microbiology
grrlscientist | May 19, 2007tags: Trypanosoma evansi, parasite, wasting disease, Tabanus, Australia, conservation
A PhD student from James Cook University in Australia hopes her research will help protect Australian wildlife from an exotic wasting disease that could devastate kangaroos and other endemic marsupials.
Kirsty Van Hennekeler has spent four years studying Surra, the disease caused by a parasite that lives in mammalian blood. This parasite, Trypanosoma evansi, causes fever, weakness, and lethargy in its victims and can lead to weight loss, anaemia and even death of infected animals. It is thought this parasite…
mikethemadbiologist | May 18, 2007So Lou Dobbs has been making ludicrous statements about leprosy and illegal immigrants, claiming that 7,000 cases have happened in the last few years as a result of illegal immigration. The Southern Poverty Law Center wrote Dobbs a letter:
Actually, we have had 7,000 cases of leprosy--over a thirty year period. Leprosy is pretty easy to keep track of....
What a fucking moron.
mikethemadbiologist | May 17, 2007
(from here)
Biologists have studied the fly Drosophila melanogaster for decades. Given its status as a model organism (perhaps the model organism), one would think figuring out what its microbial fauna is would be a high priority. Yet remarkably little is known about its microbial fauna. Until now.
A recent paper in Infection and Immunity characterizes the fauna of D. melanogaster. The authors goal was to figure out what the fauna is to use this fly as a model of intestinal disease. As far as I'm concerned, they have stumbled across something far more interesting.
The authors used a…
mikethemadbiologist | May 15, 2007The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has posted of all of the articles from In the light of evolution I: Adaptation and complex design . It looks pretty interesting. And it's free! I can't wait to see how the creationists bollox this up...
mikethemadbiologist | May 9, 2007Tristero makes an excellent point about Republican rhetoric, and I think it partially explains why so many scientists are opposed to the Bush Administration. Tristero compares the Niger 'evidence' for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq with the rhetoric opposing the HPV vaccination (italics mine):
Why were we positive Bush was lying? Because no one who is telling the truth talks like this about such a serious subject. Notice the first five words. It's not that Saddam recently sought significant quantities yadda yadda, but only that "the Briitish government has learned." If there was any…
grrlscientist | May 9, 2007tags: five-second rule, food, bacteria, microbiology
Have you ever heard of the five-second rule, where you can pick up food that has fallen on the floor within five seconds and eat it without risk of illness? Do you follow it? In 2003, a then-high school science intern at the University of Illinois, Jillian Clarke, conducted a survey and found that slightly more than half of adult men and 70 percent of adult women knew about the five-second rule and many said they followed it. Clarke then conducted an experiment to find out if various food became contaminated with bacteria after just five…
mikethemadbiologist | May 9, 2007Tragically, Massachusetts is having a hepatitis C outbreak, and it's entirely due to surging heroin use:
The spike in hepatitis C, an illness most often spread by drug needles tainted with the virus, emerges during a period of epidemic heroin use in Massachusetts.
That is almost certainly no coincidence, said John Auerbach , the state's public health commissioner. "I suspect there is a direct correlation between the increase in hepatitis C among younger people and the increase in injection drug use and heroin use, in particular," Auerbach said. "It is terribly tragic, but it is very…
mikethemadbiologist | May 4, 2007No, KPC isn't a new fast food restaurant. It's short for Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase. The bad news: it's very hard to treat. The good news: it's very rare...for now.
Actually, the correct term is KPC-possessing K. pneumoniae*, but we'll just use the slang 'KPC'--it's what all the cool microbiologists use (I'll refer to the carbapenemase gene as the 'KPC gene'). KPC causes pneumonia, urinary tract infections, and sepsis; the mortality rate from these infections is extremely high.
The KPC gene confers resistance to all cephalosporins and Ã-lactam antibiotics: basically,…
mikethemadbiologist | May 2, 2007Yesterday, the NY Times had an article about using vaccination to eliminate or greatly reduce E. coli O157:H7 infections. Strategies differ: some would vaccinate the cows, while others would vaccinate people. The new threat due to E. coli O157:H7 isn't from contaminated meat, but from contaminated vegetables, such as the spinach outbreak. Unfortunately, I don't think vaccination is going to work.
We'll ignore the notion that if we were to institute a mass vaccination campaign of either cattle or people, we might want to target something that kills more than 61 people per year, and, in…
mikethemadbiologist | April 27, 2007While washing your hands for 15-20 seconds with soap and water is the best way to prevent the transmission of infectious disease through hand to hand contact, in a pinch, alcohol santizers work well. Good news from Australia: you can use sanitizers and drive. From Microbe:
Young health care workers cite many reasons why they don't use appropriate hand hygiene at work. One concern, particularly among some young health care workers who are required to have a zero serum alcohol level to legally drive automobiles while on a probationary license in Australia and some other countries, is the…
mikethemadbiologist | April 23, 2007Tonight, at 6:30pm, at the Boston Public Library, there's a meeting "Preparing Boston Residents for Pandemic Flu." I'm going, but with a great deal of pessimism.
The reason I'm pessimistic, as I've said so many times on this blog, every year roughly 36,000 U.S. residents die from 'ordinary' influenza. We know how to make the vaccine. We could, if we so desired, produce sufficient vaccine. We know whom we should be vaccinating to maximize the vaccine's effectiveness (and, no, we don't routinely vaccinate those people--5 to 18 year olds). And doing all things things would be the needed…
mikethemadbiologist | April 19, 2007'E. coli conservatives' is Rick Perlstein's phrase, not mine. After all, the Mad Biologist is quite partial to E. coli; I suppose that makes me an E. coli liberal. Most E. coli, including those isolated from retail meats, are not harmful, so I've always thought the bug gets a bad rap. Only a minority of strains cause intestinal disease (e.g., Shigella), unless they wind up in a place they're not supposed to be, such as the bloodstream or urinary tract. These strains, known as 'ExPEC', which is short for 'extra-intestinal pathogenic E. coli', are only a small, albeit nasty, percentage of…
mikethemadbiologist | April 13, 2007While I'm not as bothered by the Pope's statement about evolution as PZ is, what's troubling is the scientific misunderstanding shown by his statements.
I agree with one sentiment, which is that biology doesn't tell us much about meaning, since I think meaning is something we ascribe to physical reality (and events). Many biologists have made much philosophical and ethical hay of the common ancestry of humankind, so it's certainly reasonable for the Pope (or anyone else) to do so. What is really disturbing is how ignorant he is of modern biology and science. According to the Pope:
"The…
mikethemadbiologist | April 11, 2007No, not those hideous boots! The Ug99 black stem rust fungus, a strain of Puccinia graminis. It doesn't kill people directly, but it could wipe out much of the world's wheat crop. As always, the developing world will probably be hit the hardest. And it's a potential failure of surveillance.
First, what the Ug99 fungus is:
The disease is Ug99, a virulent strain of black stem rust fungus (Puccinia graminis), discovered in Uganda in 1999. Since the Green Revolution, farmers everywhere have grown wheat varieties that resist stem rust, but Ug99 has evolved to take advantage of those varieties…
mikethemadbiologist | April 10, 2007I've mentioned the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System (NARMS) before. Today, I'll be attending the NARMS public hearing which is going to discuss four questions:
1) Why, on this night
1) Are there inherent biases in the sampling strategies employed in NARMS? If so, how can they be improved to ensure that the data and interpretation are scientifically sound given current resources?
2) Are there epidemiological and/or microbiological research studies that would better serve the goals of NARMS and the regulatory work of FDA?
3) Are current plans for data harmonization and…
mikethemadbiologist | April 4, 2007From the archives comes this post about the effect antibiotic resistance could have during an influenza outbreak.
I recently corresponded with someone in a position to make public health policy who wanted to know what effect antibiotic resistance would have on avian influenza (this makes me think of Kristof's recent column). Since I regularly encounter similar questions, I thought it worthwhile to share this (I've removed other parts that aren't relevant to the matter).
Also, on occasion, I like to demonstrate that the Mad Biologist isn't always Mad...:
Anti-viral resistance. While…
mikethemadbiologist | April 3, 2007You can't go wrong with the title "Residence time and food contact time effects on transfer of Salmonella
Typhimurium from tile, wood and carpet: testing the five-second rule." And it only gets better.
Here's the abstract:
Aims Three experiments were conducted to determine the survival and transfer of Salmonella Typhimurium from wood, tile or carpet to bologna (sausage) and bread.
Methods and Results: Experiment 1. After 28 days, 1·5 to 2·5 log10 CFU cm-2 remained on tile from and the more concentrated media facilitated the survival of S. Typhimurium compared with the more dilute solutions…
mikethemadbiologist | March 29, 2007In response to us foul-mouthed evolutionists, Casey Luskin asks, "Yet for all their numbers and name-calling, not a single one has answered Egnor's question: How does [sic] Darwinian mechanisms produce new biological information?" I've never liked the whole "biological information" concept.
As far as I can tell, the creationists started bandying the term about after this George Gilder article in Wired was published:
Just as physicists discovered that the atom was not a massy particle, as Newton believed, but a baffling quantum arena accessible only through mathematics, so too are biologists…
mikethemadbiologist | March 27, 2007One of the few predictable statistics in American public health is that between 35,000-40,000 people will die every year from 'ordinary' influenza. Most of these deaths are preventable. Yet we do nothing.
In the U.S., influenza kills approximately the same number of people every year as breast cancer does. But unlike breast cancer, we don't need to run, walk, jump, pogostick, or unicycle for the 'cure.' All we need to do is vaccinate enough of the appropriate people. It's that simple.
An effective influenza vaccination policy would involve the mass vaccination of those most likely to…
mikethemadbiologist | March 19, 2007There's an interesting news story about antibiotic resistance in wild chimpanzee populations that claims to have found transfer of resistant Escherichia coli from humans to wild animals.
According to the article:
To do the study, the UI researchers, working with colleagues from Makerere University in Uganda and McGill University in Canada , examined 2 of the communities of chimpanzees living in the Kibale park. One of them has been under study by scientists for more than 2 decades. The other is visited regularly by ranger guides who shepherd tourists in the park. The researchers collected…