Words about science and hiking
Let’s step back a bit on this question. We care about antibiotics and antibiotic resistance because they impact our ability to avoid suffering and death due to bacterial infections. Antibiotics are just a means to an end. Antibiotic resistance blocks one path to that end, but it is just one path; there are others. I’ll Read More …
I often despair when I read some of the papers that pass for phage therapy science, so it’s nice to see a couple of very solid contributions published this month. Neither are attention-grabbing reports of cures of patients who had failed antibiotic therapy and were at death’s door. You won’t see a word about them Read More …
Alzheimer’s rivals sepsis as the La Brea Tarpits of the pharma industry. 400+ clinical trials of new therapies were run between 2002-2012. They yielded exactly one approval. And that was for a drug (memantine) which treats symptoms but does not affect the course of the disease. Memantine was cleared in 2003; no new drugs have Read More …
Scientists show high levels of hostility aggression, and conscientiousness compared to the general population, at least according to psychologists. As a scientist and a manager of scientists, I agree but would add another trait: fear of failure. Science is supposedly distinguished from other forms of knowledge by falsifiability: if a statement cannot be disproven it Read More …
Another paper about another phage protein isn’t usually cause for notice. There are lots of phage, and they have lots of proteins, and figuring out what they all do could occupy the efforts of scientists for several millennia. Which is precisely my point. What’s sometimes lost in all the excitement about genomics is that it Read More …
Humans and bacteria are in a constant process of mutual accommodation. The discovery of antibiotics encouraged the conceit that we had reached the end of history with our microbial adversaries. We won, they lost, end of story. It wasn’t quite that neat and simple, was it? We ignored the reality that antibiotics have been around Read More …
Staph aureus excels at evading the human immune system, and its innocuous-seeming color is just one more of its tricks. The characteristic golden color was noted when it was first isolated from infected surgical wounds in 1881[1] From Microbiology in Pictures The pigment is a carotenoid, a cousin to the anti-oxidant vitamin A found in carrots Read More …
The most likely future for antivirulence therapies is that they become adjuncts rather than alternatives to antibiotic therapy. That’s the case for one of the first modern antivirulence therapies, bezlotoxumab (Zinplava) for prevention of recurrent C. difficile infections. Bezlotoxumab targets one of the toxins produced by C. diff, rather than the bug itself. It was shown to lower the recurrence Read More …
Of all the bad bugs, S. aureus – Staph – is accounted among the worst. Several hundred thousand Americans suffer severe Staph infections every year and 30,000 die. If any bacterium deserves to be classified as a pest and a killer, a microbial reprobate beyond redemption, it is surely the grape-clustered golden spheres of Staphylococcus aureus. But few bugs Read More …
Antivirulence therapies were among the very first scientific medicines. In the 1880’s Emil von Behring and Kitasato Shibasaburo developed antiserum therapies for diphtheria and tetanus. These antisera, when injected into patients, neutralized bacterial toxins without killing the bacteria. They cut the case fatality rates for these terrible diseases in half, and von Behring (but not the darker-skinned Kitasato) was recognized with the Read More …