Stories tagged public health
Let's hear it for maggots!
in Life Science, Diversity of Organisms, Scientific Inquiry, and Human Organism
Researchers at Swansea University, in the UK, are developing an antibiotic that can fight the MRSA superbug. And they're using superbugs to do it. OK, not superbugs. They're using the secretions from the maggots of the common green bottle fly.
A cage match I'm not sure I want to see: Maggots secrete a compound that can fight superbugs, including 12 strains of MRSA, E. coli, and C. difficile.
Courtesy National Institutes of Health
Super gross? Sure. And you won't see an ad for this antibiotic (Seraticin) on TV anytime soon. It takes some 20 maggots to make a single drop of the drug. So scientists have to fully identify it, figure out a way to synthesize it in the lab, test it on human cells, and put it through a clinical trial.
In the meantime, using live maggots on infected wounds is a time-tested way of beating infections. Dr. Alun Morgan, of ZooBiotic Ltd, told the BBC,
"Maggots are great little multitaskers. They produce enzymes that clean wounds, they make a wound more alkaline which may slow bacterial growth and finally they produce a range of antibacterial chemicals that stop the bacteria growing."
How effective are maggots? The University of Manchester has been doing research on diabetic patients with MRSA-contaminated foot ulcers. The patients treated with maggots were mostly cured within three weeks. Patients who got more conventional treatment needed 28 weeks.
So give maggots a big shout out. And then check these other stories:
"NHS 'needs to use more maggots'"
Prescription insects
Fun with beetles
Tags : Next year, researchers plan to start small-scale human trials of a malaria vaccine that's proven 75-80% successful in mice.
Researchers at the International AIDS Conference sifted through published papers on the risk of heterosexual HIV transmission. They say that while a popular estimate pegs the rate of HIV transmission through heterosexual sex at 1 per 1000 contacts, true rates of infectivity are all over the map and dependent on many variables. The infectivity rate for certain sorts of activities is much, much higher-- as high as 1 in 3 contacts. The take away message? "Claims in both the popular media and the peer-reviewed literature that HIV is very difficult to transmit heterosexually are dangerous in any context where the possibility of HIV exposure exists."
It's true: It's 2:30pm on Wednesday, July 30, and CNN is reporting that the U.S. salmonella outbreak originally linked to tomatoes has been traced to irrigation water and serrano peppers from a farm in Mexico. Of course, tomatoes have always been "off the hook."
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled salmonella
Courtesy lucianvenutianBut did anybody listen?
According to a Star and Tribune article MN’s own “Team Diarrhea” figured out jalapeño peppers were to blame for the MN Salmonella cases and told the FDA and CDC to look at jalapeño peppers as the culprit for cases nationwide instead of tomatoes. The DNA of the strains in MN matched the cases elsewhere. To learn more about this story check out a previous Buzz Blog.
I’m happy to report that these super sleuths were advisors and content experts in the development of Disease Detectives which is currently in the Science Museum of Minnesota’s Human Body Gallery. You can learn more about some of these disease detectives here.
So check out today’s Star and Tribune article and give thanks to Kirk Smith and the rest of his team at the Minnesota Department of Health for doing their best to keep us safe!
Monitoring consumption: By strapping this Scram device on someone's leg, officials can monitor the alcohol intake of offenders. Is this a good idea?
Courtesy Alcohol Monitoring SystemsThere’s a new tool for justice officials to use in dealing chronic alcohol abuser: the Scram. Scram stands for Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitor.
It was recently featured in a medical column in the New York Times. Judges hoping to put some more death in the sentence for those involved with alcohol-related crimes order the convicted to wear a Scram on their leg for a prescribed amount of time along with a program of recovery treatment. The Scram senses the body’s intake of any alcohol by measuring air and perspiration emissions from the skin each hour. At least once every 24 hours, the wearer must download data the Scram has collected to a modem that reports the wear’s alcohol levels to a monitoring agency or probation officer. Should Scram show a level of alcohol use, which the sensors can gauge to within a blood-alcohol level of 0.02, authorities will follow up with the offender to see what happened.
In the time that the Scram has been used, authorities report that there’s been a high compliance rate among people not drinking. But occasionally there are misreads or misreports.
Consuming some types of baked goods, such as raisin bread or sourdough English muffins, have triggered Scrams to report alcohol use by an offender. And being an electronics-based device, malfunctions can occur.
On user of the device included in the Times story had two consecutive days of his Scram reporting alcohol use several months into wearing the device. A wary probation officer gave him the benefit of the doubt when he strongly denied any drinking, and further review found that a build up of sweat and grime under the Scram was causing the false alarms.
So what do you think? Is this a good use of technology to help people get over alcohol misuse? Proponents of Scram say that it helps enforce sobriety while the offender has time to learn and work a program of recovery. But is this an infringement of a person’s right to privacy? Does an alcohol offender give up some of his/her rights to privacy? How long should someone sentenced to wear a Scram have to wear the device? Are there better ways for dealing with this? Share your ideas here with other Science Buzz readers.
China hopes to do the right thing
With the upcoming Olympics, China is in the spotlight. The Chinese Health Ministry, scrambling to fend off cover-up allegations, issued a nationwide alert Saturday over a virus that has killed 24 children and sickened more than 4,000 others.
Enterovirus-71 can be deadly
In milder cases, EV71 can cause cold like symptoms, diarrhea and sores on the hands, feet and mouth. But more severe cases can cause fluid to accumulate on the brain, resulting in polio-like paralysis and death (the journal Genetic Vaccines and Therapy). Public health officials expect the number of cases to peak in June or July. There is no effective antiviral treatment for severe EV71 infections, and no vaccine is available. This disease also has broken out in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Vietnam, although no deaths have been reported there.
Cover your coughs and wash your hands
The viruses mainly strike children aged 10 and younger and is easily spread by sneezing or coughing. A public awareness campaign is ongoing, stressing the need for good personal hygiene, mostly by hand washing.
Sources: CNN and Los Angeles Times
The World Health Organization today declared Somalia "polio free." (The last case of polio in the country was reported March 25, 2007; there hasn't been a single infection in the last year.) Health workers wiped out the disease by repeatedly vaccinating all 1.8 million Somali children under age 5.
Polio is extremely contagious and hard to eradicate, and Somalia's achievement is even more amazing given the country's challenges: war, poverty, hunger, no central government, and a lack of detailed medical data.
One more thing: the BBC article linked to above contains this quote from Ali Mao Moallim, a volunteer health worker who also happens to be the last person on Earth to have contracted smallpox:
"Somalia was the last country with smallpox. I wanted to help ensure that we would not be the last place with polio, too."
Awesome.
Body Parts
Courtesy ClaudecfThe trade in human tissue is huge around the world. A cadaver dissected for parts can not only improve the life of someone stricken with say a bad knee or a bum ticker, but can also bring in tens of thousands of dollars of revenue to businesses involved in the tissue trade. Unfortunately, the demand seems to far outweigh the supply. And when supplies are low, black markets thrive.
For example, just last week a kidney theft ring was broken up in India, and there’s the whole issue of illegal tissue harvesting in China. But now it looks like our own country has a finger in it, too.
Civil lawsuits are running amok against some US companies that processed body tissues they purchased from a man accused of secretly and illegally chopping up human cadavers for resale of the body parts.
Michael Mastromarino, owner of Biomedical Tissue Services of Fort Lee, New Jersey, is charged with stealing bodies, opening graves, unlawful dissection, forgery, and enterprise corruption, and faces up to 54 years in prison. The company, which was closed down by the FDA in early 2006, was also cited for improperly screening tissue for communicable diseases. And now in an effort to reduce his jail time, Mastromarino appears to have had a change of heart and is ready to plead guilty. The deal would include cooperating with investigators, and perhaps turning against the companies he serviced.
"Let's just say that he is going to assist them and give any information he has about the processors and their role," said his attorney, Mario Gallucci.
The tissue processors who purchased the body parts from BTS include Regeneration Technologies Inc., LifeCell Corp. and Tutogen Medical Inc., and two nonprofits, the Blood and Tissue Center of Central Texas, and Lost Mountain Tissue Bank.
Mastromarino, a former oral surgeon, is alleged to have gone door to door to funeral homes looking to acquire human tissue. He is thought to have supplied about 10,000 people with spare parts through the tissue processing firms.
The processors "loved his tissue and encouraged him to get more and more", Gallucci said.
The companies are already facing hundreds of civil lawsuits from relatives of deceased family members whose bodies were involved in this grisly endeavor.
Medtronic, the Minnesota-based corporation, is also being sued because it received some body parts from Regeneration. But officials at the medical giant (which had no direct contact with Mastromarino) claim the suits are without merit, and don’t believe the plaintiffs have a leg to stand on.
Mastromarino’s testimony could mean lots more trouble for his former clients if he implicates them in the crimes.
"Mastromarino can certainly tell us things that may lead us in directions we haven't been able to go before," said one official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
But the companies insist Mastromarino was a shady operator and a hack who deceived everyone. They all claim they had no idea the material they purchased from him was illegally procured.
South Carolina attorney Kevin Dean of the firm of Motley Rice is handling hundreds of lawsuits against the processors and thinks Mastromarino’s testimony could prove useful for his cases.
"It seems to suggest that everything that the plaintiffs have said all along is completely accurate. That the tissue processors are more involved than they want everyone to believe," he said.
If Mastromarino really has something to get off his chest about the processors’ involvement, and it proves true, the financial exposure could end up costing the companies an arm and a leg.
LINKS
Livescience story
Washington Post story
New York magazine article
Working better and better: Statistically, our hearts are getting better and better. The rate of heart-related deaths is dropping faster than goals set by by national health organizations.
Courtesy wikipediaHere’s something to strengthen your heart in advance of Valentine’s Day. Nationally, our rates for heart attack and stroke deaths have dropped faster than the pace national health organizations hope we’ll be at in 2010.
Over the period from 1999 to 2005, heart disease deaths dropped 25.8 percent while stroke deaths dropped 24.4 percent. That means that 160,000 people are still alive today who statistically would have likely died from heart and circulation trouble in the past year. If those rates continue, we’ll have an extra 240,000 people living a year from now who in past years would have died from heart ailments.
However, while our hearts are getting healthier epidemics continue on the diabetes and obesity fronts. And health problems associated with those factors could offset the decreased deaths from heart troubles.
The National Center for Health Statistics released the analysis of these health findings, but didn’t issue any causes for the changing mortality rates. So I put it to you, why are people having better heart health? Better diets? Decreased smoking? More exercise? Share your thoughts here with Science Buzz readers.
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