Tag Archives: government

Advocacy Project: The Untreatable Epidemic

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When people talk about factory farming and modern agricultural practices, we tend to think about pollution, animal cruelty, and fattened, hormone-filled meat. These are definitely important concerns; but there is an even more insidious problem that can become a major threat to public health– antibiotic-resistant infections.

Right now, 80% of the antibiotics made in the U.S. are fed to factory-farmed animals to promote growth and to counter unsanitary living conditions. Most of this ends up in manure, which is used to fertilize our vegetables. The rest of this 80% remains in the meat that we will eat. Throughout this process, bacteria have countless opportunities to be exposed to antibiotics in small amounts. The low concentrations of these drugs don’t wipe out all the germs in the animal/region/food, but they kill enough non-resistant bugs that the ones who happen to be resistant would have less competition for resources. With more space and nutrients available to them, antibiotic-resistant bacteria are free to grow out of control and completely take over whichever animal/region/food the antibiotics happen to be in. In addition, resistant bacteria have the ability to copy their DNA and transfer it to their non-resistant peers.

Here’s the CDC’s illustration of the chain of resistance and infection:

(Courtesy of the CDC)

                                                            (Courtesy of the CDC)

If there are high enough numbers of these bacteria, they will become pathogenic and cause diseases. And the most concerning part is that these are the same medicines that are used to treat human diseases. So if someone shows up to the hospital with resistant infections, the drugs would no longer work.

This is exactly what’s been happening with the recent outbreak of Salmonella in the United States. So far, about 500 people have been infected in 25 states. There are seven strains of bacteria involved, all of which are resistant to antibiotics. This has been traced back to a poultry producer in California that – you guessed it – use antibiotics in their animal feed.

The CDC estimates that at least 2 million Americans end up in the hospital with antibiotic-resistant infections each year, and this number is increasing.

resistant_infections

                     (Via steiros.com)

There is no doubt that antibiotic resistant is a major problem. But New York representative Louise Slaughter proposed a bill last year called the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA) that, if passed, would require the FDA to re-review its approval for seven major classes of antibiotics used in agriculture that are also important for human infections. This could mean huge changes in the way factory farms work. Unfortunately, there has been so much lobbying against this bill that it has been referred to committee and pretty much forgotten. My advocacy project is trying to drum up support for PAMTA through a petition and a letter to our representative, Glenn Thompson. But even if this bill is never passed, hopefully people will become more aware of this issue and more things will be done to address it.

 

Partial List of Sources:

http://www.steiros.com/Antibiotic_Stewardship.html

http://www.fosterfarms.com/about/raise.asp

[#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

Will Research For $

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third_world_867475

Let’s talk about the government. Again? You say. But this blog’s about science! What cures got discovered this week?

Well, the answer is, profitable ones. When people hear the word “science,” what comes to mind are test tubes, fruit flies, spaceships, and cancer treatments. But the thing is, the government is actually behind all of it— not in a creepy way, but their funding is needed for any type of research.  Every scientist has to apply for grants to get enough money to keep their lab and their job.

The problem is that the government has limited funds and mostly gives grants to research about diseases whose treatment could eventually benefit the government economically. They’re basically making an investment. As a result, many serious diseases that affect poor countries (but not developed ones) are being neglected; out of 336 new drugs and vaccines developed in 2010-2011, only 1% were for diseases that are mostly common in developing countries (like tuberculosis, malaria, diarrheal and tropical diseases, etc.), even though those diseases account for 11% of the global health burden.

These diseases have become known as “neglected diseases.” Dr. Bernard Pécoul, the director of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi), says that “We must keep pushing to keep these diseases on the international policy agenda and move quickly to deliver truly transformative, life-saving treatments.”

Dr. Nathalie Wourgaft, medical director of DNDi, points out that “[There are] deadly gaps in new medicines for some of the world’s least visible patients.” And this is definitely true; research is ridiculously expensive and it often takes years and years of developing a cure, and then doing animal experiments and clinical trials, before a drug is approved. People in non-visible countries just can’t afford to pay enough money in order for all the research behind the cure to be profitable. So the government’s probably not interested.

This is obviously a pretty bad situation. But what changes in the international policy agenda could be made to fix it? Should the government set aside funding for neglected diseases? Or would it be better to provide science education in poor countries in hopes that someone will grow up to discover a cure?

Sources:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131024121923.htm

http://www.dndi.org/

[Th]e [S]hutdown: Why It Matters

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Everyone knows about the really obvious effects of the government shutdown on science— the Smithsonian museums are closed, national parks are closed, NASA is pretty much closed, and this thing pops up whenever you try to do research for a science class:

Screen Shot 2013-10-10 at 6.30.01 PM

However, there are two other slightly more serious consequences that haven’t been publicized as much: many patients with serious illness are being kept from possible treatments, and our food is no longer being inspected.

Even though people are still being enrolled in clinical trials at the National Institutes of Health, the process has become much slower. Only 12 patients have been enrolled since October 1st, when the shutdown began. Normally, about 200 patients, many with cancer, are enrolled each week and more than 1,400 trials run at any given time. But because of the lapse in funding, only people who are in immediate danger of dying are being added to the list.

It’s important to note that clinical trials are often a last hope for patients—they’ve gone through other known treatments but the disease hasn’t improved, so they decide to try new, experimental treatments that are still being studied. So while lawmakers and politicians are arguing about how health care should work, other people are trying to decide which 12 patients (out of 200) with long-term, life-threatening illnesses need treatment the most, since 75% of the NIH staff has been furloughed and the agency just doesn’t have enough funding to treat everyone.

I guess this won’t be happening anytime soon:

Screen Shot 2013-10-10 at 7.46.07 PM

The CDC and FDA have also suffered cuts, losing 68% and 45% of their staff, respectively. Among this staff are epidemiologists who had been tracing a salmonella outbreak that started in California and spread through 18 states, before they were furloughed. There have been no inspections of domestically produced food this week because inspectors, lab technicians, and many other staff members have also been sent home.

Food inspections have led to a lot of important information being made public in the past, most recently the fact that arsenic was used in chicken, turkey, and pig feed. If the government shutdown lasts for many more weeks, it would be almost impossible for anyone to know what new things are added to the food that our meal plans pay for.

These issues are frustrating because even though they are so severe, they are so easily fixed; if funding is resumed, the NIH could continue to perform clinical trials, and the CDC and FDA could go back to working on public health.

Hopefully our government will pause their health care debate long enough for that to happen.

 

Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/10/us/politics/risk-to-food-safety-seen-in-furloughs.html?src=recg

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/10/health/in-shutdown-clinical-trial-enrollment-slows-but-doesnt-halt.html?ref=science