Posts Tagged ‘health’
“Sometimes this high-tech world calls for low-tech solutions”*…
Our human war against infectious microbes has escalated. As bioscience has produced a stream of anti-bacterial and anti-fungal treatments, the continuously-evolving micro-organisms they target evolve in ways to protect themselves… and so our antibiotics become less effective.
This antibiotic resistance is estimated to result in more than 2.8 million infections from antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and more than 35,000 people die as a result. Antibiotic resistance adds $20 billion in excess direct healthcare costs each year in the US. Additional costs to society for lost productivity could be as high as $35 billion a year. All of this is driven in some measure by over-prescription (the CDC reckons that over 25% of antibiotics prescribed in US outpatient settings are unnecessary)– but the evolutionary dynamics of our microbial “enemies” being what they are, the problem would be material in any case.
So effective non-antibiotic treatments are especially valuable. Ian Ingram reports on one of the latest..
The FDA cleared medical-grade Australian sheep blowfly (Lucilia cuprina) larvae in what maker Cuprina Holdings believes marks the first debridement product to use this particular species.
Dubbed Medifly Maggots, the product [pictured above] is indicated for removing dead or infected tissue from non-healing necrotic skin and soft tissue wounds — such as pressure or neuropathic foot ulcers — and non-healing traumatic or post-surgical wounds.
A healthcare worker is required to oversee the application of the prescription maggot product, which was cleared based on demonstration of equivalence to the previously cleared medical-grade green bottle blowfly larvae — Lucilia sericata (Medical Maggots).
“Maggot debridement therapy has earned its place in modern wound care, and adding a second FDA-cleared species strengthens the entire field,” Ronald Sherman, MD, the company’s medical and scientific director, said in a statement.
“Lucilia cuprina has a meaningful international track record,” and the new clearance “gives clinicians and their patients more flexibility in how this therapy is delivered,” added Sherman, who has worked on the development of medical-grade maggots for decades and was instrumental in getting the first product cleared by the FDA in 2004.
According to recent estimates, anywhere from 1-2% of people in developed countries have chronic wounds, which are associated with greater risks of limb amputation and mortality.
Maggots, long used for clearing dead or non-healing tissue before the invention of antibiotics, can spare antibiotics and have also been associated with a lower risk of lower-limb amputation in diabetics with non-healing lesions…
As poet A. R. Ammons wrote (in “Catalyst“): “Honor the maggot, supreme catalyst.”
“New Type of Maggot Cleared by FDA as Medical Treatment,” from @medpagetoday.com.
###
As we rethink remedies, we might spare a thought for Alice Stewart; she died on this date in 2002. A physician and epidemiologist, she specialized in social medicine and the effects of radiation on health. Starting in WW II, she investigated the health effects of exposure to TNT in ammunitions factories, of carbon tetrachloride, and a prevalence of tuberculosis among shoe industry workers.
In the 1950s, Stewart led a pioneering study of x-rays (especially the pre-natal x-rays of expectant mothers) as a cause of childhood cancer. Her results were initially regarded as unsound, but were eventually accepted worldwide; the use of medical x-rays during pregnancy and early childhood was curtailed as a result– though it took around two and a half decades.
And after a visit to the U.S. in 1974, Stewart consulted on a major investigation of the health of workers in the nuclear industry there: she examined the sickness records of employees in the Hanford (WA) plutonium production plant and found a far higher incidence of radiation-induced ill health than was noted in official studies (produced by the nuclear industry).
Stewart was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 1986 “for bringing to light in the face of official opposition the real dangers of low-level radiation.” In 1997 she was invited to become the first Chair of the European Committee on Radiation Risk.
“It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form”*…
We Americans spend over $60 Billion a year on dietary supplements and herbal remedies; to the extent that the market is regulated here in the U.S. it is (essentially exclusively) by the FDA– which treats the category as “food,” not “medicine” and “oversees” the industry/market very lightly. Indeed, while the extent of fraud in the supplement/remedy market (ineffective, mislabeled, or dangerous products) is estimated to be in the billions of dollars per year, the introduction to the FDA’s data base of “Health Fraud Products” reads:
This list includes unapproved products that have been subject to FDA health fraud related violations. These products have been cited in warning letters, online advisory letters, recalls, public notifications, and press announcements for issues varying from products marketed as dietary supplements claiming to cure, mitigate, treat or prevent disease, to the use of undeclared ingredients or new dietary ingredients.
This list only includes a small fraction of the potentially hazardous products marketed to consumers online and in retail establishments. Even if a product is not included in this list, consumers should exercise caution before using certain products…
That said, over half of us make those choices based on health and wellness information from social media influencers or podcasts… and too often these days, even the ostensibly qualified pitch-people are being faked by AI.
As Matthew Wills reminds us, we’ve been here before…
Never more than seventeen thousand people, the Shakers are today best remembered for their handsome furniture. In their own time they were renowned for their homemade medicinal remedies. They might have had a dubious reputation for their outlandish dancing, celibacy, gender equality, and for believing that their founder, “Mother” Ann Lee, was a manifestation of Christ’s Second Coming, but their guarantee of purity in their botanical products was generally accepted as given.
So much so that as Shaker communities dwindled through the nineteenth century, others wanted the cachet of their name in the patent medicine world. Amid all the fakery and flimflam of the pre-regulated drug market, the Shaker brand was the best.
It was worth stealing, and defending.
The Shakers, or more properly the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, arrived in North America from England in 1774. They established their first communes in New York and New England, then farther into the continent as the European frontier expanded. Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Georgia, and Florida also boasted Shaker outposts, mostly shorter-lived than the original ones.
At first, Shakers funded their separation from the “world” by selling furniture and housewares to non-Shakers. But as the number of Shakers dwindled and America’s industrial capacity increased, Shakers typically turned to selling seeds, simples [here], and botanically-based remedies. These were easier to produce, and, imbued with the Shaker reputation for purity, were as good as gold.
Medical historian J. Worth Estes quotes an 1881 almanac advertising Shaker remedies on the basic principles of Shakerism:
innocence, temperance, virgin purity, love, peace, justice, holiness, goodness, and truth. The almanac further explained that Shakers are “just and honest in all [their] dealings with mankind,” and that they “eschew every species of falsehood: lying, deceit and hypocrisy.” Such statements helped “guarantee” the purity and high quality of Shaker-made drugs in the nineteenth century struggle for the American drug market.
Shakers provided ingredients for “worldly” producers, and, in some cases, they even provided start-up capital for non-Shaker manufacturers. The A.J. White company of New York, New York, made Shaker Extract of Roots and Mother Seigel’s Curative Syrup with Shaker-sourced botanicals and capital. This remedy was advertised as “a cure for impurities of the blood” and “a cure for dyspepsia and liver complaints.” A.J. White’s company successfully expanded overseas, and when he died in 1898, his English branch bought out his American branch; in various guises the company existed until 1957, when it was purchased by Smith, Kline & French, whose successor entity is today the world’s tenth largest pharmaceutical company.
In the 1880s, Smith Bros. & Co. of Montreal started producing a product called Shakers’ Blood Syrup. This had a label similar to A.J. White’s Shaker Extract, except it said “Cures completely scrofula, cancer, rheumatism, catarrh, ulcers & skin & blood diseases.” The Shakers of New Lebanon, New York, sued for patent infringement and Smith Bros. agreed to stop pirating the Shaker name.
Shakers also produced their own remedies on their communes. Corbett’s Syrup of Sarsaparilla, for instance, was made in Canterbury, New Hampshire for about half a century until 1896. In 1886, it was one of the few Shaker products to be awarded a U.S. patent. Promoted as “a blood purifier and therefore, by implication, as a panacea,” it was made of “an aqueous mixture of sarsaparilla root, pipsissewa, yellow dock root, dandelion, thoroughwort, black cohosh, elder flowers, Epsom salts (magnesium sulfate), juniper berries, blue gentian, pokeweed root, sugar and alcohol.” At some point potassium iodide was added to “ensure the remedy’s ‘purity.’”
Estes provides a checklist of some 80 other proprietary medicines made in Shaker communities. The names are marvelous: Brother Barnabas Hinckley’s Compound Concentrated Syrup of Bitter Bugle, Eclectic Live Pills, Larus Eye Water, Vegetable Family Pills, Young Shakers’ Grand Catholicon. As Estes notes, more than a few of these products had active ingredients that were cathartic or purgative, a fact rarely noted on labels. Cathartics are generally defined as working faster than laxatives.
After the Food and Drug Act of 1906, products like the 75% alcohol (sanitizer strength!) Norwood’s Tincture of Veratrum Viride, made by non-Shakers with Shaker-sourced botanical ingredients, had to be labeled “Poison” on their instructions for use. Patent medicines, and the Shakers, didn’t survive the twentieth century…
Amid the fraud and flimflam of early drug markets, Shakers stood for purity, creating a brand others were eager to exploit: “A Trusted Name in a Dubious Drug Market” from @jstordaily.bsky.social.
* Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat
###
As we hear history rhyme, we might recall that it was on this date in 1626 that Peter Minuit, the new director of “New Netherland” for the Dutch West India Company, in what we now know as Manhattan, “purchased” the island from the the Canarsee tribe of Native Americans for a parcel of goods worth 60 guilders: roughly $24 dollars at the time, now just over $1,000.
In the event, Native Americans in the area were unfamiliar with the European notions and definitions of ownership rights. As they understood it, water, air and land could not be traded. So scholars are convinced that both parties probably went home with totally different interpretations of the sales agreement. In any case, the Carnarsees were likely happy to take payment in any meaningful amount pertaining to land that was mostly controlled by their rivals, the Weckquaesgeeks.
1626 letter from Pieter Schaghen (a colleague of Minuit) reporting the purchase of Manhattan for 60 guilders [source]
“Bacteria represent the world’s greatest success story”*…
But as Stephen Jay Gould goes on to observe (in his 1996 book, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin), “They are today and have always been the modal organisms on earth; they cannot be nuked to oblivion and will outlive us all. This time is their time, not the ‘age of mammals’ as our textbooks chauvinistically proclaim. But their price for such success is permanent relegation to a microworld, and they cannot know the joy and pain of consciousness. We live in a universe of trade-offs; complexity and persistence do not work well as partners.”
Still, we (more complex) humans have recognized– and accommodated– bacteria for millennia. As We Make Money Not Art explains in a review of a recent book– We The Bacteria. Notes Toward Biotic Architecture by architectural historians Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley— that’s fascinatingly apparent in the history of architecture…
This “alternative history of architecture from the point of view of microbes” compiles the research that led to the exhibition We the Bacteria: Notes Toward Biotic Architecture at the 24th Milan Triennale last year. Curated by Colomina and Wigley, the show investigated how microbial ecosystems relate to spatial design and health inequality.
The book argues that microbes have not only built the whole planetary biosphere but they have also been the real architects of our homes and cities throughout the ages. Or rather, it’s the fear and diseases they cause that have shaped our spaces and the ways we move through them.
About ten thousand years ago, humans began retreating into spaces increasingly cut off from the exterior world. Plants, soil and insects could be left outside. But microbes, including pathogenic ones, followed humans inside their homes, where they adapted, mutated and generated new diseases. As our shelters expanded into villages, cities and sprawling empires, so too did the microbial ecosystems.
The authors narrate how buildings and bodies exist in a constant microbial exchange, co-evolving into a single, dynamic ecosystem. The microbiome of a home is highly specific to its inhabitants. Even the microbiome of a frequently cleaned hospital room resembles the microbiome of the previous patient, but starts to resemble that of a new occupant after twenty-four hours.
Architecture cannot exist without microbes, and, by extension, without disease. While scrubbing, spraying and disinfecting may eliminate most microorganisms, these practices also breed extremophiles, species so resistant that they can take over the space.
Throughout history, the book reveals, health crises have dictated architectural and urban design. From toilets to fumigation systems, from the plague hospitals, aka lazarettos, to the sanatoriums for tuberculosis patients; from sewage systems to urban parks, cities have been continually reshaped in response to the threats they sought to contain. Architecture became the first line of defence against microbes…
[More of the intertwined history of bacteria and our reponse to them, with lots of fascinating photos…]
… Given the important role that microbes play for our immune systems and the environments we inhabit, the authors call for a biotic architecture. Biotic architecture is less human-centric than traditional architecture. It learns from microbes rather than resists them. It does, of course, maintain some antimicrobial protocols against pathogens remain crucial. Water, sewage systems, toilets and food preparation areas still need to be cleansed, but cleaning routines should also embrace controlled exposure to microbial diversity. During COVID-19, for example, microbiologist Elisabetta Caselli and her colleagues replaced conventional disinfectants with probiotic-based sanitation in six Italian public hospitals. The result was a decrease in surface pathogens by up to 90% compared to conventional chemical cleaning and lower rates of healthcare-associated infections and antibiotic resistances… For once, here is a book that presents a vision where humans can actively contribute to microbial diversity, collaborate with the unseen world around us and build in ways that nurture rather than harm the environment…
More– and more fascinating images– at: “We The Bacteria. Notes Toward Biotic Architecture.”
###
As we coexist, we might recall that it was on this date in 2012 that Rebekah Speight of Dakota City, Nebraska sold a McDonald’s Chicken McNugget that resembled President George Washington for $8,100 on eBay (the third most expensive McNugget ever sold). She had kept the McNugget in her freezer for 3 years before deciding to sell it…. because bacteria.
“The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.”*…
News you can use…
I kept throwing away food because I couldn’t remember when I bought it. Thursday’s chicken from Monday? No idea if it was still safe. DoesItLast gives a clear answer based on FDA/USDA guidelines, so you can decide with information instead of guessing…
E.g…
Instant answers for safe food storage: “How long does food last?“
See also: “The Curious History of Leftovers” (source of the image above)
* Calvin Trillin
###
As we burp the container, we might spare a thought for a man who made a monumental contribution to food preservation and storage: John Landis Mason; he died on this date in 1902. A tinsmith, he patented the metal screw-on lids for fruit jars that have come to be known as Mason jars (many of which were printed with the line “Mason’s Patent Nov 30th 1858”).
That same year he invented the screw top salt shaker.
“It’s not a bug, it’s a feature”*…
Anna Marija Helt reports that, as global warming challenges tradtional agriculture, scientists are looking to “probiotics” for crops as a new green revolution in agriculture…
Potatoes contain something about which most people are entirely unaware: endophytes, which means “within plants.” Endophytes can also be found in other vegetables, fruits, and grains. In fact, all plants harbor endophytes in the form of bacteria, fungi, and other microbes.
Endophytes eat plant-derived nutrients but typically don’t cause disease. Instead, they bolster plant growth, disease resistance, antioxidant status, or tolerance to stressors such as drought, heat, and cold. Endophytes enable plants to respond quickly to such stressors by expanding their genetic repertoire, according to a review by ecologist Christine Hawkes and colleagues. To improve crop health and sustainability, Hawkes studies how plants, their fungal residents, and such stressors interact.
Given climate-related drought and temperature extremes, declining soil quality, and a decrease in arable land, endophytes, argue Pankaj Trivedi, Chakradhar Mattupalli, Kellye Eversole, and Jan E. Leach, might undergird a sustainable “green revolution” to improve agricultural productivity while lessening reliance on environmentally damaging and health-threatening agricultural chemicals. Endophytes can have an impact, says plant biotechnologist Julissa Ek-Ramos, on “climate change, recovering the soil, and having more healthy food to eat.”…
… “It’s really amazing how strongly these endophytes can combat the fungal pathogens of crops,” [microbiologist Sharon] Doty says. And she notes regarding their growth-promoting effects, “It works in maize, in rice, in tomatoes, in bell peppers, and strawberries.” Her team has also isolated endophytes from sweet potatoes that improve the rooting of poplars, a promising biofuels crop.
Endophytes confer additional traits useful for a changing planet. For example, those from geothermal habitats can confer heat tolerance, based on studies led by geneticist Regina Redman. And crop physiologist K. M. Manasa demonstrated salt-tolerance in rice plants inoculated with an endophyte from seaside plants. Rice is salt-sensitive and one of the world’s main food crops. But increasing soil salinity is impacting a fifth of farmable land globally due to climate change and human water and land use practices…
Nitrogen is often the most limiting soil nutrient for crops, something nineteenth-century farmers recognized. Agronomist and Nobel Prize nominee Johanna Döbereiner discovered nitrogen-fixing endophytes in non-legume plants in the twentieth century that, like rhizobia, might reduce the need for financially and environmentally costly synthetic fertilizers. Many of the endophytes Doty has characterized over twenty-five years fix nitrogen and promote growth in lab, greenhouse, and field trials but have a much broader host range than rhizobia, extending from farm lands to forests…
… Developing real-world endophyte applications is a complicated challenge, but a necessary one given the need for more productive and sustainable agriculture. In the meantime, skeptical farmers are getting onboard.
“There’s a lot of conversations going on between researchers and farmers,” says Friesen, to “move the needle on our understanding of these processes that are so important for soil health but also plant health and the stability and security of our food supply.”…
More at “Better Farming Through Endophytes,” from @ahelt.bsky.social in @jstordaily.bsky.social.
###
As we muse on microbes, we might send healthy birthday greetings to John Boyd Orr (1st Baron Boyd-Orr); he was born on this date in 1880. A teacher, medical doctor, biologist, nutritional physiologist, politician, businessman, and farmer, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1949 for his scientific research into nutrition and for his work as the first Director-General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
You must be logged in to post a comment.