Scientists have reconstructed the genetic code of a strain of bacteria that caused one of the most deadly pandemics in history nearly 1,500 years ago.
They did it by finding the skeletons of people killed by the plague and extracting DNA from traces of blood inside their teeth.
This plague struck in the year 541, under the reign of the Roman emperor Justinian, so it's usually called theJustinian plague. The emperor actually got sick himself but recovered. He was one of the lucky ones.
"Some of the estimates are that up to 50 million people died," says evolutionary biologist David Wagner at Northern Arizona University. "It's thought that the Justinian plague actually led partially to the downfall of the Roman Empire."
The plague swept through Europe, northern Africa and parts of Asia. Historians say that when it arrived in Constantinople, thousands of bodies piled up in mass graves. People started wearing name tags so they could be identified if they suddenly collapsed.
Given the descriptions, scientists suspected that it was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis — the same kind of microbe that later caused Europe's Black Death in the 14th century.
The bacteria get spread by fleas. After someone gets infected from a flea bite, the microbes travel to the nearest lymph node and start multiplying. "And so you get this mass swelling in that lymph node, which is known as a buboe," says Wagner. "That's where the term bubonic plague comes from."
The Justinian plague has been hard to study scientifically. But recently, archaeologists stumbled upon a clue outside Munich.
Housing developers were digging up farmland when they uncovered a burial site with graves that dated as far back as the Justinian plague.
"They found some [graves] that had multiple individuals buried together, which is oftentimes indicative of an infectious disease," Wagner says. "And so in this particular case, we examined material from two different victims. One of those victims was buried together with another adult and a child, so it's presumed that they all may have died of the plague at the same time."
Skeletons were all that was left of the pair. But inside their teeth was dental pulp that still contained traces of blood — and the blood contained the DNA of plague bacteria.
By decoding the bacteria's DNA, Wagner and a team of international scientists could trace the pathogen's evolutionary journey.
They think the strain of bacteria that caused the Justinian plague jumped from rodents into humans and then died out, the team wrote Tuesday in the journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases. The later emergence of Black Death seems to have been caused by a separate event.
The DNA also suggests that, like Black Death, the original source of the plague was in China, says microbiologist Paul Keim, another member of the research team at Northern Arizona University.
"So the ecological reservoir for plague, the historical reservoir, is in China," Keim says. "And it's this emergence, this pattern over and over again, with people moving commodities, rats and fleas around the world that we're able to document."
Overall, this ancient strain is not that different from modern ones that still circulate in places like Arizona, says Keim.
"The biology of the pathogen no doubt could cause another pandemic if it weren't for the changes in human culture and medicine," Keim says.
These days, though, antibiotics can quickly stop plague outbreaks in their tracks.
I Couldn’t Believe What This Youth Pastor Did to His Wife and Unborn Son’s Killer
Erik is a youth pastor. Matthew is a firefighter/EMT. They meet together every month to discuss what God is doing in their lives. But Erik wishes he’d met Matthew under different circumstances. You see, a few years ago after a long shift, Matthew fell asleep at the wheel and crashed head-on into a car carrying Erik’s pregnant wife and daughter. His wife and unborn son didn’t survive.
Tourniquet, Millennia-Old Medical Device, Saved Lives In Boston Marathon Bombing
MIKE STOBBEAP04/18/13 10:09 AM ET
NEW YORK — As people lay badly bleeding in the smoke of the Boston Marathon bombings, rescuers immediately turned to a millennia-old medical device to save their lives – the tourniquet.
Using belts, shirts and other materials, they tied off bleeding limbs in fast-acting bids to prevent major blood loss, shock and death. Such fast work no doubt saved many lives, doctors at Boston area hospitals said.So it's interesting to note that if this had happened a decade ago, many emergency responders might have avoided the tourniquet. As recently as the early 2000s, the tourniquet was still enmeshed in a longstanding controversy about whether they were more trouble than they were worth.
"Some people saw them as lifesaving, and others said they were the instrument of the devil," said Dr. John F. Kragh Jr., an orthopedic surgeon with the U.S. Army's Institute of Surgical Research in Texas.
Although tourniquets have been used to stem blood loss since at least the time of the Roman Empire, modern military surgeons had grown to doubt it. There were no good studies proving their benefit. And there was a common belief that some tourniquets could do more harm than good, cutting off blood and oxygen to limbs and resulting in amputations.
"There are a number of ways to mess it up," said Kragh, who is a leading researcher on methods to control bleeding. Sometimes tourniquets were not tight enough, causing bleeding to actually get worse. Some were not wide enough.
In Vietnam, tourniquets were not often used because it was thought they led to many amputations, said Dr. Kevin Kirk, an Army lieutenant colonel who is chief orthopedic surgeon at San Antonio Military Medical Center.
That's because tourniquets often were placed too high above the injury, leading to loss of tissue that otherwise might be saved, he said. Now they are used lower. "A lot of lives and limbs have been saved by the use of a tourniquet," Kirk said.
The American Red Cross came to call tourniquets a last resort for stemming severe bleeding.
The dust settled only in the last decade, according to some experts, following publication of studies from the Iraq war by Kragh and others that showed tourniquets were clear-cut lifesavers. Those studies showed timely use of tourniquets could raise survival rates as high as 90 percent, and tourniquets are now routinely issued to soldiers.
However, some experts remain cautious. The Red Cross, for example, continues to worry that tourniquets may be used improperly or in situations when blood loss is not great enough to warrant their use.
"Clearly, if a leg is blown off, it's OK to go straight to tourniquet," said Dr. Richard Bradley, a member of the Red Cross's scientific advisory council.
But the Red Cross continues to advise that direct pressure be applied to a wound in less extreme situations.
Tourniquets should be at least 1 1/2 inches wide, and pulled very tight, to properly shut off blood flow. Medical supply companies make tourniquets that do the job best.
Bradley also stressed that it's important to use a real tourniquet if possible. News coverage of the Boston tragedy describes emergency responders using all sorts of things as makeshift tourniquets, including neck lanyards.
"Is a lanyard better than nothing? Probably," Bradley said. But other kinds of care, and rapid transport to hospitals, may have been at least as important as tourniquets, he added.
Boston EMS began including tourniquets as standard equipment in recent years and they proved to be crucial on Monday, said Joseph Blansfield, Boston Medical Center's trauma program manager.
"Without a doubt, tourniquets were a difference-maker and saved lives," said Blansfield, who spent a year as chief nurse of a combat support hospital in Iraq. "Bleeding was able to be stanched and (patients) arrived in a better physiologic state and didn't require as much resuscitation as they otherwise would."
EMS workers did much of the tourniquet work at the scene, but some improvisation was done by people with far less medical training. Monday's blasts injured at least 170 people near the finish line. Three spectators died and 13 people lost one or more limbs.
Nicholas Yanni of Boston was with his wife and friends watching another friend cross the finish line when the explosion occurred. Yanni's wife had an injury to her lower left leg. Another woman with them had a leg injury, too. Yanni ducked into a nearby sports store for T-shirts that they tore to make a tourniquet.
At Tufts Medical Center, surgeons fixed the smaller of the two bones in her lower left leg that was apparently shattered by shrapnel from the blast.
"My worst fear was that I could have lost my wife," Yanni said. "Other than that it was autopilot, adrenaline, chaos. There was a lot of just `not-even-thinking,' sort of animalistic, you know, thought. What needs to be done, you do it."
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AP writers Rodrique Ngowi and Carla K. Johnson in Boston and Marilynn Marchione in Milwaukee contributed to this report.
Expert level allergy testing facility in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
My Uncle Bill who has severe food allergies used them for a big allergy test and they have him a card he carries with a large list of bad foods for him.
You could probably have the test done locally in a major city and samples sent out to their lab for analysis. Hope it helps.
This 80 year-old man looks like a troll or maybe a creature from The Lord of the Rings. His skin is scaly, you can barely see his eyes and he smells to high heaven. The reason for this is simple, he doesn’t have a skin disease or terrible condition: he has just refused to take a bath for sixty years. A Reddit user posted the gallery below. It’s hard to believe this is a real human being.
It’s hard to tell what you’re looking at, but those are human hands.
It’s impossible to judge others for their decisions. After all we are all different, but it’s extremely difficult to understand why Amoo lives the life he does.
You can provide your child with a perfect diet, but if you don't do this, he or she will still be prone to old-fashioned illnesses.
Photo by Dmitry Naumov/Thinkstock
Iam the ’70s child of a health nut. I wasn’t vaccinated. I was brought up on an incredibly healthy diet: no sugar till I was 1, breastfed for over a year, organic homegrown vegetables, raw milk, no MSG, no additives, no aspartame. My mother used homeopathy, aromatherapy, osteopathy; we took daily supplements of vitamin C, echinacea, cod liver oil.
I had an outdoor lifestyle; I grew up next to a farm in England’s Lake District, walked everywhere, did sports and danced twice a week, drank plenty of water. I wasn’t even allowed pop; even my fresh juice was watered down to protect my teeth, and I would’ve killed for white, shop-bought bread in my lunchbox once in a while and biscuits instead of fruit, like all the other kids.
We ate (organic local) meat maybe once or twice a week, and my mother and father cooked everything from scratch—I have yet to taste a Findus crispy pancake, and oven chips (“fries,” to Americans) were reserved for those nights when Mum and Dad had friends over and we got a “treat.”
As healthy as my lifestyle seemed, I contracted measles, mumps, rubella, a type of viral meningitis, scarlatina, whooping cough, yearly tonsillitis, and chickenpox. In my 20s I got precancerous HPV and spent six months of my life wondering how I was going to tell my two children under the age of 7 that Mummy might have cancer before it was safely removed.
So the anti-vaccine advocates’ fears of having the “natural immunity sterilized out of us” just doesn’t cut it for me. How could I, with my idyllic childhood and my amazing health food, get so freaking ill all the time?
My mother would have put most of my current “crunchy” friends to shame. She didn’t drink, she didn’t smoke, she didn’t do drugs, and we certainly weren’t allowed to watch whatever we wanted on telly or wear plastic shoes or any of that stuff. She livedalternative health. And you know what? I’m glad she gave us such a great diet. I’m glad that she cared about us in that way.
But it just didn’t stop me getting childhood illnesses.
My two vaccinated children, on the other hand, have rarely been ill, have had antibiotics maybe twice in their lives, if that. Not like their mum.I got many illnesses requiring treatment with antibiotics. I developed penicillin-resistant quinsy at age 21—you know, that old-fashioned disease that supposedly killed Queen Elizabeth I and that was almost wiped out through use of antibiotics.*
My kids have had no childhood illnesses other than chickenpox, which they both contracted while still breastfeeding. They, too, grew up on a healthy diet, homegrown organics, etc. I was not quite as strict as my mother, but they are both healthier than I have ever been.
I find myself wondering about the claim that complications from childhood illnesses are extremely rare but that “vaccine injuries” are rampant. If this is the case, I struggle to understand why I know far more people who have experienced complications from preventable childhood illnesses than I have ever met with complications from vaccines. I have friends who became deaf from measles. I have a partially sighted friend who contracted rubella in the womb. My ex got pneumonia from chickenpox. A friend’s brother died from meningitis.
Anecdotal evidence is nothing to base decisions on. But when facts and evidence-based science aren’t good enough to sway someone’s opinion about vaccinations, then this is where I come from. After all, anecdotes are the anti-vaccine supporters’ way: “This is my personal experience.” Well, my personal experience prompts me to vaccinate my children and myself. I got the flu vaccine recently, and I got the whooping cough booster to protect my son in the womb. My natural immunity—from having whooping cough at age 5—would not have protected him once he was born.
I understand, to a point, where the anti-vaccine parents are coming from. Back in the ’90s, when I was a concerned, 19-year-old mother, frightened by the world I was bringing my child into, I was studying homeopathy, herbalism, and aromatherapy; I believed in angels, witchcraft, clairvoyants, crop circles, aliens at Nazca, giant ginger mariners spreading their knowledge to the Aztecs, the Incas, and the Egyptians, and that I was somehow personally blessed by the Holy Spirit with healing abilities. I was having my aura read at a hefty price and filtering the fluoride out of my water. I was choosing to have past life regressions instead of taking antidepressants. I was taking my daily advice from tarot cards. I grew all my own veg and made my own herbal remedies.
I was so freaking crunchy that I literally crumbled. It was only when I took control of those paranoid thoughts and fears about the world around me and became an objective critical thinker that I got well. It was when I stopped taking sugar pills for everything and started seeing medical professionals that I began to thrive physically and mentally.
If you think your child’s immune system is strong enough to fight off vaccine-preventable diseases, then it’s strong enough to fight off the tiny amounts of dead or weakened pathogens present in any of the vaccines.
But not everyone around you is that strong, not everyone has a choice, not everyone can fight those illnesses, and not everyone can be vaccinated. If you have a healthy child, then your healthy child can cope with vaccines and can care about those unhealthy children who can’t.
I would ask the anti-vaxxers to treat their children with compassion and a sense of responsibility for those around them. I would ask them not to teach their children to be self-serving and scared of the world in which they live and the people around them. (And teach them to love people with autism spectrum disorder or any other disability supposedly associated with vaccines—not to label them as damaged.)
Most importantly, I want the anti-vaxxers to see that knowingly exposing your child to illness is cruel. Even without complications, these diseases aren’t exactly pleasant. I don’t know about you, but I don’t enjoy watching children suffer even with a cold or a hurt knee. If you’ve never had these illnesses, you don’t know how awful they are. I do. Pain, discomfort, the inability to breathe or to eat or to swallow, fever and nightmares, itching all over your body so much that you can’t stand lying on bedsheets, losing so much weight you can’t walk properly, diarrhea that leaves you lying prostrate on the bathroom floor, the unpaid time off work for parents, the quarantine, missing school, missing parties, the worry, the sleepless nights, the sweat, the tears, the blood, the midnight visits to the emergency room, the time sitting in a doctor’s waiting room on your own because no one will sit near you because they’re rightfully scared of those spots all over your face.
Those of you who have avoided childhood illnesses without vaccines are lucky. You couldn’t do it without us pro-vaxxers. Once the vaccination rates begin dropping, the drop in herd immunity will leave your children unprotected. The more people you convert to your anti-vax stance, the quicker that luck will run out.
*Update, Jan. 6, 2013: This post has been updated to clarify that the quinsy the author contracted, not the author herself, was resistant to penicillin. (Return.)
Many of the changes in my body when I took part in the clinical trial of an intermittent fasting diet were no surprise. Eating very little for five days each month, I lost weight, and I felt hungry. I also felt more alert a lot of the time, though I tired easily. But there were other effects too that were possibly more important.
During each five-day fasting cycle, when I ate about a quarter the average person's diet, I lost between 2kg and 4kg (4.4-8.8lbs) but before the next cycle came round, 25 days of eating normally had returned me almost to my original weight.
But not all consequences of the diet faded so quickly.
"What we are seeing is the maintenance of some of the effects even when normal feeding resumes," explains Dr Valter Longo, director of USC's Longevity institute, who has observed similar results in rodents.
The popularity of intermittent fasting has grown over the past year or so. The 5:2 diet, which involves dramatically reducing your calorific intake on certain days of the week, is one example. Butmore clinical data is needed to confirm the benefits of such regimes.
I love to eat. I enjoy a big, healthy breakfast, exercise a lot and - left to my own devices - snack all day before digging in to a hearty evening meal.
"That was very good news because that's exactly what we were hoping to achieve."
Clinical tests showed that during the diet cycles my systolic blood pressure dropped by about 10%, while the diastolic number remained about the same. For someone who has, at times, had borderline hypertension, this was encouraging. However, after the control period (normal diet), my blood pressure, like my weight, returned to its original - not-so-healthy - state.
The researchers will be looking at whether repeated cycles of the diet could be used to help manage blood pressure in people over the longer term.
Arguably, the most interesting changes were in the levels of a growth hormone known as IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor). High levels of IGF-1, which is a protein produced by the liver, are believed significantly to increase the risks of colorectal, breast and prostate cancer. Low levels of IGF-1 reduce those risks.
"In animals studies we and others have shown this to be a growth factor that is very much associated with ageing and a variety of diseases, including cancer," says Longo.
Studies in mice have shown that an extreme diet, similar to the one I experienced, causes IGF-1 levels to drop and to stay down for a period after a return to normal eating.
My data showed exactly the same pattern.
"You had a dramatic drop in IGF-1, close to 60% and then once you re-fed it went up, but was still down 20%," Longo told me.
Such a reduction could make a significant difference to an individual's likelihood of developing certain cancers, he says. A study of a small population of people in Ecuador, who have much lower levels of IGF-1, because they lack a growth hormone receptor, showed that they rarely develop cancer and other age-related conditions.
IGF-1 is a protein produced by the liver when it is stimulated by growth hormone circulating in the blood
It plays a role in the growth of muscle, bones and cartilage throughout the body, and is critical to growth and development during childhood
Lower levels of IGF-1, induced by calorie restriction, have been shown in rodents to slow the ageing process and protect against cancer
IGF-1 levels in adult humans vary according to age and gender
My blood tests also revealed that the major inhibitor of IGF-1, which is called IGFBP-1, was significantly up during the fasting period. Even when I resumed a normal diet, the IGFBP-1 level was elevated compared with my baseline. It is, according to Longo, a sign that my body switched into a mode that was much more conducive to healthy ageing.
Data from other participants in the study is still being analysed, but if they also show lower levels of IGF-1 and higher levels of IGFBP-1, it could help scientists develop an intermittent fasting regime that allows people to eat a normal diet for the vast majority of the time, and still slow down the ageing process.
One idea being explored by Longo is that a five-day intervention every 60 days may be enough to trigger positive changes in the body.
"This is exactly what we have in mind to allow people, for let's say 55 every 60 days, to decide what they are going to eat with the help of a good doctor, and diet in the five days. They may not think it is the greatest food they have ever eaten, but it's a lot easier, let's say, than complete fasting and it's a lot safer than complete fasting and it may be more effective than complete fasting."
Normal range for men 51-60 years old is 68-245ng/ml
The very small meals I was given during the five-day fast were far from gourmet cooking, but I was glad to have something to eat. There are advocates of calorie restriction who promote complete fasting.
My blood tests also detected a significant rise in a type of cell, which may play a role in the regeneration of tissues and organs.
It is a controversial area and not fully understood by scientists.
"Your data corresponds to pre-clinical data that we got from animal models that shows that cycles of fasting could elevate this particular substance, considered to be stem cells," said Dr Min Wei, the lead investigator.
The substance has also been referred to, clumsily, as "embryonic-like".
"At least in humans we have a very limited understanding of what they do. In animal studies they are believed to be 'embryonic-like' meaning... they are the type of cells that have the ability to regenerate almost anything," says Longo.
A dual X-ray absorptiometry (Dexa) scan checks this 51-year-old for body fat
It would be highly beneficial if intermittent fasting could trigger a response that enhances the body's ability to repair itself, but much more research is required to confirm these observations.
This diet is still at the experimental stage and data from the trial are still being studied. Other scientists will eventually scrutinise the findings independently, and may attempt to replicate them.
"We generally like to see not only an initial discovery in a trial but we like to see confirmatory trials to be sure that in the broadest kind of sense, in the general population that these findings are going to be applicable," says Dr Lawrence Piro, a cancer specialist at The Angeles Clinic and Research Institute.
"I do believe fasting to be a very effective mechanism. They are pieces of a puzzle, that puzzle is not fully revealed yet, the picture isn't clear yet but there's enough of the picture clear. I think we can be really excited that there is some substantial truth here, some substantial data coming forward and something that we can really be hopeful about."
Future clinical trials will focus on "at-risk" members of community - those who are obese - to gauge their response to a severely restricted diet.
But if this diet, or another intermittent fasting diet, is eventually proven be effective and sustainable, it could have profound implications for weight loss and the way doctors fight the diseases of old age.
A dual X-ray absorptiometry (Dexa) scan checks this 51-year-old for body fat