Mysterious Tourettes-Like Tics Strike Teen Population Of New York Town
Can this really be a case of youthful “mass hysteria”? Feel bad for the left-out teens who have not acquired the exciting mystery illness. Via MSNBC:
The mystery illness now producing Tourette’s-like symptoms in a more than a dozen girls from upstate New York is also affecting a 36-year-old who is experiencing the same tics as the teens. Some neurologists have suggested the illness could be “conversion disorder,” or mass hysteria.
High school student Thera Sanchez, 17, and 14 others started experiencing the odd symptoms last fall: stammering, verbal outbursts and limb spasms.
The teens’ plight captured the attention of environmental activist Erin Brockovich, who began speaking out about a 1970 train accident that spilled cyanide and industrial solvent four miles from the teens’ school, LeRoy Junior-Senior High School. According to a 1999 Environmental Protection Agency report, approximately 35,000 gallons of TCE (trichloroethene) contaminated the area near the derailment.
…
Flesh-Eating Bacteria Mutation Now Spread By Sneezing And Handshakes
My bet for how civilization will end in 2012…The worst strains of antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” have largely been found within hospitals, but the newest version can be contracted far more easily and is spreading through the streets in Britain and the United States, the Daily Mail reports:
A flesh-eating form of pneumonia that is easily passed between healthy people on public transport is spreading across the UK, experts have warned.
The deadly strain of MRSA called USA300 passes easily through skin-to-skin contact. It can also survive on surfaces and so has the potential to be picked up on crowded buses and tubes. It was first seen in the U.S but cases are now being reported in the community and not just hospitals in Britain.
USA300 is resistant to treatment by several front-line antibiotics and can cause large boils on the skin. In severe cases, USA300 can lead to fatal blood poisoning or a form of…
Mysterious White-Nose Syndrome Is Killing Bats Across The U.S.
Holy Fungus, Batman! Reports David Wrights and Jonann Brady of ABC NEWS:
A mysterious fungus is killing off thousands of bats around the country. Scientists are calling it white-nose syndrome, because of the distinctive white smudges on the noses and wings of infected bats.
White-nose itself doesn’t kill bats, but it disturbs their sleep so that they end their hibernation early. During the winter there are no insects to eat, so the bats literally starve to death.
Bats may be one of Mother Nature’s least cuddly creatures, but they are ecologically important, keeping mosquitos and insects that attack crops in check.
Researchers say the syndrome has killed upward of half a million bats from New England to Virginia.
Tuberculosis Strain Totally Resistant To Antibiotics Spreads In India
Sputum sample containing Mycobacterium tuberculosis
Are we approaching the end of the wondrous age of antibiotics? Scientists have nothing to combat this strain of TB, as Eryn Brown reports for the LA Times:
At least a dozen people in India are infected with a type of tuberculosis that is resistant to all antibiotics used to treat the disease.
In December, the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases published an online report that documented four of the cases. This weekend, news outlets in India reported that there were actually at least 12 people with the drug-resistant lung disease.
Officials fear that what they’ve seen so far is just the beginning, and that many more cases are lurking undetected.
“It’s estimated that on average, a tuberculosis patient infects 10 to 20 contacts in a year, and there’s no reason to suspect that this strain is any less transmissible,” study co-author Zarir Udwadia of the Hinduja National Hospital and Medical Research…
UN Forces Spread Deadly ‘Superbug’ Strain Of Cholera
UN peacekeeper in Haiti. Photo: Robert Miller (CC)
As if Haiti didn’t have enough problems already… From ABC News:
Compelling new scientific evidence suggests United Nations peacekeepers have carried a virulent strain of cholera — a super bug — into the Western Hemisphere for the first time.
The vicious form of cholera has already killed 7,000 people in Haiti, where it surfaced in a remote village in October 2010. Leading researchers from Harvard Medical School and elsewhere told ABC News that, despite UN denials, there is now a mountain of evidence suggesting the strain originated in Nepal, and was carried to Haiti by Nepalese soldiers who came to Haiti to serve as UN peacekeepers after the earthquake that ravaged the country on Jan. 12, 2010 — two years ago today. Haiti had never seen a case of cholera until the arrival of the peacekeepers, who allegedly failed to maintain sanitary conditions at their…
Mystery Kidney Disease Epidemic in Central America
Kate Sheehy reports for PRI’s The World:
In the western lowlands of Nicaragua, in a region of vast sugarcane fields, sits the tiny community of La Isla.The small houses are a patchwork of concrete and wood. Pieces of cloth serve as doors.
Maudiel Martinez emerges from his house to greet me. He’s pale, and his cheekbones protrude from his face. He hunches over like an old man — but he is only 19-years-old.
“The way this sickness is — you see me now, but in a month I could be gone. It can take you down all of a sudden,” he says. Maudiel’s kidneys are failing. They do not perform the essential function of filtering waste from his body. He’s being poisoned from the inside. When he got ill two years ago, he was already familiar with this disease and how it might end. “I thought about my father and grandfather,” he says.…
Fecal Matter Transplants Used to Cure Intestinal Infection
C. difficile colonies on a blood agar plate.
James Gallagher reports in BBC News
Transplanting faecal matter from one person to another — the thought might turn your stomach, but it could be lifesaving.
Some doctors are using the procedure to repopulate the gut with healthy bacteria, which can become unbalanced in some diseases. Dr Alisdair MacConnachie, who thinks he is the only UK doctor to carry out the procedure for Clostridium difficle infection, describes it as a proven treatment. He says it should be used, but only as a treatment of last resort.
The logic is simple. C. difficile infection is caused by antibiotics wiping out swathes of bacteria in the gut. It gives the surviving C. difficile bacteria room to explode in numbers and produce masses of toxins which lead to diarrhoea and can be fatal.
The first-choice solution, more antibiotics, does not always work and some patients develop recurrent infection. The theory…
Parkinson’s Disease Linked To Common Chemical
.png "569px-Paralysis_agitans_(1907,_after_St._Leger)")
The petro-chemical industry likes to portray itself as the progenitor of our rapidly-advancing technological society, but it will come as little surprise to some that there is a price to be paid, principally to the health of our planet and our selves. Neil Bowdler reports on a new study showing a six-times greater likelihood of developing Parkinson’s disease after exposure to trichloroethylene (once used as a general anesthetic), for BBC News:
An international study has linked an industrial solvent to Parkinson’s disease.
Researchers found a six-fold increase in the risk of developing Parkinson’s in individuals exposed in the workplace to trichloroethylene (TCE).
Although many uses for TCE have been banned around the world, the chemical is still used as a degreasing agent.
The research was based on analysis of 99 pairs of twins selected from US data records.
Parkinson’s can result in limb tremors, slowed movement and speech impairment, but the exact cause of the disease…
Mosquitoes That Are Genetically-Engineered to Self Destruct (To Prevent Disease) Are in the Air
Bijal P. Trivedi writes in Scientific American:
A new breed of genetically modified mosquitoes carries a gene that cripples its own offspring. They could crush native mosquito populations and block the spread of disease. And they are already in the air — though that’s been a secret.
Outside Tapachula, Chiapas, Mexico — 10 miles from Guatemala. To reach the cages, we follow the main highway out of town, driving past soy, cocoa, banana and lustrous dark-green mango plantations thriving in the rich volcanic soil. Past the tiny village of Rio Florido the road degenerates into an undulating dirt tract. We bump along on waves of baked mud until we reach a security checkpoint, guard at the ready. A sign posted on the barbed wire–enclosed compound pictures a mosquito flanked by a man and woman: Estos mosquitos genéticamente modificados requieren un manejo especial, it reads. We play by the rules.
Inside, cashew trees frame…
UK Doctors Claim Gonorrhea Is ‘Drug Resistant’
The good ol’ days of penicillin …. Michelle Roberts reports for BBC News:
UK doctors are being told the antibiotic normally used to treat gonorrhoea is no longer effective because the sexually transmitted disease is now largely resistant to it. The Health Protection Agency says we may be heading to a point when the disease is incurable unless new treatments can be found.
For now, doctors must stop using the usual treatment cefixime and instead use two more powerful antibiotics. One is a pill and the other a jab.
The HPA say the change is necessary because of increasing resistance. Tests on samples taken from patients and grown in the laboratory showed reduced susceptibility to the usual antibiotic cefixime in nearly 20% of cases in 2010, compared with just 10% of cases in 2009.
Addiction Is Not A Disease Of The Brain
Alva Noe explains at NPR:
Addiction has been moralized, medicalized, politicized, and criminalized. And, of course, many of us are addicts, have been addicts or have been close to addicts. Addiction runs very hot as a theme.
Part of what makes addiction so compelling is that it forms a kind of conceptual/political crossroads for thinking about human nature. After all, to make sense of addiction we need to make sense of what it is to be an agent who acts, with values, in the face of consequences, under pressure, with compulsion, out of need and desire. One needs a whole philosophy to understand addiction.
Today I want to respond to readers who were outraged by my willingness even to question whether addiction is a disease of the brain.
Let us first ask: what makes something — a substance or an activity — addictive? Is there a property shared by all the things to which…
Washington Health Sec.: Contagion Movie Is Very Real
[Note spoilers below and in the link.] Josh Kirns amps up fear of contagious diseases for Mynorthwest.com:
Talk about a horror movie. The global outbreak thriller “Contagion” topped the weekend box office and it prompted a lot of extra hand washing and increased hesitance to touch door knobs, hand rails, or just about anything else we all come in contact with. Of course it’s prompting many to ask if the fictional story of an unknown virus spreading around the world in a matter of days can come true.
“What was rolling around in my mind was when SARS happened,” Washington Secretary of Health Mary Selecky told Seattle’s Morning News on 97.3 KIRO FM. “And then of course, there was H1N1 (commonly known as Swine Flu,) it was an unknown novel virus just like in the movie.”
She said just like in the movie, we didn’t know what it was or how to treat…
South Korean Scientists Clone Beagle That Glows Fluorescent Green
Could Tegon, the glowing dog, be the key to finding cures for many human diseases? Via Reutuers:
South Korean scientists said on Wednesday they have created a glowing dog using a cloning technique that could help find cures for human diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, Yonhap news agency reported.
A research team from Seoul National University (SNU) said the genetically modified female beagle, named Tegon and born in 2009, has been found to glow fluorescent green under ultraviolet light if given a doxycycline antibiotic, the report said.
The Roads In North Dakota Are Giving People Cancer
What do you do when you find out the roads in your town are giving you and your children cancer? Via io9:
In Dunn County, North Dakota, the roads can kill you. In fact, anything you do to disturb rocks in the area, like driving or even sweeping, can kick up naturally-occurring particles that lodge in your body and give you a rare kind of lung cancer up to 30 years later. Dunn County, you see, is home to a lot of rocks containing erionite, an asbestos-like substance that’s highly toxic. Unfortunately, nobody knew that until very recently. And so at least 300 miles of roads in North Dakota are paved with the stuff.
What do you do when you discover that you’ve built your county’s infrastructure out of poison rocks?
So far, nothing is being done. This week, a group of researchers published an article about the problem in Proceedings of the…
Frightening ‘Super Gonorrhea’ Strain Emerges
It has been found in Japan, the country from which new strains have typically originated in the past. (Due to their love hotels?) It could go global in a decade, writes Reuters:
Scientists have found a “superbug” strain of gonorrhea in that is resistant to all antibiotics and say it could transform a once easily treatable infection into a global public health threat.
The new strain of the sexually transmitted disease — called H041 — cannot be killed by any currently recommended treatments for gonorrhea, leaving doctors with no other option than to try medicines so far untested against the disease.
Magnus Unemo of the Swedish Reference Laboratory for Pathogenic Neisseria, who discovered the strain with colleagues from Japan in samples from Kyoto, described it as both “alarming” and “predictable.”
In a telephone interview Unemo said the fact that the strain had been found first in Japan also followed an alarming pattern — “Japan…
Food Ark: Will Seed Banks Save Our Sources of Food?
“Experts estimate that we have lost more than half of the world’s food varieties over the past century”. Charles Siebert writes in National Geographic:
Svalbard Vault Mountain (Cutaway). Illustration: Global Crop Diversity Trust
A crisis is looming: To feed our growing population, we’ll need to double food production. Yet crop yields aren’t increasing fast enough, and climate change and new diseases threaten the limited varieties we’ve come to depend on for food. Luckily we still have the seeds and breeds to ensure our future food supply — but we must take steps to save them.
Six miles outside the town of Decorah, Iowa, an 890-acre stretch of rolling fields and woods called Heritage Farm is letting its crops go to seed. It seems counterintuitive, but then everything about this farm stands in stark contrast to the surrounding acres of neatly rowed corn and soybean fields that typify modern agriculture. Heritage Farm is devoted…
Donors Pledge $4.3 Billion For Child Vaccinations In Poor Nations
A case of good humanitarians. Via Reuters:
International donors led by Britain and Bill Gates pledged $4.3 billion on Monday to buy vaccines to protect children in poor countries against potential killers such as diarrheal diseases and pneumonia.
“But every 20 seconds, a child still dies of a vaccine-preventable disease. There’s more work to be done.”
The funding should allow more than 250 million of the world’s poorest children to be vaccinated by 2015, helping to prevent more than four million premature deaths, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI) said.
“Today is an important moment in our collective commitment to protecting children in developing countries from disease,” said Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who attended the pledging conference in London.
[Continues at Reuters]
UN Asks The World To Put An End To AIDS By 2020
With numerous research groups inching closer to a cure for AIDS, the United Nations asks that leaders throughout the world end the pandemic by 2020. While one of the largest problems in the spread of AIDS is the lack of knowledge about the disease and access to treatment in certain areas, there is also a lack of funding to facilities that are on a progressive path towards a cure, but are stopped because of finances. The Christian Post reports:
World leaders must do everything in their power to end the AIDS pandemic by 2020, the U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said at the U.N. Summit on AIDS in New York.
“Today, we gather to end AIDS,” Ban said as the United Nations General Assembly opened on Wednesday.
The three-day summit is being held as the world marks the 30th anniversary since HIV was first discovered. Ban told delegates gathered from across the world…
Waxy Monkey Frog Skin Could Treat Cancer
Photo: Alexander Maier (CC)
Belfast Telegraph reports:
A little-known frog from South America could hold the key to lifesaving treatments for up to 70 devastating medical conditions, Northern Ireland researchers have found.
Scientists from Queen’s University in Belfast have discovered the poetically-named Waxy Monkey Frog could be used in the fight against cancer.
They also found that the Giant Fire-bellied Toad, native to China and Vietnam, has the potential to treat an array of diseases including diabetes and stroke.
It will bring hope to the 8,500 people in Northern Ireland diagnosed with cancer each year and more than 3,500 people here who are told each year they have diabetes.
The Queen’s boffins stumbled upon the amazing breakthrough – which could revolutionise the treatment of billions of patients around the globe – purely by accident.
[Continues at Belfast Telegraph]
