Germ Quiz

Via a sick friend:

2,426,760How Many Germs Live On Your Keyboard?

Salmonella Sushi

Via Universal Hub: Wicked Local Brookline reports on salmonella and vermin at Fugakyu:

Inspectors visited Fugakyu in late August after the Boston Department of Public Health told the town that one of the restaurant’s employees had contracted salmonella poisoning.
The restaurant, at 1280 Beacon St., reportedly had not told Brookline officials about the potential health danger. It was not clear from reports how Boston found out. [...]
Reports stated food handlers were also seen washing their hands with no soap for only five seconds. The worker with salmonella was allegedly handling food at the time of the visit, according to reports.

Let's hope Dice-K keeps away from his eponymous roll until the World Series is over.

Adenovirus on the Rise

Via ProMED-mail: Reuters reports on a rise in the prevalence and severity of adenovirus infection (one of several causes of the common cold).

Gray's team used the test on 2,200 samples from 22 U.S. medical facilities, including eight military sites. Military personnel are especially susceptible to outbreaks of all kinds of disease, including adenoviruses.
Adenovirus 21 was found in 1 percent of specimens in 2004, but in 2.4 percent in 2006. And it was making people much sicker than the other strains, killing 50 percent of bone marrow transplant patients, for instance.

Salmonella in Strange Places

Via an unnamed source: CBS reports on a recall of white chocolate.

Kraft Foods announced Thursday it is recalling white chocolate distributed in the United States because of possible salmonella contamination.
Kraft said consumers who purchased its six-ounce, Baker's Premium White Chocolate Baking Squares should immediately discard the product. The recalled product was distributed nationally and have the UPC Code 0043000252200 and best when used by dates of March 31, April 1, April 2 and April 3, 2008.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration detected the presence of salmonella in some packages of the white chocolate baking squares during tests, according to Kraft.

Salmonella in Space

Via GeekPress, among others: The AP reports on the B-movie salmonella that came back deadlier after its trip on the space shuttle:

After 25 days, 40 percent of the mice given the Earth-bound salmonella were still alive, compared with just 10 percent of those dosed with the germs from space. And the researchers found it took about one-third as much of the space germs to kill half the mice, compared with the germs that had been on Earth.
The researchers found 167 genes had changed in the salmonella that went to space.
Why?
"That's the 64 million dollar question," Nickerson said. "We do not know with 100 percent certainty what the mechanism is of space flight that's inducing these changes."
However, they think it's a force called fluid shear.

"Being cultured in microgravity means the force of the liquid passing over the cells is low." The cells "are responding not to microgravity, but indirectly to microgravity in the low fluid shear effects."

Toxoplasmosis and You

Today's featured parasite is the stealthy and adaptable protozoan, Toxoplasma gondii.

This is the cat-litter bug that causes miscarriages and birth defects. The cat-loving parasite that lures rats to their deaths and causes traffic accidents. The latest schizophrenia suspect and a possible cause of epilepsy, psychosis, and migraines.

T. gondii may be making society rigid and neurotic, men more masculine, stupider, or more surly, and women more promiscuous. And if you think things are bad in the northern hemisphere, you should see the Brazilian strains.

About 16% 11% 33% of Americans are infected; infection rates are much higher in tropical countries (and France). Wikipedia tells the sad tale of Louis Wain, English cat artist, late-onset schizophrenic, and poster-child for the toxoplasmosis-schizophrenia connection.

T. gondii has its own book, conference, mugs and a blog, The Anti-Toxo, where you can follow mankind's losing battle with our one-celled masters.

Image by kqedquest. Some rights reserved.

Ebola in the Congo

Via ProMED-mail: USA Today reports a total of nine confirmed cases of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

At least 167 people have died — though it is not clear how many of Ebola — in the affected region of Kasai Occidental over the past four months, and nearly 400 have fallen ill, according to Congolese health officials.
Christiana Salvi, a spokeswoman for the World Health Organization effort in Congo, said that the newest cases came from the same zone as the original confirmed samples.
She added that some of the 40-odd samples sent for testing have been negative for Ebola, but positive for other diseases like shigella — a diarrhea-like disease — or typhoid. Results from dozens more samples have yet to be released.

Bat Woman Found on Facebook

ProMED-mail reports that the mysterious woman who brought a rabid bat to the Toronto Wildlife Center has been found and inoculated:

Toronto Public Health has located the woman who had delivered an injured bat to the Toronto Wildlife Centre that later tested positive for rabies. Finding her proved to be very challenging as the Wildlife Centre did not have her updated demographic information. After several attempts to locate her, including a media release, proved to be unsuccessful, one of the communications staff at Toronto Public Health suggested using the website "Facebook.com".

If you come across an injured rodent of a populous and frequently rabid species, Plagueblog recommends that you walk away and let Darwin handle the situation.

Schizotypal Selection

Via John Hawks and the Four Stone Hearth Carnival of Anthropology: The Primate Diaries' explains Sapolsky's theory of selection for schizotypal personalities, possibly in shamans.

Several years ago Robert Sapolsky suggested that genes promoting schizophrenia may have been selected for in human evolution because some of them conferred benefits that outweighed the 1% of people worldwide that were disabled by the disorder. Like the sickle-cell trait that confers resistance to malaria (so long as you don’t receive two recessive alleles and develop full fledged sickle cell anemia) a partial schizophrenia may be beneficial in some way. He observed that relatives of schizophrenics have a high likelihood of “schizotypal personalities,” or a mild form of the disorder that just makes these people a little strange and allows them to see the world in a unique way. What if, he wondered, schizophrenia maintained itself in human populations because of selection for schizotypal personalites? As luck would have it, for a hundred years anthropologists had observed such individuals thriving in nearly every society they encountered: shamans.

Leishmaniasis endemic in North Texas

Via ProMED-mail: UT Southwestern reports that Leishmania mexicana should be considered endemic in North as well as South Texas.

North Texas doctors must have a high index of suspicion and understand that this organism must now be considered endemic in this area, said Dr. Kent Aftergut, a clinical instructor of dermatology at UT Southwestern and in private practice at Methodist Charlton Medical Center.
“Luckily, all of the leishmaniasis cases in North Texas that have been cultured have grown Leishmania mexicana, which is less dangerous than other forms of the parasite,” he said. “It makes skin sores, but the infection doesn’t spread and become a full body disease like some of the others species of Leishmania. Usually, if patients have a normal immune system, the sores will resolve in six to 12 months and won’t make the patients ill.”

Bird Flu Hits 200

Via ProMED-mail: AFP reports Indonesia's 85th bird flu fatality, for a total of 200 bird flu deaths worldwide.

The plantation worker died at 2:00 pm (0700 GMT), the doctor treating him at the state general hospital in the city of Pekanbaru, Azizman Daad, told AFP.
A health ministry official earlier confirmed that the man was infected with the deadly H5N1 virus, after two tests came back positive.
H5N1 is endemic in birds across nearly all of Indonesia.
The archipelago nation has now reported 106 cases overall, including the 85 deaths.
Daad said it was not clear whether the man had come into contact with infected poultry, but he had bought two live chickens at a local market.

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.