Science Ain't So Bad

OUR BUDDY, MISTER PYLORI

THE BUG THAT SHARES YOUR LUNCH

Helicobacter pylori. Ever hear of it? It’s a bug that eats your gut.

I guess you could say it dines where you dine.

It wasn’t THAT long ago (1982) that two Australians, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, discovered that these little helicobacter pylori were involved with ulcers. An amazing, amazing thing, really, since everyone KNEW that ulcers were caused by stress. Bacteria couldn’t live in the stomach where it’s so acid.

That’s where we were wrong.

We now know that there are bugs (I’m being terminally cute here, I mean, microorganisms) which can live in places you wouldn’t believe. Hot, dry, cold, acidic, basic, radioactive. We call them “extremeophiles”. If they can live in yer gut, what next? Could they live on Mars?

In New York, even?

Well.

In fact, helicobacter pylori do inhabit the intestinal tract where they are associated with ulcers, gastritis, and cancer. The obvious question: if this stuff can be caused by microbes, can antibiotics help?

Sure.

Which means that some people are getting cured.

If everything goes right.

Not so fast, though. Ever hear about antibiotic resistance? Every time we get our hopes up, there always seems to be a new disappointment. Finding out about helicobacter pylori was a great step. But efficiently rousting MISTER pylori from the gut?  Currently that means using several antibiotics as well as strong anti-acids.

Sometimes it works.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

Where to turn? How about the University of Rhode Island?

RHODY TEK

LAB ON A CHIP ( Mohammad Faghri, Dept Of Mechanical Engineering, URI )

Ever heard of the University of Rhode Island? It’s a public university in a state the size of a  parking lot.

URI seems to be having its own “Sputnik moment”, something ABC’s Christiane Amanpour (a URI graduate) calls ” a whole new era of technological, scientific.. progress”. Stanford and MIT have nothing to apologize for. Excellent centers of science and engineering. But they’re looking over their shoulders at “Rhody Tek”

A group of URI’s scientists have reduced the functionality of a medical testing lab onto a single chip. Drop of blood. Instant results. This technology  may wind up in apps for the iPhone. Android phones, too.

Another group’s figured out how to use saliva (instead of blood) to monitor immunosuppressive drugs. (Don’t see the big deal? I’m happy for you. I hope you never do.) And another group’s working on a patch for anti-tick vaccines. (I said the STATE’S small. I didn’t say the insects were.)

URI’s Graduate School of Oceanography, which had a research vessel on station monitoring the BP oil spill,  has hundreds of projects cooking.

(My wife? Maybe she works at this fine institution, maybe she doesn’t. I would NEVER let something like that influence my objectivity!!!!)

What’s URI got to do with h pylori?

A group headed by Dr. Steven Moss is  developing a vaccine against helicobactoer pylori. The vaccine is delivered nasally, by the way. Yet another “sniffer”. (The work’s in the Journal Vaccine.) In addition to the researchers from URI,  Moss is working with scientists from Brown University, Rhode Island Hospital, and Epivax, Inc..  In the  careful way that researchers talk, he calls this work “encouraging” but “preliminary”.

Which it is.

If everything works out, there’ll be a lot less miserable digestive tracts on this planet.

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Image credit: Wikipedia commons.

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BOMBS CAN BE HIDDEN IN ALMOST ANYTHING

NEUTRALIZING TERRORISM

EXCUSES

I’ve been a little slow to update the blog this time. I hope you understand. Six feet of snow in my state this year.

Seriously.

Brrr!

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"Is it my imagination or is this one kinda restless?"

OW! OW! OW!

Although it’s UNUSUAL to wake up in the middle of an operation, it isn’t that rare, either.

Not to scare you or nothin’, but I’m lookin at a report in Deutsches Ärzteblatt International by Petra Bischoff and Ingrid Rundshagen. The report states that as many as one in 500 patients experience “unintended awareness” in the middle of an operation. For Massachusetts General, which does about 34,000 surgical procedures a year, that could be 78 people.

Worse for kids. Could be as much as one in 50.

Pop quiz. How many lawyers are there in the United States and what do they do for a living? (Answer: more lawyers than surgeons. More than all the doctors in the country put together. As for what they do for a living, care to guess how some of them are spending their time?)

Anesthesia isn’t just one thing. It consist of

unconsciousness (being asleep)
analgesia (doesn’t hurt)
amnesia (not being able to remember anything bad)
and temporary paralysis (can’t move)
reversibility’s good, too

All this stuff’s supposed to happen simulaneously. In fact, it’s really important that it does.

What happens when things go wrong? One possibility is that you might not be asleep when you’re sposed to be; you might feel what’s going on; you might be unable to move and,  therefore, be unable to let anyone know AND you might remember every horrible moment, later. That’s a really bad combo.

Another possibility: you might experience the pain but not recall the infinitely crappy experience. Does suffering count if you can’t remember it?

So many issues. So few trained philosophers.

Bischoff and and Rundshagen provide some suggestions to anesthesiologists and surgeons about possible steps to avoid unintended consciousness among their patients and MISTER ScienceAintSoBad fervently hopes their suggestions are heeded and lead to more tranquil surgical experiences but, all in all, MISTER ScienceAintSoBad would be a lot happier if he had never reviewed this darn paper.

Some things you just don’t want to know.

A CAVEAT

I don’t want to scare the pants off of you.

Anesthesiologists sometimes describe patients as being “light”. Doesn’t mean they’re fully awake. There’s an entire spectrum of wakefulness. Bischoff/Rundshagen describe “awareness” but don’t appear to distinguish how awake the patients are. It may well be that many of them are a little more aware than they should be but well south of  being tortured. It’s good to understand some of the things that  can happen during surgery, No need to walk around with a ripe appendix though.

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Credits for the above image (which show an operation on a US Navy ship)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

OBSESSIVE INNOVATION

LANGUAGE BARRIER?

You wouldn’t remember Esperanto.

Idealistic project.

The idea was to just make up a language. a good one with a logical grammar and no history behind it to piss anyone off who thinks that the Esperants exploited his people and enslaved his great grandparents. With no “baggage”, it could be introduced around the world and become the new common language for all.

Good idea, right?

What happened?

It wasn’t spoken in enough colonies so it got ignored.

Today, English is the global language. Maybe Chinese’ll be the next one.

But Google’s got an app for that all right.  It just announced that it’s cracked the “impossible” problem of rapid automated voice translation. Still a little rough. It’s available “for now” to converse in Spanish to English/ English to Spanish. Other languages will follow as the technology matures.

This is amazing. It was thought to be way beyond what could be done with present technology.

ScienceAintSoBadRating on this one?

Humbled.

GOOGLE  SCIENCE  FAIR

Speaking of Google (aren’t we always?). Google’s announced a Science Fair. It’s for kids 13 to 18 years old. First prize: $50,000 and a trip to the Galapagos Islands. Lot of other prizes. This is worldwide although certain “pariah” countries like North Korea and Syria are off the list for, I suspect, legal reasons.