Monthly Archives: April 2014

[#ThirdWorldProblems Issue 2]: World Malaria Day!

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(Picture courtesy of rollbackmalaria.org)

(Picture courtesy of rollbackmalaria.org)

Friday, April 25th was World Malaria Day! This is a date designed to raise awareness and funding for malaria- one of the Big Three” diseases that together account for one out of every ten deaths in the world. (The other two are tuberculosis and AIDS). This year, the theme was: “Invest in the future. Defeat malaria.”

And malaria definitely deserves more attention and research. Every year, more than 200 million people are infected and more than 600,000 people (mostly children under 5 years old) are killed by this disease. That’s about 20 times the number of students in Penn State!

The parasite that causes malaria is also harder to study than many others because it has such a complex life cycle. It does completely different things depending on whether it is inside a mosquito, in someone’s liver, or in their bloodstream. So researchers have to decide the exact part of the life cycle they will focus on, and consider many other ecological and social factors when talking about the disease (since mosquitoes are the main carriers). As if that’s not complicated enough, it also infects monkeys and other animals that can come into contact with people, so only treating the disease in humans wouldn’t eradicate it.

(Diagram courtesy of nature.com)

(Diagram courtesy of nature.com)

The main symptoms of malaria include nausea, fatigue, fever, chills, muscle pain, and an enlarged spleen. However, some people may develop a more serious set of complications when the parasite invades the brain– they can get hallucinations, slip into a coma, and die. As of now there is actually no way to determine which patients are at risk for these dangerous types of malaria. And so many children who have a high chance of dying are just sent home with mild malaria medication.

However, a study was published just last Wednesday about a pretty amazing discovery— researchers in Sweden have found 13 proteins that are present in the blood samples of patients with the lethal form of malaria, but are much less common in patients with mild malaria.

“Our results indicate that there is muscle tissue that is broken down, particularly in patients who have cerebral malaria (the lethal type) — something that does not occur in patients who have lighter malaria variants,” explains Dr. Nilsson, a professor at the university that published the paper. Apparently the byproducts of muscle breakdown can be identified from blood tests.

This discovery has pretty awesome implications– physicians would be able to easily identify children with deadly malaria, and then care for them accordingly. And the local governments of malaria-stricken countries (and US agencies like the FDA) don’t require approval for testing blood samples, so this can happen very quickly. If this really works, the mortality rate of malaria could be reduced drastically. World Malaria Day has definitely gone well this year.

 

Sources:

http://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/malaria-symptoms

http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=122119

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140423095158.htm

 

[#ThirdWorldProblems Issue]: Sleeping Sickness

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Sleeping sickness is one of those diseases that we don’t hear much about in the US but are a huge concern in many tropical regions. It is common in 49 countries in Africa and infects over 10,000 people a year– in some places it is actually the most common cause of death.10,000 people might not seem like much, but sleeping sickness is a chronic infection and can stay in a patient for months or years without causing any symptoms. And by the time symptoms show up, the person is probably in an advanced stage and his nervous system has already been invaded. The infected person would experience “changes in behavior, confusion, sensory disturbances, poor coordination, and disturbance of the sleep cycle,” according to the World Health Organization. Just like rabies, it eventually causes victims to go mad, fall into a coma, and die.

You can read more here.

A pregnant tsetse fly. Look how repulsive that is

A pregnant tsetse fly– female flies tend to “breast-feed” their young.

Sleeping sickness is almost always transmitted through a bite from the tsetse fly (which also carries many other diseases that kill livestock), so getting rid of this insect would pretty much stop the epidemic. Just this month, researchers at Yale announced that they had finished sequencing the genome of the tsetse fly after ten years of work.

This is a really big deal because the tsetse fly has proved to be very difficult to study so far. Most insects lay hundreds of identical eggs at a time, but this fly gives birth to one larvae at a time and has no more than 10 children during her lifetime. The entire genome project was done with only 15 flies.

One major issue with research on sleeping sickness is lack of funding– because this disease is really only an issue in third-world countries, it gets very little money from governments in Europe, North America, or other well-off regions. Dr. Aksoy, who ran the genome sequencing project at Yale, expalined “Sleeping sickness is a neglected disease, an African disease,” she said, “so we didn’t get [the huge amounts of money that went into research on mosquitoes, which are a threat to Americans].” The sequencing project was almost completely funded by the World Health Organization and various nonprofit groups. Many of the scientists were volunteers.

The researchers have already discovered several genes that can be exploited to either kill the fly (with specially made pesticides) or to make it resistant to the parasite that causes sleeping sickness. Hopefully this new discovery will lead to some treatments for sleeping sickness or weapons against the insect. But more importantly, this might also bring more attention to many other neglected diseases that are wreaking havoc in third-world regions but are not receiving enough support for progress to be made.

 

Sources:

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs259/en/

http://www.who.int/neglected_diseases/diseases/en/

 

The Ripple Effect of Oil

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We probably all remember the disastrous BP oil spill of 2010, when over 4.1 billion barrels of crude oil spewed into the ocean over the course of three months. This has become old news– I personally haven’t heard about this oil spill for a long time and the media rarely talks about it anymore. But even though the leak has been stopped and the panic has died down, some of the more serious effects of this event are only just starting to be felt.

This past fishing season has unearthed an extremely high number of deformed animals, including eyeless, clawless, or shell-less crabs, fish with lesions and tumors and no livers, and clams with soft shells.

The Simpsons called it years ago (Picture courtesy of taringa.net)

The Simpsons called it years ago        (Picture courtesy of taringa.net)

In fact, according to Louisiana commercial fisher Tracy Kuhns, more than half of the shrimp caught in a popular shrimping area by the Gulf of Mexico had no eyes. One fisherman caught 400 pounds of shrimp at the height of the shrimp season, none of which had eyes (or even eye sockets).

In the meantime, researchers from the US and Australia discovered that embryos of large commercial fish (including herring, salmon, tuna, etc.) also tended to develop deformities and have shorter lifespans after being exposed to crude oil.This study was done in a lab, and although people haven’t noticed major dents in commercial fish populations due to these deformities, it’s a little alarming that oil can have long-lasting effects that go beyond just coating someone’s feathers or gills, and that can appear a long time after the disaster.

But why are these effects only showing up now? It turns out that crude oil is a mutagen that damages the DNA of many different animals. After several generations, these changes actually become part of the species’ genome and can lead to birth defects or cancer.

Shrimp with tumors and no eyes
(Photo courtesy of thinkprogress.org)

This raises even more concerns— how can this affect beachgoers in Florida and other places in the South? What did the fishermen do with all the deformed animals they caught? What about dolphins, whales, and sharks that depend on these creatures for food? Are there any other less visible effects that could be even more dangerous? One thing we can be sure about is that the consequences of the spill are turning out to be much messier than we had thought.

So what does the government plan to do to address this issue? Go back to offshore drilling as soon as possible, of course. In fact, oil companies have pretty much gone back to doing whatever they were doing before the spill, and Senator David Ritter of Louisiana is currently advocating for more drilling permits for the Gulf of Mexico. “Mother Nature has proved amazingly resilient with recovering from the spill,” he cheerfully observed.

 

Sources:

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/04/18/466660/legacy-of-bp-oil-spill-eyeless-shrimp-and-fish-with-lesions/

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/us/fish-embryos-exposed-to-oil-from-bp-spill-develop-deformities-a-study-finds.html?ref=science

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140310090615.htm

Trapped No More

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The last thing you remember is crashing your car. You end up in the hospital with major brain damage and slip into a coma for an extremely long time. When you wake up, you can finally see and hear what’s going on around you– your family and friends and doctors talking to you and asking questions. You understand exactly what they are saying, but your body just won’t move the way it should and you can’t even turn your eyes to glance at them. You can’t wiggle your toes to prove to your doctor that you’re “in there,” and after nine or ten years, the people around you start giving up hope.

Sound like a pretty bad situation? Unfortunately, this might be a true story for many survivors of serious accidents or illnesses who are classified as “vegetative” (they haven’t shown signs of awareness for six months). “Vegetative” people have basic reflexes and can breathe, make noises, and move their eyes, but are unable to track movements with their eyes, or perform voluntary movements when they are told to.

Until recently, there hasn’t been much evidence that vegetative people were truly aware of their surroundings. But this changed in 2006, when Dr. Adrian Owen found a way to communicate with people who couldn’t move; using an fMRI machine (functional magnetic resonance imaging), he identified two different brain areas that were activated when the patient imagined herself playing tennis, and when she thought about walking through her house. Playing tennis caused parts of the motor cortex to light up, while exploring the house activated another area in the center of the brain. Dr. Owen then asked several vegetative people obvious questions, like “Is the sky blue?” or “Do you have three siblings?” and they would think about tennis for yes, and house for no. The patients shocked doctors and scientists everywhere by answering almost all of the questions correctly.

Terri Schiavo– could fMRI have allowed her to communicate with her family?
(Photo courtesy of LifeSiteNews.com)

As soon as the public realized that fMRI can be used to communicate with vegetative people, everyone wanted this technology to become more accessible so they could use it. Right now, Dr. Owen is working on making fMRI machines more portable and user-friendly so family members of these accident victims could take advantage of it.

fMRI machines are bulky and expensive to run.
(Photo courtesy of Bing Images)

This discovery also brings up many more questions. What brain areas can be activated by other simpler thoughts (since walking through your house or playing tennis would take at least 30 seconds to imagine)? Will fMRI technology become advanced enough that you can guess exactly what the person’s thoughts are, without having to ask yes-no questions? And on a more serious note, can we rely on these machines to ask patients if they want to end their life support? There are lots of possibilities, and I’m excited to see where this will go in the future!

 

Sources:

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/man-supposed-vegetative-state-communicates/story?id=17716726&singlePage

http://www.nature.com/news/neuroscience-the-mind-reader-1.10816