Infectious Superbug Invades Beaches

From Live Science:

CHICAGO — Add the MRSA "superbug" to the list of concerns you bring to the beach nowadays, a research doctor said today.

It's still safe to go in the water, especially if you shower thoroughly before and after swimming, but antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a strain of bacteria that can cause staph infections that are difficult to treat with traditional anti-infection drugs such as methicillin, can be caught when you take a dip in ocean water, said Dr. Lisa Plano of the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine.

MRSA stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or multiple-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. It has become a deadly and growing problem in hospitals in recent years.

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Scientists Warn Of First Ever Case Of Human Mad Cow Disease From Blood Plasma

From The Telegraph:

The first case of a person being infected with the human form of mad cow disease after receiving contaminated blood plasma has been identified by scientists.

The man was one of thousands of haemophiliacs who received blood plasma transfusions in the years before strict controls were brought in to eliminate the spread of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD).

Until now, scientists had maintained that the 4,000 people who may have received plasma from infected donors were at very low risk of developing the fatal brain disease. Warnings were issued to them as a "highly precautionary measure".

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New Malaria Vaccine More Than 50 Percent Effective

(Photo from Foreign Policy Passport)

From Foreign Policy Passport:

Results of the latest malaria vaccine trials will be published today in The New England Journal of Medicine, and from the looks of it, the news is good -- fantastic, in fact. "We are closer than every before to having a malaria vaccine for use by children in Africa, says Christian Lucq, director of the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative.

First, some background: The new trials use a vaccine candidate known as RTSS, the most clinically advanced malaria vaccine in development. The two tests took place in Kenya and Tanzania, and included 340 and 894 children, respectively. After vaccination, children were visited in their homes to follow up on their health and most importantly, their contraction (or not) of malaria.

Here are some highlights from the results:

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Scientists Discover 21st Century Black Plague That Spreads From Rats To Humans

Black Death: A brown rat, common in the UK, has been found carrying a new strain of bacteria called Bartonella rochalimae, which is deadly to humans

From The Daily Mail:

A new plague which jumps from rats to humans has been discovered by scientists.

Fears are growing that increasing numbers of brown rats - the most common kind in Europe - are carrying a strain of bacteria that can cause serious illness in humans from heart disease to infection of the spleen and nervous system.

The new strain of bacteria called Bartonella rochalimae is spread between rats by fleas, Taiwanese researchers have said.

It was first discovered in an American woman with an enlarged spleen who had recently travelled to Peru.

'This event raised concern that it could be a newly emerged zoonotic pathogen,' said Professor Chao-Chin Chang from the National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan.

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The Reality of Mysterious Medical Maladies

From Live Science:

A recent governmental panel composed of scientists and veterans concluded that Gulf War Syndrome is real, the symptoms likely caused by neurotoxins that veterans were exposed to during the war.

About 60,000 of the nearly 700,000 Gulf War veterans began reporting health problems in the months and years following their military service. Complaints include insomnia, irritability, hair loss, chronic fatigue, muscle spasms, skin rashes, memory loss, diarrhea, headaches, and unexplained aches and pains. Some veterans believe that the disease is also responsible for birth defects and cancer.

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New Strain Of Deadly Ebola Virus Discovered

A Medecins Sans Frontieres team takes a blood sample from a man suspected of carrying the Ebola virus in Bundibugyo following an Ebola outbreak in Uganda in 2007. Scientists said Friday an outbreak of Ebola that killed 37 people in Uganda last year was sparked by a hitherto unknown species of one of the world's most notorious viruses. (AFP/Medecins Sans Frontieres /File/Claude Mahoudeau)

From Yahoo News/AFP:

PARIS (AFP) – Scientists said Friday an outbreak of Ebola that killed 37 people in Uganda last year was sparked by a hitherto unknown species of one of the world's most notorious viruses.

The strain -- provisionally named Bundibugyo ebolavirus after the district where the outbreak occurred -- joins four other known species of the pathogen, they said.

More than one in three of patients infected with Bundibugyo died, according to their study, appearing in the US journal PLoS Pathogens, published online by the open-access Public Library of Science (PLoS).

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Gulf War Research Panel Finds 1 In 4 Veterans Suffers From Illness Caused By Toxic Exposure

From E! Science News:

At least one in four of the 697,000 U.S. veterans of the 1991 Gulf War suffer from Gulf War illness, a condition caused by exposure to toxic chemicals, including pesticides and a drug administered to protect troops against nerve gas, and no effective treatments have yet been found, a federal panel of scientific experts and veterans concludes in a landmark report released Monday. The Congressionally-mandated Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses presented the report today to Secretary of Veterans Affairs James Peake at VA headquarters in Washington.

Scientific staff support to the Committee is provided by the Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH). The full report is posted at: http://sph.bu.edu/insider/racreport

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How Disease Can Wipe Out An Entire Species

Photo by Patricia Wynne
This illustration shows the rat species Rattus nativitatis, which went extinct on Australia's Christmas Island by 1908. In a new study of museum DNA samples, researchers report that the likely cause of the animals' extinction was an introduced disease.

From The MSNBC:

Rat study presents first evidence for extinction due to ‘hyperdisease’.

Disease can wipe out an entire species, reveals a new study on rats native to Australia's Christmas Island that fell prey to "hyperdisease conditions" caused by a pathogen that led to the rodents' extinction.

The study, published in the latest issue of the journal PLoS One, presents the first evidence for extinction of an animal entirely because of disease.

The researchers say it's possible for any animal species, including humans, to die out in a similar fashion, although a complete eradication of Homo sapiens would be unlikely.

"I can certainly imagine local population or even citywide 'extinction,' or population crashes due to introduced pathogens under a condition where you have a pathogen that can spread like the flu and has the pathogenicity of the 1918 flu or Ebola viruses," co-author Alex Greenwood, assistant professor of biological sciences at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., told Discovery News.

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The Good News and Bad News About MS

Multiple sclerosis attacks the myelin sheath that protects the nerve fiber.
(From How Stuff Works)

From Slate:

A miracle drug carries some serious risks.

Problem: Multiple sclerosis is a quite common and often terrible disease that most frequently attacks young adults—especially young women. There are two phases to MS—an early one and a late one. The early phase, in which the disease waxes and wanes, is caused when the body becomes allergic to its own tissues—specifically, white matter located in the brain and spinal cord. The inflammation caused by this allergy (which attacks the cells that form a protective layer surrounding the long, cablelike structures in nerve cells responsible for carrying electrical signals) causes the early symptoms (like visual disturbances or unsteadiness in walking) and primes the body for the second phase, in which irreversible damage is done to nerve cells, causing marked weakness, fatigue, loss of balance and coordination, bladder and bowel problems, and even changes in thinking and depression. There is a lot of evidence that if the early phase is managed in ways that decrease symptoms, the late phase, during which most of the irreversible damage happens, can be delayed and perhaps even prevented.

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Oldest Malarial Mummies Shed Light On Disease Evolution

From National Geographic:

The oldest known cases of malaria have been discovered in two 3,500-year-old Egyptian mummies, scientists announced.

Researchers in Germany studied bone tissue samples from more than 90 mummies found in the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes, now called Luxor.

Two adult mummies from separate tombs had tissues containing ancient DNA from a parasite known to cause malaria, the researchers announced at a conference last week.

In addition, a separate team at University College London recently found that a pair of 9,000-year-old skeletons—a woman and a baby—discovered off the coast of Israel were infected with the oldest known cases of tuberculosis in modern humans.

Both finds contribute to the burgeoning field of paleopathology, or the study of ancient diseases.

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Doorknobs And TV Remotes Are Germ Hotbeds

Germs, germs everywhere. Now that cold and flu season has arrived, germs are lurking in more places than you might think. Read on to find out where pesky bugs love to hang out. Rob Cross/The Ottawa Citizen

From Yahoo News/AP:

WASHINGTON – Someone in your house have the sniffles? Watch out for the refrigerator door handle. The TV remote, too. A new study finds that cold sufferers often leave their germs there, where they can live for two days or longer. Scientists at the University of Virginia, long known for its virology research, tested surfaces in the homes of people with colds and reported the results Tuesday at the nation's premier conference on infectious diseases.

Doctors don't know how often people catch colds from touching germy surfaces as opposed to, say, shaking a sick person's hand, said Dr. Birgit Winther, an ear, nose and throat specialist who helped conduct the study.

Two years ago, she and other doctors showed that germs survived in hotel rooms a day after guests left, waiting to be picked up by the next person checking in.

For the new study, researchers started with 30 adults showing early symptoms of colds. Sixteen tested positive for rhinovirus, which causes about half of all colds. They were asked to name 10 places in their homes they had touched in the preceding 18 hours, and researchers used DNA tests to hunt for rhinovirus.

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The Spread Of Polio

Polio Spreads to New Countries and Increases
Where It’s Endemic -- New York Times

Polio infections are increasing and spreading to new countries, according to case counts recently released by the World Health Organization.

Since April, outbreaks have been found in 10 countries beyond the 4 in which polio is considered endemic — Afghanistan, India, Nigeria and Pakistan. And in those four countries, the number of cases is more than double the number found by this time in 2007.

In Africa, cases have been found as far south as Angola and as far west as Ethiopia. Each detected case implies another 200 cases with few or no symptoms, experts say.

There have been outbreaks of both type 1 and type 3 polio, which frustrate W.H.O. plans, begun in 2005, to concentrate on a monovalent vaccine against type 1. Recent studies show that vaccine to be far more effective against type 1 than the old trivalent vaccine was. But it does not protect against type 3, and a new monovalent vaccine against that is being introduced. (Type 2 was eliminated in 1999.)

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Google Invests In Preventing Disease

Electron micrograph of the bird flu virus. Google is funding an initiative to spot dangerous pathogens that leap from animals to humans. Image: Corbis

Pandemics: Google Takes On Real Viruses -- The Guardian

The search giant Google has pledged to fund research aimed at detecting and preventing virulent new diseases

Google has pledged to try to stop the next global pandemic by investing $15m in a series of hi-tech health schemes.

Money from the internet giant will provide funding for six projects that aim to detect new diseases and understand the conditions that help them spread – potentially saving millions of lives in the process.

"Business as usual won't prevent the next Aids or Sars," said Dr Larry Brilliant, the executive director of Google.org. "The teams we're funding today are on the frontiers of digital and genetic early-detection technology."

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Africa Needs Disease Warning Systems

From Cosmos Magazine:

BARCELONA: Africa needs early warning systems to deal with the increased threat of disease spreading from wild animals to humans caused by climate change, health experts say.

Speaking at the International Union for Conservation of Nature congress in Barcelona, Spain, the scientists said that many wildlife pathogens, such as Ebola, may spread as a result of changing temperatures and precipitation caused by climate change

Monitoring patterns

"Building warning systems and undertaking disease surveillance in places like the Congo Basin would be cheaper than building expensive machines to control an outbreak," said William Karesh, head of the Field Veterinary Program at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).

The early warning systems he suggested include monitoring disease patterns in wild animals, and monitoring environmental changes and how these affect the behaviour of wild animals and pathogens.

According to Karesh, these offer both fertile ground for building early warning systems and areas for future research. "Wild animals are more susceptible to new diseases than domesticated animals, and are good indicators of an impending outbreak," he said.

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A New Class of Antibiotics Could Offer Hope Against TB

Indian Tuberculosis (TB) patients stand in a queue for sputum collection at a Tuberculosis Treatment Centre in New Delhi. Manan Vatsyayana / AFP / Getty

From Time Magazine:

Eighty years after the discovery of penicillin, researchers say they are on the verge of developing a new class of antibiotics.

Publishing in the Oct. 17 issue of the journal Cell, scientists at Rutgers University describe a group of antibiotic compounds, first isolated decades ago from naturally occurring antibacterial substances in soil. Among them, researchers say, is a compound called myxopyronin that shows great promise. It has been synthesized in the lab and shown to be safe in animal trials, and although the drug hasn't been tested in humans yet, cell-based experiments suggest that it is potent enough to kill a wide range of stubborn bugs, including drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis and the deadly type of staph known as MRSA.

The Rutgers research reflects a much-needed, if slow, renewal of scientific interest in antibiotics development. The last two decades of the 20th century saw nearly zero progress, and in those years several disease-causing bacteria evolved resistance to commonly used drugs. Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that more than 40% of staph infections in the U.S. in 2006 were MRSA — a bug that now kills more Americans a year than AIDS. Today, the first line of treatment against MRSA is vancomycin, a formidable antibiotic that has been around since the 1950s and is otherwise typically considered a drug of last resort. In the developing world, health workers report a proliferation of XDR (extensively drug-resistant) and MDR (multidrug-resistant) tuberculosis, against which the current first-line antibiotics, rifamycins, developed in the 1960s, have also become useless.

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Genetic-based Human Diseases Are An Ancient Evolutionary Legacy, Research Suggests

Artistic illustration of a phylostratigraphy.
(Credit: Irena Andreic, Ruđer Bošković Institute, Zagreb)

From Space Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 19, 2008) — Tomislav Domazet-Lošo and Diethard Tautz from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany, have systematically analysed the time of emergence for a large number of genes - genes which can also initiate diseases. Their studies show for the first time that the majority of these genes were already in existence at the origin of the first cells.

The search for further genes, particularly those which are involved in diseases caused by several genetic causes, is thus facilitated. Furthermore, the research results confirm that the basic interconnections are to be found in the function of genes - causing the onset of diseases - can also be found in model organisms (Molecular Biology and Evolution).

The Human Genome Project that deciphered the human genetic code, uncovered thousands of genes that, if mutated, are involved in human genetic diseases. The genomes of many other organisms were deciphered in parallel. This now allows the evolution of these disease associated genes to be systematically studied.

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Haemorrhagic Virus Carried By Common African Mouse

From the New Scientist:

Three people have died and another is seriously ill with a previously unknown strain of a virus carried by a common African rodent. The virus requires close contact to spread, but experts warn that more like it could be circulating.

A 36-year-old woman on a small farm outside the Zambian capital Lusaka developed flu-like symptoms in early September. When they worsened she was taken by air ambulance to South Africa, where she died.

Alarms were raised after the ambulance paramedic and the nurse who attended her also died after developing similar symptoms two weeks later. The nurse who tended the paramedic is also in a serious condition.

On Sunday South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Diseases announced that the victims were infected by an arenavirus, one of a family of viruses carried by rodents.

"They are very widespread," says Bob Swanepoel, former head of the NICD and one of the world's leading experts on haemorrhagic viruses. In Africa, arenaviruses are carried, with no symptoms, by the multimammate mouse, a common farm pest sold in Europe as a "pocket pet".

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"Deadly Dozen" Diseases Could Stem From Global Warming

(Photo from National Geographic)

Tick populations will shift as a result of climate change, bringing Lyme disease to new regions and infecting more animals and people. An October 2008 study suggests that global warming will lead to new outbreaks of other dangerous diseases as well.

From National Geographic:

A spike in deadly infectious diseases in wildlife and people may be the "most immediate consequence" of global warming, according to a new report released today.

Dubbed the "deadly dozen," sicknesses such as Lyme disease, yellow fever, plague, and avian influenza, or bird flu, may skyrocket as global shifts in temperature and precipitation transform ecosystems.

Babesia, cholera, ebola, intestinal and external parasites, red tides, Rift Valley fever, sleeping sickness and tuberculosis round out the list. (Read descriptions.)

An "early warning system" based on an international wildlife-monitoring network may be the only effective defense, said William Karesh, a report co-author and vice president of Global Health Programs at the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society.

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The Continual Existance Of Tuberculosis

(Click To Enlarge)
World TB incidence. Cases per 100,000; Red => 300, orange = 200–300, yellow = 100–200, green = 50–100, blue =< grey =" n/a." href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculosis">Photo of world map is from Wikipedia)

Tuberculosis: An Ancient Disease Continues to Thrive
-- Time Magazine

The Church of Scotland Hospital in Tugela Ferry, South Africa, sits in an arid valley among the mountains of KwaZulu-Natal. Occupying a dozen or so tin-roofed, low-slung buildings, the hospital serves its rural patients well: Women come to have babies, H.I.V. patients register to receive their medications, and those infected with tuberculosis check in for a chance to recover from an ancient scourge.

But in 2005 a physician noticed that some of those TB patients, many of whom were H.I.V.-positive, were not getting any better, despite being on anti-TB medications. Nothing he provided them seemed to control the tubercle bacillus flourishing in their bodies. Of the 53 who were sickest, 52 died, most within a month of entering the hospital.

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A Cure For The Uncommon Flu

The H5N1 Virus

Scientists Have Succeed In Replicating Flu Pandemic
Antibodies From 90 Year Old Survivors

Ninety years ago the Spanish flu swept across the globe, killing between 50 and 100 million people in only a few months. Since then, the specter of another flu pandemic dealing death and woe around the world has periodically terrified the medical and popular communities. But scientists searching for ways to prevent a similar outbreak in the form of the H5N1 bird flu have found a cure for the deadliest flu in the most unlikely place: nonagenarian immune systems.

A new paper in the journal Nature confirms that a team of doctors has succeeded in isolating pandemic-flu killing antibodies from 90+ year old survivors of the Spanish flu outbreak. To test whether or not the antibodies still worked, the doctors injected the immune cells into mice, and then dosed the mice with preserved copies of the 1918 flu recovered from frozen victims of the Spanish flu that had been buried in Alaskan permafrost. Within those mice, the antibodies and the virus renewed a microscopic battle that had lain dormant for almost a century. The mice that received a high dose of the antibodies lived, while mice that received a low dose of antibody, or none at all, died as expected.

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