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alliefulginiti1

Infection Raises Specter of Superbugs Resistant to All Antibiotics - The New York Times - 0 views

  • dentified the first patient in the United States to be infected with bacteria that are resistant to an antibiotic
  • superbugs that could cause untreatable infections,
  • The resistance can spread
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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,
grayton downing

The Downside of Antibiotics? | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

  • addition to the growing threat of antibiotic-resistant bugs
  • What the authors are suggesting is that in addition to the bactericidal properties of antibiotics, they also affect . . . the mitochondria
  • the average person who might be prescribed a short course of antibiotics, DePinho reckoned there would probably be nothing to worry about.
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  • “coupled with the concerns about drug-resistance. . . one should only use antibiotics when you really need antibiotics.”
johnsonma23

BBC News - Antibiotics: US discovery labelled 'game-changer' for medicine - 0 views

  • Antibiotics: US discovery labelled 'game-changer' for medicine
  • The decades-long drought in antibiotic discovery could be over after a breakthrough by US scientists.
  • ielded 25 new antibiotics, with one deemed "very promising".
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  • 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.
sissij

Common Science Myths That Most People Believe | IFLScience - 0 views

  • We only use 10% of our brains.ADVERTISINGinRead invented by TeadsADVERTISINGinRead invented by Teads It's true that there’s a great deal we don’t know about the brain, but we certainly do know that we use our entire brain.
  • Sugar makes children hyperactive. Attending any child’s birthday party where cake, ice cream, and sugary drinks about would make just about anyone a believer that sugar influences hyperactivity. There has not been much evidence to suggest that the so-called “sugar buzz” is actually real for children (aside from a small subset with an insulin disorder coupled with certain psychiatric disorders).
  • Antibiotics kill viruses.  This one pops up every cold and flu season. Antibiotics, by their very definition, kill bacteria.
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    This article really surprise me that some of my intuitions are wrong. I always thought that if we swallow the gum, then the gum will stick in our stomach and never go away. However, it will pass along as waste. This shows that for many people, some fields of science they learned about are usually second-handed. Many "scientific knowledge" we have are not first handed and they have been modified. Before we are using them as scientific knowledge, we need first to make sure that they are really science, not another myth. --Sissi (1/10/2017)
maddieireland334

Rapid blood test to 'cut antibiotic use' - 0 views

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    A new blood test can help doctors tease out whether an infection is caused by a virus or bacteria within two hours, research in Plos One suggests. It could stop patients being given antibiotics when they are not needed, scientists say. It is still at a laboratory stage but the team is working on a portable device too.
Javier E

Counting Calories to Stay Fit? There's a Trillion Little Problems With That. - Mother J... - 0 views

  • The scientists during Atwater’s era saw the human digestive system as a single engine producing a predictable quantity of energy from a given amount of fuel.
  • Yet the human gut contains a multitude of engines, and they interact with each other in ways science is just beginning to unravel. Over the past 15 years, a fast-growing body of literature suggests that the gut microbiome—the trillions of microbes that live inside us—shapes the way we metabolize food and may play an important role in how we gain weight.
  • Antibiotics, it turns out, reconfigure your gut’s balance in favor of microbes that help us store food as body fat.
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  • 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.
runlai_jiang

Human Microbiome and Microbiota - 0 views

  • The human microbiota consists of the entire collection of microbes that live in and on the body. In fact, there are 10 times as many microbial inhabitants of the body than there are body cells. Study of the human microbiome is inclusive of inhabitant microbes as well as the entire genomes of the body's microbial communities. These microbes reside in distinct locations in the ecosystem of the human body and perform important functions that are necessary for healthy human development.
  • Microbes of the BodyMicroscopic organisms that inhabit the body include archaea, bacteria, fungi, protists, and viruses. Microbes start to colonize the body from the moment of birth. An individual's microbiome changes in number and type throughout his or her lifetime, with the numbers of species increasing from birth to adulthood and decreasing in old age. These microbes are unique from person to person and can be impacted by certain activities, such as hand washing or taking antibiotics. Bacteria are the most numerous microbes in the human microbiome.
  • Human skin is populated by a number of different microbes that reside on the surface of the skin, as well as within glands and hair. Our skin is in constant contact with our external environment and serves as the body's first line of defense against potential pathogens. Skin microbiota help to prevent pathogenic microbes from colonizing the skin by occupying skin surfaces. They also help to educate our immune system by alerting immune cells to the presence of pathogens and initiating an immune response
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  • 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.
katherineharron

Covid-19 in the US: Hydroxychloroquine treatment for Covid-19 linked to a greater risk ... - 0 views

  • Seriously ill Covid-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine were more likely to die or develop dangerous heart arrhythmias, according to a large observational study published Friday in the medical journal The Lancet.
  • Researchers looked at data from more than 96,000 Covid-19 patients from 671 hospitals. All were hospitalized from late December to mid-April and had died or been discharged by April 21. Just below 15,000 were treated with the antimalarial drugs hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, or one of those drugs combined with an antibiotic.
  • Those treatments were linked with a higher risk of dying in the hospital, the study found.
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  • "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.
proudsa

CDC Director Calls It 'Shameful' This Curable Disease Still Kills Millions - 0 views

  • "Drug-resistant tuberculosis threatens to reverse the gains that we've made. It's not just the threat overseas, it's the threat here,"
  • Drug-resistant tuberculosis knows no borders, and we risk turning the clock back on antibiotics and making it very difficult for us to stop tuberculosis from spreading around the world and in this country if we don't improve our control efforts.
  • We do prioritize addressing MDR-TB. We have done that for more than 20 years; that's why we've been able to drastically reduce U.S. cases of MDR-TB.
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  • 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.
maxwellokolo

NASA launched a superbug into space - 0 views

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    Before you start to worry, this isn't a sign of an impending apocalypse. Working in conjunction with NASA, lead researcher Dr. Anita Goel hopes that by sending MRSA bacteria to a zero-gravity environment, we can better understand how superbugs mutate to become resistant to available antibiotics.
maxwellokolo

The 12 bacteria posing greatest risk to humans - 0 views

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    The first list of its kind, it highlights bacteria that global health experts believe pose the greatest threats to human health. The WHO is calling on governments and pharmaceutical companies to prioritize the development of new drugs against them.
Emily Freilich

Gut Bacteria Might Guide The Workings Of Our Minds : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views

  • Turns out you really can have a gut feeling about something, because evidence has been mounting that those microbes in the body may be important for our emotional health as well as our physical health.
  • PRIA TEWARI: Growing up in India we believe that what you eat influences your thoughts.
  • MAYER: We found that the type of community you have, of microbes you have in your gut, is reflected in some ways in some basic architectural aspects of the brain.
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  • 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.
  • They did things like replace the gut bacteria of anxious mice with bacteria from fearless mice.
  • COLLINS: And this resulted in a change in behavior. The mice became a little bit less anxious, a little bit more gregarious.
  • 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.
  • 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.
grayton downing

Inhibit Mitochondria to Live Longer? | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

  • Although previous work had indirectly suggested that changing mitochondrial function affected lifespan, “this is the first clear demonstration [that it] extends mouse lifespan,” Miller added.
  • well known that mitochondria are linked to health. Some evidence suggests that inhibiting mitochondrial function can be harmful—as in the case of diabetes or obesity—but earlier data from nematodes and fruit flies also suggest a link to lifespan increase. The latest findings are a step toward untangling one of the current debates in the field—whether inhibiting mitochondrial function is detrimental or beneficial,
  • The average lifespan of BXD mice range from 1 year to almost 2.5 years. The researchers were able to link 3 genes to longevity variability, including mitochondrial ribosomal protein S5 (Mrps5), which encodes a protein integral to mitochondrial protein synthesis. They found that BXD strains with 50 percent less Mrps5 expression lived about 250 days longer than BXD mice with more robust Mrps5 expression.
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  • 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.”
Javier E

A Reply To Jonathan Chait On Stimulus | The New Republic - 0 views

  • It is certainly true that a large majority of professional economists accept the view that “increasing spending or reducing taxes temporarily increases economic growth”—but that is very far from claiming that disputing it is largely a political campaign.
  • in a genuinely scientific field which has accepted a predictive rule as valid to the point that there is a true consensus—such that the only reason for refusal to accept it is crankery or, in Chait’s terms, “politics”—you don’t usually see: several full professors at the top two departments in the subject, when speaking directly in their area of research expertise, challenge it; 10 percent of all practitioners in the field refuse to accept it; and the two leading global general circulation publications in field running op-eds questioning it.
  • A great many leading economists may accept the proposition that enough stimulus spending will probably cause at least some increase in output for a short period of time in some circumstances, yet are still uncomfortable with the kind of stimulus spending strategy that is the actual subject of current political debate. In 2009, James Buchanan (1986 Nobel Laureate in Economics), Edward Prescott (2004 Nobel Laureate in Economics), and Vernon Smith (2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics) promulgated this statement: “Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance.”
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  • 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.
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    An incisive analysis of knowledge claims in economics, and Keynesian approaches.
Javier E

Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science - Magazine - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed. His work has been widely accepted by the medical community
  • for all his influence, he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem
  • he discovered that the range of errors being committed was astonishing: from what questions researchers posed, to how they set up the studies, to which patients they recruited for the studies, to which measurements they took, to how they analyzed the data, to how they presented their results, to how particular studies came to be published in medical journals
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  • “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.
anonymous

Gene Therapy Creates Replacement Skin to Save a Dying Boy - The New York Times - 1 views

  • The boy in the Nature article had suffered since birth from blisters all over his body, and in 2015 contracted bacterial infections that caused him to lose two-thirds of his skin. His doctors did not know how to treat him, other than keeping him on morphine for the pain.
  • Doctors in the burn unit tried everything: antibiotics, bandages, special nutritional measures, a skin transplant from the boy’s father. Nothing worked.
  • The doctors removed a sample of the boy’s skin — slightly more than half a square inch — and took it to Modena, where they genetically engineered his cells, using a virus to insert the normal form of his mutated gene into his DNA.Then they grew the engineered cells in the laboratory into sheets of skin and transported them back to Germany, where surgeons grafted them onto the boy’s body.In October 2015, they covered his arms and legs with the new skin, and in November, his back. Ultimately, they replaced 80 percent of the child’s skin.
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  • 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.
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