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We have that genetic element that would allow for bacteria that are resistant to every antibiotic.”

colistin

We are one step away from CRE strains that cannot be treated with antibiotics.

overuse of antibiotics in people and in animals put human health at risk by reducing the power of the drugs,

“coupled with the concerns about drug-resistance. . . one should only use antibiotics when you really need antibiotics.”

The researchers, at the Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, turned to the source of nearly all antibiotics - soil.

It allowed the unique chemistry of soil to permeate the room, but kept the bacteria in place for study.

The scientists involved believe they can grow nearly half of all soil bacteria.

uncultured bacteria do harbour novel chemistry that we have not seen before. That is a promising source of new antimicrobials and will hopefully help revive the field of antibiotic discovery."

The researchers also believe that bacteria are unlikely to develop resistance to teixobactin.

There are limits to the discovery of the antibiotic teixobactin, which has yet to be tested in people.

As a result, our microbiomes are better at helping us store fat than those of our ancestors.

Antibiotics aren’t the only force shifting our internal ecology. Modern diets are full of processed foods and low in fiber, the kind of hard-to-break-down carbohydrates found especially in vegetables, legumes, and whole grains that are crucial for a healthy microbiome.

The vast majority of our internal microbes live in the far reaches of our digestive tract, the colon, explains Justin Sonnenburg, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford. Because of their location, these microscopic critters “really only get access to the dregs of what we eat”—the dietary fiber that our organs can’t digest. The microbes have evolved to process that fiber by fermenting it with enzymes.

feeding this fermentation process appears to be crucial for averting weight gain and diseases like obesity and Type 2 diabetes

fiber supplements might also trigger liver cancer.

“Right now, the only useful advice I could give somebody would be to eat foods naturally rich in fiber,” he says, like bran cereal and every kind of bean you can think of. Other winners included pears, avocados, apples, seeds, and nuts.

The Institute of Medicine recommends that women eat 25 grams and men 38 grams of fiber every day, but Americans only get about 15 grams on average.

The choice of whether to lunch on a cup of black beans or five chicken nuggets—which both contain about 220 calories—just got a whole lot easier.

The human gut microbiome is diverse and dominated by trillions of bacteria with as many as one-thousand different bacterial species. These microbes thrive in the harsh conditions of the gut and are heavily involved in maintaining healthy nutrition, normal metabolism, and proper immune function. They aid in the digestion of non-digestible carbohydrates, the metabolism of bile acid and drugs, and in the synthesis of amino acids and many vitamins. A number of gut microbes also produce antimicrobial substances that protect against pathogenic bacteria.

Microbiota of the oral cavity number in the millions and include archaea, bacteria, fungi, protists, and viruses. These organisms exist together and most in a mutualistic relationship with the host, where both the microbes and the host benefit from the relationship. While the majority of oral microbes are beneficial, preventing harmful microbes from colonizing the mouth, some have been known to become pathogenic in response to environmental changes. Bacteria are the most numerous of the oral microbes and include Streptococcus, Actinomyces, Lactobacterium, Staphylococcus, and Propionibacterium.

"Previous small-scale studies have failed to identify robust evidence of a benefit and larger, randomised controlled trials are not yet completed," Dr. Frank Ruschitzka, director of the Heart Center at University Hospital Zurich and the study's coauthor, said in a statement.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly touted hydroxychloroquine as a potential coronavirus cure. Earlier this week he claimed he was taking daily doses of it as a prophylaxis to prevent infection.

Additionally, the study found serious cardiac arrhythmias were more common among patients who received any of the four treatments. The largest increase was among the group treated with hydroxychloroquine and an an antibiotic -- 8% of those patients developed a heart arrythmia, compared to 0.3% of the control group.

Items such as masks and hand sanitizer will be familiar sights in stuffed backpacks. Classes and school buses will have fewer people while some office meetings will be conducted by video conference, experts say.

Children with underlying health conditions are especially vulnerable, and it's crucial that people follow rules to keep everyone safe, Altmann said. She shared other things US schools must address before unlatching their doors.

"We need to quickly test them, diagnose, isolate and then contact trace, which is a lot easier when there's fewer kids they've come into contact with throughout the day," Altmann added.

In New York, 16.6% of people have been infected, compared with 1% in California, the researchers said.

In the most severe scenario, the CDC assumes that 1% of people overall with Covid-19 and symptoms will die. In the least severe scenario, it puts that number at 0.2%.

"Go out, wear a mask, stay six feet away from anyone so you have the physical distancing," he said. "Go for a run. Go for a walk. Go fishing. As long as you're not in a crowd and you're not in a situation where you can physically transmit the virus."

Alaska is allowing all businesses to reopen, as well as houses of worship, libraries, museums and sporting activities, starting at 8 a.m. Alaska has the fewest cases of all states and has reported single-digit new cases since mid-April.

How will you and the CDC help ensure a well-executed program?

Right, and one of the things that will help tuberculosis control is the test and treat approach, and increasing the proportion of HIV-positive people that are treated. The majority of TB cases currently occur before people are started on anti-HIV medicines.

Partly it's the characteristic of the bacteria: You require long-term treatment for many months, we don't have a vaccine as we do with measles or polio, but partly it's the nature of the control program.

Fundamentally, what happens with tuberculosis will depend on two things. First, how well we implement what we know today, and second, how quickly we get better tools to stop tuberculosis.

If we could figure out which of them are going to develop active TB and provide shorter, more effective treatments for them, then we might really be able to knock down tuberculosis cases.

STEIN: The brain connections of people whose microbes are dominated by one species of bacteria look different than those of people whose microbes are dominated by another species. That suggests that the specific mix of microbes in our guts helps determine what kinds of brains we have, how our brain circuits develop, how they're wired.

STEIN: It worked the other way around too. The bold mice became timid when they got the microbes of anxious ones. Aggressive mice also calmed down when the scientists altered their microbes by changing their diet, feeding them probiotics, or dosing them with antibiotics.

This could help explain why some people are born with brains that don't work the way they're supposed to, causing problems like autism, anxiety, depression.

COLLINS: And this resulted in a change in behavior. The mice became a little bit less anxious, a little bit more gregarious.

They did things like replace the gut bacteria of anxious mice with bacteria from fearless mice.

STEIN: Finally, these scientists figured out how the microbes in the guts of the mice were communicating with their brains - by sending signals up a big nerve known as the vagus nerve.

All this is raising the possibility that scientists could create drugs that mimic these signals. Or just give people the good bacteria - probiotics - to prevent or treat problems involving the brain.

researchers were also able to activate the mitochondrial UPR via pharmacological means. Dosing worms with the antibiotic doxycyline, which inhibits bacterial and mitochondrial protein translation, also activated the mitochondrial UPR and extended worm lifespans. Rapamycin, shown to enhance longevity in mice, also extended worm lifespan and induced mitonuclear protein imbalance and the mitochondrial UPR in mouse hepatocytes.

mitochondrial ribosomal proteins are not to be trifled with. “There are a number of well-defined severe disorders in humans, including neonatal lethality, due to defects in those exact proteins,”

is beginning to cast a wider net, looking to see whether mitonuclear protein imbalance could explain longevity induced by other means, such as caloric restriction. Auwerx hopes that the work will aid in designing a drug intervention “to pump up this response via pharmacological tools.”

he’s optimistic that his team has identified a “common thread” demonstrating that longevity is not affected so much by inhibiting or stimulating mitochondria, but how the organelles “deal with proteins.”

It is nerdy-sounding, but I believe critical to this discussion, to distinguish between measurement and knowledge. I made a very strong claim about measurement, and a very specific claim about knowledge. I claim that we cannot usefully measure the effect of the stimulus program launched in 2009 at all.

All potentially useful predictions made about the output impact of the stimulus program are non-falsifiable. Failure of predictions can be simply justified by this sort of ad hoc explanation after the fact.

This argument will always degenerate back into endlessly dueling regressions, because there is no ability to adjudicate among them via experiment.

It simply means that we have no scientific knowledge about this topic. Macroeconomic assertions about the effect of a proposed stimulus policy are not valueless, but despite their complex mathematical justifications, do not have standing as knowledge that can trump common sense, historical reasoning, and so on in the same way that a predictive rule that has been verified through experimental testing can.

When using stimulus to ameliorate the economic crisis, we are like primitive tribesmen using herbs to treat an infection, and we should not allow ourselves to imagine that we are using antibiotics that have been proven through clinical trials. This should not imply merely a different feeling about the same actions, but should rationally lead us to greater circumspection.

“The studies were biased,” he says. “Sometimes they were overtly biased. Sometimes it was difficult to see the bias, but it was there.” Researchers headed into their studies wanting certain results—and, lo and behold, they were getting them. We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it’s easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously. “At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded,” says Ioannidis. “There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded.”

Ioannidis laid out a detailed mathematical proof that, assuming modest levels of researcher bias, typically imperfect research techniques, and the well-known tendency to focus on exciting rather than highly plausible theories, researchers will come up with wrong findings most of the time.

if you’re attracted to ideas that have a good chance of being wrong, and if you’re motivated to prove them right, and if you have a little wiggle room in how you assemble the evidence, you’ll probably succeed in proving wrong theories right. His model predicted, in different fields of medical research, rates of wrongness roughly corresponding to the observed rates at which findings were later convincingly refuted: 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials.

He zoomed in on 49 of the most highly regarded research findings in medicine over the previous 13 years, as judged by the science community’s two standard measures: the papers had appeared in the journals most widely cited in research articles, and the 49 articles themselves were the most widely cited articles in these journals

Ioannidis was putting his contentions to the test not against run-of-the-mill research, or even merely well-accepted research, but against the absolute tip of the research pyramid. Of the 49 articles, 45 claimed to have uncovered effective interventions. Thirty-four of these claims had been retested, and 14 of these, or 41 percent, had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated. If between a third and a half of the most acclaimed research in medicine was proving untrustworthy, the scope and impact of the problem were undeniable.

A major concern with any type of gene therapy is that the inserted genetic material could have dangerous side effects, like turning off an essential gene or turning on one that could lead to cancer.