Mad Cow Disease Able to Mutate and Evolve
March 1, 2010
Natural News
By Ethan A. Huff
The Scripps Research Institute has published a study in the journal Science alleging that prions, lifeless protein particles that are believed to cause serious brain diseases, are able to mutate and develop resistance to drugs in the same way that bacteria and other living things do.
Associated with over 20 different brain diseases, prions have typically been thought to morph only once and in the presence of living transformation agents but recent research is suggesting that these proteins can continue to mutate as they transfer from host to host, becoming more virulent each time.
In the presence of infections like mad cow disease, prions are converted from their normal state into an abnormal, malignant state. As the disease gets passed around, it often becomes more deadly due to the ever changing characteristics of the prions which develop increasingly resistant to drugs.
Charles Weissman, head of the department of infectology at Scripps in Florida, remarked that prions have similar adaptive characteristics as viruses, yet without the DNA or RNA. Interestingly, lab tests showed that prions which were removed and placed into a new environment ended up out-performing those that remained in the original host. Each time prions are moved to a new environment, those that survive and adapt do so more quickly and effectively than did the ones at the original source.
Prions are normal and likely exist throughout the body. Though excited about their findings, researchers noted that the implications of their discovery reveal much about the dangers of continually mutating disease. Their solution is to investigate new drugs that can block normal prion proteins in order to prevent them from ever adapting and causing the host to develop resistance to other drugs.
Drugs, drugs, and more drugs seem to be the answer to every medical science problem in the Western world, even when the problem in question was likely caused by drugs. Similar to “superbugs” that are emerging due to overuse of antibiotics, the emergence of mutating proteins which develop resistance to drugs cannot be remedied by more drugs.
Mad cow disease is the result of feeding cows ground cow meal and other animal byproducts. Rather than pursue yet another drug to solve the problem, perhaps the best option is to reassess what cows eat and reformulate it to what is proper and healthful. The same strategy can and should be pursued with other diseases that easily morph and become increasingly virulent.
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New Superbugs Coming from China
February 8, 2010
Telegraph.co.uk
By Peter Foster
Chinese doctors routinely hand out multiple doses of antibiotics for simple maladies like the sore throats and the country’s farmers excessive dependence on the drugs has tainted the food chain.
Studies in China show a “frightening” increase in antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as staphylococcus aureus bacteria, also know as MRSA . There are warnings that new strains of antibiotic-resistant bugs will spread quickly through international air travel and internation food sourcing.
“We have a lot of data from Chinese hospitals and it shows a very frightening picture of high-level antibiotic resistance,” said Dr Andreas Heddini of the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control.
“Doctors are daily finding there is nothing they can do, even third and fourth-line antibiotics are not working.
“There is a real risk that globally we will return to a pre-antibiotic era of medicine, where we face a situation where a number of medical treatment options would no longer be there. What happens in China matters for the rest of the world.”
Particular alarm has been raised by resistance rates of MRSA in Chinese hospitals, which has more than doubled from 30 per cent to 70 per cent, according to Professor Xiao Yonghong of the Institute of Clinical Pharmacology at Beijing University.
Last year researchers found a new strain of MRSA in Chinese pigs imported into Hong Kong and called for urgent new studies into its potential to infect humans after an infection of the new strain was confirmed in Guangzhou, where many of the pigs were farmed.
A Beijing-based health expert with access to unpublished surveys showed that the situation in China was actually worse earlier studies had indicated.
“The Chinese Ministry of Health has all the data,” the expert warned, “but they seem unable or unwilling to believe it. The situation has global implications and is highly disturbing.”
The Chinese Ministry of Health failed to respond to requests for an interview or information by phone, email and fax over a three-day period.
New prescription guidelines to restrict antibiotic use being issued by the Chinese Ministry of Health in 2004.
“The guidelines are not being followed effectively,” added Professor Xiao, “over just the last five years, for example, our studies show the rate antibiotic-resistant E.coli has quadrupled from 10 per cent to 40 per cent.”
Public health experts say the rampant over-use of antibiotics in China is primarily caused by China’s under-funded healthcare system where hospitals derive up to half of their operating income from selling drugs. In some cities, such as Chongqing, almost half of all drugs sold are antibiotics.
“In Chinese hospitals our data shows that 60 per cent of in-patients are being prescribed antibiotics compared with the WHO guideline of 30 per cent,” added Professor Xiao who also heads China’s National Antibiotic Resistance Investigation Network.
China’s State Food and Drug Administration bans the sale of antibiotics without prescription but a survey by the The Daily Telegraph found the drugs were still easily obtainable over-the-counter.
Three out of five chemists agreed to sell antibiotics after a cursory consultation with the ‘patient’ who complained of a sore throat.
At one outlet a pharmacist handed over a course of the second-generation antibiotic, Cefuroxime Axetil, with minimal hesitation.
Asked if the sale could “get her into trouble” she said that the pharmacy would get a doctor to write the prescription later to cover their sales records. She added that even doctors from the nearby Capital Institute of Pediatrics came to buy antibiotics without prescription.
“When the surveillance is strict, we won’t risk selling antibiotics,” Ms Zhang added. Asked to elaborate, she explained, “For example during the 2008 Olympic Games period, we didn’t sell them”.
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Antibiotics Used on Animals Ends up in Our Food
January 26, 2010
NaturalNews
by David Gutierrez
Widespread antibiotic use in animal agriculture is drawing increasing fire as a primary cause of the growing prevalence of drug-resistant and ever more lethal superbugs.
“There is clear evidence of the human health consequences [from agricultural use of antibiotics, including] infections that would not have otherwise occurred, increased frequency of treatment failures (in some cases death) and increased severity of infections,” the World Health Organization wrote in 2003.
Seventy percent of all antibiotics used in the United States are used promote growth or prevent infection in healthy farm animals — in other words, animals that are not showing any signs of disease.
“The heavy reliance on routine antibiotic use is a byproduct of the way we raise animals for food: packed into dim and dirty enclosures where they live amid their own filth, eat food that they haven’t evolved to digest, and are pretty much stacked atop one another,” writes columnist Ezra Klein in the Washington Post.
The food industry claims that such antibiotic use is necessary to keep food prices low for consumers.
“That really is a strange defense,” said U.S. Rep. Louise Slaughter. “We keep animals in such deplorable conditions that they’ll become sick as a dog if we don’t dose them?”
The industry’s argument is weak on financial grounds as well, Klein says. According to a study conducted by researchers at Tufts University, antibiotic resistant infections cost the U.S. health-care system $50 billion per year. In contrast, the National Academy of Sciences concluded that ending non-therapeutic antibiotic use in farm animals would raise the cost of meat consumption by $5 to $10 per person per year.
“I’d pay that for a lower risk of super-staphylococcus,” Klein writes.
Slaughter has introduced a bill, H.R. 1549, that would ban non-medical use of the most effective human antibiotics.
Scientologists ‘Heal’ Haiti Quake Victims Using Touch
January 25, 2010
BreitBart
Amid the mass of aid agencies piling in to help Haiti quake victims is a batch of Church of Scientology “volunteer ministers”, claiming to use the power of touch to reconnect nervous systems.
Clad in yellow T-shirts emblazoned with the logo of the controversial US-based group, smiling volunteers fan out among the injured lying under makeshift shelters in the courtyard of Port-au-Prince’s General Hospital.
A wealthy private donor provided his airplane to fly in 80 volunteers from Los Angeles, along with 50 Haitian-American-doctors, in a gesture worth 400,000 dollars, said a Parisian volunteer who gave her name as Sylvie.
“We’re trained as volunteer ministers, we use a process called ‘assist’ to follow the nervous system to reconnect the main points, to bring back communication,” she said.
“When you get a sudden shock to a part of your body the energy gets stuck, so we re-establish communication within the body by touching people through their clothes, and asking people to feel the touch.”
Next to her lay 22-year-old student Oscar Elweels, whose father rescued him from the basement of his school where he lay with a pillar on his leg for a day after the deadly January 12 quake.
His right leg was amputated below the knee and his left leg was severely bruised and swollen.
More than half of his fellow students died in the rubble of his school, although the rest of his family was unscathed, he said, thanking God.
“One hour ago he had no sensation in his left leg, so I explained the method to him, I touched him and after a while he said ‘now I feel everything’,” said Sylvie.
“Otherwise they might have had to amputate his other leg. Now his sister knows the method and she can do it.”
Asked about the method being used on him, a smiling Elweels described it as “a sort of harmony between the nerves, a kind of exercise. I couldn’t feel at all, but then I could.”
Does he know Scientology? “Yes, it’s a French organization,” he said.
“All the patients are happy with the technique,” said Sylvie. “But some doctors don’t like the yellow T-shirts. It’s a color thing,” she insisted.
Another group of Scientologists distributed antibiotic pills. “The doctors said give everyone with wounds antibiotics,” said Italian volunteer Marina.
Some doctors at the hospital are skeptical. One US doctor, who asked not to be named, snorted: “I didn’t know touching could heal gangrene.”
When asked what the Scientologists are doing here, another doctor said: “I don’t know.”
Do you care? “Not really,” she said, wheeling an unconscious patient out of the operating room to join hundreds of others in the hospital’s sunny courtyard.
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Disinfectants Helping Germs Evolve into Superbugs
January 13, 2010
Natural News
By S. L. Baker
The opportunistic bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa is increasingly recognized as a cause of severe nosocomial infections — those are infections people contract as a result of treatment in a hospital or other medical center. In fact, a Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection can be life-threatening, especially if someone is immunocompromised.
The germ also causes chronic infections in cystic fibrosis patients. So it’s no surprise that disinfectants are widely sprayed, sloshed and wiped over surfaces in medical settings to supposedly protect patients. But now comes evidence the very act of relying on disinfectants to prevent Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections could be turning the already dangerous germ into a superbug that’s resistant to antibiotics as well as the disinfectant itself.
Germs adapt to survive
For a study just published in the January issue of the journal Microbiology, researchers from the National University of Ireland in Galway took laboratory cultures of Pseudomonas aeruginosa and added increasing amounts of disinfectant to the bacteria. They found this caused the germs to adapt over time so they could survive the disinfectant.
But something else also happened when the bacteria were exposed to the disinfectant. Remarkably, the germs became resistant to ciprofloxacin, a strong antibiotic widely-prescribed to fight Pseudomonas aeruginosa. And the germs became resistant to the drug even though they weren’t exposed to it.
How could this be possible? The scientists discovered that when exposed to the disinfectant, the bacteria adapted to more efficiently pump out antimicrobial agents (both the disinfectant and antibiotics) from the germ’s cells. The researchers also found the bacteria’s adaptation resulted in a DNA mutation that allowed the Pseudomonas aeruginosa microbes to specifically become immune to ciprofloxacin-type antibiotics.
Dr. Gerard Fleming, who headed the research team, warned in a media statement that the study results could mean “… residue from incorrectly diluted disinfectants left on hospital surfaces could promote the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. What is more worrying is that bacteria seem to be able to adapt to resist antibiotics without even being exposed to them.”
Obviously, if disinfectants used to kill bacteria on surfaces to prevent their spread are actually making the germs stronger so they survive and go on to infect patients — and if antibiotics used to treat these infections are no longer effective — the results could be a serious threat to hospitalized patients. Dr. Fleming added that it is important for scientists to zero in on environmental factors that might promote antibiotic resistance, thereby creating superbugs.
“We need to investigate the effects of using more than one type of disinfectant on promoting antibiotic-resistant strains. This will increase the effectiveness of both our first and second lines of defense against hospital-acquired infections,” he stated.
Fecal Matter Found In Nearly Half Of Fast-Food Soda Fountains
January 8, 2010
ABC News
By Lauren Cox
Those soda fountain machines found in restaurants and fast food joints may be squirting out liquids contaminated with fecal bacteria, a small study found. Whether it was self-serve or behind the counter, nearly half of all sodas dispensed from a sample of 30 machines in the Roanoke Valley in Virginia had coliform bacteria — a group of bacteria banned in drinking water by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) because it indicates the possibility of fecal contamination.
“The EPA regulates our drinking supply, and there can be some bacteria, but one of the things that is not allowed is coliform bacteria,” said Renee D. Godard, professor of biology at Hollins University and a co-author of the paper published in the January print issue of the International Journal of Food Microbiology.
“We can’t have that in our drinking supply. But they’re coming out of these soda fountain machines,” she said.
The soda machines had turned into a bacteria metropolis with Escherichia coli (E. coli), species of Klebsiella, Staphylococcus, Stenotrophomonas, Candida, and Serratia. Most of the bacteria were resistant to the 11 antibiotics Godard tested on her samples.
“About 70 percent of the beverages had bacteria and 48 percent of them had coliform bacteria,” said Godard.
However, only 20 percent of the sodas sampled had coliform bacteria that exceeded the EPA limit for drinking water.
Since the tap water and ice from the machines didn’t test positive for bacteria, Godard and her team ruled out the possibility of a valley-wide contamination of the water supply.
Various brands of soft drinks and various types — sugared, diet or even water — were contaminated, leading Godard to think that it wasn’t the soda, but the machine that was growing bacteria.
From all her testing, Godard still isn’t sure where the bacteria came from. Few people observed in the restaurants touched the nozzles of the soda fountain machines and restaurant managers Godard interviewed reported cleaning the nozzles daily.
But only one restaurant manager reported rinsing the plastic tubing within the machines on a regular basis.
Click here for the full report
Disinfectants Helping Germs Evolve into Superbugs
January 06, 2010
Natural News
By S. L. Baker
The opportunistic bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa is increasingly recognized as a cause of severe nosocomial infections — those are infections people contract as a result of treatment in a hospital or other medical center. In fact, a Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection can be life-threatening, especially if someone is immunocompromised.
The germ also causes chronic infections in cystic fibrosis patients. So it’s no surprise that disinfectants are widely sprayed, sloshed and wiped over surfaces in medical settings to supposedly protect patients. But now comes evidence the very act of relying on disinfectants to prevent Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections could be turning the already dangerous germ into a superbug that’s resistant to antibiotics as well as the disinfectant itself.
Germs adapt to survive
For a study just published in the January issue of the journal Microbiology, researchers from the National University of Ireland in Galway took laboratory cultures of Pseudomonas aeruginosa and added increasing amounts of disinfectant to the bacteria. They found this caused the germs to adapt over time so they could survive the disinfectant.
But something else also happened when the bacteria were exposed to the disinfectant. Remarkably, the germs became resistant to ciprofloxacin, a strong antibiotic widely-prescribed to fight Pseudomonas aeruginosa. And the germs became resistant to the drug even though they weren’t exposed to it.
How could this be possible? The scientists discovered that when exposed to the disinfectant, the bacteria adapted to more efficiently pump out antimicrobial agents (both the disinfectant and antibiotics) from the germ’s cells. The researchers also found the bacteria’s adaptation resulted in a DNA mutation that allowed the Pseudomonas aeruginosa microbes to specifically become immune to ciprofloxacin-type antibiotics.
Dr. Gerard Fleming, who headed the research team, warned in a media statement that the study results could mean “… residue from incorrectly diluted disinfectants left on hospital surfaces could promote the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. What is more worrying is that bacteria seem to be able to adapt to resist antibiotics without even being exposed to them.”
Obviously, if disinfectants used to kill bacteria on surfaces to prevent their spread are actually making the germs stronger so they survive and go on to infect patients — and if antibiotics used to treat these infections are no longer effective — the results could be a serious threat to hospitalized patients. Dr. Fleming added that it is important for scientists to zero in on environmental factors that might promote antibiotic resistance, thereby creating superbugs.
“We need to investigate the effects of using more than one type of disinfectant on promoting antibiotic-resistant strains. This will increase the effectiveness of both our first and second lines of defense against hospital-acquired infections,” he stated.
Organic Milk Linked to Lower Rates of Allergies, Asthma, and Eczema
December 28, 2009
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
Young children who consume exclusively organic dairy products are significantly less likely to develop allergies, asthma or eczema by the age of two, according to a study conducted by researchers from the Louis Bolk Institute in the Netherlands and published in the British Journal of Nutrition.
“This is the first example of a definite health impact of organic food consumption being published in a peer-reviewed journal,” said Carlo Leifert of Newcastle University, who is leading a study into the connection between organic food consumption and health.
Researchers followed 2,500 pregnant women until their children were two years old, recording information on their health and their lifestyle and dietary habits. They found that the rate of allergies was 36 percent lower among children who drank or ate organic milk, cheese and yogurt and whose mothers had consumed these products while breastfeeding than among children and mothers who had eaten either only non-organic dairy products or a mix of organic and non-organic products.
“There was a clear relationship between organic dairy use and less eczema,” said researcher Machteld Huber. “The difference was significant but only for children exclusively eating organic dairy products.”
“We didn’t find a relationship if they had [both] organic and conventional dairy products.”
Researchers do not know whether the increased allergy risk from non-organic dairy is caused by extra toxic ingredients, such as antibiotics, by lower levels of key nutrients, such as omega-3 fatty acids, by some combination of the two, or by some other factor.
“Organic milk doesn’t contain any pesticides, added hormones or antibiotics,” said Stuart Martin of the Scottish Organic Milk Producers Association. “When an organic cow becomes sick our farmers are encouraged to treat it homeopathically first and only use antibiotics as a last resort. Meanwhile, the milk from that cow is removed from the milk stream and is not used at all.”
Click here for the full report
First Case of Highly Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis Found in U.S.
December 28, 2009
The Associated Press
By Margie Mason and Martha Mendoza
It started with a cough, an autumn hack that refused to go away.
Then came the fevers. They bathed and chilled the skinny frame of Oswaldo Juarez, a 19-year-old Peruvian visiting to study English. His lungs clattered, his chest tightened and he ached with every gasp. During a wheezing fit at 4 a.m., Juarez felt a warm knot rise from his throat. He ran to the bathroom sink and spewed a mouthful of blood.
I’m dying, he told himself, “because when you cough blood, it’s something really bad.”
It was really bad, and not just for him.
Doctors say Juarez’s incessant hack was a sign of what they have both dreaded and expected for years — this country’s first case of a contagious, aggressive, especially drug-resistant form of tuberculosis. The Associated Press learned of his case, which until now has not been made public, as part of a six-month look at the soaring global challenge of drug resistance.
Juarez’s strain — so-called extremely drug-resistant (XXDR) TB — has never before been seen in the U.S., according to Dr. David Ashkin, one of the nation’s leading experts on tuberculosis. XXDR tuberculosis is so rare that only a handful of other people in the world are thought to have had it.
“He is really the future,” Ashkin said. “This is the new class that people are not really talking too much about. These are the ones we really fear because I’m not sure how we treat them.”
Forty years ago, the world thought it had conquered TB and any number of other diseases through the new wonder drugs: Antibiotics. U.S. Surgeon General William H. Stewart announced it was “time to close the book on infectious diseases and declare the war against pestilence won.”
Today, all the leading killer infectious diseases on the planet — TB, malaria and HIV among them — are mutating at an alarming rate, hitchhiking their way in and out of countries. The reason: Overuse and misuse of the very drugs that were supposed to save us.
Just as the drugs were a manmade solution to dangerous illness, the problem with them is also manmade. It is fueled worldwide by everything from counterfeit drugmakers to the unintended consequences of giving drugs to the poor without properly monitoring their treatment. Here’s what the AP found:
• In Cambodia, scientists have confirmed the emergence of a new drug-resistant form of malaria, threatening the only treatment left to fight a disease that already kills 1 million people a year.
• In Africa, new and harder to treat strains of HIV are being detected in about 5 percent of new patients. HIV drug resistance rates have shot up to as high as 30 percent worldwide.
• In the U.S., drug-resistant infections killed more than 65,000 people last year — more than prostate and breast cancer combined. More than 19,000 people died from a staph infection alone that has been eliminated in Norway, where antibiotics are stringently limited.
“Drug resistance is starting to be a very big problem. In the past, people stopped worrying about TB and it came roaring back. We need to make sure that doesn’t happen again,” said Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who was himself infected with tuberculosis while caring for drug-resistant patients at a New York clinic in the early ’90s. “We are all connected by the air we breathe, and that is why this must be everyone’s problem.”
This April, the World Health Organization sounded alarms by holding its first drug-resistant TB conference in Beijing. The message was clear — the disease has already spread to all continents and is increasing rapidly. Even worse, WHO estimates only 1 percent of resistant patients received appropriate treatment last year.
“We have seen a huge upburst in resistance,” said CDC epidemiologist Dr. Laurie Hicks.
Juarez’ strain of TB puzzled doctors. He had never had TB before. Where did he pick it up? Had he passed it on? And could they stop it before it killed him?
At first, mainstream doctors tried to treat him. But the disease had already gnawed a golf-ball-sized hole into his right lung.
TB germs can float in the air for hours, especially in tight places with little sunlight or fresh air. So every time Juarez coughed, sneezed, laughed or talked, he could spread the deadly germs to others.
“You feel like you’re killing somebody, like you could kill a lot of people. That was the worst part,” he said.
Tuberculosis is the top single infectious killer of adults worldwide, and it lies dormant in one in three people, according to WHO. Of those, 10 percent will develop active TB, and about 2 million people a year will die from it.
Simple TB is simple to treat — as cheap as a $10 course of medication for six to nine months. But if treatment is stopped short, the bacteria fight back and mutate into a tougher strain. It can cost $100,000 a year or more to cure drug-resistant TB, which is described as multi-drug-resistant (MDR), extensively drug-resistant (XDR) and XXDR.
There are now about 500,000 cases of MDR tuberculosis a year worldwide. XDR tuberculosis killed 52 of the first 53 people diagnosed with it in South Africa three years ago.
Drug-resistant TB is a “time bomb,” said Dr. Masae Kawamura, who heads the Francis J. Curry National Tuberculosis Center in San Francisco, “a manmade problem that is costly, deadly, debilitating, and the biggest threat to our current TB control strategies.”
Juarez underwent three months of futile treatment in a Fort Lauderdale hospital. Then in December 2007 he was sent to A.G. Holley State Hospital, a 60-year-old massive building of brown concrete surrounded by a chain-link fence, just south of West Palm Beach.
“They told me my treatment was going to be two years, and I have only one chance at life,” Juarez said. “They told me if I went to Peru, I’m probably going to live one month and then I’m going to die.”
Holley is the nation’s last-standing TB sanitarium, a quarantine hospital that is now managing new and virulent forms of the disease.
Tuberculosis has been detected in the spine of a 4,400-year-old Egyptian mummy. In the 1600s, it was known as the great white plague because it turned patients pale. In later centuries, as it ate through bodies, they called it “consumption.” By 1850, an estimated 25 percent of Europeans and Americans were dying of tuberculosis, often in isolated sanatoriums like Holley where they were sent for rest and nutrition.
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