Posts tagged news
"Man tried to fly in India with monkey in his pants"
Relevant to this recent post on endangered lorises.
C’mon, people. Don’t be stupid. Dried testicles of lorises, stewed tiger penis, and cobra blood drank straight up are not going to make you any more virile, strong, or healthy. If anything, it’ll make you LESS virile, because what the fuck, YOU JUST ATE A TIGER PENIS, who in their right mind would get with you or even talk to you?!
Leave our wild buddies in the wild, and go work out for a while, or eat a hearty salad, or ANYTHING that doesn’t involve the genitalia of wild animals. I promise it’ll do you way more good than dried testicles.
Look at this guy. He’s happy in the wild. He DOES NOT WANT TO BE IN YOUR PANTS.
Lonesome George, dead at 100.
The Pinta Island subspecies of the Galapagos Tortoise (Chelonoidis nigra abingdoni) is now believed to be extinct.
Lonesome George lived in a large corral on the main island of Galapagos, with several females of the Espanola subspecies. George was much fonder of his fronds and sunshine than the females, though, and despite their genetic similarity (meaning that the eggs would likely be fertile), he did not mate with them.
The tortoise subspecies of the islands were second only to the finch adaptations in inspiring Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
I thought I posted about Lonesome George on Darwin Day, but alas, it appears I did not. I have a few posts on tortoises, including a photo of Harriet, a notable Galapagos tortoise who died in 2006, at age 176, but no George.
As Lonesome George was considered a fairly young adult, in terms of tortoise years, his death was unexpected, and the cause is unknown. A necropsy will take place to determine the cause, and his body will be preserved and kept at the Galapagos National Park visitor center.
In fairness to Louisiana, Naegleria fowleri is all over the place ;P Actually, its prevalence in LA is lower than in many other water-logged states, since their coastal marshes are bracken water, and N. fowleri doesn’t like the ocean (though clearly it’s fine with salt, given the neti pot incidents).
As for its history, N. fowleri is a relative newcomer to the stage of Things That Can Kill You, at least in terms of our knowledge of it. R.F. Carter and M. Fowler discovered it in 1965, down in Australia. It was actually used as the example to prove the hypothesis that there were highly adaptive amoebo-flagellates out there that could live both 100% freely in the environment, as well as establish themselves within the human body, when given the opportunity and loss of original environment. You know, like when one introduces a liquid into the sinuses and the amoeba gets caught on something, and it doesn’t get washed out. It’s lost its initial environment (which it would prefer to stay in, since adaptation to a new environment is physically demanding), but it can still survive just fine.
Meningitis from amoebas (Primary Amoebic Meningitis - PAM) like what N. fowleri causes hasn’t been known for too long, either. Though the pathogenicity of Entamoeba histolyca (the source of amoebic dysentery) was established back in 1875, the fact that it could establish itself in the central nervous system and cause such rapid death wasn’t known until I believe the Korean war, though I’m not positive on that fact. Either way, we didn’t know amoebas were such nasty bugs (even if they DID already kill us with dysentery) until the mid-20th century or so.
National Geographic: Wormlike Parasite Detected in Ancient Mummies
Since the discovery of parasite eggs on mummies in the 1920s, scientists have suspected that the Nubians might have been infected by schistosomiasis. Nubia was a former African kingdom that existed from about A.D. 250 to 1400 in what is now northern Sudan.
But researchers generally assumed that the disease in Nubians had been caused by S. haematobium, a close cousin of S. mansoni that causes similar symptoms but that doesn’t require irrigation channels to thrive.
“The snail that transmits S. haematobium thrives better in water that’s moving and well oxygenated and that is not very polluted, whereas the S. mansoni snail does very well in water that’s been standing around and has more yuck in it,” said study first author Amber Campbell Hibbs, who conducted the study while at Emory.
Campbell Hibbs and colleagues examined hundreds of naturally mummified Nubian mummies.
“What happened is they were buried, and it’s so dry that you usually get mummification of the external skin, and sometimes some of the organs.”
An analysis of the mummified skin revealed traces of proteins belonging to S. mansoni—the first proof that the ancient Nubians, or any ancient civilization, were afflicted by schistosomiasis.
Click to enlarge & read.
I’ve been doing some research about the general history of antibiotic development/resistance and came across this article. I found it rather, ah, colorful? in its presentation of antibiotic resistance. I can just see a little demon germ accompanying these words in a children’s book. I love it.
Article from the Victoria Advocate. October 23, 1957.
Ringing the Warning Bell: New resistance popping up to few remaining last-ditch antibiotics. Oh crap.
I hope you haven’t forgotten the dangerous new superbug gene that popped up in India recently, the so-called NDM-1 gene? Bacteria that co-opt this resistance factor are highly dangerous and deadly little bastards, and their infections are extremely hard to treat. There’s only a couple of drugs, namely colistin and tigecycline, that can treat these infections.
Well, now there’s a resistance factor floating around to colistin in a pesky bacteria that causes hospital infections in already sick patients. So we still have that one other drug (tigecycline) to pin our hopes on, right?
Haha, NOPE. Just last night an advance bulletin was published that an E. coli infection containing NDM-1 resistance became resistant to tigecycline.
There are no new antibiotics in the pipeline for these classes of bacteria. There now exist resistance genes for essentially every single antibiotic we can throw at them. The only good news is that they don’t currently exist in one bacterial species, and the public health community better be at their freakin’ battle stations to make sure that doesn’t happen.
(via Wired Science)
Terrifying stuff.
Penicillin has only been mass produced since 1943. The first penicillin-resistant bacteria were recognized in 1947. Since then, we’ve developed dozens of antibiotics with dozens of mechanisms of action, and the bacteria have kept right up with us. I won’t go into the horizontal transfer of resistance and the over-use/misuse of antibiotics, but it’s a fascinating (and somewhat scary) subject.
The fact that we’ve targeted almost every mechanism within the bacteria with what we’ve developed so far (and many bacteria have developed resistance to all antibiotics that would normally work on microbes with their structure) leaves very few options but to move away from the traditional antibiotic therapies that were supposed to be the “miracle cure”, leading to a bacterial disease-free world. As always, the microbes were, and still are, just a step behind us - and they have the Law of Very Large Numbers on their side.
The current approaches to the problem of antibiotic resistance being taken in Norway and Tsbilisi, Georgia are promising. However, there’s still a lot of research to be done regarding safety, efficacy, and cost-effectiveness of the latter, and the former would require a massive overhaul of hospital culture - though hospitals outside of Norway implementing similar protocols regarding sanitation and antibiotics have also reported positive results.
By the way, anyone looking for current news in science and other fascinating things should follow jtotheizzoe. Quality blog, that.
The Healthy Human Gets the Worm
Back in the Stone Age, humans had to put up with all sorts of creepy crawlies. Parasites ran amok in people’s innards, freeloading on nutrient supplies. The parasites took a toll, but over the millennia, those that killed off their meal ticket too quickly didn’t make it. The survivors of this evolutionary shakeout include parasitic roundworms and flatworms, hitchhikers that allow their human hosts to live.
While this scenario might appear to be win-lose, with humans the clear losers, research now suggests that may not be the whole story. In their drive to make humans hospitable hosts, parasites have developed the ability to suppress inflammation aimed against them. And this, it turns out, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Read more …
Everyone’s heard of how devastating the 1918 flu epidemic was. Sometimes it’s hard to truly understand the scope of things when all you see is massive numbers and statistics.
This photograph was taken in a family’s home on the East coast (unsure where, but was urban) when a neighbor (who was a reporter) hadn’t heard from the family for several days. The father, mother, and infant child had all died, and the other five young children were all critically ill, and four of them would have likely died within the day. The five children were taken to a hospital and all five recovered, though two of them took over five weeks to be stable enough to leave.
I don’t know what happened to the kids after that. It was noted that they were from a Catholic family (not sure why it was relevant). Perhaps it was large enough that their parents siblings were willing to take them in. Many children who lost parents ended up in orphanages and were easily exploited. Some took to the streets. It was a bleak outlook.
A blog for all biological and medical ephemera, from the age of Abraham through the era of medical quackery and cure-all nostrums. Featuring illustrations, history, and totally useless trivia from the diverse realms of nature and medicine.
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