Every year, tens of thousand of people in the United States contract Lyme disease, a malady that can cause permanent damage to the brain, heart, and other organs in the worst cases. Lyme disease is most common in the Northeast, even though the bacteria that causes the disease and the ticks that spread it around are commonly found across much of the nation. What keeps most people in the U.S. safe from Lyme disease? According to Dr. Cherie Briggs, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the answer is lizards. In the podcast, Briggs discusses western fence lizards, ... Read More
Among Antibiotics, Resistance Knows No Bounds
September 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Since penicillin was isolated from a fungus in 1929, mankind's stockpile of antibiotics has expanded to include a diversity of life-saving compounds. However, from streptomycin in the 1940s to synthetics such as ciprofloxacin in the late 1980s, they are losing their effectiveness. While the idea that we are losing some potent antibiotic weapons is widely known, that's not the same as it being widely understood, says Jo Handelsman, Howard Hughes Medical Institute professor of microbiology at Yale University. She cautions that what researchers know and what the public knows are not the ... Read More
The Next Epidemic — How Society Aids Disease
June 7, 2011 • By •
One reason that E. coli kills so many — in the industrialized world as well as less-developed areas — is that the bacteria is found across mammals and birds. If livestock are infected by a lethal strain of E. coli, it only takes one round of undercooked meat for the infection to spread like wildfire to people. In fact, the vast majority of human infectious diseases can infect animals as well. And the last few decades have seen the rise of a large number of new virulent diseases — SARS, AIDS, Marburg virus, to name a few — that have animal origins. Why are so many of these ... Read More
ARCHIVE Says Home Is Where the Health Is
April 26, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Growing up in Kingston, Jamaica, Peter Williams took for granted the holes in the wood floors of his house — and the rats that crawled through them. But when his father contracted a bacterial infection that left him paralyzed, Williams, a budding architect, began to recognize the connection between shoddy housing and ill health. "The disease was directly attributed to the fact that the house was poorly constructed," says Williams, 35. "I saw firsthand how housing was both responsible for his illness and also incapable of meeting his care needs, given that he was quite immobile." If the ... Read More
Your Next M.D. Might Be a PDA
January 18, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Your doctor has a hunch that your respiratory infection and fever are caused by bacteria (and should be treated with antibiotics), but it might instead be a simple virus, which should be allowed to run its course. Today, lab tests could take several days to complete, but in a couple of years a handheld device called an acoustic wave biosensor might sample a droplet of your saliva to reveal within seconds whether your doctor’s hunch was correct. Just three of these biosensors, developed by the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center and Sandia National Laboratories, exist at the ... Read More
Teaming with Technology to Fight TB and HIV
November 24, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Tuberculosis — already infecting the global population about one new case a second — is considered one of the most dangerous opportunistic infections attacking people with HIV. The STOP TB Partnership reports that TB is the leading cause of death among persons infected with HIV in Africa. Worldwide, 1 in 4 TB deaths is HIV-related. While the calculus seems straightforward — get HIV, see your immune system falter, then get TB — the tangled tango between the two deadly diseases is more complex. According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health Division of Acquired ... Read More
Predators Make Great Mosquito Repellent
November 8, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Quiet as they are, mosquitoes generate a lot of buzz from scientists, pharmaceutical companies, aid groups and governments trying to get rid of them and the diseases they carry, including dengue, West Nile virus and malaria. Today, the fight against mosquitoes has never been so heated. In March, scientists announced a new way to interfere with mosquito reproduction by unlocking a sort of "chastity belt". In July, a University of Kansas lab was able to make the bugs more susceptible to insecticides by silencing genes in larvae using nanoparticles. Also in July, a team at the University of ... Read More
America’s Hidden Diseases
November 6, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Millions of poor Americans living in distressed regions of the country are chronically sick, afflicted by a host of hidden diseases that are not being monitored, diagnosed or treated, researchers say. From Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta to the segregated inner cities of the Great Lakes and Northeast, they say, and from Navajo reservations to Latino communities along the U.S.-Mexico border, more than 20 chronic diseases are promoting the cycle of poverty in conditions of inadequate sanitation, unsafe water supplies and rundown housing. "These are forgotten diseases among forgotten ... Read More
