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Bees have an impressive sense of smell and New Zealand biologists now believe they may be able to train them to help identify people with tuberculosis by the faint floral odor victims of the disease develop.
“When we tested them with the tuberculosis odours we found the bees can still smell it down to parts per billion,” says Max Suckling.
Christchurch zoologists are training bees to associate the smell of the disease with a sweet treat and to stick out their tongues when it’s present.
While TB is common worldwide, it is most prevalent in poverty stricken areas and the bees could provide an inexpensive screening solution for these people.
Link Via BoingBoing
Image Via Dendroica cerulea [Flickr]
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Bill Gates is only 56 years old, but he stepped down as the CEO of Microsoft a decade ago. He’d still be the richest man in America if he and his wife Melinda hadn’t been so busy giving money away. And instead of just donating, they did the research to determine how they would get the most bang for the buck. As it turns out, those bucks get a lot of bang when you use them to buy simple vaccines. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has gone through 25 billion dollars to not only get vaccines to children who need them, but to change the way that vaccines are developed, manufactured, and distributed globally.
The results have been equally massive: 3.4 million lives saved from hepatitis B, which causes liver cancer, 1.2 million lives from measles, 560,000 from the Hib bacteria, 474,000 from whooping cough, 140,000 from yellow fever and 30,000 from polio. In the past year the new initiatives have prevented another 8,000 deaths from pneumonia and 1,000 from diarrhea.
“I’ve met mothers who walked eight hours to get their child a vaccine and hoped that it’s there on that day,” Melinda says. On a trip in January to a rural clinic in Kenya she saw four children with pneumonia sharing a single oxygen tube. “They were just sucking breath,” she recalls. But across the clinic the Gates Foundation work showcased a different future: Children lined up to get the new vaccine that would dramatically reduce the risk they would ever get pneumonia.
Read about how they did it at Forbes. Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science
In 1983, more than 10,000 transfusion recipients were infected with HIV from tainted blood. In response, the FDA instituted a lifelong ban on blood donations from any man who’d had sexual contact with another man (“MSM” for short). There are no exceptions, even for celibate men who have tested negative for HIV.
Last month, U.K. Department of Health, acting on recommendation in a report from the the U.K. Advisory Committee on the Safety of Blood, Tissues and Organs (SaBTO), lifted their similar law banning MSM blood donations — provided the men haven’t had sex in at least one year. Restrictions have been relaxed in Australia, Japan, Sweden, South Africa and New Zealand. Some think the US should follow suit, but others believe the ban should remain to protect transfusion recipients.
Why a one-year deferral?
The SaBTO report looked at data regarding HIV and related diseases and “additional infectious agents” in the donor population as well as the UK overall population. What SaBTO found is that these diseases can be reliably screened for at the time of donation – if the donor is not in an “early window infection” stage. This window is between nine days and 12 months, depending on the disease. During the window, test results could be unreliable -a false negative might appear in donors who’d recently engaged in high-risk behavior, who could then transmit the disease to a recipient.
The SaBTO recommended deferring gay males for either one or five years from their last sexual encounter to ensure the window had been exceeded. The UK chose the one-year deferral.
Should the US follow suit and institute a deferral system rather than an outright ban on donations from gay men?
In favor of maintaining the lifetime ban
In 2009, the Center for Disease Control “estimate[d] MSM represent approximately 2% of the US population, but accounted for more than 50% of all new HIV infections annually from 2006 to 2009.” This data is the most heavily cited in ban-lifting opponents, who say this creates an increased risk to recipients.
Dr. Jay P. Brooks, a professor of pathology and the director of blood banking and transfusion medicine at University Hospital in San Antonio, says the risk is too great to lift the ban:
“If the current policy is changed or eliminated, we just don’t know what the increased risk to the blood supply will be. We could have one additional HIV-positive unit released every 10 years, every 20 years — or one per year. . . But if the policy is changed to relieve the stigma, you have a risk that has been transferred to a completely different group — the recipients — and I think that is an unfair situation.”
The FDA agrees: a petition put forth from the American Red Cross in 2006 called the ban “medically and scientifically unwarranted,” but the FDA maintained that the increased risk of HIV infection in the general population was too great to assume.
In favor of lifting the lifetime ban
The American Red Cross continues to advocate a repeal of the MSM donor ban in favor of a deferral system, as does Dr. James P. AuBuchon, president of the American Association of Blood Banks. “Given the sensitivity of the tests we now have available, there is no detectable increased risk of HIV entering the blood supply by allowing gay and bisexual men to donate. . . [U]nits of blood are typically destroyed quickly if they’re identified as unsuitable, and blood collectors have a robust protocols — including computer systems approved by the FDA — to prevent erroneous releases.”
What the FDA should focus on, says Joel Ginsberg, head of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association, are “behavioral risks rather than belonging to a particular group” by reworking the donor questionnaire about sexual activity and lifestyle behaviors, regardless of demographic.
There are opponents to this tactic, though–primarily, SaBTO. They felt that “the introduction of extensive donor health check questionnaires regarding sexual history will lead to a loss of existing donors,” when presenting their data to the UK Dept. of Health. So there’s the dilemma: do you lose part of your current donor base to admit the (very few) celibate homosexual men who could then donate under the new, fairer screening process? That gamble is not likely to be accepted in the U.S. The most viable option for lifting the ban appears to be the one-year deferral adopted in 12 other industrialized nations.
OK, Neatoramanauts: If it were on a ballot, would you vote to keep the blood donation ban for gay men intact, or vote to implement a deferral system?
Sources:
Pro/Con: Two views of U.S. prohibiting gay men’s blood donation
American Red Cross Fights Ban On Gays’ Blood
Bloody Personal
Britain Lifts Ban on Gay Men Donating Blood. Could the U.S. Be Far Behind?
SaBTO Donor Criteria Selection Review (April 2011) [PDF]
HIV Incidence Report, CDC 2009
If you grew up playing the game Oregon Trail, you know how easy it is to die along the way, from dysentery, cholera, diphtheria, typhoid, or the measles. Hey, at least you learned about the diseases, right? Mental_floss takes a look at how bad those diseases really were at the time the West was being settled, and how far we’ve come in the treatment, prevention, and eradication of them today. Isn’t medical science great? Link
Smallpox was the first disease to be declared completely eradicated. Last year, we told you that rinderpest, a scourge of cattle and other cloven-hoofed animals, became the second disease completely wiped from the earth by human intervention. Now you can read the story of how it was done.
The long but little-known campaign to conquer rinderpest is a tribute to the skill and bravery of “big animal” veterinarians, who fought the disease in remote and sometimes war-torn areas — across arid stretches of Africa bigger than Europe, in the Arabian desert and on the Mongolian steppes.
“The role of veterinarians in protecting society is underappreciated,” said Dr. Juan Lubroth, chief veterinary officer of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, at whose headquarters Tuesday’s ceremony is being held. “We do more than just take care of fleas, bathe mascots and vaccinate Pooch.”
The victory is also proof that the conquest of smallpox was not just an unrepeatable fluke, a golden medical moment that will never be seen again. Since it was declared eradicated in 1980, several other diseases — like polio, Guinea worm, river blindness, elephantiasis, measles and iodine deficiency — have frustrated intensive, costly efforts to do the same to them. The eradication of rinderpest shows what can be done when field commanders combine scientific advances and new tactics.
The New York Times has the saga of rinderpest, from its effects on ancient civilizations to the successful (but long) eradication process. Link -via reddit
Scientists and health officials are pretty certain that the smallpox virus exists in only two places in the world: at the CDC in Atlanta and in a government laboratory in Russia. The World Health Organization declared the disease eradicated in 1979, and the two remaining supplies are for research only. This week, the 64th World Health Assembly will take up the question of whether these two stores of the virus should be destroyed.
Now, public health officials are divided on how to ensure that the disease stays eradicated. Some say our best bet is to keep the remaining samples of the virus safe and continue to study them, then destroy them at a later date; others say the safest course is to destroy them now, once and for all.
A list of pros and cons for keeping smallpox around are listed at 80beats. Link -via Carl Zimmer
Every day, scientists are striving to make our lives better and to better understand our lives through a range of experiments on just about every subject. Unfortunately, not all of these projects work out so well. These five experiments have all gone wrong, whether due to the errors of the scientists, the unexpected behavior of the subjects or because the public reaction destroyed what may have actually been an advantageous advance in the field.
Image via http2007 [Flickr]
While many test animals are killed in the name of research, many of them are at least being used to investigate potentially life-saving drugs. Perhaps the saddest and most spectacular failure of any animal-based experiment occurred in 1962, when Tusko the elephant (not the one pictured) was given LSD simply for the sake of seeing how the magnificent beast would react to such a substance.
Unfortunately, the researchers, Louis Jolyon West and Chester M. Pierce, had no idea how much LSD it would take to dose an elephant. Rather than erroring on the side of safety, the doctors decided that they didn’t want to have to do the experiment again just because they underdosed the elephant the first time. They ended up deciding to give Tusko 297 milligrams, which is about 3000 times the dosage a human takes, despite the fact that an elephant weighs about 90 times more than the average human.
After being dosed, Tusko immediately started running around in his pen and soon lost control of his movements, eventually collapsing to the ground and going into seizures. To counteract the LSD, the doctors gave the elephant 2,800 milligrams of an antipsychotic. The drug reduced his seizures slightly, but didn’t stop them. After another hours, the doctors decided to give Tusko a barbiturate to calm him down, but it didn’t help. He died a few minutes later.
Two other elephants were later dosed with the drug and suffered no ill effects. Ultimately, the doctors that dosed Tusko summed up their experiment in Science by saying, simply, “It appears that the elephant is highly sensitive to the effects of LSD.” Even so, it is still unclear whether or not Tusko died from the acid or a combination of the three drugs given to him that day.
The effects of positive vs. negative reinforcement have fascinated scientists and parents for hundreds of years. Unfortunately, testing on a group of unsuspecting orphans isn’t the best way to find out. In 1939, Doctor Wendell Johnson of the University of Iowa and his assistant, Mary Tudor, selected 22 children from an orphanage in Iowa. Ten of the children had stutters and the rest spoke just fine.
The stutterers were put in two groups, group IA that was to use positive reinforcement and other, group IB, that was to receive negative reinforcement. The non-stutterers were also broken into two groups, group IIB, that was told they spoke fine, and group IIA, who were told they were starting to stutter and needed to avoid making mistakes at any cost. The goal was to get those in group IA to stop stuttering and those in group IIA to start stuttering.
The impact on group IIA was exactly what the doctor had hoped for. The entire group started falling behind on their school work. The children started to second-guess their speech abilities and many stopped talking at all. One girl ran away shortly after the experiment ended. While Mary Tudor visited the orphanage three times after the experiment was over, attempting to convince the children that they didn’t have any speech problems, the damage was already done. Although none of the kids became stutterers, many of the children retained speech problems their entire life and most were reluctant to speak. In 2007, six of these children were awarded $925,000 in a lawsuit against the state for the university’s role in the experiment.
The study has since been dubbed “The Monster Study” by the public and scientists alike who were disgusted with the doctor’s methods.
more …
Pandemic takes the idea of audience participation to the world of social networking. The Colony is a simulated-reality Discovery Channel show that creates the scenario of a disease pandemic and we watch to see how isolated participants react to the altered world. You can join in via Facebook. The Pandemic site takes your circle of friends and puts them into that world. You can change the time line from the outbreak to the pandemic to the survival phase. I have to admit it was unnerving to read as my Facebook friends “reported” on the fictional chaos. The pandemic requires you to allow access to your Facebook data. Link
Diseases and conditions are often named after the doctor who first described or treated it. Years after the doctor is gone, people associate the name with the condition, such as Tourette’s Syndrome.
Credit George Gilles de la Tourette for his modesty. When the French neurologist first described the illness that now bears his name in 1884, he didn’t name it after himself. Instead, he referred to the condition as “maladie des tics.” Tourette’s mentor and contemporary Jean-Martin Charcot renamed the illness after Tourette.
Tourette didn’t have such great luck with patients, though. In 1893, a deluded former patient shot the doctor in the head. The woman claimed that she lost her sanity after Tourette hypnotized her. Tourette survived the attack.
Mental_floss takes a look at 13 of those people and the ailments that made them a household name. Link
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Looking to cuddle up with your own bit of disease? Try this breast cancer cell sculpture by Amyof Glitter, Vinyl and Thread. She was inspired by the beauty of the cancer cells and entered her creation in the Good Cause Challenge.
Link Via Craftzine Image Via Glitter, Vinyl and Thread
On October 26th, 1977, a hospital cook in Somalia named Ali Maow Maalin was diagnosed with smallpox. What makes this so remarkable is that no naturally-occurring cases of smallpox have been diagnosed in the 32 years since.
The global eradication of smallpox was certified, based on intense verification activities in countries, by a commission of eminent scientists on 9 December 1979 and subsequently endorsed by the World Health Assembly on 8 May 1980[10][48] as Resolution WHA33.3. The first two sentences of the resolution read: “Having considered the development and results of the global program on smallpox eradication initiated by WHO in 1958 and intensified since 1967 … Declares solemnly that the world and its peoples have won freedom from smallpox, which was a most devastating disease sweeping in epidemic form through many countries since earliest time, leaving death, blindness and disfigurement in its wake and which only a decade ago was rampant in Africa, Asia and South America.”[49]
Smallpox once killed millions of people every year, and may have been responsible for up to 500 million deaths in the 20th century. National vaccination programs began in the early 1800s, but it was a global push by the World Health Organization begun in 1958 that finally led to the eradication of the disease worldwide. Link -via Bad Astronomy Blog
(image credit: CDC)
SARS Corona Virus by Luke Jerram
Artist Luke Jarram has created glass sculptures of some of the deadliest diseases known to man including HIV, E. Coli and Small Pox. The incredibly intrincate sculptures challenge both the state of the art in glass sculpting and the ability of scientists to visualize these diseases. For instance scientists are unable to describe to Jarram how RNA is situated in the Capsid.
Jarram’s website includes a video showing how he uses glass blowing techniques to create the sculptures. The video shows him working on the HIV sculpture.
From the Upcoming 
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Scientists may finally be on the cusp of finding a vaccine for the Ebola virus. According to an article in EurekAlert:
Because Ebola virus is so dangerous, producing and testing a vaccine is extremely challenging for the scientists. One significant factor slowing down progress has been that there are only a very limited number of high containment facilities with staff capable and authorised to conduct the research.
“Ebola virus is a Biosafety Level 4 threat, along with many other haemorrhagic fever viruses”, says Dr Sanchez. “As well as the difficulty in getting the right staff and facilities, vaccines for viruses like Ebola, Marburg and Lassa fever have been difficult to produce because simple ‘killed’ viruses that just trigger an antibody response from the blood are not effective. For these viruses we need to get a cell-mediated response, which involves our bodies producing killer T-cells before immunity is strong enough to prevent or clear an infection.”
The researchers have now used several different recombinant DNA techniques, which have allowed them to trigger a cell-mediated response and produce a vaccine that is effective in non-human primates. One of the candidate vaccines is about to be tested on people for the first time, after entering Phase 1 clinical trials in autumn 2006.
I’m old enough to still remember the early 90s, when movies like Outbreak and books like The Hot Zone had a firm grip on the popular imagination. There was a mystique about these deadly diseases that people just found utterly compelling. I can’t really speculate why, except to say that that maybe it’s the same reason people find serial killers compelling too: We long to know why/how they do what they do. But, like serial killers, we’ll probably never understand any of them completely. We just need to be able to stop them.
Here’s wishing Dr. Sanchez good luck at the CDC today, where he’ll be presenting Ebola vaccine developments!
