Infectious causes of chronic disease
tsmith | December 4, 2013Regular readers keeping up on infectious disease issues might have seen Seth Mnookin's post yesterday, warning of an upcoming episode of the Katie Couric show focusing on the HPV vaccine. Even though Mnookin previously spoke with a producer at length regarding this topic, the promo for the show certainly did not look promising:
"The HPV vaccine is considered a life-saving cancer preventer … but is it a potentially deadly dose for girls? Meet a mom who claims her daughter died after getting the HPV vaccine, and hear all sides of the HPV vaccine controversy."
And indeed, reviews thus far show…
tsmith | June 21, 2013Student guest post by McKenzie Steger
Off the southeastern coast of Australia lies a small island that in the 1700 and 1800’s was inhabited by the very worst of Europe’s criminals and is now the only natural home in the world to a species named after the devil himself. Decades later beginning in 1996 Tasmanian devils were going about their nocturnal lifestyle in normal devilish fashion feasting on small mammals and birds, finding mates and reproducing, occasionally fighting with one another and so on. (1) Just as criminals divvied up their booty hundreds of years before, the devils were…
tsmith | June 20, 2013Student guest post by Bradley Christensen
No, this isn’t a clip from a science fiction movie. Although dramatic, this does occur in the brains of some people and animals around on our home planet. What is a prion you ask? Prions are almost as mysterious to the scientists that research them as they are to me, you and the neighbor down the street. Prion is a term used to describe an abnormal and particularly destructive strand of protein found in the brain. Proteins are the building blocks of the muscles and tissues of our bodies that work combine together to perform different functions. …
tsmith | June 20, 2013Student guest post by Kyle Malter
In many areas of the country there is a vile blood sucker that lurks in our forests, our parks and even our backyards. What concerns us is not what this creature takes but rather what it leaves in our body after it bites us: corkscrew shaped bacteria called spirochetes and with the name Borrelia burgdorferi. When the bacteria invade our bodies and cause problems along the way we call it Lyme disease.
It is Lyme, not “Lymes” disease, and here’s how it got that name. In the early 1970’s a large number of cases emerged involving children with a “bulls-eye”…
tsmith | April 27, 2013It's time for this year's second installment of student guest posts for my class on infectious causes of chronic disease. Fifth one this year is by Nai-Chung Chang.
Of the many health problems that everyone is bound to have at some point, influenza, or just “the flu,” is one of the most prominent. In fact, we call the time during which it is most prevalent the “flu season”. It has now become a regular occurrence in the U.S. to just get a shot before the flu season hits, and be free of it for the rest of the year. In some cases, like me, people just decide not to get the vaccine at all. I say…
tsmith | April 26, 2013It's time for this year's second installment of student guest posts for my class on infectious causes of chronic disease. Fourth one this round is by Kristen Coleman.
If you are anything like me, you have been told countless reasons over the years why we must watch what we eat, keep our cholesterol intake down, and try to work out. It shouldn’t really come as a surprise then that I, since I am a public health student after all, aim to convince you of yet another reason why a healthy diet and exercise are valuable. What is this huge reason to avoid Big Macs and think about taking the stairs…
tsmith | April 26, 2013It's time for this year's second installment of student guest posts for my class on infectious causes of chronic disease. Third one this round is by Jack Walsh.
The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) infection is one of the most significant global health challenges of this 21st century. Since the isolation of the virus in 1983, it has infected 70 million people among whom 35 million have died of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS).1 Although important progresses have been made in slowing down the pandemic and reducing the morbidity and mortality related to HIV/AIDS with the highly…
tsmith | April 24, 2013It's time for this year's second installment of student guest posts for my class on infectious causes of chronic disease. Second one this round is by Jonathan Yuska.
If you happen to be one of the 46 million individuals who have not been swayed to quit smoking by the countless anti-cigarette ads in print and on television, here is one more piece of evidence that may have you second thinking that next puff. On top of the more than 3,000 chemicals and heavy metals already identified in ordinary cigarettes1, upwards of a million microorganisms per cigarette have also been found to live and…
tsmith | April 23, 2013It's time for this year's second installment of student guest posts for my class on infectious causes of chronic disease. First one this year is by Dana Lowry.
Humans have a long history of illness and death from infectious diseases. It wasn’t until the 1790s that we had a solution. Edward Jenner recognized that milkmaids never contracted smallpox but suffered from a more mild disease, cowpox. Jenner took pus from a cowpox lesion on a milkmaid’s hand and placed it in an incision he made in an eight year-old boy’s arm. He then exposed the boy to smallpox; the boy didn’t contract the disease,…
tsmith | March 1, 2013Fifth of five student guest posts by Jonathan Yuska
The saying, “The more you know, the more you can control,” is no more meaningful than when used in the context of HIV detection and prevention. Public health advocates endlessly stress the need for knowing one’s status; and one would assume that any way in which the most amount of people can be tested would be beneficial for the population1. The Food and Drug Administration shared this same idea when they overwhelmingly approved the first ever over-the-counter (OTC) HIV testing kit in 20052; which in theory, sounds like a promising way to…
tsmith | February 27, 2013Third of five student guest posts by Dana Lowry
In 1911, Peyton Rous first discovered viruses can cause cancer. A chicken with a lump in her breast had been brought to Rous by a farmer. Rous prepared an extract that eliminated bacteria and tumor cells and injected this extract into other chickens—tumors grew. Rous suggested “a minute parasitic organism” was causing the tumor growth, which is now known to be a virus. However, Rous’ discovery remained very controversial, and it wasn’t until 1966 that he was awarded a Nobel Prize for his discovery. Since Rous’s discovery, researchers have…
tsmith | February 26, 2013Second of five student guest posts by Nai-Chung N. Chang
Tuberculosis (TB) is a major disease burden in many areas of the world. As such, it was declared a global public health emergency in 1993 by the World Health Organization (WHO). It is a bacterial disease that is transmitted through the air when an infected individual coughs, sneezes, speaks, or sings. However, not all individuals who contract the disease will display symptoms. This separates the infected into two categories, latent and active. Latent individuals are non-infectious and will not transmit the disease, whereas active…
tsmith | February 25, 2013First of five student guest posts by Kristen Coleman
Every morning as I prepare for class, I go through the same internal dialogue, “to wear or not to wear my hearing aide.” I am forced to do this because when I was a child I, like most American children (about 80% by age 3 as estimated by the American Academy of Family Practitioners, AAFP), suffered from otitis media and my treatment resulted in hearing loss. The treatment I underwent was called tympanostomy with ventilation tube insertion, which has rapidly become the most common reason for general anesthesia in children in the United…
tsmith | February 25, 2013It’s that time again. I teach a class every other year on infectious causes of chronic disease, looking at the role various infections play in cancer, autoimmune disease, mental illness, and other chronic conditions. Each year, the students are assigned two writing assignments-–to be posted here on the blog. Over the next week or so, I will be putting up guest posts authored by students on various topics under the broad umbrella of infection and chronic disease.
Constructive comments on their posts are appreciated, but please keep in mind that they’re students doing this as an assignment and…
tsmith | March 27, 2012The emergence of "new" diseases is a complicated issue. "New" diseases often just means "new to biomedical science." Viruses like Ebola and HIV were certainly circulating in Africa in animal reservoirs for decades, and probably millenia, before they came to the attention of physicians via human infections. Hantavirus in the American southwest has likely infected many people, causing pneumonia of unknown origin, before the Four Corners outbreak led to the eventual identification of the Sin Nombre virus. Encroachment of humans into new areas can bring them into contact with novel infectious…
tsmith | November 15, 2011Oh, Discover. You're such a tease. You have Ed and Carl and Razib and Phil and Sean, an (all-male, ahem) cluster of science bloggy goodness. But then you also fawn over HIV deniers Lynn Margulis and Peter Duesberg. Why can't you just stick with the science and keep the denial out?*
But no, now they've let it spill into their esteemed blogs. I was interested to see a new blog pop up there, The Crux, a group blog "on big ideas in science and how these ideas are playing out in the world. The blog is written by an outstanding group of writer/bloggers and scientist/writers who will bring you the…
tsmith | November 13, 2011Aah, the things one learns when awake at 3AM on a Saturday night. Via a few different Tweeps, I ran across this article from Men's Health magazine, titled "Urgent Warning: Sex with Animals Causes Cancer."
I probably should have just stopped there.
But no, I read the magazine article, which states:
Brazilian researchers polled nearly 500 men from a dozen cities, and found that--we're not joking around here--roughly 35 percent of the men had "made it" with an animal. That's a problem, because screwing a horse, donkey, pig, or any other animal was found to up your likelihood of developing…
tsmith | June 24, 2011Part One
It appears that the E. coli O104 sproutbreak is starting to wind down, with more than 3,500 cases diagnosed to date and 39 deaths. Though sprouts remain the key source of the bacterium, a recent report also documents that human carriers helped to spread the organism (via H5N1 blog). In this case, it was a food service employee working at a catering company, who spread infection to at least 20 people before she even realized she was infected.
As with many infectious diseases, there are potential lingering sequelae of infection, which can occur weeks to years after the acute…
tsmith | June 23, 2011As I've laid out this week (part 1, part 2, part 3), the realization that a fairly simple, toxin-carrying bacterium could cause a "complex" and mysterious disease like hemolytic uremic syndrome came only with 30 years' of scientific investigation and many false starts and misleading results. Like many of these investigations, the true cause was found due to a combination of hard work, novel ways of thinking, and simple serendipity--being able to connect the dots in a framework where the dots didn't necessarily line up as expected, and removing extraneous dots as necessary. It's not an easy…
tsmith | June 22, 2011I left off yesterday with the initial discovery of "Vero toxin," a toxin produced by E. coli (also called "Shiga toxin" or "Shiga-like toxin"). Though this may initially seem unconnected to hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), the discovery of this cytotoxin paved the way for a clearer understanding of the etiology of this syndrome, as well as the mechanisms by which disease progressed. By the early 1980s, several lines of research pointed toward E. coli, and particularly O157:H7, as the main cause of HUS.
A 1982 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention MMWR report found a rare E. coli…