[#ThirdWorldProblems Issue]: Sleeping Sickness

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/

 

Gene Screen

It seems like every day, people come up with new things to do with DNA that could either be borderline creepy or incredibly brilliant. Today is no different.

Hospitals have been switching from paper to electronic medical records in the past few years—now, 93% use some kind of electronic records, and 2.2% are now completely paperless. Because electronic records are much easier to scan on a massive scale, they are being used to link diseases and genes. Since 2005, there has been a type of research called genome-wide association studies, where scientists identify a lot of people with the same disorder, obtain tissue samples, and look for links between the conditions and certain mutations that are more common among these people than among everyone else.

This week, researchers are trying a new thing called phenome-wide association studies, where they take a mutation and, using electronic medical records, track down everyone who has it and look for disorders they have in common. Dr. Joshua Denny, an author of this study, explained that because of the electronic system, “we have everything they come to the doctor for.” So far, this has proved to be much more reliable than genome-wide association studies.

The medical records used in this research come from the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics Network, which includes several very prestigious hospitals.

This doesn’t exactly have controversy surrounding it because it’s such a new system, but I couldn’t help but wonder— when you work in a hospital, you have to carry all patient records in a sealed pouch to keep you from reading it. This is because hospitals are legally not allowed to give out any health information about their patients. But phenome-wide association studies gather huge amounts of data from tens of thousands of people, along with blood or tissue samples (to obtain DNA), often without the patient’s knowledge. Is this really ethical?

So what do you think about this? Are these concerns just conspiracy-theory ramblings and this research can do much more good than harm, or should privacy be protected no matter what?

 

Source:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/28/science/linking-genes-to-diseases-by-sifting-through-electronic-medical-records.html?ref=science&_r=0

Turkey With a Side of Guilt

Every Thanksgiving, I come across at least one ad or article about “heritage turkeys.” And I always get the impression that they are just another vegan-super-expensive-high-quality-psuedo-organic fad. This year I’ve seen at least six ads on Facebook alone, so I finally caved in and decided to do some research on heritage turkeys—after all, it might have something to do with science!

Screen Shot 2013-11-23 at 11.40.20 PMScreen Shot 2013-11-23 at 11.37.40 PM

Basically, there are two types of turkeys: white industrial turkeys, and several breeds of “heritage” turkeys that closely resemble the wild ones hunted by Pilgrims and Native Americans. Both descended from the same wild ancestors, but the white turkeys have been selectively bred over hundreds of years to grow as fast as possible and produce the most amount of meat. As a result, they can no longer fly. Because they are so top-heavy and it’s hard for them to walk or even stand up after a certain age, they can’t mate, so they have to be artificially inseminated. And while wild turkeys are intelligent and aggressive (Benjamin Franklin considered it a symbol of “the temper and conduct of America”), white industrial ones are apparently very dim-witted because of all the inbreeding.

Bill Niman, who raises both breeds on his ranch, observed that “not only did the industry breed the ability to fly and [procreate] out of the white birds; they bred the personality out of them too. It’s hard to interact with them—they have limited cerebral capacity.”

In addition, white turkeys are dramatically less healthy—they are more prone to disease and require a lot of antibiotics in their diet, and have a lifespan of twelve months while heritage turkeys can live for seven years.

Selective breeding seems to have done some crazy things in this case; heritage and white turkeys are about as similar as German shepherds and pugs. Finding out all of this has made me really interested in getting a heritage turkey this year. Not surprisingly, they are extremely expensive and can cost as much as $7 per pound because they take so long to raise and require so much living space. But it might be a worthwhile investment, especially compared to the moral baggage of buying (and supporting) something that’s the product of extreme industrialization and shady farming practices and messing with biology in a way that’s not really beneficial to anyone. We should definitely look into this more!

Sources:

http://www.localharvest.org/features/heritage-turkeys.jsp

http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/genetic/genetically-modified-turkey1.htm

“The Center for Postnatural History”

We’ve always known that scientists have created some pretty strange things. Popular culture agrees, giving us ideas like Frankenstein and Soylent Green and the Hulk. But now, you can actually see all of these creations under one roof. The “Center for Postnatural History” in Pittsburgh was opened last year by Richard Pell, an electronic media professor at Carnegie Melon University. Pell is very aware how controversial some of the creatures might be, so he keeps the language and labels very neutral to try to create an environment where “activists and scientists can run into each other, feel comfortable and maybe even blow each others’ minds.”

Three notable displays are Freckles the goat, GloFish®, and some leaves from a genetically modified African chestnut tree. Freckles was genetically engineered to produce in her milk the same material that makes spider silk, by Utah genetics professor Randy Lewis (who also happens to enjoy farming). This silk, which is stronger than Kevlar, could be used for everything from bulletproof vests to ligament repair. After her death, Freckles was stuffed and displayed in Richard Pell’s museum.

GloFish® are regular aquarium fish that have been engineered to produce the proteins that make jellyfish fluorescent. And the African chestnut tree has a wheat gene that makes it immune to a fungal disease that almost wiped out normal types of the tree.

This museum features many, many other post-natural species. Personally, I think the museum awesome and I might look into visiting it sometime because I’m interested in this stuff. There are many natural history museums where we can learn a lot about dinosaurs and evolution, but it would be harder to apply it to research that’s going on right now. “Center for Postnatural History” would not only generate much discussion, but it might also inspire people to come up with brilliant new ideas.

Sources:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/humans’-living-creations-put-display

http://www.postnatural.org/

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jan/14/synthetic-biology-spider-goat-genetics