Various viruses
tsmith | March 13, 2007I was out yesterday, and as such missed Lynn Margulis' blog tour stop at Pharyngula. For those who may not be familiar with Margulis, she's a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and was the one who pushed the (now accepted) idea that chloroplasts and mitochondria in cells came about due to symbiosis. In the post announcing her impending arrival, there were lots of questions about her stance on HIV/AIDS. This is mostly due to a review she co-authored on Amazon of Harvey Bialy's biography of HIV denier Peter Duesberg. The review ends: "As both Bialy and Duesberg…
tsmith | February 21, 2007...I'm sure they'll be happy to see that Gambia's president is curing AIDS:
From the pockets of his billowing white robe, Gambia's president pulls out a plastic container, closes his eyes in prayer and rubs a green herbal paste onto the rib cage of the patient -- a concoction he claims is a cure for AIDS.
He then orders the thin man to swallow a bitter yellow drink, followed by two bananas.
"Whatever you do, there are bound to be skeptics, but I can tell you my method is foolproof," President Yahya Jammeh told an Associated Press reporter, surrounded by bodyguards in his presidential compound…
tsmith | February 8, 2007So, I left off on Tuesday noting two things about our normal flora: 1) that in the big picture, we know hardly anything about them; and 2) that one reason we know so little about them is because we've never grown many of them in a laboratory setting--that is, we've never cultured them using our typical tools of the trade.
What's one way to remedy this? Eliminate the need for culture, and take some cues from the microbial ecologists. More on this below.
I've mentioned the term "metagenomics" previously on this blog (see the stories about it here and here). Using this technique,…
tsmith | February 2, 2007Introduction to Microbiology and Infectious Disease
You and your normal flora, Part I
You and your normal flora, Part II
tsmith | February 2, 2007It's been awhile since I've written about HIV/AIDS denial on here. To be honest, the whole area has just burned me out a bit; it gets tiresome to even discuss issues with people who so fundamentally deny the basic tenets of microbiology and infectious disease epidemiology. But in my absence, there's been quite a bit going on, much of it collected here at the AIDStruth website. However, I have to draw your attention to a notable story today.
The first is like something out of "Law and Order." An HIV-positive man is appealing his conviction in Australia of endangering the lives of three…
tsmith | January 30, 2007Readers who are regulars at Effect Measure or Deltoid will be familiar with the opinions of attorney and author Michael Fumento. Fumento considers himself an avian flu "skeptic," and recently issued a "challenge" (the title, "My avian flu challenge to the leftist bird-brained squawkers", might give you some clue as to its scientific value) to bloggers, in response to one blogger's comment that "... there was a "50%/50%" chance of [an influenza] pandemic in the next year":
I took advantage of Mr. Paramedic's oversight to bet him 10-1, with him picking the dollar amount, that there would be…
tsmith | January 25, 2007Like most fields, microbiology is one filled with jargon. Many laymen don't even realize the differences between a bacterium and a virus, much less the smaller differences between, for example, a pathogenic versus a commensal organism. So, while I haven't decided yet exactly what I might write about in future posts, I thought I'd begin with a very general microbiology primer to get everyone up to speed on the basics of the microbial word.
To begin with, in the "well, duh" category, microbiology is the study of very tiny life. Initially, those studied were mainly disease-causing organisms;…
tsmith | January 25, 2007Measles deaths down 60 percent in six years
Though we tend to think of measles as a mere childhood disease here in the U.S.--a nuisance more than anything--this is a reminder that worldwide, it's still a significant cause of morbidity and mortality. To counter this, a mass vaccine campaign was begun in 2001, and has served to drastically reduce the burden due to the disease:
Deaths from measles have fallen by 60 percent worldwide since 1999 in what experts described on Friday as an historic victory for global health.
Accelerated control measures including an increase in routine measles…
tsmith | January 16, 2007Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is one of those nebulous diseases that's really more of a diagnosis of exclusion than anything else. As the name suggests, it's characterized by overwhelming fatigue--often so much so that patients can barely get out of bed--as well as a number of non-specific symptoms, including weakness, muscle pain, and insomnia. Currently, there is no diagnostic test for the disease, and the cause(s) is (are) unknown. Indeed, it should be noted that there's disagreement over even the most basic assumption that such a thing as CFS exists, or whether it's merely…
tsmith | January 11, 2007In yesterday's post regarding the current outbreak of Rift Valley Fever in Kenya, I noted:
...while there's little people in the area can do about periodic flooding, scientists are actively examining the relationship between weather and RVF outbreaks. This hopefully will prove useful to predict--and potentially ward off--future disease outbreaks via animal vaccination.
Little did I know that this outbreak had already been predicted by scientists working in this area--back in September. More after the jump...
The deaths from Rift Valley fever could have been avoided if Kenya had heeded a…
tsmith | January 10, 2007 When it comes to hemorrhagic fevers, Ebola and Marburg tend to get the lions' share of the press. Both are highly fatal, both can cause people to die in excruciating ways, and both have come to represent somewhat our fear of and fascination with emerging exotic diseases. However, as I've pointed out previously, as far as actual fatalities--or even illnesses go--both viruses are small potatoes. Other viruses that can also have hemorrhagic manifestations--including dengue and yellow fever--are much more common. One of these other viruses that frequently causes hemorrhagic fever is Rift…
tsmith | January 8, 2007When people think of Iowa, many of them think of our agriculture (for good reasons). Obviously, it's big business here. We ranked first in the nation in production of corn, soybeans, eggs, and pork in 2005. Indeed, population-wise, hogs here outnumber humans by more than 5 to 1. This is one reason research at our center focuses on zoonotic disease (diseases which can be transferred between animal species), and specifically, diseases of domesticated animals. A story in the news today shows one reason why we study what we do:
Iowa State health officials say someone in eastern Iowa has…
tsmith | December 21, 2006Ho ho ho, and welcome to the early Christmas edition of Animalcules. Sit back, grab some hot cocoa, and click below to open your Christmas gift of some of the most interesting microbiology-themed blog posts over the past month.
To start us off with, in a new blog to me (the Cornell Mushroom blog), we learn how a fungus assists in the transmission of a nematode from the environment to the host--in this case, cattle. It's a fascinating example of commensalism.
From the same blog comes another post on Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (or Bd), a fungus which is a cause of skin infections in…
tsmith | December 19, 2006 Libya to execute HIV medics
(Previous posts on the topic)
A court convicted five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor Tuesday of deliberately infecting 400 children with HIV and sentenced them to death, despite scientific evidence the youngsters had the virus before the medical workers came to Libya.
The United States and Europe reacted with outrage to the verdict, which prolongs a case that has hurt Libya's ties to the West. The six co-defendants have already served seven years in jail.
The sentence brought cheers in Libya, where there is widespread public anger over the infections.…
tsmith | December 14, 2006Today's New England Journal of Medicine has an article (free access) with more information on the Tripoli Six, who are still awaiting their December 19th verdict.
tsmith | December 13, 2006If the last circumcision post caused a lot of heat, this news is likely to cause even more of an uproar worldwide. From NBC News comes word that the NIH will be announcing shortly that they're stopping two trials looking at circumcision and HIV in Africa, because the intervention group (those who were circumcised) show far less HIV infections than the uncircumcised men:
NBC News has learned that the National Institutes of Health will announce at Noon ET Wednesday that two clinical trials in Africa have been stopped because an independent monitoring board determined the treatment was so…
tsmith | December 12, 2006 I've written previously about how it's a bad idea to import exotic pets, after "exotic" African species of small animals were imported into the United States and housed alongside prairie dogs that were also to be sold as pets. The African animals brought along with them their own diseases, including monkeypox, which then spread to the prairie dogs and onto humans, causing at least 80 cases of monkeypox in the U.S.
Think this is a rare event, unlikely to re-occur? Think again. The Baltimore Sun has a story on how "exotic" pets like these African rodents enter the U.S. by the millions…
tsmith | December 8, 2006As I've been busy this week, other Sciencebloggers (with Revere leading the fray and more posts here) have updated everyone on the newest developments in the case of the Tripoli Six (previous update here), the six medical workers on trial for their lives in Libya, accused of spreading HIV to more than 400 children in a hospital there. Nature's Declan Bulter broke news on a new Nature paper showing, using molecular phylogenetics, that the strains of HIV which infected the children were already circulating in the hospital prior to the medics' arrival--again, showing that these workers are…
tsmith | December 1, 2006Revere over at Effect Measure has an excellent post linking together the current bird flu situation with John Snow's investigations of 19th century cholera outbreaks. It's an interesting take on the situation--check it out.
tsmith | November 30, 2006 Esther Lederberg dies at 83
Stanford University microbiologist Esther Miriam Zimmer Lederberg, a trailblazer for female scientists and the developer of laboratory techniques that helped a generation of researchers understand how genes function, has died at Stanford Hospital.
Professor Lederberg, who lived at Stanford, was 83 when she died Nov. 11 of pneumonia and congestive heart failure.
She discovered the lambda phage, a parasite of bacteria that became a key tool for the laboratory study of viruses and genetics, and was the co-developer with her husband [Nobel prize winner Joshua…