Articulatory Loop

This ain't your grandfather's gonorrhea. Due to careless antibiotic use and of course to careless sexual practices, the US is seeing a ginormous rise in proportion of drug-resistant strains of this STD. Currently only one class of antibiotic seems to remain effective, and how long that will last no one can guess.

Speaking of making babies, a UK group claims to have grown immature sperm from bone marrow stem cells, potentially hinting at future fertility treatment advances. Gives new meaning to the concept of "boning" somebody...

But what genes get passed on? Hopefully not a faulty copy of FTO, which greatly increases risk of obesity. We may also soon know a good bit more about how genes evolve and change over time from the newly sequenced macaque genome.

Finally, if you thought bird flu and monkey pox were bad, wait till you hear about cow tuberculosis! It appears that this potentially lethal infection is, contrary to previous thought, transmissable from human to human. D'oh!

Labels: antibiotic resistance, bacteria, bird flu, bone marrow, bovine, cowboys, cows, evolution, fertility, genes, genome, gonorrhea, macaque, obesity, sex, sperm, STDs, stem cells, TB, tuberculosis

While the BBC article is short on details, some UK researchers have apparently found that playing in the dirt could be good for both your mood and you immune system. An interesting finding, and one that I'd really love to wave in the faces of all those obnoxiously over-clean mothers out there. You know who I mean - the ones who hover over their child's every move, waving antibacterial wipes (breeding resistant strains) and then go home to scream at the maid because there might be three molecules of dust in the nursery (where the 8-year-old still lives).

These are often the same people who demand that the pediatrician prescribe antibiotics for everything, again helping to evolve super-bugs resistant to all treatment. Sinusitis, it seems, may be a big contributer to this problem: US doctors are prescribing antibiotics at a very high rate, relative to the proportion of infections likely to be bacterial as opposed to viral. Much of this is due to a combination of provider ignorance, but a substantial chunk is that patients demand drugs, and providers have neither the time nor the expertise to explain why they don't need them.

On the upside, doctors worldwide may soon have two major concerns fewer to worry about, as researchers move to neutralizing donated blood types and growing organs for transplant. In the former case, a US team has identified a pair of enzymes for removing the A and B antigens from blood, effectively rendering it type O - the universal donor type. While not solving the blood shortage entirely, this would take immense pressure off of the supplies of rarer types.

Second, UK doctors say that they've grown heart valves in culture from marrow cells. If this technology can be applied to human hearts, and is effective, it would set the stage for a major revolution in transplant treatments. Cool!

Labels: antibiotic resistance, antibiotics, blood, depression, dirt, enzymes, hearts, immunity, play, serotonin, sinusitis, transplantation

Seriously, a mini-tiger? YES PLEASE! I'm not even a cat person, but I want one of these guys so bad it hurts.

And that's not the only wonderful science brings us today.

Canadian researchers have identified a peptide, which they are calling innate defense regulator peptide (IDR-1), that appears to be able to upregulate the innate immune system without a dangerous inflammatory response, offering hope against antibiotic resistant infections (among other things).

The battle against HIV/AIDS may get some new help now, as the WHO has published its recommendation that heterosexual men in sub-Saharan African be circumcised as a preventive measure. Now, I won't re-hash all the innumerable problems with this approach and its announcement (go here for a good, if shrill, discussion), but if it has any chance of helping, I say go for it. The potential harm is minimal, especially if the media is willing to be a little, teensie bit responsible about it.* In a possibly-more-important discovery, a US-UK team of researchers have found that green tea's famous epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) could help stop HIV, by interfereing with its ability to bind to cells. The work is really preliminary, but also has tons of potential.

And possibly good news for ADD** folks (like me): MIT researchers have found that different kinds of attention seem to be governed by different areas of the brain. The executive-function type attention, which is often the thing that us ADD folks lack seems to reside in the PFC, and could perhaps be improved separately from other attention types. Interesting...



* OK, so there's a good chance this'll be a disaster.
* * I don't actually buy any of this ADD stuff. 50 or 100 years ago, people who were interested in lots of different things and didn't like to do one thing too long were called "Renaissance Men," which was a compliment. Now we get tossed on Ritalin and told to settle down, which makes no one happier.

Labels: AIDS, antibiotic resistance, brains, circumcision, cute, cute overload, EGCG, green tea, HIV, immune system, toyger