0 Female Pheromones and Infection May Affect Tick Behavior

Image: Researcher drags white
flannel to collect questing ticks. 

Recently I came across an abstract for the paper, "The correlation between tick (Ixodes persulcatus Sch.) questing behaviour and synganglion neuronal responses to odours".

I'm looking forward to reading the full text, as the abstract demonstrates two findings on tick behavior which may reveal who is more likely to be bitten by ticks.

In this experiment, the taiga tick or Ixodes persulcatus is used - a tick common in parts of Russia. It is unknown if other Ixodes ticks would respond to the same odors the same way, and I think the same experiment should be conducted in Western Europe and North America with local Ixodes ticks to see if there would be a similar outcome.

The researchers experimented with seeing which odors would attract and repel ticks, focusing on seeing how ticks respond to synthetic hormones and insecticides/acaricides. Osmopherone®, Osmopherine®, DEET®, ethanol, and water were placed in a simple maze, and changes in their synganglia - basically their entire central nervous system, as ticks do not have a brain as we think of one - were measured to reflect whether they were attracted, repelled, or neutral to the specific odor tested.

Also, researchers tested which odors were most likely to encourage the maximum height ticks could reach during questing behavior by placing ticks on glass rods which were held at a 75 degree angle.

Two notable findings came from these experiments:

1. Ticks were, as expected, repelled by DEET® and ethanol. It's good to have further confirmation that DEET® works as a repellent. But what was interesting is that ticks were totally neutral to Osmopherone® and water - and attracted to Osmopherine® .
   
   
2. Questing ticks were studied not only for their attraction to certain odors but were tested for whether or not they were infected with Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato and tickborne encephalitis virus. It was found that not only did those ticks which were most attracted to Osmopherine® reach the highest questing height - but also those ticks which were infected with Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato were more likely to reach the highest questing height.
   

What is the difference between Osmopherone® and Osmopherine®? Osmopherone® is a synthetic sex pheromone that is meant to mirror the scent human males give off. Osmopherine® is a synthetic sex pheromone that is meant to mirror the scent human females give off. Each of these pheromones are found in their natural form on people and are not an obvious smell people give off - they are registered on a subconscious level and may act as an attractant to the opposite sex.

In these experiments, it appears the female sex pheromone, Osmopherine®, attracts ticks, and ticks infected with Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato are more likely to have the highest questing height in a laboratory.

What is not known is whether or not the same behavior occurs in the wild, outside a lab - and how much other factors may play into ticks' behavior when questing. Different ticks have different behavior in the wild to begin with, such as Amblyomma americanum tends to be more aggressive in searching out a blood meal and Ixodes scapularis is a more passive questing tick.

Ticks are already attracted to the source of their blood meal through detecting heat and carbon dioxide (CO₂) given off by exhalation. One thing I would hope the full text of this article would explain is how the presence of warm blooded, CO₂ exhaling researchers was shielded so they did not have any influence on these ticks. It may be that these indicators of the next potential dinner may play a bigger role than the gender of the potential host in front of them and whether or not the tick is currently infected with Borrelia burgdorferi s.l. 

Certainly more research is needed to determine what the case is in the wild, but in the meantime these findings provide one with more food for thought as to how a tick host's gender and the tick's state of infection might play a role in tick behavior.

This work by Camp Other is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Read More

0 Article: The Mouse Trap: How One Rodent Rules The Lab

Slate recently posted a three part series on the use of mice in biomedical research and how that use has helped as well as hindered drug development and scientific understanding of human illness.

This three part series kicks off with "The Mouse Trap: the dangers of using one lab animal to study every disease", which examines the rise in the use of the murine (mouse) model  to test new pharmaceuticals and get a better understanding of human processes in illness. We also learn that this model - useful as it has been - has its drawbacks.

 Mark Mattson, neuroscientist, finds that murine studies may not accurately represent what happens between the study and control group when the control group is often overfed, sedentary, and develops cancer, renal problems, and diabetes - unlike a wild mouse living in its normal habitat. It was later discovered that medication which worked in chubby rodents did not go on to work in rodents with a normal weight and activity level.

Furthermore, in clinical trials on humans later on, the difference between plump mice and a diverse group of humans was too great. A drug which worked in the rodents did not work in humans at all.

Cheap, efficient, and mass produced, these mice are raised in germ-free barrier rooms and sometimes pumped with antibiotics. The ease in which they can be raised, bred, and genetically modified to single out specific processes similar to those in the human body to study has made mice very popular for researchers. While they can closely model many processes in the human body, are they a close enough match for modeling and testing everything?

Mattson argues they are not, and that science needs to wake up and take a closer look at how heavily mice have been used to make decisions that affect human medicine. He's not the only one, either - Clif Barry, the nation's leading expert on tuberculosis, thinks the murine model has shortcomings too. This is no clearer than in work in his own field: The latent form of TB that humans get is not one which can be found in mice. Mice do not experience a latent stage of TB - they only get progressively weaker, age, and die.

This particular passage from the article gave me a moment to pause and reflect:

"[...] for some patients a latent case of tuberculosis can suddenly become active. The granulomas rupture and propagate, spilling thousands of organisms into the lungs, where they can be aerosolized, coughed up, and passed on to a new host. Left untreated, the infection migrates into the bloodstream and other organs; widespread inflammation leads to burst arteries or a ruptured esophagus; and in about half of all cases, the patient dies.

The layered granuloma is the defining feature of human tuberculosis: The place where the host fights the infection (successfully or not), and the necessary site of action for any drug. To cure the disease, a treatment must be able to penetrate each ball of cells, whatever its type or composition; every last bacterium must be destroyed. "It's the structure of those granulomas that makes it so difficult to treat TB," says Barry. And they simply don't exist in mice.

If you infect a mouse with TB—if you spritz a puff of infected air into its nostrils through a trumpet, as so many labs do around the world—the animal's lungs quickly fill up with bacteria and immune cells, like a nasty case of pneumonia. There are no discrete balls of tissue, no well-defined granulomas sheathed in fibrin, no array of structures that harbor the bugs at various stages of development. The mice have no special, latent form of TB, either, and no way to pass on the disease. They simply die, after a year or two, of a slow and progressive decline.

That's why we've made so little progress using mice to generate new drugs and treatments, Barry tells me."

The article continues to outline the history behind why mice have become the dominant research model to use to determine whether or not a drug or treatment plan will be tried in clinical trials on people, and also discusses the setbacks generated by this decision. In the end, the verdict is that using mice has distinct limitations and a number of studies may be invalidated and useless because of it.

It does get me to wondering, of course, as to how useful the murine model is for studying Borrelia burgdorferi. Perhaps in some ways it is useful, but in others it is less so: Dr. Stephen Barthold has said mice are a poor model for neuroborreliosis.

And this does raise the question of which details are important in a study that the layperson will miss when reading it. The average person will read about the study design, and perhaps some discussion and the conclusion - but will one question the decision to use one research animal model over another? What about primers? What about media? What about any number of small details that once changed could result in a different outcome?

Read the full Slate article, and continue with the next two articles in the series. It is a fascinating look into the world of biomedical research, tradition, and profit.

Reference: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_trap/2011/11/lab_mice_are_they_limiting_our_understanding_of_human_disease_.html

This work by Camp Other is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Read More

1 Paper: Fluorescent Bead-Based Multiplex Assay (For Detection of Bb Antibodies)

I was originally going to write on a paper on Borrelia burgdorferi and lymphadenopathy that has been making the rounds, but the following link was sent to me and I think it deserves more immediate attention:

http://ahdc.vet.cornell.edu/docs/Scopes_2011_02.pdf

Following this link, on page 6 of the document is an interview with Dr. Bettina Wagner, Assistant Professor of Equine Health at Cornell University, on the use of a Lyme disease blood test for dogs which is more accurate than earlier tests.

The test uses a technology known as bead-based multiplex technology, a technology that has been in use for the past decade - but this is the first veterinary diagnostic lab which is using it for Lyme disease.

Key excerpts from the article:

The improved test for Lyme disease in horses and dogs developed by Wagner and her colleagues takes less time, requires smaller samples, and answers more questions about the disease. In the past, diagnosticians had to run several tests to confirm Lyme disease. The multiplex procedure can detect many kinds of antibodies to several different antigens of B. burgdorferi using a single test on a single sample, eliminating the need for separate tests.

[...] Different kinds of antibodies can be found in the body at different stages of infection. The new test can distinguish and measure these differences, giving more information about the timing of the disease. "We can now not only distinguish between infection and vaccination, but also between early and chronic infection stages,” Wagner noted. “That was not possible before. You were able to say whether an animal was infected, but not when it was infected, or how far the infection had developed.”

The test and information it provides can help veterinarians make advanced decisions about treatment. After the long treatment period ends, veterinarians usually conduct follow-up testing to see if it was successful.

I decided I wanted to learn more about Dr. Wagner and if she did any research - as well as to learn more about bead-based multiplex assays.

I also had one question: Why isn't this test available for people, since many have complained that Lyme disease serological tests are not that accurate?

Read More

0 Lyme Brain: Diagnosing Early Neuroborreliosis

While looking around You tube for something interesting and educational to share with my minions readers, I came across this little two minute video (no audio):

It really got my attention, because I suspect that long-term complications that come on the heels of a Lyme disease infection could be because a certain number of people are either misdiagnosed to begin with (and thus treatment is delayed) - or they are under-treated for Lyme disease in the first place when they have neuroborreliosis.

Throwing 10-14 days worth of doxycycline at an infection that is passing or has passed the blood-brain barrier is not going to cut it,  and this is why IV Rocephin for 30 days is the baseline treatment for early neuroborreliosis.

There has been some debate over what dose of which antibiotic can be used to treat neuroborreliosis, but putting that debate aside, one big step in treating it properly is being able to diagnose its presence early.

So when I found this little video, I had to know more...

N-acetylaspartate (NAA) concentrations in the brain are decreased if there is damage.

I noticed there was a name on the lower lefthand corner: Dr. Oded Gonen. Tiny, tiny print, but there.

So I looked that name up to see if I could learn more about him. Maybe you're reading this and you already know about him, but I suspect a number of my readers may not.

Dr. Oded Gonen is working for the clinic that Dr. David Younger began - a clinic mentioned in Cure Unknown:

A new program led by neurologist David S. Younger M.D. will open its arms to patients and their treating doctors, wielding science to get a handle on the disease. 

Pamela Weintraub, Cure Unknown, Inside the Lyme Epidemic, 2nd Edition, 2009.

And so, the Lyme Neuroborreliosis Program was born in New York City, and Dr. Onen Gonen is one of the researchers on staff who is conducting his own clinical trials on neuroborreliosis.

The clinic has this to say about neuroborreliosis symptoms and treatment:

"The spectrum of neurological and behavioral disorders ascribed to Lyme disease has been the subject of intense debate. Three clinical syndromes are seen in such increased frequency that their presence alone or together should prompt consideration of Lyme neuroborreliosis in a given patient. They include meningitis, painful polyradiculitis, and cranial neuritis (most commonly a facial palsy). It is important to recognize them and potentially other central, peripheral, and autonomic nervous system manifestations, abbreviated CNS, PNS, and ANS, because they occur early in the infectious illness, lead to a vigorous immune response, and their symptoms resolve more quickly with early institution of antibiotics. There is still debate about encephalopathy, cognitive impairment, and neuropsychiatric involvement in Lyme disease, and the frequency of chronic and late Lyme disease in treated individuals. Notwithstanding, the vigorous immunological response triggered by the Borrelia spirochete infection appears to be a potent factor in the perpetuation of symptoms long after effective treatment has been administered and the infection has been presumably eradicated."

Whatever your beliefs about the efficacy of long-term antibiotic treatment, early treatment of neuroborreliosis is particularly important, but one of its stumbling blocks has been accurate diagnosis.

As mentioned in this blog before, only a small percentage of early neuroborreliosis patients are diagnosed using a positive CSF culture or blood tests - often a good clinician has to pay close attention to symptoms and history to pin down the diagnosis.

Even Dr. Younger has suggested a combined testing method for neuroborreliosis and Lyme disease in general, in his 2010 publication, Lyme Neuroborreliosis: Preliminary Results from an Urban Referral Center Employing Strict CDC Criteria for Case Selection.

Dr.Younger stated:

"A two-tier test approach for active disease and previous infection with the demonstration of a significant change in IgM or IgG antibody response to B. burgdorferi in paired acute- and convalescent-phase serum samples, examination of diagnostic levels of IgM and IgG antibodies to the spirochete in CSF, and isolation of B. burgdorferi from CSF are recommended to improve the diagnostic accuracy of serological testing in Lyme disease, including LNB."

This is better than just giving someone with a tick bite and rash an ELISA and then calling it a day when it comes back negative if they are symptomatic. It's not perfect - but it's an improvement.

Dr. Younger further wrote in his summary:

"The management of LNB remains controversial as to the timing and duration of oral and intravenous antibiotics. The occurrence of peripheral neuropathy, dysautonomia, and encephalopathy years later after adequate antibiotic therapy underscores the selective vulnerability of the nervous system to the immunological effects of B. burgdorferi infection, although the exact mechanisms remain uncertain."

Maybe further test development could at least uncover more cases earlier, even as the mechanisms are said to be unknown.

Right now Dr. Gonen is working on a new test for diagnosing neuroborreliosis. He's conducting clinical trials on the use of proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS),  which detects metabolic disturbances in the brain - even without showing an MRI abnormality such as a visible lesion. In the trial, he intends to examine metabolic parameters in neuroborreliosis patients.

The parameters he is examining are demyelination, oxidative, and neuronal damage processes indicated by monitoring their surrogate markers: creatine, chloride, lactate and N-acetyl aspartate (NAA).

Of these markers, N-acetyl aspartate or NAA is specific to the brain, being the second-most-concentrated molecule in the brain after the amino acid glutamate. NAA is a useful indicator for disease, as it gives off the largest signal in magnetic resonance spectroscopy of the human brain - and the levels measured are decreased in numerous neuropathological conditions ranging from brain injury to stroke to Alzheimer's disease.

1H-MRS is also used to measure the impact of HIV on the brain and in Lupus and MS studies. It's good to know that someone is conducting more tests using this technology if it can help diagnose early neuroborreliosis - so far, I've only found the below study in the use of 1H-MRS for neuroborreliosis, and it may yet be another tool in the Lyme toolbox.

Related studies:
Proton MR spectroscopy in neuroborreliosis: a preliminary study
http://www.springerlink.com/content/4lb8ba29yycv136e/

This work by Camp Other is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Read More

5 One way to treat Borrelia naturally?

Many Lyme disease patients have used antibiotics for treating Lyme disease and other tickborne coinfections. They have years of scientific study behind them and many reports of patient improvement come from doctors and specialists - patients have had a lot of success with them.

But sometimes antibiotic use leads to various side effects, digestive problems, and potentially, undesirable secondary infection with C. difficile. Using probiotics can often help with digestive problems and prevent C. difficile, but it is not guaranteed.

In some cases - due to allergies or intolerance of the side effects - patients have to stop antibiotic treatment. Because of this, patients have opted at some point in their treatment to stop taking antibiotics after a while and switch to alternative treatments such as herbs.

Whether a patient decides to use antibiotics or herbs, one thing on the horizon seems certain: Eventually antibiotic resistance will lead to more restrictive use of antibiotics, and antibiotic resistance may challenge patients' ability to treat some of their own infections.

However, there is one completely natural possibility that might treat Borrelia and some other tickborne infections in the future which is rarely mentioned in the west other than as a curiosity - yet everyone in the world is surrounded by this abundant and prosperous source of healing from nature all the time.

Much as there are different probiotic bacteria are found in yogurt and probiotic supplements that Lyme disease patients take -- there are viruses in our environment that are helpful to us.

A lot people think of a few things when they hear the word "virus": they think of H1N1 or the swine flu, colds, herpes, HIV, and meningitis, for a start. Not good things. But like the probiotic bacteria that we consume in yogurt all the time, viruses are also present in our environment - in our food, our soil, our drinking water, and our own digestive systems.

Like adding probiotic mixes to your yogurt, these helper viruses have been approved by the FDA to be sprayed on the surface of cheese across the US in order to prevent the development of the bacteria, Listeria monocytogenes, from causing serious disease in pregnant women,  immunocompromised people such as cancer patients, and those with immuno-deficiences. Thousands of people can be severely sickened by Listeria and in some cases even die. So the use of these viruses in food such as cheese is beneficial.

In addition to providing protection from harmful bacteria in food, these helpful viruses have also been used to help save baby calves from dying of diseases which cause severe diarrhea and prevent salmonella from colonizing chickens.

The method for treating these cases was find out which bacterial strains the animals were infected with in order to find the viruses which would eat them. Then use these viruses just as they are found in nature, with no genetic engineering required - put the viral material in pills, injections, or lotions in order to treat the infection.

So this leads one to wonder if this all-natural, non-GMO treatment which is low-cost compared to antibiotics and so abundant in nature can kill off bacterial infections in animals - why can't they kill off infections in people too?

Well, they can.

Watch the next two videos, paying special attention to the first video.


The first video is a 48 minute BBC documentary on the use of viruses to kill bacteria, also known as "bacteriophage therapy" in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, in the Eliava Institute of Tblisi.

Note that if the institute seems run down, filming was done after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the hospital just came out of a civil war - thus buildings had poor maintenance, but the technology to use bacteriophage therapy was in place and used. (After a period of economic instability and social problems - followed by the Rose Revolution - Georgia and Tblisi have been doing much better in the past several years.)

So this documentary is a little dated but general principles remain the same - it explains very well what bacteriophage therapy is and how it has been used in Europe for over 60 years through the 1990's (it continues to be used today - more on recent research using phages will be posted this week).

Youtube (3 parts)

BBC Horizon - 1997 - The Virus That Cures

This second video is from Canadian television as well as CBS news and is more recent - it contains two clips back to back about two people who were treated with phage therapy and their results. Don't miss it - the results are amazing when you realize the initial prognosis each patient was given.

Case studies on phage treatment plus Evergreen College, 

Washington State phage research - [Time: 9:26 minutes]

Is bacteriophage therapy this effective? Does it have any pitfalls? Why don't we hear more about it here yet, given the rising number of cases of antibiotic resistance to deadly bacteria such as MRSA? What can it treat so far? How can this treatment help Lyme disease patients in the future? Here's just one more video just to get a different angle on it from Australian news (Channel 7 and Channel 9). It talks more about history, plus business investments and projections for human trials...

The Forgotten Cure - on Sunday Sunrise, Channel 7 - 

plus a short clip on phages from Channel 9

More on this later this week - for now, check out the videos and let me know what you think, including your own questions and concerns about this kind of medical treatment. [CO note: Continue reading part two of this series, "Phage Therapy and Borrelia burgdorferi".]

This work by Camp Other is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Read More

14 The Friday Four

In this week's edition of the Friday Four, we look at the IDSA's plan to combat antibiotic resistance with a brief recap of highlights of the STAAR Act, using artemisinin and hyperbaric oxygen as a potential cancer treatment, a dangerous new tickborne virus identified in China, and creating a new antibiotic using marine bacteria.

1) Lifesaving antibiotics face doubtful future

Source link: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110407121435.htm

ScienceDaily (2011-04-07) -- To head off a health care disaster, the Infectious Diseases Society of America has developed a plan to combat deadly antibiotic-resistant "super bugs" and is rolling out the multi-pronged plan today, on World Health Day 2011.

Comments: I don't know why this is considered the latest news on ScienceDaily... this plan is basically a repeat of all that is found in the STAAR Act.

I wrote about the IDSA's 2010 testimony to the House Committee back in early January. I posted about it on Lymenet, too.

Did anyone notice back then? I sure hope people notice now.

I'll repeat here what I wrote back in January:

This act should be more familiar to you all, because the STAAR Act stands for "Strategies to Address Antimicrobial Resistance".


Taken from the final 2010 report from the IDSA to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health:


"The STAAR Act strengthens existing efforts by establishing an Antimicrobial Resistance Office (ARO) within the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary of Health. The Director of ARO will serve as the director of the existing interagency task force. The Act also establishes a Public Health Antimicrobial Advisory Board (PHAAB) comprised of infectious diseases and public health experts who will provide much-needed advice to the ARO Director and task force about antimicrobial resistance and strategies to address it. The STAAR Act will strengthen existing surveillance, data collection, and research activities as a means to reduce the inappropriate use of antimicrobials, develop and test new interventions to limit the spread of resistant organisms, and create new tools to detect, prevent and treat drug-resistant “bad bugs.”" 

And that's just part of it, really - you ought to read the entire report.

One of the IDSA's broader goals beyond this act is to institute a special fee called "the Antibiotic Innovation and Conservation Fee" on every course of antibiotics used by doctors and veterinarians in the future - both to acquire money for funding new antibiotic development - and to encourage restricted and judicial use of the antibiotics remaining in use. And then there is also the proposal for an "antibiotic stewardship program" which will be intended to track and reduce usage of antibiotics as well as lower medical cost.

This is one of the reasons I mention the issue of needing more research into the issue of persistence, and that it can't wait. It already couldn't wait, but now it becomes a more important issue. If persistence is proven, then long-term use of antibiotics to treat Lyme disease beyond the standard minimum would be accommodated - but if it isn't, then with the passage of the STAAR Act, if the proposed antibiotic stewardship program passes along with it - could affect Lyme disease patients on long-term antibiotics a lot.

How far will this act go, and how does one determine what the "inappropriate use of antimicrobials" actually is?

I'm in support of stopping antibiotic use on healthy livestock and think antibiotic use can be cut back for ear infections and acne. I'm in support of hospitals practicing more safe hygiene controls and using UV irradiated keyboards - if not UV-C doused rooms between patients - to reduce the spread of potentially deadly MRSA and C. difficile. I see the value of the STAAR Act  - especially in reducing the spread of resistant organisms and funding new antibiotics - the world desperately needs new antibiotics, including Lyme disease patients. Even better, I'd like to see development of technology that stops infection in its tracks without the use of antibiotics - thus avoiding the concern over resistance entirely. In the meantime, though? I have concerns this act could potentially be a strike against Lyme disease patients in getting ongoing treatment. It all depends on the implementation.

2) Kill Cancer Naturally - With Hyperbaric Oxygen and Artemisia Annua L. aka Artemisinin

Artemisia Annua or
"Sweet Annie"

ScienceDaily (Apr. 4, 2011) — An environment of pure oxygen at three-and-a-half times normal air pressure adds significantly to the effectiveness of a natural compound already shown to kill cancerous cells, researchers at the University of Washington and Washington State University recently reported in the journal Anticancer Research.




Link: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110404142813.htm

Comments:  And you thought Artemisinin was just for Babesia and Malaria treatment... In the future it might be used to treat cancer - only time will tell.

Seriously, someone needs to do more research using hyperbaric oxygen chambers. This could be something useful - and it should be easy enough to test on human volunteers under the supervision of a medical professional.

Note, though, that this study wasn't on actual people with cancer - it is a study in which the researchers used artemisinin or high-pressure oxygen alone on a culture of human leukemia cells. Results on cancer cells in vivo in people who sit in hyperbaric oxygen chambers may differ - this is something that needs to be tested in the future.

They found out that using either the artemisinin or the oxygen reduced the cancer cells' growth by 15 percent. But if they used them in combination - over a 48 hour period after 90 minutes of high-pressure oxygen - the cancer cells' growth was reduced by 38 percent. That's an over 50 percent increase in artemisinin's effectiveness.

Henry Lai, UW research professor of bioengineering, said that, "Artemisinin is a promising low-cost cancer treatment because it's specific, it's cheap and you don't have to inject it. It's 100 times more specific than traditional chemotherapy. In breast cancer, it's even better."

Is that true? A 100 times more specific? How? Where is he getting this information from? I want to know.

At any rate, it would be interesting to hear more about this and see further studies.

[ Side note: Science Daily's write up mentions that the FDA has approved the use of hyperbaric oxygen therapy chambers for Lyme disease - when that is not true. HBOT has only been approved for the use of 13 indications, and Lyme disease is not one of them - treatment with HBOT for Lyme disease is considered an off-label use or experimental. ]

Publication source:
Yusuke Ohgami, Catherine A. Elstad, Eunhee Chung, Donald Y. Shirachi, Raymond M. Quock, Henry C. Lai.Effect of Hyperbaric Oxygen on the Anticancer Effect of Artemisinin on Molt-4 Human Leukemia Cells.Anticancer Research, 2010; 30: 4467-4470 [link]

3) New Tickborne Virus In China Has High Mortality Rate

Source link: http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20110222214117data_trunc_sys.shtml

Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, scientists explain how a previously unknown and dangerous virus carried by ticks has been responsible for seasonal outbreaks of the disease in six of China's most populated provinces.

The newly discovered pathogen has been dubbed 'Severe Fever with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome virus'. It has been placed in the Bunyaviridae family, along with the hantaviruses and Rift Valley Fever virus.

Symptoms include high fever and gastrointestinal disorder; the mortality rate was initially estimated at 30 percent.

Comments:  This is scary. I think between the TBE in Europe and this, my next vacation will be at McMurdo station.

4) New Drugs From Bugs

Source Link: http://www.sciguru.com/newsitem/7751/New-drugs-from-bugs/

bioluminescent marine
bacteria on agar

This is interesting news from the UK... Chemists from Bristol and microbial geneticists from Birmingham determined the sequence of the complete DNA content of a marine bacterium that produces the new antibiotic, thiomarinol (owned by Daiichi-Sankyo). They then identified the genes responsible for making the antibiotic on the basis of their similarity to genes that make the related but less potent antibiotic, mupirocin, which is currently used to combat MRSA (methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus).

They found the genes are on a relatively small, separate DNA molecule called a plasmid, which is just big enough to carry the genes for making the antibiotic plus genes to allow the plasmid to replicate autonomously in the bacterium. The plasmid thus carries genes that make both the mupirocin-like antibiotic as well a second antibiotic, holomycin, and a gene responsible for joining both antibiotics together, forming a more potent molecule.

Tests showed that by joining the antibiotics together the resulting chemical is able to inhibit the growth of MRSA strains that have become resistant to mupirocin.

Comments: Read more at the link. I think it's pretty interesting to learn about how new antibiotics are made, even though I would like to find a way to fight infection using other medications and other technologies. We really need antibiotics that don't eventually become resistant and don't cause C. difficile infections (or imbalances that lead to infections, in a number of cases) - or we need an entirely different infection-fighting approach. This development of new antibiotics in the meantime is something desperately needed worldwide, and I'm glad to see it happening - I just wonder how long it will take before clinical trials are on the horizon...

Related Publications:
A natural plasmid uniquely encodes two biosynthetic pathways creating a potent antibiotic.
D. Fukuda, A. S. Haines, Z. Song, A. Murphy, J. Hothersall, E. R. Stephens, R. Gurney, C.
Riemer, R. Marshall, R. J. Cox, J. Crosby, C. L. Willis, T. J. Simpson and C. M. Thomas,
PLoS ONE, 2011, 6, in press.

Nature Reviews Microbiology 8, 281-289 (April 2010) | doi:10.1038/nrmicro2278
Resistance to and synthesis of the antibiotic mupirocin
Christopher M. Thomas, Joanne Hothersall, Christine L. Willis, Thomas J. Simpson
http://www.nature.com/nrmicro/journal/v8/n4/full/nrmicro2278.html

Read More

0 Video Parody: Bad Project

I'm working on posts about the persistence issue in Lyme Disease. In the meantime, I came across this video parody of Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" that I thought was kinda funny.

This is dedicated to all of you overworked graduate and doctoral researchers working in bio and microbio school labs...

I think the biohazard bag dress on their version of Lady Gaga is a real trip... And oh, they sing about Western blots, too!

Warnings: Use of the word "bitch" NSFW.  You may want to use headphones...

Read More