Rock Snot in New England

Via Universal Hub: The Huffington Post reports on the dangerous advance of Didymosphenia geminata, or rock snot, into New England.

"We're starting to realize it's all over the place," said Karl Hermann, a regional waste monitoring and assessment coordinator for the Environmental Protection Agency in Denver.
What started out in Vancouver Island in British Columbia "has suddenly just skyrocketed," he said.
The algae has the potential to bloom into thick masses with long stalks, blanketing the bottoms of some streams, threatening aquatic insect and fish populations by smothering food sources.
In New England, it has turned up in the White River, Connecticut River and the Batten Kill, a trout fishing mecca in southern Vermont that's famed for its hard-to-catch fish. Quebec is grappling with it in Matapedia River in the lower St. Lawrence.
There's no easy way to get rid of it. Experts say the only hope is to keep it from spreading. But that's a lofty challenge, since a single cell carried on absorbent fishing gear or clothing can be transferred _ unknowingly _ into other waters.

Dopamine Agonies

Google Alerts brought me a very odd story from the Kenilworth Weekly News, in which a masked Parkinson's sufferer accosted a British schoolgirl in her home. But it became somewhat less odd when USA Today reported on the weird obsessions of patients taking too much dopamine agonist:

They still don't have hard-and-fast proof, but as the evidence accumulates, many scientists now say the drugs can kick off compulsive urges in certain people.
And they say the side effect is anything but rare.
At a meeting in Toronto last month, Stacy and other experts reviewed the cases reported so far and concluded that the drugs appear to trigger a syndrome of bad behavior that includes compulsive gambling, shopping, binge eating and an unstoppable urge for sex.
"Fifteen percent of all Parkinson's patients might have this syndrome," Stacy says. If he's right, that could mean as many as 150,000 people in the USA are struggling with out-of-control behavior. Even those numbers may underestimate the problem.

The judge refused to jail the unfortunate patient, and the defense attorney gave a rare but unsurprising glimpse into the NHS:

"He finds everyday life very difficult. He can speak but with an almost uncontrollable stammer at times. Even a month in prison in his condition would be inhumane."
Mr Ward added that Guest, who has the support of his family, needs help, and has an appointment with a doctor at the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham later in the year.

Good Filoviruses Make Good Neighbors

Via Universal Hub: the Boston Globe reports on the NIH's Draft Supplementary Risk Assessments And Site Suitability Analyses for the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory Boston University. In short, there's no reason Boston University shouldn't build a new lab in the South End to play with Ebola:

Researchers at the State University of New York at Buffalo compared what would happen if germs migrated from the lab into its South End neighborhood with what might happen if the lab had instead been built on more secluded property owned by BU in Tyngsborough or Peterborough, N.H.
The report concludes that even if an accident happened in the lab "under realistic conditions, infectious diseases would not occur in the communities as a result." The study also concludes that "there was no difference in simulated disease transmission among the urban, suburban, or rural communities."

TB at the OCME

Via an unnamed source: The Boston Herald reports that state health officials will give a press conference later today about a tuberculosis outbreak at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

The sources differed on whether the testing was routine or the result of a recent positive case within the troubled office.
Regardless, the two sources confirmed that at least three employees of the OCME tested positive. At least one employee has been prescribed a nine-month regimen of medication to treat the symptoms and will also undergo monthly liver testing.
“They are trying to test as many people as possible,” said one source. “People are back working. As far as I know they are not walking around wearing face masks. I dont know where they got it. They probably got it from the building.”
Another source, who is familiar with law enforcement issues, said that one or two medical examiners and at least three clerical workers were affected to some degree by the TB outbreak. The office employs about 60 people.
Dr. Joseph Prahlow, president of the National Association of Medical Examiners, said TB was known to affect medical examiners’ offices. “It’s a recognized potential hazard of the work that we do,” he said.

Nature Finds a Way

Eye on DNA reports on a mule who gave birth to a...mulette?

If a horse breeds with a donkey, they end up with sterile offspring that have 63 chrosomes - 32 chromsomes from the horse parent and 31 from from the donkey parent. Horse-donkey offspring aka mules are sterile because their odd number of chromosomes makes it technically difficult for chromosomes to pair up properly during the process of meiosis (cell divison of sperm and eggs). This should mean that mules cannot reproduce.
A female mule in Colorado has beaten insurmountable odds and given birth to a foal.

Harry Potter and the Incomplete Penetrance

Via Eye on DNA: Pondering Pikaia gives an overview of controversial theories on the genetics of wizardry.

First up: the genetics of wizardry. What makes a person a wizard, and not a muggle? There was actually some discussion in the journal Nature on this very topic, back in 2005: a letter (Craig, J. Dow, R. and Aitken, M. Harry Potter and the Recessive Allele. Nature. Vol 436: 776.) and a rebuttal letter (Dodd, A., Hotta, C. and Gardner, M. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Presumptions. Nature. Vol 437, p 318.).
The first letter claims that being being magical must depend upon a recessive allele. Wizards can have a variety of family histories: they can be born from a purely magical family, they can come from a strictly nonmagical family, or they can have one magical and one nonmagical parent (commonly scorned as "mudbloods" by haughty purebloods such as the Malfoys). Since wizards/witches can be born into muggle (nonmagical) families, Craig et al suggest that magical ability is a recessive trait (they designate the wizard allele as W and the muggle allele as M). They hypothesize that all wizards/witches are WW, which can result from a cross between two muggle "carriers" that are MW.

Smallpox and the Little Ice Age

Via Analog Science Fiction and Fact: Richard A. Lovett's column on "The Ice Age That Wasn't" in the April issue was partly drawn from Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum by William F. Ruddiman. An Amazon reviewer explains Ruddiman's smallpox connection:

He proposes that major plague pandemics have caused sufficient die-offs, abandonment of farms, and reforestation to temporarily lower CO₂ and temperature. This could explain the later-Roman/Dark Ages lower temperatures, followed by the relatively disease-free Medieval Warming Period, in which Greenland was settled, and UK vineyards spread again to current levels, if not quite as far as early Roman. He ascribes the Little Ice Age drop to Bubonic plagues in Europe, and especially, to the death of estimated 50 million native Americans from smallpox and other European diseases.

Wolbachia and the Single Butterfly

Via John Hawks: MSNBC reports on a butterfly population that has developed resistance to the bacterial parasite Wolbachia.

Sylvain Charlat of the University of California, Berkeley, and the University College London, along with colleagues, studied the sex ratios of Hypolimnas bolina butterflies on the Samoan islands of Upolu and Savaii, where males had dwindled to 1 percent of the populations in 2001.
The likely culprit was a male-killing parasite, Wolbachia, which lives inside the butterfly’s reproductive cells, preferably female sex cells. With a female host, Wolbachia can hitch a ride to the next generation aboard the mother’s eggs. Since males are “useless” for the bacteria's survival, the parasite kills male embryos.
But the male butterflies found a way to stealthily overcome the parasites. At the beginning of 2006, the scientists found the males made up about 40 percent of Upolu’s butterfly population.
On Savaii, females still dominated the Blue Moon butterfly population (99 percent) at the start of 2006, but by the year’s end, males made up nearly 40 percent.
The team ran genetic analyses to see if the parasite had somehow vanished. It hadn’t. Wolbachia was still present in butterflies from both islands. Other lab experiments indicated the males had evolved suppressor genes to shield against the parasite.

If you find yourself a member of a suddenly or unexpectedly parthenogenic species, PlagueBlog recommends tetracycline.

Birthwort and Balkan Nephropathy

Via ProMED-mail: New Scientist reports on the likely solution to a longstanding mystery.

Since it was first formally recognised in 1956, the disease called endemic Balkan nephropathy has perplexed experts, who have considered various explanations, including groundwater contamination.
Unlike most patients with kidney failure, people with the Balkan illness often have healthy blood pressure. Nonetheless, as their kidneys begin to fail they require dialysis and about half of them eventually develop a rare cancer of the upper urinary tract.
Arthur Grollman, at the University at Stony Brook, New York, US, did not expect to discover birthwort as the cause of this kidney disease when he set out for the region a few years ago. Instead, he had hypothesised that herbal remedies were to blame for this nephropathy.
[... H]e surveyed patients in dialysis clinics in the region on whether they had taken any herbal medicines. But none reported taking such supplements.
Disappointed his theory had proved wrong, Grollman headed for home – but not before killing a final afternoon in a library in Zagreb, the Croatian capital.
There, he came across a striking description from the 1930s about how horses in the region had developed kidney failure after grazing on a plant known as Aristolochia clematis, also known as birthwort. Grollman immediately cancelled his flight and set off to meet Balkan farmers.
A survey of their fields and mills revealed that some of their wheat was indeed contaminated with Aristolochia clematis seed. Back in the lab, Grollman and his colleagues examined kidney samples from Croatian nephropathy patients. They found the same telltale signs of DNA damage linked to Aristolochia clematis as seen in animal studies.

PlagueBlog recommends weeding the wheat.

Another Typhoid Traveller

Via ProMED-mail: The Sydney Morning Herald reports on Australia's first polio case in 21 years, imported from Pakistan by plane:

A 22-year-old man carrying the disease was in isolation in a Melbourne hospital last night and health authorities were trying to track down the 249 passengers who shared his July 2 Thai Airlines flight from Bangkok to Melbourne.
Those on flight TG999 were urged to contact the health information hotline on 1800 004 599, which is open between 8.30am and 10pm.

Autism and Vaccines Again

Via Gene Expression: the UK Times reports on the latest autism and MMR controversy.

One of the two team members reported as resurrecting the discredited theory that MMR causes autism is Dr Carol Stott, a developmental psychologist who once worked at ARC. Baron-Cohen says she left ARC some time ago. She is now listed as a member of staff at Thoughtful House, a research centre in developmental disorders in Texas. Thoughtful House is run by Dr Andrew Wakefield, the gastroenterologist who first raised the possibility of a MMR-autism link in 1998. The other figure named as having revived the MMR-autism link was Dr Fiona Scott, who still works at ARC as an honorary research associate and runs training courses on how to diagnose autism. Scott has issued a statement denying that she privately believes in any link between MMR and autism.
Baron-Cohen says the news story is alarmist and wrong. He does not believe that MMR has anything to do with autism. “We are gobsmacked, really, at how this draft report has got out,” Baron-Cohen says. “It was only in the hands of the authors – about half a dozen people. There are three professors listed, including me, and none of us was contacted. It was also seen by two PhD students for whom I have the utmost respect because they are very careful scientists.
“I don’t believe that the MMR vaccine causes autism and I don’t believe that there are hidden environmental reasons for any rise in cases. For the moment, we should assume [any rise] is more to do with diagnostic practice.”

Autism, Bipolar Disorder, and Schizophrenia

Via Gene Expression, a PNAS article that correlates susceptibility to 161 diseases, pairwise, with special attention to autism, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. They interpret the correlations as overlap in the genetic mechanisms of (susceptibility to) the various diseases.

Our analysis suggests that, instead of following the familiar model of ‘‘unique malady–unique (disjoint with others) set of broken genes’’ applicable to most Mendelian disorders (Fig. 2D), most complex phenotypes are probably rooted in genetic variation that is significantly shared (in either a competitive or cooperative manner) by multiple disease phenotypes (Fig. 2E).
Phenotypes of non-Mendelian disorders are often defined with a considerable degree of fuzziness, especially those that are neurological: it is not uncommon to define a neuropsychiatric disease phenotype as comprising, for example, at least five of a list of 10 symptoms (4). This fuzziness arises because, in many cases, the observed disease is a heterogeneous collection of multiple maladies that have partially similar symptoms and potentially different genetic causes. However, these genetically heterogeneous maladies are combined because of the history of disease identification and the incompleteness of our knowledge about the disease causes.
Our interpretation of genetic overlap among pairs of disorders does not exclude the possibility that one disorder can cause the other. For example, it is possible that comorbidity of autism (or schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder)with infectious and autoimmune maladies indicates that the neurodevelopmental disorder can be triggered by different developmental insults, including viral or bacterial infection, or an autoimmune disease launched by a benign allergen. Another possibility is that the same molecular features that make a child more susceptible to infection or to autoimmune attack have a pleiotropic effect on brain development and function.

For the full list of overlaps, see the appendices. Appendix 1 has more pretty pictures, while 4 and 5 have some easier-to-read tables. Here's the pretty picture for plague (click to enlarge):

CDC Closes Texas A&M's Biodefense Lab

Via ProMED-mail: CIDRAP reports that the CDC has shut down Texas A&M's biodefense research lab for failure to report accidents.

In April, the Sunshine Project reported that a Texas A&M researcher had been infected with Brucella after a February 2006 aerosol chamber mishap and that the school did not immediately notify the CDC as required by federal law. Five days ago, the watchdog group reported that the exposure of three other Texas A&M workers to C burnetti, which causes Q fever, was confirmed in April 2006 but also was not reported to the CDC.

The CDC noted other concerns as well:

In the Jun 30 letter, the CDC outlined the concerns it has about the lab, which include the adequacy of biosafety plans, security of the facility from unauthorized visitors, occupational safety protocols, authorization from the CDC to work with certain agents, and compliance with federal select agent regulations.

Nosocomial HIV Transmission in Africa

Via Gates of Vienna: Medilinks has an October 2002 article from the International Journal of STD & AIDS on HIV infections in sub-Sahara Africa not explained by sexual or vertical transmission.

An expanding body of evidence challenges the conventional hypothesis that sexual transmission is responsible for more than 90% of adult HIV infections in Africa. Differences in epidemic trajectories across Africa do not correspond to differences in sexual behavior. Studies among African couples find low rates of heterosexual transmission, as in developed countries. Many studies report HIV infections in African adults with no sexual exposure to HIV and in children with HIV-negative mothers. Unexplained high rates of HIV incidence have been observed in African women during antenatal and postpartum periods. Many studies show 20%-40% of HIV infections in African adults associated with injections (though direction of causation is unknown). These and other findings that challenge the conventional hypothesis point to the possibility that HIV transmission through unsafe medical care may be an important factor in Africa's HIV epidemic.

Although the authors of the article dance around the issue, the primary cause of the HIV epidemic in Africa appears to be the reuse of hypodermic needles. Both Marburg and Ebola have been spread nosocomially in Africa, but in that case the evidence is so immediate and bloody that no one questions it.

PlagueBlog recommends against seeking medical care in sub-Saharan Africa.

Apocalyptic XDR-TB

Via ProMED-mail: Reuters reports on the "apocalyptic scenario" of an epidemic of extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis and a return "to the pre-antibiotic era":

XDR-TB cases are particularly difficult to treat, and a patient could infect other people for years, according to Mario Raviglione, director of the WHO's Stop TB Department.
"That is the big threat here. If you have more and more of these cases, you will automatically magnify the problem by having transmission going on to other individuals ... Once they become infected they are sort of a time bomb," Raviglione said.
"If this is kept unchecked and goes on, then you may also see an apocalyptic scenario where the present epidemic of TB is replaced by an epidemic of TB which is now fully resistant to everything," he added.

it's hard to maintain one's alarmist reputation when the WHO is more alarmed than you are...

Indonesia Hits 100

Via ProMED-mail: the WHO reports that Indonesia has reported its 100th human case of bird flu and 80th bird flu fatality.

A 26-year-old male from Riau Province developed symptoms on 3 June, was hospitalized on 6 June and died in hospital on 12 June. Investigations into the source of his infection indicate exposure to sick and dead poultry.

The Typhoid Traveller

Pretty much everyone, including The New York Times, reports on the travelling tuberculosis patient who may have infected two intercontinental flights full of people before being picked up sneaking home from Montreal and quarantined by the CDC--reportedly the first person to be subject to a federal isolation order since a smallpox patient was quarantined in 1963.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has an interview with the Typhoid Traveller in which he tells his side of the story of his ill-fated honeymoon:

Katkowsky and CDC officials say they only knew that the man's TB was resistant to many drugs before he left, but that the tests showing he had the most serious form of TB — XDR TB — only came back after he was in Europe. The test results came back on May 21, Fulton County officials said.
The man says he and his bride were in Rome on their honeymoon when they got a message to call the CDC. The CDC official said that they needed to cancel their trip and return home and that the CDC would call the next day with travel information.
The patient says he and his wife canceled plans to move on to Florence the next day as they awaited the CDC's instructions.
The next day, instead of giving the couple travel arrangements, the man said a CDC staff member told him he'd need to turn himself into Italian health authorities the next morning and agree to go into isolation and treatment in that country for an indefinite period of time.
"I thought to myself: 'You're nuts.' I wasn't going to do that. They told me I had been put on the no-fly list and my passport was flagged," the man said.
The man said the CDC told him he could not fly aboard a commercial airliner with his disease. "We asked about the CDC jet and they said no, there wasn't funding in the budget to use the jet," he said.

Don't Eat the Squirrels

Via ProMED-mail: Channel 4 in Denver reports that a hooded capuchin monkey in the Denver Zoo died of plague.

The zoo learned late Friday from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment that the hooded capuchin monkey had the plague.
The monkey seemed lethargic last Tuesday and was found dead Wednesday morning by a zookeeper, zoo officials said.
It's unclear if the monkey contracted the disease from infected fleas, or if the monkey ingested the remains of an infected squirrel. The zoo suspects it's from ingestion.
None of the other monkeys in the troop have displayed signs of illness, but antibiotics have been administered as a precaution.

PlagueBlog recommends against eating squirrels, especially if they appear ill or dead before their time.

Another Stay for Smallpox

Via ProMED-mail: Reuters AlertNet reports on another stay of execution for US and Russian smallpox stocks until sometime after 2011.

The 60th annual World Health Assembly, the top decision-taking body of the United Nations agency, reaffirmed a previous commitment to getting rid of the remaining stockpiles but agreed to postpone any decision on when this should happen until its 2011 meeting.
In 2010, the WHO secretariat will carry out a review of all research undertaken and still planned in order that the "64th World Health Assembly may reach global consensus on the timing of the destruction of existing variola virus stocks."
A previous 2002 deadline for destroying smallpox had been waived by the WHO until new vaccines or treatments for smallpox were found, after the United States said it would keep stocks on hand to combat any re-emergence of the disease.

I, for one, am glad I was vaccinated against this sadly continuing threat.

Adopt-A-Rabid-Bat Month

Via ProMED-mail: the Casper Star-Tribune reports on a case of rabies exposure at Trinity Lutheran School in Riverton, Wyoming:

A staff member on May 9 discovered the bat in the school basement, where it was captured and stored in a cage in Steve Coniglio's seventh- and eighth-grade classroom.
It was also displayed in other classrooms, and students fed it crickets through the cage. No one is believed to have touched the bat directly, head teacher Susan Tucker said.
School officials notified a local veterinarian after the bat died suddenly on May 11. The state Department of Health was called in once the animal tested positive for the rabies virus.
Coniglio and a teacher's aide who washed the cage without protective gloves after the bat died are receiving the rabies vaccine as a precaution.

PlagueBlog recommends getting your pets from an animal shelter, pet store, or reputable breeder.