-160.

CLD or PLDS

2012-01-26T22:00:00.000-08:00

That is, Chronic Lyme Disease or Post Lyme Disease Syndrome?

That's just the trailer, you can watch the longer reports here:
Part I
Part II

The reports are quite sympathetic to sufferers who are clearly suffering from something but it isn't any clearer whether they are suffering from an undetectable Lyme infection, an immune response to an old infection or something else.

Don't click off the video at the end. Big 'Ol Fish comes on. It's awesome.

Tick removal

2012-01-25T14:38:00.000-08:00

Many people seem to have heard of one or other supposed foolproof way to remove ticks. None of them seem to work very well though, or be any better than simply pulling the tick out. At least not according to 'Evaluation of five popular methods for tick removal' by Glen Needham from the Acarology laboratory at Ohio State.

It is recommended that the tick be grasped as close to the skin as possible with curved forceps; if these are not available, use tweezers or protected fingers. Pull straight up with steady even pressure. If cement or mouthparts remain, then extract if that is practical. Disinfect bite site before and after tick removal.

Commercial tools that function in this manner may make the task slightly easier.

Here's a video guide to removing ticks from the University of Rhode Island's TickEncounter Resource Center.

Bacterial conjugation

2012-01-24T13:18:00.001-08:00

Bacteria having some conjugal fun. Any questions?

Pigs on pills

2012-01-23T14:15:00.000-08:00

Agricultural use of antibiotics for growth promotion is back in the news this week because of a paper published in PNAS this week: In-feed antibiotic effects on the swine intestinal microbiome
This comes hot on the heels of the failure of the FDA to take a harder line against big business on the topic. In fact the Atlantic has an article on this subject today: The Rise of Antibiotic Resistance: Consequences of FDA's Inaction
By allowing big food to self-regulate when it comes to using antibiotics as a growth promoter in animals, the FDA is setting us up for disaster.

New antibiotics

2012-01-22T22:57:00.000-08:00

There's an article in The Daily Telegraph, a British Newspaper, tomorrow about the lack of new antibiotics: The battle to discover new antibiotics.

Most of our antibiotics, and practically all of the different classes of antibiotics (ie the different families with different modes of action) were discovered over a period of three decades from the early 1940's to the late 1960's. No new classes of antibiotics were discovered for over thirty years and only two new classes have been discovered since 1968 - the Oxazolidinones in the late 1990's (although one of them was used against Tuberculosis since 1956) and the Lipopeptides approved in 2003.

The figure to the left is from a similar article in the New York Times in 2010 and shows the steep decline in the number of antibiotics approved for sale over the last three decades. This is the absolute number of antibiotics, not different classes, most of these antibiotics are variations on existing themes.

Interestingly both these articles make the same point that it is not necessarily the science that is lacking but the financial incentive:

While the notion of directly subsidizing drug companies may be politically unpopular in many quarters, proponents say it is necessary to bridge the gap between the high value that new antibiotics have for society and the low returns they provide to drug companies.

New TB aconym

2012-01-21T23:44:00.000-08:00

On Monday we will discuss MDR-TB (multi-drug resistant TB) and XDR-TB (extensively drug resistant TB). Although a completely resistant strain was identified in Italy in 2007 it wasn't until reports from India this week that the name TDR-TB (totally drug resistant TB) seems to have become general.

The Indian Government is disputing whether the strain is totally or merely extensively drug resistant but in either case it is not good news for India which sees about 2 million new cases of Tuberculosis each year.

Favorite episodes

2012-01-20T15:09:00.000-08:00

We don't get repeats on TV anymore we just get favorite episodes and marathon weekends. In the same spirit here are some favorite and dearly beloved blog postings from the past that you may enjoy at this point in the course.

Sneezing correctly

2012-01-19T15:18:00.000-08:00

During the recent swine flu pandemic there were a number of public health awareness measures aimed at getting people to sneeze a little more carefully. Many of these were provoked by a New Zealand study that showed that as few as 5% of people sneeze 'correctly' (ie cover both mouth and nose whether with their hand, a tissue or their sleeve). The vampire cough became a popular meme.

This is only the latest in a long running series of campaigns to prevent people spreading germs. Until recently the concern was not for just colds and flu but also for the far more dangerous Tuberculosis. During the second world war these campaigns were intensive due to the importance of maintaining production and reducing absenteeism due to sickness. Although the posters have been around for years and have been reproduced in many books the old public service films are also now increasingly available online and are BRILLIANT.

Remember this was an era before television so most of the audience would watch these films at the cinema which would have had a huge attendance.

There's so much to like about this film. I love how the 'prankster' who kicks a guy headfirst into a river is considered 'pretty harmless'.

Photographs Highlight Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis

2012-01-18T14:52:00.000-08:00

Photographer James Nachtwey has been covering war and human rights stories for 30 years, traveling from Northern Ireland to Iraq, from the orphanages of Romania to the deadly killing grounds of the Sudan. He knows the power of news photographs to raise awareness and make real change. In 2007, he was awarded the TED Prize, which comes with $100,000 and one wish to change the world. You can also watch his TED Talk online or visit XDRTB.org.

2012-01-18T11:31:00.001-08:00

What caught my attention in this article was the publish date of the article because we will be learning about this in class tomorrow. And this certain type of tuberculosis does not yet have a cure which is exhilarating because we do not know what this disease can do to our bodies. Like how this can affect our world that we live in, and if vaccines can be made in time...most likely not. However, researchers say, "this bacterium can leave you on antibiotics for approx. 9 months"...which is crazy because I can't even handle being on antibiotics for a week!

Here is the start of the article which came out yesterday, Jan. 16:

Experts have long feared the eventual arrival of a completely drug-resistant TB (tuberculosis) - a hospital in India has reported the nation's first cases of a type of tuberculosis for which there are no effective drugs, making the TB virtually untreatable. Other untreatable TBs have emerged over the last nine years; there have been reported cases in Iran and Italy. Most likely, there are many more cases that have never been documented, experts believe.

The link: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/240357.php

Love in the Time of Cholera

2012-01-17T14:15:00.000-08:00

If you've never read it, or you've only seen the movie, I strongly recommend Gabriel García Márquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera. Despite it's main theme, that lovesickness is literally an illness, a disease comparable to cholera, it is a beautifully written book that has a lot to say about love in its myriad forms.

Here's the start of Thomas Pynchon's review of the book for the New York Times:

Love, as Mickey and Sylvia, in their 1956 hit single, remind us, love is strange. As we grow older it gets stranger, until at some point mortality has come well within the frame of our attention, and there we are, suddenly caught between terminal dates while still talking a game of eternity. It's about then that we may begin to regard love songs, romance novels, soap operas and any live teen-age pronouncements at all on the subject of love with an increasingly impatient, not to mention intolerant, ear.

At the same time, where would any of us be without all that romantic infrastructure, without, in fact, just that degree of adolescent, premortal hope? Pretty far out on life's limb, at least. Suppose, then, it were possible, not only to swear love "forever," but actually to follow through on it -- to live a long, full and authentic life based on such a vow, to put one's alloted stake of precious time where one's heart is? This is the extraordinary premise of Gabriel García Márquez's new novel Love in the Time of Cholera, one on which he delivers, and triumphantly.

Max Joseph von Pettenkofer

2012-01-16T22:49:00.000-08:00

I love the Internet. Not just for its vast array of information but for the fact it provides me with this information in the comfort of my own home at any hour of the day.

I has been meaning to look up some more information on Max Joseph von Pettenkofer - that most famous of cholera drinkers. In particular I was curious if any of his students had died from their cholera drinking activities. It took only a few clicks to find this biographical sketch of von Pettenkofer published in the Journal of Nutrition in 1977.

In 1892, when almost 74 years of age, Pettenkofer performed on himself what he called his experimentum cruets. He swallowed 1cc of a cholera culture prepared from the "rice-water" stools of a dying man. No symptoms resulted except a "light diarrhea with an enormous proliferation of the bacilli in the stools".

Pettenkofer's students repeated the experiment on themselves. In two cases, the reaction was severe, but no one died. Pettenkofer considered the results a vindication of his views, but most epidemiologists were not swayed by these results.

So none of the students died but I was amazed to discover that Pettenkofer had carried out this experiment at the age of 74. I need to change the picture I use of him.

Miasma - not to be confused with miasm

2012-01-15T23:37:00.000-08:00

The long discredited idea of the miasma lives on in homeopathic medicine as the 'Miasm' which, according to homeopaths, is the underlying cause of many diseases which is described as "a peculiar morbid derangement of the vital force".

And if you enjoyed that Mitchell and Webb sketch you should check out this one from a later series that nicely illustrates the uptight nature of the Victorians. Unless you are easily offended (like the Victorians). In which case you shouldn't.

Miasma and mass graves

2012-01-14T23:28:00.000-08:00

I mentioned in class that the fear of disease spreading from unburied corpses is largely unfounded and probably dates back to our fear of miasma. The worst miasma was that created from decaying corpses.

I wanted to chase up a citation for this since this comment was something I originally came upon in a historical paper on miasma. I found this press release, Mass burials do more harm than good, from UCLA Center for Public Health and Disasters that not only substantiates this comment but raises several points I hadn't considered about why the very hasty burial of bodies, in mass graves following large natural disasters for example, may be problematic.

(H)ealth workers said it was a myth that dead bodies constituted an acute health risk after earthquakes.
"As far as public health professionals have been able to determine, this concern has never been substantiated," Steven Rottman, director of the UCLA Center for Public Health and Disasters, told AlertNet.
Rottman said no scientific evidence existed that bodies of disaster victims increased the risk of epidemics, adding that cadavers in fact posed less risk of contagion than living people.

Indiscriminate burial demoralises the survivors and can lead them to be deprived of transferable pension benefits through failure to provide death certificates for pension holders.
In some countries it is difficult for survivors -- especially women -- to prove their ownership of inherited property without proper documentation.
Alexander pointed out that spraying was a waste of disinfectant and manpower.

The World Health Organisation has long challenged the often-cited need to conduct quick mass burials after earthquakes to prevent the spread of disease.
"The most pressing issue is preserving the identity of those who have lost their lives," its U.S. arm, the Pan American Health Organisation, said in a report in October. "Under no circumstances are burials in common graves or cremations justified or warranted."

The Sewer King

2012-01-13T15:25:00.000-08:00

I haven't watched it yet but I just discovered that Episode 4 of a BBC series entitled Seven Wonders of the Industrial Age is all about Joseph Bazalgette and the construction of London's sewer system.

Set in London during the 1850s, this episode focusses on the construction of the London sewerage system, built to replace the antiquated medieval system that was overworked and inadequate for the needs of the-then largest metropolis in the world, causing epidemics of disease and a permanent foul stench to fill the air. The episode follows the efforts and work of Joseph Bazalgette, the brilliant engineer who designed the influential and modern sewer system that would purify the city, transform the streets above and would result in the end of the epidemics of cholera and typhoid that had ravaged the population - although, ironically not for the reasons that he initially thought.

I found it on YouTube but only with subtitles I'm afraid. Looks good if you like your history reenacted.

First case of Cholera in Haiti

2012-01-12T13:57:00.000-08:00

Man collecting water in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Earlier this week a Boston aid group reported that it had tracked down the first person to be infected by Cholera in Haiti's epidemic. Cholera had been eliminated from Haiti for many decades prior to the recent earthquake

A mentally ill man who bathed in and drank from a contaminated river most likely was the first person to be infected in the Caribbean country's deadly cholera outbreak. Althoug the man's family had access to clean drinking water he bathed in and drank frequently from a river into which the Meye River fed. The Meye has been identified as the likely source of the epidemic. Studies suggest the cholera was likely brought to Haiti by a United Nations peacekeeping battalion from Nepal, where the disease is endemic.

"It's a striking example of how mental health, infectious disease and community health affects overall well-being." Dr David Waltern, a co-author of the study.

Given the conditions in Haiti it is perhaps inevitable that cholera might break out but this interaction with mental health is especially interesting, and tragic.

Great stink

2012-01-11T15:46:00.000-08:00

In the sweltering summer of 1858 the stink of sewage from the polluted Thames was so offensive that it drove Members of Parliament from the chamber of the House of Commons. Sewage generated by a population of over two million Londoners was pouring into the river and was being carried to and fro by the tides. The Times called the crisis "The Great Stink". Parliament had to act - drastic measures were required to clean the Thames and to improve London's primitive system of sanitation.

I was going to post a link to some more information about the book I mentioned, The Great Stink of London, in case anyone was curious about this, the smelliest period in history, when I discovered that someone has written a novel about it with a very similar title set in the same era.

It takes a world of confidence to name your debut novel The Great Stink, and to set it in a sewer. Not even a modern sewer--charmless though that may be--but the crumbling, cholera-laden, rat-infested, fungus-rich sewers of London in the mid-Victorian period, from which pockets of deadly gas frequently burbled to the surface. Clare Clark's unsavory but completely absorbing first novel is a Dantean tour of this reeking underworld and its denizens: both the scavengers--human and animal--and the reformers, who brave the tunnels in the service of public hygiene and social progress after the 1858 Act of Parliament that called for the rebuilding of the sewer system. The Great Stink juxtaposes two darknesses, both embodied in the filthy tunnels: the lawless desperation of the very poor, and the despair of madness.

#cholera

2012-01-10T13:28:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Julio for the tip on this article today in Nature reporting on a study that showed social media data, including Twitter posts, accurately tracked Haiti's cholera outbreak and provided this data up to two weeks before official reports.

Such data could allow health workers to "gain early insight into an evolving epidemic" — and help plan a response sooner.

Just an appendix...

2012-01-09T22:37:00.000-08:00

Cholera cases by region. The size of a region shows the proportion of all cholera cases found in that region

We barely had time to get started with Cholera today but there was an interesting article on the Scientific American blog last week about how the appendix may not be as useless as we previously thought.

The essence of the argument is that in the presence of serious diarrheal diseases like Cholera the appendix forms a refuge for beneficial gut bacteria that are being purged from your intestines (hopefully along with the Cholera bacteria).

(T)he appendix serves as a nature reserve for beneficial bacteria in our guts. When we get a severe gut infection such as cholera (which happened often during much of our history and happens often in many regions even today), the beneficial bacteria in our gut are depleted. The appendix allows them to be restored. In essence, Parker sees the appendix as a sanctuary for our tiny mutualist friends, a place where there is always room at the inn. If he is right, the appendix nurtures beneficial bacteria even as our conscious brains and cultures tell us to kill, kill, kill them with wipes and pills.

Welcome

2012-01-04T12:56:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the blog for EEMB40 - the Ecology of Disease - for Winter 2012. It will also serve as a class website and you will find links to lectures etc. in a box at the top right imaginatively called 'links'. Lecture slides will be available shortly after each lecture. They are put there for your convenience (you don't need to scribble down details of a graph because you know it will be available later) but please note that they are not designed to be lecture notes. In fact in most cases my slides would make very poor notes. In order to help you take notes I have made a glossary for the class - also linked on the right. All the terminology you will be required to know is listed in the glossary.

You are all welcome, and encouraged to post here. To do that all you need to do is to send me an e-mail saying just that. I will then add your address and Google will send you an invitation to be an author. Just follow the simple instructions and away you go.

Postings to the blog should be relevant to the class but the blog is specifically designed to be a place where you don't need to worry about how relevant your post is. (I give you 'Basket full of puppies' as an example). I will be posting lots of things that I read in the news or that I take out of lecture (for time purposes) but that some of you may find interesting. By putting it here you can look at it at your leisure and you know it won't be on the exam.

I try to post every day when the class is running and, where possible, the postings are relevant to the current topics we are covering in class. You can access older postings (there are nearly 800 of them from the previous times I have taught this class) by using the 'Labels' (scroll down and they'll be on the right hand side) to pull up posts on particular topics.

Less spotty

2011-07-25T14:40:00.000-07:00

On CNN today: Deaths from chickenpox down
Deaths from chickenpox (the varicella virus) have dropped 97 percent in adolescents and children since the use of the vaccine began in 1995, new analysis shows.

"Every kid did get chickenpox and, in the pre-vaccine era, there were 3-4 million cases a year," Seward said. "What people may not have realized, every year, about 105 people died of chickenpox. About half of those were children and about 11,000-12,000 were hospitalized with severe complications. We started preventing the disease to really prevent those very serious complications."

Polio

2011-07-23T23:38:00.000-07:00

The report of the 30 June - 1 July meeting of the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) report has been released. Although affirming that polio eradication can be achieved in the near-term, the IMB states that 'this will not happen if things continue as they are'.

You can read the latest about the global battle to eradicate polio at the Global Eradication Initiative website.

For a contrary view check out this New York Times article about Polio eradication that contains some interesting comments about Bill Gates funding for the initiative in particular:

The effort has now cost $9 billion, and each year consumes another $1 billion. By contrast, the 14-year drive to wipe out smallpox cost only $500 million in today’s dollars.

“Bill Gates’s obsession with polio is distorting priorities in other ... areas. Global health does not depend on polio eradication.”

Attractiveness of humans to mosquitoes

2011-07-19T15:44:00.000-07:00

There were a couple of questions on this paper, Malaria Infection Increases Attractiveness of Humans to Mosquitoes, that I wanted to check up on, and like I said, the answer is usually more complicated and more interesting than expected.

First, children infected with malaria but NOT producing gametocytes were no more attractive to mosquitoes than uninfected children. Not even slightly. The data points are practically on top of one another.

BUT, what I hadn't realized was that when they treated the children the ones that had been infected with gametocytes were then LESS attractive to mosquitoes. Strange.

A striking aspect of our results is that former gametocyte carriers (i.e., after treatment) seem to repel mosquitoes, as only 22%, i.e., less than one third, of the responding mosquitoes prefer these children (t-test: t = −2.203, df = 11, p = 0.050; Wilcoxon signed-rank test: p = 0.040). An explanation for this result could be based on the slight anaemia in previously infected children. Mosquitoes might sense this anaemia and prefer those children with a higher concentration of red blood cells as it is these that the mosquitoes require. This would indicate a remarkable adaptation by the mosquitoes. The interpretation, however, would predict that the children previously infected with the asexual stage should also repel mosquitoes—but this was not observed.

Good news for tea and coffee drinkers

2011-07-18T14:57:00.000-07:00

It's amazing how many times there is a story in the news at the same time we cover the topic in class.

In the news at the moment is the interesting story that coffee and tea drinkers could be at lower risk of a developing a deadly drug-resistant staph infection.

As part of the 2003-04 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), more than 5,000 Americans from across the country were tested for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus — better known by its abbreviation, MRSA — in the nasal cavity. Although carrying MRSA in the nose is not at all dangerous by itself, some studies show that nasal colonization may put people at higher risk of systemic MRSA infection throughout the body, and that can be fatal.

The results of the NHANES testing, published in the July/August issue of the journal Annals of Family Medicine, showed that 1.4% of the nationally representative survey participants had nasal MRSA carriage. However, people who drank coffee or hot tea at least once a month were only about half as likely to be infected as those who did not — even after adjusting for age, race, sex, recent antibiotic use and hospitalization history, and a few other variables.

Coffee and tea drinkers saw advantages of about the same magnitude, no matter which drink they favored. The study authors say they cannot be sure why people drinking tea or coffee might be less likely to have nasal MRSA carriage, but that it could be the result of antimicrobial compounds known to exist in the beverages.

The actual research paper in the Annals of Family Medicine, Tea and Coffee Consumption and MRSA Nasal Carriage, is very readable. It's also interesting to see that statistic that 1.4% of people had nasal MRSA. Given that about 25% of people are carriers of S.aureus (actually 28% in this study) it means that about 1 in 17 of those carriers had the MRSA strain.

2011-07-17T23:24:00.000-07:00

Researchers believe they may be a step closer to HIV vaccine

Researchers are hoping they are one step closer to a HIV vaccine – using HIV. At the 6th International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Pathogens, Treatment, and Prevention in Rome, researchers with the Maryland-based VirxSys Corporation announced the findings of their VRX1273 vaccine.

The vaccine is a genetically altered version of SIV, the version of HIV found in non-human primates. Over the course of six months, five infected monkeys were injected with the vaccine three times, while five others were given a placebo vaccine. After 18 months, it was found that 40% of the vaccinated monkeys had very low to undetectable amounts of virus in their bodies.

Pills to prevent HIV

2011-07-15T23:30:00.000-07:00

Pills found to be highly effective in preventing HIV transmission
Experts hail a pair of trials involving heterosexual couples in Africa as a breakthrough in AIDS prevention. The studies show that taking a pill containing one or two drugs each day can decrease transmission of HIV by as much as three-quarters.

The report above is from the LA Times. The report from the Guardian seems a little more realistic:
Daily pill can prevent HIV infection
Groundbreaking studies suggest tablets could help partners of people with HIV protect themselves – secretly, if necessary.

Did the CIA Fake a Vaccination Campaign?

2011-07-13T15:51:00.000-07:00

Apparently the CIA faked a vaccination campaign in an attempt to collect DNA samples from Bin Laden's children. The scheme was concocted by the C.I.A. earlier this year when they were struggling to learn whether Bin Laden was hiding in the compound in Pakistan.

There's a fairly factual report in the New York Times, Vaccination Ruse Used in Pursuit of Bin Laden, but they miss the serious implications of this that are discussed in this post at Wired, File Under WTF: Did the CIA Fake a Vaccination Campaign?

This is awful. It plays, so precisely that it might have been scripted, into the most paranoid conspiracy theories about vaccines: that they are pointless, poisonous, covert shields for nefarious government agendas meant to do children harm.

The fallout from this scheme has already begun, Reported CIA vaccine ruse sparks fear in Pakistan.

One of the Pakistani Taliban's top commanders, Maulvi Faqir Mohammed, recently called on people in the northwest to avoid vaccines offered by the international community, claiming they were made with "extracts from bones and fat of an animal prohibited by God — the pig."

"Don't fall prey to these infidel NGOs and this U.S.-allied government and its army," said Mohammed over the illegal radio station he transmits from his sanctuary in eastern Afghanistan.

Pakistani officials and their international partners have pushed back against these claims, but the CIA's reported activities in the country may have made their job that much harder.

The Emerging Race to Cure HIV Infections

2011-07-12T15:08:00.000-07:00

A recent article in Science, The Emerging Race to Cure HIV Infections, describes the effect that Timothy Ray Brown's cure has had on the research community. The abstract is below but the full article is fairly short and very interesting.

Four years after Timothy Ray Brown received bone-marrow transplants to fight leukemia, the most sophisticated labs in the world cannot find any trace in his body of the HIV that had infected him for 12 years. Brown is the only living human, a growing consensus contends, to be cured. Brown's treatment clearly does not offer a road map for many others. After all, the expensive, complex, and risky transplant only made sense because Brown was dying from leukemia. Nor is it clear exactly which components of the extensive transplant regimen cleared the virus from his body. But Brown's case has moved the much-ridiculed idea of curing HIV onto the most scientifically solid ground it has yet occupied, say leading AIDS researchers. Brown's case showed for the first time that it is possible to rid the body of the virus—even from the minuscule reservoirs where the virus can hide out for years, evading both the immune system and antiretroviral drugs (ARVs). His astonishing turnaround also raised hopes that other, more practical drugs and immune system modulators might find and destroy every last bit of virus—or at least reduce it to such low levels that people no longer need ARVs.

Bad news everyone..

2011-07-11T14:18:00.000-07:00

Hitting the news today is a report on a new strain of gonorrhea that is resistant to all available antibiotics.

Here's a link to the MSNBC article quoted below, but you can find hundreds of news reports on the story via google news.

For several years, public health officials have been concerned that gonorrhea, one of the most prevalent STDs in the world, might become resistant to the last widely available antibiotics used to treat it, a class of drugs called cephalosporins.

Now, it has.

In the space of one week, infectious disease specialists have received a one-two punch of bad news that confirms those fears, including the discovery of a new, cephalosporin-resistant strain of the bacteria.

Cholera returns

2011-07-09T16:56:00.000-07:00

From the Washington Post today:
Cholera returns to rural Haiti amid fears that relief funds to contain it are running dry

The epidemic began in rural Haiti last fall, likely brought by U.N. peacekeepers from Nepal. It swept through the countryside of an impoverished nation already overwhelmed by a January 2010 earthquake that left hundreds of thousands homeless and by political instability following disputed elections.
...
The disease faded in winter and spring, when rain is less frequent, and many aid workers moved on. U.N. troops in Haiti turned their attention to the country’s many other pressing problems.
Now there is a fear among aid workers who remain that there won’t be enough resources if the latest surge gets much worse.

Insects, disease and history

2011-07-06T23:41:00.000-07:00

If you are interested in history then there are a number of interesting articles at the 'Insects, disease and history' website: a site devoted to understanding the impact that insects have had on world history. This site focuses on the influence of insect-borne disease on history...

There are several articles on Typhus including, The Historical Impact of Epidemic Typhus , Typhus Fever on the Eastern Front in World War I and Insects, Disease, and Military History: The Napoleonic Campaigns and Historical Perception.

Bone Church

2011-07-05T11:57:00.000-07:00

I was reading a novel this weekend and came across a reference to the Bone Church outside Prague in the Czech Republic. The Sedlec ossuary contains between 40,000 and 70,000 human skeletons which have been artistically arranged to form decorations and furnishings for the chapel. During the Black Death thousands of people were buried in the cemetery, many in mass graves, and when the cemetery was full and needed expanding a church was built in the center. Skeletons exhumed during the construction of the church were used to decorate it.

The smart of the knife...

2011-07-02T22:22:00.000-07:00

I mention the Crimean war (1853-1856) in this class a couple of times and I've posted on it here a couple of times previously (eg Crimean War Photographs and Minié balls and infection before penicillin) but like most of you, I suspect, I don't really know much about it. So when I was in Goleta library last week and noticed Orlando Figes new history of the Crimean War I thought I'd pick up a little holiday weekend reading.

Interesting stuff, I had no idea the extent to which this was a religious war. But most shocking was the passage on the armies response to the new anaesthetic gases such as chloroform which were just becoming available. The use of such anaesthetic gases was embraced by the Russians, who used them to increase their surgical survival rates, but rejected by the British who favored a stiff upper lip. The Principal medical officer of the British Army, Dr John Hall, issued a memorandum cautioning:

'against the use of chloroform in the severe shock of serious gunshot wounds... for however barbarous it may appear, the smart of the knife is a powerful stimulant; and it is much better to hear a man bawl lustily than to see him sink silently into the grave.'

All this surgical amputation was, of course necessary because of the threat of infection - mainly by gram positive bacteria. For upper leg amputations, the most dangerous and the most common type of surgery, the Russian army used the new anaesthetics to improve their survival rate to 25%. In the British army it remained at 10%....

How safe are vaccines?

2011-06-30T00:12:00.000-07:00

Two very readable articles on the vaccine issue from the popular press.

First, How Safe are Vaccines? - a 2008 article from Time magazine.

CDC officials estimate that fully vaccinating all U.S. children born in a given year from birth to adolescence saves 33,000 lives, prevents 14 million infections and saves $10 billion in medical costs. Part of the reason is that the vaccinations protect not only the kids who receive the shots but also those who can't receive them—such as newborns and cancer patients with suppressed immune systems. These vulnerable folks depend on riding the so-called herd-immunity effect.

and secondly, An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All - an article from Wired magazine at the end of 2009.

“I used to say that the tide would turn when children started to die. Well, children have started to die,” Offit says, frowning as he ticks off recent fatal cases of meningitis in unvaccinated children in Pennsylvania and Minnesota. “So now I’ve changed it to ‘when enough children start to die.’ Because obviously, we’re not there yet.”

Note that the Wired article attracted 690 comments! I think I remember reading in a following issue that this story attracted more letters and comments than any other story they had ever run.

Tradition

2011-06-28T23:16:00.000-07:00

It's traditional that at this point in the course I post this video.

For those who wish to know more about the flagellants of the middle-ages we mentioned today here's the Google article, the rather interesting Catholic Encyclopedia entry on the flagellants it links to and, above, a demonstration, albeit not from the middle ages, by German rock band Rammstein also courtesy of Google. That's the band beating themselves there and they seem to be really putting some effort into it.

The Rise of Superbugs

2011-06-27T15:03:00.000-07:00

From an article in The Atlantic last week. Well worth a read:

The Rise of 'Superbugs': Time to End a Decades-Long Problem By Frances Beinecke
We've known since the mid-'70s that feeding animals antibiotics is dangerous—but we haven't changed our ways

All 27 EU nations have already successfully stopped using antibiotics for growth promotion. Denmark, the world's largest pork exporter, ended the practice over a decade ago, and industry data have shown a sustained decrease in overall antibiotic use and the amount of drug-resistant bacteria found in livestock and meat products. At the same time, livestock production has grown and prices have remained stable.

The American National Academy of Sciences estimated in 1999 that if we were to take similar steps in the U.S. to eliminate all non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in livestock, it would cost grocery shoppers less than $10 annually. That's less than $13.50 per year in today's dollars.

BCG after all...

2011-06-26T23:30:00.000-07:00

There's an unusual story making the rounds this weekend - I saw it in the LA times:
Is BCG a cure for diabetes?
The first trial in a handful of humans has suggested that injecting patients with Type 1 diabetes with an inexpensive vaccine normally used to prevent tuberculosis can block destruction of insulin-secreting pancreatic cells in humans and allow regeneration of the pancreas. Such a finding, if confirmed and expanded on, could lay the foundation for freeing the estimated 1 million U.S. Type 1 diabetics from their daily insulin shots. It brings up a word that is rarely or never used in considering the disease: "cure."

So maybe the BCG vaccine will become more popular in the US - but as a cure for diabetes?!

New TB Vaccine

2011-06-23T22:43:00.000-07:00

The current Tb vaccine, the BCG vaccine, has been in use since 1921 and there are concerns that its protection may wear off over time - ie the protection given by the vaccine is not lifelong.

A new vaccine, with the catchy name MVA85A has recently passed clinical trials but, unfortunately it doesn't seem to work as well when given with other vaccines:

MVA85A was deemed to be safe, well tolerated and induced a strong immune response. And importantly, the responses to the standard childhood vaccines were not affected by giving MVA85A at the same time. But the immune response prompted by MVA85A was lower in infants who received it with standard childhood vaccines, compared with those who got it alone.

"It's reassuring to see that MVA85A does not affect immunity to the other vaccines," said Helen McShane of Oxford University, who helped develop the new shot. But she said scientists would now need to find the best way to integrate MVA85A into infant immunization plans in future without limiting its effect.

Report, New TB Vaccine Passes Safety Tests, But proves less effective when given with other immunizations at Voice of America.

Rock 'n roll disease history moment

2011-06-22T22:51:00.000-07:00

Link Wray was an aspiring musician when he contracted Tuberculosis during the Korean war and ultimately had a lung removed. Doctors apparently advised him that his singing career was over - I guess in those days a full complement of lungs was considered necessary for a vocalist. Wray devoted himself to his guitar, completely revolutionizing the way the instrument was used.

Quite simply, Link Wray invented the power chord, the major modus operandi of modern rock guitarists. Listen to any of the tracks he recorded between Rumble in 1958 through his Swan recordings in the early '60s and you'll hear the blueprints for heavy metal, thrash, you name it.
(All Music biography of Link Wray)

Wray's most distinctive record, Rumble, also has the distinction of being banned on several radio stations in the United States on the grounds that it glorified juvenile delinquency. An impressive feat for a song with no lyrics.

Cholera - next stop Chad and the Ivory Coast

2011-06-21T23:53:00.000-07:00

Heavy rains in a number of African countries bring the threat of Cholera;

Rainy season to worsen Chad cholera outbreak - Oxfam
A cholera outbreak that has killed more than 100 people in Chad could worsen this June as the rainy season starts in the Central African country, Oxfam warned on Wednesday.

The Chadian government says only 0.6 percent of the country’s households use improved latrines, while 88 percent of people defecate in the open. There is no garbage collection system in villages, while in towns waste water disposal and storm drainage systems are nearly nonexistent.

UNICEF responds to cholera outbreak in Ivory Coast
Following the confirmation of 10 cases of cholera in the Koumassi district of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, UNICEF has provided medical supplies to local health authorities to treat up to 1,000 patients infected with the disease and kits with soap, chlorine, and water treatment products for 400,000 people.

Welcome

2011-06-16T11:44:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the blog for EEMB40 - the Ecology of Disease - for Summer 2011. It will also serve as a class website and you will find links to lectures etc. in a box at the top right imaginatively called 'links'. Lecture slides will be available shortly after each lecture. They are put there for your convenience (you don't need to scribble down details of a graph because you know it will be available later) but please note that they are not designed to be lecture notes. In fact in most cases my slides would make very poor notes. In order to help you take notes I have made a glossary for the class - also linked on the right. All the terminology you will be required to know is listed in the glossary.

You are all welcome, and encouraged to post here. To do that all you need to do is to send me an e-mail saying just that. I will then add your address and google will send you an invitation to be an author. Just follow the simple instructions and away you go.

Postings to the blog should be relevant to the class but the blog is specifically designed to be a place where you don't need to worry about how relevant your post is. (I give you 'Basket full of puppies' as an example). I will be posting lots of things that I read in the news or that I take out of lecture (for time purposes) but that some of you may find interesting. By putting it here you can look at it at your leisure and you know it won't be on the exam.

I try to post every day when the class is running and, where possible, the postings are relevant to the current topics we are covering in class. You can access older postings (there are over 750 (!) of them from the previous times I have taught this class) by using the 'Labels' (scroll down and they'll be on the right hand side) to pull up posts on particular topics.

Culling Chickens as a Result of Avian Influenza Outbreak in India

2011-03-10T21:26:00.000-08:00

After an outbreak of Avian Influenza in India veterinatires. In Tripura in a state-owned poultry farm in Ganhigram, veterinarians started to cull their chickens. This farm is one of the main breeding centers and it has a capacity of around 7,000 chickens.

Samples were sent to the High Security Animal Disease Laboratory in Bhopal after 380 birds died between March 1 and March 4. The samples tested for HIN5.

The culling is going to continue for the next few days in order. They people in charge of the poultry farm announced that they still have 1,400 Japanese peahens and 20,000 eggs that have to be dumped. Also the poultry in the surrounding 10 Km would be culled as well.

This is not the first time this outbreak has occurred in India. The last time there was an outbreak was in 2006.

http://www.medindia.net/news/Tripura-Starts-Culling-of-Chickens-After-Bird-Flu-Outbreak-81927-1.htm

Thermal scanning for flu

2011-03-10T14:09:00.000-08:00

If there is an influenza pandemic then initial attempts at isolating the outbreak, or prevent its entry into particular countries, may involve the use of infrared thermal image scanners (ITIS) at airports to detect people with elevated body temperatures characteristic of influenza. We saw this in the 2009 H1N1 (Swine Flu) pandemic. Analysis suggests that countries that adopted the policy managed to delay disease entry for 7-12 days compared to countries that did not: Entry screening to delay local transmission of 2009 pandemic influenza A (H1N1). Of course there may be other differences between these two types of countries. Correlation is not causation...

A paper in PLoS ONE in January this year, Thermal Image Scanning for Influenza Border Screening: Results of an Airport Screening Study, looked at a sample of 1275 airline passengers who agreed to be screened, have their temperature actually measured and give a respiratory sample. Six of the travellers had a fever and thirty of the travellers tested positive for influenza. But none of the influenza-positive travellers had a temperature high enough to be considered in the fever group!

Our findings therefore suggest that ITIS is unlikely to be effective for entry screening of travellers to detect influenza infection with the intention of preventing entry of the virus into a country.

I'm sure we'll see more of these thermal scanners in airports in future pandemics even if they are fairly useless. Why? Because it makes it look like somebody is doing something (even if it is useless). Just like the rest of airport security

"Junk" Medicine

2011-03-10T08:53:00.001-08:00

As the government releases 600,000 doses of the H1N1 vaccine today, predatory online “pharmacies” are dispensing junk medicine to a frightened public.

With the first 600,000 doses of swine flu vaccine scheduled to be released today and the media already swirling about how difficult it will be to get a dose, scam artists from Internet “pharmacies” are lining up to bridge the gap.

Specifically, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, the World Health Organization and the pharmaceutical industry are bracing for an onslaught of fake and substandard drugs, with a special eye out for unauthorized versions of Tamiflu, the patented Roche vaccine that is the cornerstone of the public health-effort. “We don’t know what we could be seeing in the next few weeks,” says Gary Coody, who coordinates health-care enforcement for the FDA. “They (Internet drug operators) don’t necessarily have any regard for public-health safeguards.”

full blog post: "Swine Flu Swindle"
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-10-05/swine-flu-swindle/

Blog wind up

2011-03-09T23:28:00.000-08:00

A big hand for this quarter's bloggers: Ethan, Emily, Meghan, Blair, Nate, Kelsey, Marise and Eric. I hope you all enjoyed reading the blog, it really works well when we get several people involved and there are several new posts each day (as opposed to me scrambling to post something before midnight each day). I think we broke records this quarter for the overall number of posts and also the most posts in one day.

I'll keep posting until Friday and then I'll wrap up with some review questions etc.

New H1N1 Mutation

2011-03-09T12:00:00.000-08:00

An article published in Science Daily today reveals that a mutation in the H1N1 strain of influenza virus (aka "swine flu") may allow it to become more easily transmitted from person to person. The strain of flu that the WHO declared a pandemic back in 2009 is actually a mixture of human, bird, and pig influenza genes. Despite the enormous amount of media attention it got, it proved to not be significantly deadlier or more debilitating than the seasonal flu humans encounter nearly every year. The swine flu proved to be relatively inefficient at moving from person to person... until now. Researchers at MIT have discovered a mutation that may allow this flu virus to transmit much more rapidly and effectively from person to person. A potentially deadly mutation to the virus' hemagglutin has been identified, but this should allow to WHO to quickly identify any outbreaks of the potential new strain and determine how deadly it can be. MIT scientists merely altered 1 amino acid chain that allowed the Hemagglutin to bind much more strongly to respiratory cells, increasing its ability to infect as well as kill humans. They identified this mutation as being a very possible one for the swine flu to evolve into. As the article is quick to point out (namely, the first few sentences), this potential two-wave pattern of flu outbreak is similar to the infamous 1918 Spanish Flu, which killed around 50 million people. Keep your fingers crossed everyone.

Swine Flu Survivors Built Super Flu Antibodies

2011-03-08T22:24:00.000-08:00

A study of antibodies in people who were infected with H1N1 swine flu suggests that a universal flu shot that could neutralize many flu strains, including swine and avian flu. Scientists believe that people who were infected with H1N1 developed a unique immune response in which antibodies that could protect them from all the seasonal H1N1 flu strains that have appeared in the last decade were produced. A universal flu vaccine could have a major impact in controlling influenza which kills anywhere from 3,300 to 49,000 people every year in the U.S. Scientists are currently working on a vaccine from antibodies isolated from nine people who were infected with the first wave of the H1N1 swine flu pandemic. Of these, five of the antibodies were cross-productive so that they are able to interfere with many different flu strains. Studies in mice show that they were protected from what is considered a lethal dose of the flu. The vaccine is currently being tested in people.

Polio: To eradicate, or not to eradicate

2011-03-08T20:43:00.001-08:00

Polio is one of the few human diseases that is on the brink of eradication. This article in the New York Times discusses the debate between Bill Gates, who has donated $1.3 billion for polio eradication, and public health experts who believe that polio eradication is not worth the cost. Gates points out that we have an effective and inexpensive vaccine, and that polio has been scaled back to just a few countries. Here's what some other experts say:

“Bill Gates’s obsession with polio is distorting priorities in other critical BMGF areas. Global health does not depend on polio eradication.” (The initials are for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.) -- Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet

“We ought to admit that the best we can achieve is control.” -- Arthur L. Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s bioethics center, who himself spent nine months in a hospital with polio as a child.

Gates counters: “These cynics should do a real paper that says how many kids they’re really talking about. If you don’t keep up the pressure on polio, you’re accepting 100,000 to 200,000 crippled or dead children a year.”
Right now, there are fewer than 2,000. The skeptics acknowledge that they are arguing for accepting more paralysis and death as the price of shifting that $1 billion to vaccines and other measures that prevent millions of deaths from pneumonia, diarrhea, measles, meningitis, and malaria.
“And think of all the money that would be saved,” Mr. Gates went on, turning sarcastic. “It’d be like 5 percent of the dog food market in the United States.” (Americans spend about $18 billion a year on pet food, according to the American Pet Products Association.)

“If we fail, we’ll be consigned to continuing expensive control measures for the indefinite future,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which leads the country’s effort.

The article also points out some of the differences between polio and smallpox that have made polio so much harder to eradicate.

One injection stops smallpox, but in countries with open sewers, children need polio drops up to 10 times. Only one victim in every 200 shows symptoms, so when there are 500 paralysis cases, as in the recent Congo Republic outbreak, there are 100,000 more silent carriers. Other causes of paralysis, from food poisoning to Epstein-Barr virus, complicate surveillance. Also, in roughly one of every two million vaccinations, the live vaccine strain can mutate and paralyze the child getting it. And many poor families whose children are dying of other diseases are fed up with polio drives.

Not an easy debate to choose a side in, at least for me...

Flightless mosquitoes may curb dengue

2011-03-08T15:18:00.000-08:00

Genetically altered mosquitoes that cannot fly may help slow the spread of dengue fever and could be a harmless alternative to chemical insecticides, U.S. and British scientists said on Monday. [Feb 22, 2010]

They genetically altered mosquitoes to produce flightless females, and said spreading these defective mosquitoes could suppress native, disease-spreading mosquitoes within six to nine months.

There is no vaccine or treatment for dengue fever, which is endemic in the tropics and is particularly prevalent in Asia and the western Pacific. The disease, which causes severe flu-like symptoms and can kill, is spread through the bite of infected female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes.

"This could be the first in a new wave of products that might supplant insecticides," researcher Anthony James of the University of California, Irvine, said in a telephone interview.

James's team, including a group from the British biotechnology firm Oxitec Ltd., altered mosquito genes to disrupt development of the insects' wing muscle.

The genetic modification grounded only the virus-carrying females and did not affect the males' ability to fly, they wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences here

The idea would be to distribute tens of thousands of eggs that would hatch out these genetically modified males, that would proceed to create a new generation of flightless, and thus doomed, daughters.

Because eggs are so small and easy to distribute, there would be far more genetically modified mosquitoes than natives, so they could in effect blot out the dengue-carrying population.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/02/22/us-mosquitoes-dengue-idUSTRE61L5JI20100222

Flu trends

2011-03-08T14:15:00.000-08:00

Google has been tracking flu trends for some time by analyzing people's choice of search terms. This method has been very successful and they can usually pick up trends a few weeks before the CDC data. In 2009 a variety of workers from Google and one from the CDC published a paper in Nature describing their technique: Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data.

For epidemiologists, this is an exciting development, because early detection of a disease outbreak can reduce the number of people affected. If a new strain of influenza virus emerges under certain conditions, a pandemic could ensue with the potential to cause millions of deaths (as happened, for example, in 1918). Our up-to-date influenza estimates may enable public health officials and health professionals to better respond to seasonal epidemics and pandemics.

The graph above shows, for the United States as a whole, that the peak flu season is usually in February and that we are probably past the peak this year. You can also see how unusual last year was, pandemic years are always different. The big peak in October is from 2009-2010. The same pattern was seen in California except that our peak flu season seems a bit less predictable.

PNAS

2011-03-07T22:09:00.000-08:00

Two relevant but rather different papers in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

In the first: Bacillus anthracis comparative genome analysis in support of the Amerithrax investigation, they describe how genomic analysis was used in the investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks.

The paper describes how the Institute for Genome Sciences faculty and collaborators from the FBI found that the anthrax samples used in all the attacks were genetically identical. Later, another group of scientists -- also including Institute for Genome Sciences faculty -- would trace the anthrax spore used in the letters back to a flask of Bacillus anthracis and several samples taken from that flask. The primary custodian of the flask was Bruce Ivins, Ph.D., a scientist at a U.S. Army biodefense laboratory in Maryland. With this key investigative lead from the scientific team, the FBI used additional police work to conclude that Dr. Ivins was the perpetrator of the mail attacks. Dr. Ivins killed himself before the case could go to court. The FBI has since closed the Amerithrax investigation. (From a report at ScienceDaily)

In the second paper, Hybrid influenza viruses may have pandemic potential, which is relevant to this weeks discussion, the authors describe how the H1N1 strain that caused the 2009 pandemic, but relatively few deaths, may yet turn out to be problematic.

The H1N1 influenza virus that spawned the 2009 pandemic is now predicted to circulate as a seasonal flu. However, researchers fear it could once again present a major public health threat by recombining with the H9N2 virus, which is endemic to several bird species in Asia, and has infected pigs and humans. Yipeng Sun et al. explored this possibility by dissecting the H1N1/2009 and H9N2 influenza viruses, and systematically mixing their genes to generate 127 hybrid viruses. The authors then tested the hybrid viruses in mice to assess the likelihood that genetic reassortment between H1N1/2009 and H9N2 could create a virus of pandemic proportions. More than half of the hybrid viruses instantly infected mice and replicated as efficiently as did the parent strains. Eight of the hybrids proved more virulent and dangerous than did either of the two parent strains. Curiously, each of these eight strains carried a gene encoding part of the RNA polymerase, known as the PA gene, from the pandemic H1N1/2009 virus. The authors suggest that the pandemic PA gene may play a key role in the virus’s pathogenicity, and that screening H9 viruses for the gene might help identify influenza viruses that pose a public health risk.

Building Immunity- Research for Artificial Antibodies

2011-03-07T20:31:00.000-08:00

As you should know, antibodies are the bodies agents for seeking out pathogens, clumping them together, and signaling to the body so they can be destroyed by the immune system. Currently, the favored technique for getting new antibodies is to introduce the pathogen to an animal, and then to remove the antibody (or what created them) for further use.

Researchers at Arizona State University are pioneering a new method in which random chains of amino acids are combined to produce the artificial antibodies. The wondrous thing about this new method is that even when combined at random, the amino acids come together to produce something that can bind to a few proteins. After created, the "antibodies" are checked for matches with many, many proteins so scientists can find out what they might be the antibody to.

The advantages of this method are related mainly to saving time and money. This method is much easier (and humane) than waiting for a disease-infected monkey to create antibodies, and then stealing away the monkey's hard earned defenses through a needle, and it saves costs such as Mr. Banana's food and board. Obviously this method can't be used to easily create an antibody to anything that scientists want to fight, but with its low cost and easiness, this method should allow many new antibodies to be found.

Mosquito Nets Used for Fishing

2011-03-07T10:53:00.000-08:00

When we covered Malaria in class, we discussed the helpfulness of Insecticide Treated Nets and learned about non-profit organizations focused on ending Malaria, which raise money to send these nets to infected countries. However, one student shared that he visited one of these countries and learned that the nets are actually stolen by fishermen and are not reaching the people who need them most. After doing some research, I found that the student was absolutely right: these nets are being used for fishing because they are stronger than normal nets and do not disintegrate. This is especially prevalent in Kenya and Zambia, but is a problem in many other countries as well. According to malariaworld.org, "This phenomena has caused an increase in the malaria prevalence rate along the coastlines of various African countries."

More iron lungs

2011-03-06T15:22:00.000-08:00

When people are nostalgic for the 'simpler' times of the 1950's (after the war but before the turbulence of the sixties) they usually conveniently forget about horrors such as polio and iron lungs. These days many people probably only think of an iron lung as a Radiohead song, and even then many people miss the metaphor - something that keeps you alive but becomes very restrictive.

I am amazed by people who have lived their whole lives in them but have remained cheerful and happy. As well as the story below about John Prestwich there is also the story of Martha Mason who has lived in an ironlung for over 60 years.

(A)s one of the few surviving people left who live their lives encased in an iron tank, she said she intends to continue as she always has -- making the most out of what life has offered her.
"Get as much joy from life for yourself and others as you can squeeze out of it," she said.

Polio: a virus' struggle

2011-03-05T21:37:00.000-08:00

The story of Polio in comic book form. by James Weldon, a journalism student at the University of British Columbia. Learn the full story from the polio virus itself as it tells all in a group therapy session for 'diseases nearing extinction' with smallpox, guinea worm and leprosy. Lots of little jokes in here and a surprising amount of information. Enjoy.

Man lives in iron lung for 48 years

2011-03-05T13:46:00.000-08:00

John Prestwich has needed the assistance of an iron lung for 48 years as a result of his teenage polio infection. However, John does not see his iron lung as a sort of prison, but rather embraces it as a life-saving friend. Prestwich would be unable to live without the lung, and if the machine stopped working he could die within three minutes.

However, he does not have to live in the iron lung all the time. With modern technology, people designed a smaller machine that he can use at home. The new machine is the size of his chest and performs almost the same exact functions as the large iron lung.

Prestwich also shares parts of his personal story:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3182096.stm

Guinea Worm

2011-03-04T19:29:00.000-08:00

The reason I wanted to briefly mention Guinea Worm at the end of today's lecture is that it looks like it will be a close race with Polio as to which disease is eliminated next. Both diseases are close to the verge of extinction, only found in 4 countries each and both had under 2,000 cases worldwide last year - down from a total that was once in the millions.

However what makes Guinea worm a very interesting case is that the main tool in eradication has not been vaccination (there is no vaccine) but has been breaking the life cycle of the parasites by both encouraging the use of clean drinking water and by preventing people from entering sources of drinking water with an active infection. Since there is no host other than man the disease can be eradicated if there are no infected people,

Guinea worm disease is set to become the second disease in human history, after smallpox, to be eradicated. It will be the first parasitic disease to be eradicated and the first disease to be eradicated without the use of a vaccine or medical treatment.

Much of the work in eradicating Guinea Worm has been funded by former President Jimmy Carter and the Carter Foundation. For over two decades the Carter Foundation have been slowly winning the war against Guinea worm.

Time magazine had a photo-essay on the effect of Guinea Worm on a Ghanaian village.

Malaria Idol - 2010

2011-03-03T21:20:00.000-08:00

In June of 2010, the nonprofit Malaria No More wanted to encourage people to use bed nets in order to prevent malaria. On June 9, 2010 in Dakar, Senegal nine finalists took to the stage to vie for a recording deal. All of the songs sung were written by the contestants and they were all on the topic of prevent malaria. The idea behind the campaign is simple and brilliant: if you’re working in public health and you want to change people’s behavior for the better, don’t try to convince them yourselves. Instead, find someone outside the medical community who already knows how.

The video above was recorded by one of Senegal's biggest pop stars. It is a cautionary tale about protecting yourself from malaria. It was released with a special concert the night before the Senegalese government kicked off a massive distribution of bed nets for all children younger than 5.

http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/the-human-condition/2010/06/09/malaria-idol-in-senegal-using-music-to-send-a-message.html

Are bednets the solution?

2011-03-03T14:29:00.000-08:00

Not everyone agrees that bednets should be the main focus of our malaria eradication campaign. This video raises a number of very good points, particularly that the western world eliminated malaria via the use of DDT, a tool we now deny to other countries.

For further reading on the issue of using pesticides such as DDT check out Tina Rosenberg's controversial article in the New York Times: What the world needs now is DDT.

Also, it is interesting to note that even Rachel Carson, whose book Silent Spring sounded the alarm on the environmental dangers of DDT, did not call for a total ban on DDT:

Practical advice should be "Spray as little as you possibly can" rather than "Spray to the limit of your capacity."

Unfortunately because we did the latter we eventually saw environmental consequences and ultimately banned DDT, but only after we had eliminated malaria. Is it right to deny this tool to other countries, even its appropriate use, because we screwed up?

Comedians Fight Malaria

2011-03-03T09:11:00.000-08:00

In this new campaign by Malaria No More, comedians including Elizabeth Banks and Aziz Ansari come together to end malaria deaths in Africa by 2015. Listen to the luminaries share their childhood dreams in this PSA.

View the 1 minute campaign clip for a light-hearted yet inspirational step in the cause of putting a stop to malaria.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybNEsrh2eIE&feature=player_embedded

Then take a look at the Malaria No More webpage--a site promoting the Malaria No More campaign. Malaria is a preventable and treatable disease and recent progress shows that malaria's days are numbered — but our help is needed. Together, we can make malaria no more. As seen in the video clip, Hollywood icons are using their powerful voices to make a difference. As part of the campaign, a large group of them are hosting "Hollywood Bites Back!," a live comedy show on April 16 at Nokia Theatre in L.A. to benefit Malaria No More.
http://www.malarianomore.org/

Malaria & Malnutrition

2011-03-02T15:16:00.000-08:00

Young children are more likely to fall victim to food shortages and thereby malnutrition, which increases their susceptibility to infectious disease, including an increase in mortality due to malaria. Severely malnourished children with a malarial infection may have no fever and show few or none of the classic signs of the disease, making it much more difficult to diagnosis & treat effectively. The World Health Organization suggests that all malnourished children in regions where malaria is endemic be screened proactively for malaria weekly even when they show no symptoms.

Depressing Polls

2011-03-02T14:17:00.000-08:00

At the end of today's class I showed you some poll data on the public's opinion on cutting foreign aid. This result has been fairly consistent across a variety of polls.. For example Gallup repeat some of their polls on a yearly basis and this year's data, which has just been released, is no exception.

(A) majority of Americans said they favor cutting U.S. foreign aid, but more than 6 in 10 opposed cuts to education, Social Security, and Medicare. Smaller majorities objected to cutting programs for the poor, national defense, homeland security, aid to farmers, and funding for the arts and sciences.

One of the explanations for this rather ungenerous attitude is that the US public vastly over estimates how much money the government actually gives in foreign aid. This, again, has been shown by several research polls and seems to be a fairly consistent result. (Interestingly, and perhaps logically, people greatly underestimate how much of the US budget goes to other sources such as Medicare/Medicaid and defence.)

The only good news I can give you is that according to Kaiser Family Foundation 2010 Survey of Americans on the U.S. Role in Global Health when the specific purpose of the foreign aid is explained it is more likely to be supported.

When it comes to U.S. foreign aid in general, six in 10 Americans (61%) say the U.S. spends too much, and four in 10 incorrectly think that foreign aid is one of the two biggest areas of spending in the federal budget. In comparison, when asked about “improving health in developing countries,” 28 percent say the U.S. spends too much, while nearly two thirds say such spending is too little (23%) or about right (42%).

“The old canard that most Americans do not support ‘foreign aid’ is a misunderstanding of how the public really feels,” said Kaiser President and CEO Drew Altman. “When the specific purposes of spending abroad are put before the public, Americans are more supportive of health and development funding.”

Mechanics of Malaria: Elasticity of Red Blood Cells

2011-03-01T23:37:00.000-08:00

The researcher from Brown and MIT are coming closer to finding valuable information that could lead to a cure for malaria, mainly cerebral malaria. The researchers are studying the effects of Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite causing cerebral malaria, on red blood cells. This form of malaria mainly affects children and is one of the deadliest forms of malaria.

The main goal of this research was to examine the features of this disease from a mechanical point of view. Through their research the team has discovered that the red blood cells that are affected by the parasite Plasmodium falicparum were far stiffer and more adhesive than healthy red blood cells. They stretched the cells in order to examine their elastic properties and saw that these infected cells were 10-20 times stiffer than normal cells.

Since red blood cells have to be fast messengers, traveling quickly through the capillaries, these stiffer cells cannot travel at the same speed. Also, since the cells become adhesive they tend to travel closer to the walls of the arteries while healthy red blood cells travel through the center. These two characteristics of the infected blood cells cause these red blood cells to stick to the capillaries in the brain, thus causing them to not reach the spleen. The spleen is responsible for filtering parasites from the blood. These infected red blood cells are unable to transport nutrients and oxygen to the rest of the body.

These discoveries could provide information extremely valuable to treating malaria.

http://www.browndailyherald.com/mechanical-view-sheds-light-on-malaria-1.2459334

Malaria Site: All About Malaria

2011-03-01T21:15:00.000-08:00

While searching for something malaria-related to post on the blog this week I stumbled upon this site: Malaria Site. The website has numerous fascinating sections dedicated to the history of malaria including reports on the earliest written descriptions of malaria dating back thousands of years ago to Babylonian cuneiform tablets which attribute the disease to Nergal, the Babylonian god of destruction and pestilence (described as a double-winged, insect).

The site even has a section dedicated to "Famous Victims" which include notable figures such as Italian author Dante, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Byron, and a list of 8 American president's who suffered from the disease (though none of them died).

There is a lot of neat stuff on the website that I would advise you to check out if you're interested: Malaria Site.

Fighting Malaria with Candy

2011-03-01T20:16:00.000-08:00

A spoonful of sugar may help the medicine go down, but why bother when you could just give patients chocolate? That's what Bill Gates wants to do.

Through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he's given $100,000 in grants each to scientists who want to use candy to diagnose and treat malaria. UCLA doctoral candidate Andrew Fung received a grant to use gum to detect malaria indicators in saliva, making the test painless. Steven Maranz, a researcher at Weill Cornell Medical College will use his money to study the effects of chocolate, which binds to and removes the cholesterol the malaria parasite needs to survive from the bloodstream. Maranz thinks chocolate may be able to kill most parasites while leaving enough in the blood to help children develop a lifetime resistance. The five-year grants for malaria are part of the foundation's Grand Challenges Exploration program, which also gave $100,000 to 74 other unconventional approaches to world problems.

from an article dated October 2009

Walter Reed: Physician, Researcher, Soldier

2011-03-01T15:04:00.000-08:00

From the Military Health System website at the Department of Defense a short video about Major Walter Reed’s contributions to military medicine, which include discoveries that paved the way for health care modernization at the dawn of the 20th century.

Malaria Proof Mosquitoes

2011-02-28T22:36:00.000-08:00

Time magazine recently named the development of that have been genetically modified to resist malaria as one of the 50 best inventions of 2010 and gave it the No. 1 spot in the health-and-medicine category.

Now the goal is to make the altered mosquitoes hardier than native varieties, which they could someday supplant in nature throughout the world.

"Our hope is to release them and drive the gene through the population," said professor Shirley Luckhart, a leader in the joint effort between scientists at UC Davis and the University of Arizona.

From an article last week, Researchers work to create malaria-proof mosquitoes, in The Republic Newspaper.

An alternative approach that I very briefly mentioned in class is to use knockout genes to drive certain mosquito species to extinction. This approach was described by Olivia Judson in a New York Times Op-Ed piece in 2003: A Bug's Death.

There's no shortage of ideas. So why are so many people still suffering from malaria and why do so many children die?

Does Malaria come from Great Apes?

2011-02-28T16:39:00.000-08:00

I found a recently published article (September 2010), which presents information on research regarding the evolution of malaria. Scientists have concluded that the parasite most likely originated in the lowland gorillas, who may be infected with a "genetically identical microbe." Amazingly, researchers also believe that the parasite crossed the species border with just one mosquito bite--one bite is responsible for the outbreaks and epidemics of the disease!
Furthermore, scientists are hopeful as to the benefits of knowing the source of the parasite. They believe that with this new information they may be better able to understand and treat the disease. The article uses HIV as a parallel study, because knowing that HIV originated in primates has allowed for further research into the nature of the disease.
Finally, the researchers believe that the parasite does not have as negative an effect on the gorillas as it does on humans.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/evolution-of-malaria-is-traced-back-to-greatest-ape-2087035.html

Pseudacteon Flies

2011-02-28T15:59:00.000-08:00

This post is a little late, as it concerns a topic that we discussed last week, but it's another really interesting example of how a parasite can alter host behavior. Female Pseudacteon flies quickly inject an egg into the neck region of an ant through a rapid attack. The larva moves into the head cavity of the ant, where it eventually eats the brain of the ant (and therefore kills it). The head of the ant falls off, and the organism continues to develop inside the detached head. Once fully developed, the organism leaves the head as an adult fly.

http://www.biocontrol.entomology.cornell.edu/parasitoids/pseudacteon.html

Transgenic fungi combat malaria

2011-02-27T21:36:00.000-08:00

A day early for our malaria week, but too topical not to mention, is this report today on ScienceDaily about the use of transgenic fungi to combat malaria and other diseases. The ScienceDaily report is based on a paper out in the journal Science this week: Development of Transgenic Fungi That Kill Human Malaria Parasites in Mosquitoes.

New findings by a University of Maryland-led team of scientists indicate that a genetically engineered fungus carrying genes for a human anti-malarial antibody or a scorpion anti-malarial toxin could be a highly effective, specific and environmentally friendly tool for combating malaria, at a time when the effectiveness of current pesticides against malaria mosquitoes is declining.

The research team found that compared to the other treatments, spraying mosquitoes with the transgenic fungus significantly reduced parasite development. The malaria-causing parasite P. falciparum was found in the salivary glands of just 25 percent of the mosquitoes sprayed with the transgenic fungi, compared to 87 percent of those sprayed with the wild-type strain of the fungus and to 94 percent of those that were not sprayed. Even in the 25 percent of mosquitoes that still had parasites after being sprayed with the transgenic fungi, parasite numbers were reduced by over 95 percent compared to the mosquitoes sprayed with the wild-type fungus.

Parasite Rex

2011-02-26T23:26:00.000-08:00

If you'd like to read more about parasites that are capable of changing host behavior than Carl Zimmer's book, Parasite Rex, contains several chapters devoted to them. Zimmer is an excellent writer and this book is a very entertaining read. You can also check out his science blog, The Loom, where he frequently talks about parasites.

Imagine a world where parasites control the minds of their hosts, sending them to their destruction.

Imagine a world where parasites are masters of chemical warfare and camouflage, able to cloak themselves with their hosts' own molecules.

Imagine a world where parasites steer the course of evolution, where the majority of species are parasites.

Welcome to earth.

Friday videos

2011-02-25T14:27:00.000-08:00

If you were unable to make class today here are two videos you missed. Plus a bonus video at the end if you already saw these two.

The last video shows a horsehair worm (Nematomorpha) exiting from its host. The larvae live inside the insect and absorb nutrients directly through their skin. The adults are mostly free living in freshwater or marine environments

In Spinochordodes tellinii, which has grasshoppers and crickets as its larval host, the infection acts on the insect's brain and causes it to seek water and drown itself, thus returning the nematomorph to water. They are also able to survive the predation of their host, being able to wriggle out of the predator that has eaten the host! This manipulation of the host is documented here: Do hairworms (Nematomorpha) manipulate the water seeking behaviour of their terrestrial hosts?

office hours survey

2011-02-25T08:27:00.001-08:00

I was contacted by some researchers at UCSB that want to do a survey of student attendance in office hours. If you want to participate, I'm copying the email and the link below. You are in no way required or expected to participate, and if you do it is anonymous.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
My student group (Community Research Group @ UCSB) and I are working on research investigating how office hour attendance is related to undergraduates' grades. EEMB 40 was selected as part of the random sample for this project. It would be extremely helpful to us if you could take 3 minutes (it really is that quick) to fill out the survey and to forward the undergraduate-specific version (also extremely brief) to the students in this class. If you would like to see the content of the undergraduate survey, just open the link below. Of course, all responses are collected anonymously.

Please forward this address to the undergraduate students in this class via email: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GRVCT37

We hope this project will demonstrate the importance of office hours to undergraduate success, and illuminate factors that prevent students from attending. If you have any questions about any part of the research (or about Community Research Group), please feel free to contact me.

Community Research Group is an undergraduate-run research team advised by Dr. Paolo Gardinalli (UCSB Social Science Survey Center).

Thank you for your participation!

Ilya Altshteyn
President
ilya01@umail.ucsb.edu | 858.349.9773

No more litter boxes??

2011-02-24T20:41:00.000-08:00

Someone in class talked about a cat toilet. here are a few options for a litter free home:

The Litter Kwitter-Cat Training System.

Richell Paw Trax Cat Potty

And my personal favorite...

Activeion

2011-02-24T19:20:00.000-08:00

So here we have another product that kills 99.9% of germs, but this one is a bit different from the rest. It has one ingredient, and thats good old H2O. This Activeion spray bottle ionizes water by sending it through an ion exchange membrane where the water is separated into a mixture of oxygenated positively and negatively charged nano-bubbles. The water stays in this state for about 45 seconds before returning to its normal state. The ions lift the dirt off the table and make it easier to clean so no residue is left, water or dirt. Also, it creates a small electrical field which can cause certain bacterium to become agitated and burst. Watch the video for more. It seems like it could be useful in hospitals or other places where alot of germs are present and I feel like its methods would be less likely to create resistant drugs since its merely ionized hydrogen and oxygen Heres the link to the website with a video that clearly demonstrates its method of action

Activeion Spray Video

A Positive of Protozoa

2011-02-24T18:30:00.000-08:00

Protozoa, such as Toxoplasmosis gondii (the infectious agent of toxoplasmosis), may appear to be solely malignant organisms that infect a large portion of the worlds population, however, scientists working for Massachusetts-based company Petrel Biosensors have found an extremely beneficial use for the nasty single-celled organisms: testing water quality.

Sure we have modern methods to test water quality, however this newly developed technology, called Swimming Behavioral Spectrophotometer or “SBS”, is able to accomplish that task in a much cheaper and faster way than our current technologies.

The system, designed by Scott Gallager, detects toxins in the water supply through analysis of how the protozoa move throughout the sample. Most toxins are known to disrupt calcium transport and since the hair-like cilia responsible for protozoan motion are sensitive to aqueous calcium content, the presence of toxins can cause an erratic and irregular response in the microorganism (see original article on circleofblue.com)

This new method has a variety of applications including water monitoring for public drinking water supplies, for military units in the field, and for industrial waste discharge. Because the SBS acts as a “real-time” test, the quality of the water can be determined very quickly and appropriate action can be taken immediately. And at $1 to $2 per test, Gallager’s protozoan-dependent method presents a cheap and affordable system which rivals laboratory analyses ranging from $50 to $250 per evaluation.

However, in order to get his SBS technology moving forward, Gallager predicts that the company will need at least $2 million, on top of the $1 million Department of Defense grant already received, to get his new technology distributed to the world.

All cats are not created equal

2011-02-24T13:24:00.000-08:00

Can I "catch" toxoplasmosis from my cat?
Because cats only shed the organism for a few days in their entire life, the chance of human exposure is small. Owning a cat does not mean you will be infected with the disease. It is unlikely that you would be exposed to the parasite by touching an infected cat, because cats usually do not carry the parasite on their fur. It is also unlikely that you can become infected through cat bites or scratches. In addition, cats kept indoors that do not hunt prey or are not fed raw meat are not likely to be infected with T. gondii.
In the United States, people are much more likely to become infected through eating raw meat and unwashed fruits and vegetables than from handling cat feces.
From Cornell Feline Health Center's Toxoplasmosis brochure.

On the other hand because cats are the definitive host ONLY cats shed oocysts. This means that all infected meat, fruit and vegetables must ultimately have been contaminated from oocysts shed in cat faeces. Even though cats may only shed oocysts for a short while they can last a long time in the environment. Your domestic kitty may not be responsible for the environmental oocyst contamination but some kitty is....

Nigerian Rinderpest: A Huge Loss

2011-02-23T21:10:00.000-08:00

Between the years of 1980 and 1984, and especially in 1983, Rinderpest affected cattle in Nigeria very severely, affecting not only the health of cows, but the country’s economy, forcing many cattle farmers out of the trade. In this post I will discuss the 1983 epidemic.

Lesser breakouts of the disease caused the death and slaughter of over 10,000 cows before being put under control. (One theory is that infected herds from Cameroon were introduced as their owners tried to escape the inevitable slaughter of their herds.) During the dry season of 1983, coincidentally, after huge brush fires had diminished grazing area, cattle herders were forced to drive cattle to a limited amount of areas in search of water. Because of the fires, malnutrition was also a problem at this time, and when combined with the density of cows, led to a huge outbreak.

In 1982, a combined 826 cows died in Nigeria as a direct result of Rinderpest, and from slaughters aimed towards preventing its spread. In 1983, this figure skyrocketed as a result of combined factors. How high? In 1983, this number surpassed 418,000. Vaccine use was implemented, (nearly 9 million cows were vaccinated) but not in time to prevent the ENOURMOUS cost to the country of Nigeria.

When all areas of profit loss, preventative, slaughter and other costs were combined, this epidemic took a huge toll on the country. About 304 million dollars in cattle were lost, 140 million dollars lost as a result of active cattle infections, 100 million lost in disease surveillance, 90 million lost in working hours, 303 million lost in cattle replacement costs, and an astounding 577 million in losses due to reduced value of Nigerian cattle, the need for important milk and meat, and other national costs. Overall, the estimated monetary loss for Nigeria totaled 1.5 billion dollars.

Toxoplasmosis as a Cultural Determinant?

2011-02-23T21:03:00.000-08:00

According to a blog that I found, a recent study seems to suggest that Toxoplasmosis can have an effect on human cultures. As we discussed in class today, toxoplasmosis levels vary from country to country, correlating with levels of exposure and risk factors such as the consumption of undercooked meat. Also as we discussed today, toxoplasmosis can have effects, albeit small, on human behaviors. Therefore, this blogger suggests that varying cultural behavior may be at least partly affected by toxoplamosis infections. This is not to say that the blogger thinks that all cultures are completely determined by toxoplasmosis affects, but I think that it is an interesting hypothesis. I'll let you decide if you think that it's a sound judgement.

http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2008/10/toxoplasma_the_brain_parasite_that_influences_human_culture.php

Toxoplasmosis and the French

2011-02-23T20:47:00.000-08:00

Based on the data that toxoplasmosis is present in 90% of the population in France and Professor Latto's not so subtle remark that toxoplasmosis could be responsible for certain "behavioral problems" associated with French people, I decided to try to do a little research into this possible correlation. I did not find much, but on Webster's extended online dictionary definition of toxoplasmosis, I found a very interesting quote attributed to one Kevin Lafferty:

"In populations where this parasite is very common, mass personality modification could result in cultural change. [Variations in the prevalence of Toxoplasma gondii] may explain a substantial proportion of human population differences we see in cultural aspects that relate to ego, money, material possessions, work and rules."

I took the liberty of bolding a few words that might assist Professor Latto's hypothesis about French people. I wish there was more information on this subject, and maybe certain French stereotypes are not really their fault (if you do not want to blame them on eating undercooked meat). Oh well, c'est la vie.

Toxoplasmosis passed to kittens?

2011-02-23T20:34:00.000-08:00

Today in lecture, someone asked a question about whether a cat infected with toxoplasmosis can/will pass the disease along to its kittens...here are some things a veterinary site I found had to say about the subject:

- Once cats become infected with Toxo they will always have it, but they will only pass it in the stool for a brief time just after they are first infected. Most cats only pass the organism in the stool ONCE in their lives and usually when they are kittens. The exception to this would be if an older cat got another disease that suppressed their immune system (such as feline leukemia or feline aids).

- How do we prevent this? That is a tough problem. Many folks recommend getting rid of your barn cats. The problem is that stray cats passing through your barn or pasture can also shed the organism. Other people have advocated having a few, neutered barn cats. These cats are not going to be having kittens (the age most likely to shed the parasite) and they are going to hopefully chase off any stray cats that come around. The most successful method of preventing this is to keep the feed and the hay in areas where cats cannot get to it...and practice good hygiene!

Behavioral Effects of Toxoplasmosis

2011-02-23T13:01:00.001-08:00

Toxoplasmosis appears to manipulate personality by the same adaptations that normally help the parasite complete its life cycle. A study on rats with a latent infection, the rat's behavior alters so that it becomes more active, less cautious and more likely to be eaten by a cat, where the parasite can complete its life cycle. Tests on humans suggest that toxoplasmosis is associated with different, often opposite, behavioral changes in men and women, but both genders exhibit guild proneness. The study also found that countries with high toxoplasmosis prevalence had a higher neuroticism score and western countries with high prevalence also scored higher in the neurotic dimension of male sex roles and uncertainty avoidance.

http://www.news-medical.net/news/2006/08/03/19237.aspx?page=2

Waterborne toxoplasmosis

2011-02-23T13:01:00.000-08:00

Just what we need - another way to get infected by Toxoplasmosis.

Waterborne toxoplasmosis – Recent developments
Humans become infected with Toxoplasma gondii mainly by ingesting uncooked meat containing viable tissue cysts or by ingesting food or water contaminated with oocysts from the feces of infected cats. Circumstantial evidence suggests that oocyst-induced infections in humans are clinically more severe than tissue cyst-acquired infections. Until recently, waterborne transmission of T. gondii was considered uncommon, but a large human outbreak linked to contamination of a municipal water reservoir in Canada by wild felids and the widespread infection of marine mammals in the USA provided reasons to question this view. The present paper examines the possible importance of T. gondii transmission by water.

Possible canine distemper outbreak in Mt. Angel

2011-02-22T21:59:00.000-08:00

The Mt. Angel Police Department has recently received numerous complaints about sick raccoons in the area. Canine distemper is highly contagious. It is a viral disease affecting raccoons, coyotes, skunks and un-vaccinated dogs. Distemper symptoms include nose and eye discharge, rough coat of hair, emaciated appearance and unusual behavior which can include disorientation and aimless wandering.

So far 6 raccoons have been disposed of, one of the animals died before the police had arrived. After the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife was contacted it seems that distemper is the likely cause of the illness inflicting raccoons in this area. While some believe that rabies could be the cause, especially since they have some similar symptoms, there are some main differences. The main difference is that rabies is able to be transmitted to humans whereas canine distemper cannot.

The main advice that seems to be spreading around is to not feed their pets outside since unvaccinated dogs can catch the viral disease if infected raccoons use their food or water dishes. It is also highly encourage to not feed or approach raccoons since their behavior can be potentially dangerous.

http://www.statesmanjournal.com/article/20110207/UPDATE/110207024/1062/Mayor-s-censure-spurs-discussion/Canine-distemper-suspected-raccoons-Mt-Angel?odyssey=mod_sectionstories

Flu shot scare or HOAX?

2011-02-22T15:07:00.000-08:00

One of my friends showed me this video over the weekend. Desiree Jennings claimed to have contracted a highly rare case of the neurological disorder called "dystonia." After a routine flu shot, she claims to have suffered problems with speech, with walking, with eating, etc--unable to perform any of these normal tasks without seizing uncontrollably. However, after this story became such a hot topic in the news during a period of heightened vaccination scares, news teams discretely followed Desiree to track any improvements...and look what they found!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOmNuIYFD7g&NR=1

click on this youtube link for the surprising video!!

Expedited Partner Therapy

2011-02-22T14:58:00.000-08:00

Yesterday's LA Times had an article about some new programs to help combat sexually transmitted disease.

They mainly talk about the 'I want the kit' program that supplies free in-home testing kits for three of the most commonly reported STDs, however they also mention the Get Yourself Talking, Get Yourself Tested program and the more controversial Expedited Partner Therapy (EPT) which allows those who test positive for certain sexually transmitted diseases to take home antibiotics for up to three partners without a health care provider first examining the partners.

Although this is not legal in all states (see the map at the CDC website) the CDC has reviewed the evidence and concludes that EPT is a useful option particularly for treatment of male partners of women with chlamydial infection or gonorrhea.

(Graphic is from inSPOT a website that allows you to send electronic postcards anonymously or from your email address to your sex partners to inform them that you have an STD).

Robert Koch and Rinderpest

2011-02-21T13:21:00.000-08:00

The German physician and microbiologist Robert Koch is most famous for developing the germ theory of disease and for proposing that ‘one germ causes one disease- every disease has its specific germ’.

Koch and his pupils found the organisms responsible for tuberculosis, anthrax, diphtheria, typhoid, pneumonia, gonorrhoea, cerebrospinal meningitis, leprosy, bubonic plague, tetanus, and syphilis, among others.

In 1896 Koch was brought to South Africa by the Cape Government to investigate and find a cure for cattle plague, or Rinderpest, which had broken out during the last decade of the 19th century. The epidemic affected most of southern African, but it hit the Transvaal and Northern Cape particularly hard.

Although he did not identify the cause of this disease, he succeeded in limiting the outbreak of it by injection into healthy farm-stock of bile taken from the gall bladders of infected animals. He announced the discovery of his vaccine on 10th February 1897.

The Panic Virus

2011-02-20T13:47:00.000-08:00

I was going to blog about the release of a new book called 'The Panic Virus' - that has received some good reviews when I noticed that today's Doonesbury cartoon also takes on the Jenny McCarthy issue. As a former playmate Boopsie has some harsh words for Jenny and the damage she has caused to the playmate brand. The full strip is here at Slate .com.

From the blurb for The Panic Virus:

In 1998 Andrew Wakefield, a British gastroenterologist with a history of self-promotion, published a paper with a shocking allegation: the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine might cause autism. The media seized hold of the story and, in the process, helped to launch one of the most devastating health scares ever. In the years to come Wakefield would be revealed as a profiteer in league with class-action lawyers, and he would eventually lose his medical license. Meanwhile one study after another failed to find any link between childhood vaccines and autism.

Yet the myth that vaccines somehow cause developmental disorders lives on. Despite the lack of corroborating evidence, it has been popularized by media personalities such as Oprah Winfrey and Jenny McCarthy and legitimized by journalists who claim that they are just being fair to “both sides” of an issue about which there is little debate. Meanwhile millions of dollars have been diverted from potential breakthroughs in autism research, families have spent their savings on ineffective “miracle cures,” and declining vaccination rates have led to outbreaks of deadly illnesses like Hib, measles, and whooping cough. Most tragic of all is the increasing number of children dying from vaccine-preventable diseases.

Parasite biology indicates a land–sea connection

2011-02-20T13:37:00.000-08:00

Investigation into the processes promoting T. gondii infections in sea otters may be our best opportunity to understand terrestrial parasite flow into the coastal marine system. In the absence of evidence that the high number of sea otters infected off the coast of California can be attributed either to the ingestion of prey containing tissue cysts or vertical transmission, the most likely source of infection is exposure to the environmentally resistant, infective oocysts of T. gondii, which can survive for months or years in contaminated soil, freshwater or seawater. Toxoplasma gondii oocysts may remain infective despite water chlorination or sewage processing... Furthermore, the infectious dose for some species may be as low as one oocyst.

Several studies have demonstrated that oocysts and cysts of pathogenic protozoa are concentrated by clams, mussels and oysters during filter-feeding activity. Thus, raw shellfish could serve as a source of pathogenic protozoal infection for both marine mammals and humans. To maintain normal body weight and meet metabolic demands, sea otters consume approximately 25% of their body weight each day in invertebrate prey, such as mussels. Other possible modes of T. gondii infection could be by the ingestion of oocysts in seawater, by grooming and ingesting oocysts collected on their fur or by ingestion of oocysts that are on or in prey other than bivalves...however, these hypotheses require further investigation!

Toxoplasmosis in Humans

2011-02-19T16:40:00.000-08:00

It seems that toxoplasmosis transmission is not only a problem for seals, but also for humans, who can fairly easily come into contact with the disease. For example, people can accidentally ingest the harmful parasite through normal practices such as gardening. If an infected cat's feces are in the soil and a gardener does not wash his or her hands before eating, the person can accidentally swallow the parasite. People can also come into contact with the parasite while cleaning their cat's litter box and failing to wash their hands afterward. So if you have a cat make sure that you always wash your hands after cleaning the litter box or do things outdoors where your cat may have been roaming around!

Humans can also become infected through contaminated or undercooked food products, and, less commonly, through blood transfusion or mother-to-child transmission.

http://www.cdc.gov/parasites/toxoplasmosis/epi.html

Eradicating Rinderpest

2011-02-19T14:05:00.000-08:00

A short 4 minute video that explains a little more about the eradication of Rinderpest.

Scientific innovation, international collaboration and investment from donors, such as/including the UK's Department for International Development, supported the work of teams of community health workers wherever rinderpest attacked cattle. Two of the scientists involved, Dr John Anderson and Dr Michael Baron, explain what has been achieved and how.

After the Rinderpest

2011-02-18T13:58:00.000-08:00

Whilst there is, of course, a death metal band called Rinderpest, with a song called Rinderpest, I couldn't make much headway with the 'lyrics'. Let me know if you have better luck.

More interestingly there is a South African musician who has a whole album about the Rinderpest epidemic that devastated Africa.

The Scene is the Cape Colony border, late 19th century, a terrible plague, the Rinderpest (rather like Foot & Mouth), has decimated the livestock and lives of the Boers, Brits and Amaxhosa alike. The infected animals have to be piled in pits and burned. The land is covered in smoke and weeping.

It's not easy to find but you can download an mp3 of the title song , After the Rinderpest, from the Last.FM website.

After the Rinderpest

There’s a wicked wind on the smoking ground
All out hopes and dreams, we had to burn them down.
And our poisoned wells took our first and best
Gave our childrens’ lives to the Rinderpest.

Sent our youths away to be militarized
And we couldn’t see into their empty eyes.
Would you have the strength, if they confessed
To what they saw, in the wilderness.

With a burying pit full of burning beasts
With the crimson coals of the heat beneath.
Holding out our hands to be cauterized
But the Rinderpest left us paralyzed.

And a tattooed child full of battle scars
With a heart of iron, hammered hard.
Do we act surprised, as though we never knew
What the sulphur air would have done to you.

There are bands of us that have survived
And all we have is how we live our lives.
As we struggle on, we must not forget,
Just what we learned, from the Rinderpest.

New Zealand Blood Donation

2011-02-18T00:35:00.000-08:00

Starting in 2000, the New Zealand Blood Service banned donations from anyone who lived in Britain, France, or Ireland for six months or longer during 1980 and 1996. This ban was put in place because of the risk of donated blood helping to transmits vCJD.

British scientists have recently developed a prototype blood test which is 100,000 times more sensitive than the previous test. This test is able to detect tiny amounts of vCJD-causing particles(prions).

The lead researcher, Graham Jackson, said that even though larger studies are going to be needed to confirm its effectiveness, the tests could in the future allow doctors to screen whole populations for vCJD. If this test is truly effective it could clear the way for thousands of residents of New Zealand to give blood.

Chronic Wasting Disease

2011-02-17T20:53:00.000-08:00

A new form of TSE (transmissible spongiform encephalopathy) that is becoming a main concern in the United States is Chronic Wasting Disease, or CWD, which is becoming more prevalent in wild game such as deer, elk, and moose throughout the US.

The disease is related to BSE, or “Mad Cow” Disease, and therefore concern of it being transmitted to humans through the consumption of wild game is growing as more and more deer and elk are found to be infected with the prion-caused disease.

Deer and elk infected with CWD suffer loss of body condition and control, behavioral abnormalities and eventually death. While there have been no confirmed cases of CWD among humans so far, the fact that the disease has spread from endemic areas of northeastern Colorado, southeastern Wyoming and southwestern Nebraska to numerous places across North America is a source of concern for wildlife managers. (Map of CWD cases in wild deer and elk throughout the USA)

The origin of CWD is unknown, mainly because it occurs in wild game that are not closely monitored for infectious diseases. One theory suggests that CWD is derived from scrapie in sheep.

Also unknown among experts is the method by which CWD is transmitted from deer to deer. Theories suggest it may be passed through contact with feces, urine, or saliva but another theory suggests maternal transmission from mother to fetus.

Hopefully scientists can figure out exactly what causes the disease and how it is transmitted amongst wild game in case the disease does become transmissible to humans in the years to come.

Prions and memory

2011-02-17T14:35:00.000-08:00

As we now know Prions are really just misshapen forms of a normal protein that occurs in everyone. This raises the important question of just what these 'normal' prions do in the body. One suggestion is that they may be involved in the maintenance of memory: Prions as adaptive conduits of memory and inheritance (in yeast) and Hippocampal synaptic plasticity in mice devoid of cellular prion protein (in mice). From the first paper:

Any molecular basis for long-term memory formation must explain its endurance (for many years) despite the continuous turnover (every few hours) of the proteins that might encode them. Information storage despite molecular turnover is traditionally explained by autophosphorylation loops, self-sustaining feedback loops in complex signalling networks, or transcription factors that stimulate their own synthesis once they cross a threshold concentration. The conformational replication of prions provides another durable form of molecular memory. Moreover, as is clear from studies in yeast, prion conformations are not usually toxic. Incredibly, prion-based mechanisms might operate in individual neuronal synapses to maintain their growth and contingent long-term facilitation.

Fungal prions are proving to be a very useful model organism for studying mammalian prions since numerous forms have now been identified, they are infectious and self-replicating like mammalian prions but they do not appear to be associated with disease in fungi. In fact there are several suggestions they may have aided fungal evolution.

Mad cow disease-- good for grassland birds?

2011-02-17T00:15:00.000-08:00

Mad cow disease is good for grassland birds: Exploring novel socioeconomic links to wildlife ecology

Results/Conclusions from their experiments:

We found support that included a one-year lag between each step wherein: 1) imports increase and exports decrease in response to BSE outbreaks in the previous year, 2) the hay harvest in North America is then reduced two years after the outbreak as fewer cattle remain in North America, which ultimately yields 3) a positive response in grassland bird populations in the year after hay harvest reduction – three years after the BSE outbreak. Our results illustrate the importance of socioeconomics in conserving North American avifauna – such knowledge will allow us to improve management recommendations and better predict future periods of adversity to bird populations.

HealthMap

2011-02-16T14:02:00.000-08:00

As Professor Latto discussed a few weeks ago in lecture, virtual maps (such as "Google Maps") can be very helpful in tracking disease outbreaks. I recently discovered a resource called "HealthMap," which was created in 2006. According to a blog article, HealthMap currently "mashes up with a variety of sources including ProMED-mail, the World Health Organization, EuroSurveillance, and Google News to give way to a useful world health maps mashup application."

If you look at the map, you can locate any area in the world and see if an outbreak has been noted. Below the map, you can see outbreak alerts from the past three days. This seems like a great way to stay informed about world health issues!

Mad Cow Disease in Art

2011-02-16T13:36:00.000-08:00

Despite the seriousness of Mad Cow Disease, many cartoonists have found it to be a prime subject for their art. If you need a break from the humorless aspects of the disease, take a look at some of these fun cartoons!

"Sacred Cow"
"Mad Children's Disease"
"Bird Flu"
"Mad Farmer"
"Mootation"
"Revenge of the Mad Cow"
"Mad Cow Disease"
"It's the US"
"Bird Flu" (2)