Monday 12 February 2018

Talk : Predatory bacteria to treat infection

Fascinating recent talk by Prof Liz Sockett on "Cafe Sci: Predatory bacteria to treat infection" which described research done by Prof Sockett and colleagues Chris Moore, Alex Willis and Dr Serge Mostowy looking at how certain types of bacteria can be used to fight infection, as can be seen in this BBC article on the teams research.

Prof  Sockett, together with charming and cuddly visual aids 

Prof Socketts talk had three major characters :

i) The bacteria Shigella, which causes dystentry and kills hundreds of thousands around the world each year.

ii) The predatory bacteria Bdellovibrio, which, although smaller, can attack Shigella by burrowing into the Shigella bacteria and eating it up from the inside. It then reproduces inside the remains of the Shigella bacteria, with the multiple, newly formed Bdellovibrio then bursting out from the husk of the Shigella in a manner that is perhaps best described as Alien-stylee. This whole process takes around 4hrs.

Bdellovibrio life cycle (credit)

ii) Zebrafish larvae, which are often used as a model organism in medical research because they share many similarities to humans in the way their bodily systems function and are easily studied, the latter quality helped by the larvae being transparent so that interactions within their bodies can be viewed as they happen with a microscope. To allow the small ~1-2mm long larvae to be viewed, they are anesthetised so that they are asleep, then placed on a pad of sticky agar in a water filled dish. Critically, dozens of larvae can be prepared for each experiment, and experiments typically last a few days. This means that sufficient data is generated for statistically significant trends to be determined (compare, for example, with trying to be sure about the validity of results of a test on just 5 mice).

A transparent Zebrafish larvae

Firstly, Prof Sockett and team looked at what happened when they injected just Dbellovibrio into the hind-brain of zebrafish larvae (they used the hind-brain as the blood-brain barrier would ensure that the bacteria would remain in this area during the test). The work was reported in the Open Access paper "Injections of Predatory Bacteria Work Alongside Host Immune Cells to Treat Shigella Infection in Zebrafish Larvae". In the image below you can see (on the left) that the numbers of Bdellovibrio bacteria decreases over time, as they are attacked by the larvaes own white blood cells and because they have no pathogen bacteria to invade and use for reproduction. And on the right you can see that none of the larvae died - showing the Bdellovibrio is not harmful to the larvae.

Effect of injecting Bdellovibrio only (credit)

Then the researchers injected Shigella bacteria that had been modified to glow green under UV light, as you can see below, they grew rapidly and killed many of the larvea after 3-4 days. Other work (with glowing white blood cells), showed that, for reasons not yet known, the larvae's white blood cell response was not activated by the Shigella.

Over time (left to right), when Shigella only injected,
 the Shigella bacteria grow and kill most of the Zebrafish larvae (credit)

Next, the team injected Shigella (green glowing) and Dbellovibrio (red glowing) and saw that the Dbellovibrio bacteria (red) attacked the Shigella and grew inn numbers, with the amount of Shigella (green) reducing over time. They were also able to see (in other research) that the Dbellovibrio provoked the immune system to respond, sending white blood cells to attack both the Shigella and the Bdellovibri - this was an unexpected bonus! One point that was made was that whereas antibiotics use a single line of attack to kill bacteria, and so are vulnerable to bacteria evolving resistance; predatory bacteria use many different attack techniques at the same time, which makes it hard for pathogens to build resistance to them. This is one reason why predatory bacteria have been able to survive for millions of years.

Over time (left to right) when both Shigella and Dbellovibrio injected,
 the Bdellovibrio (red) attack and kill the Shigella (credit)

They group found that the use of Bdellovibrio (together with the white blood cell response it triggered) increased survival rates of the larvae from just over 20% to around 60%, which is very encouraging.

Comparison of injection Shigella vs Shigella and Bdellovibrio (credit)

The work has spurred further research, and attracted further funding - but of course, many questions remain to be answered :

-The predator bacteria are not like antibiotics and are unlikely to work across the whole body. Instead, they are likely to be of most use in localised areas of infection or potential infection such as wounds.

-It is not clear whether the technology will work in humans

-Risks of allergies or inflammation when used in humans are a concern (although the fact that Dbellovibrio is already all around us suggest that the risk is low).

-If people have had prior exposure to Bdellovibrio will it still work?

It was a team effort

The next Cafe Science talk is on 12th March 2018 at the Vat and Fiddle Pub, Central Nottingham at 8.00pm

Image Sources
Zebrafish,

Sunday 11 February 2018

Talk : How Can Chemistry Save The World?

Returning for the first talk of the year, Cafe Sci persuade The Vat & Fiddle to open specially on the night of their staff party in order to welcome YouTube star Sir Martyn Poliakoff to talk on How Can Chemistry Save The World?

@Gav Squires was there and has kindly written this guest post summarising the event, with some linkage added by NSB....

Sir Poliakoff began by pointing out that the world needs chemicals - Earth could no support its current population with natural materials alone. For example, we need fertilisers for food and synthetic materials for clothing. Since 1969, the population of the planet has doubled and will very soon hit 7.6 billion people. In 2012, the Royal Society produced a report entitled The People & The Planet, which came to the conclusion that most of us consume too much. That’s despite the fact that there are 1.6 billion “profoundly poor” people on the planet who deserve to consume more. The usually definition of profoundly poor is someone who can recall all of their possessions from memory.

UN population projections

  Today, more people in the world use a mobile phone than use a toothbrush. Smartphones contain 50 different chemical elements, out of 89 that are non-radioactive, and many of these are in short supply. The list includes tungsten, needed to make your phone vibrate and indium, used on the inside of the touch screen as it’s see-through and conducts electricity. You can’t get rid of an element without a nuclear explosion but it is possible to distribute it out so thinly that you can’t get it back together. This leads to the “Robin Hood” question - how can we provide for the poor without robbing the rich? Even the most altruistic aren’t going to accept a fall in their living standards.

Modern Circuit Board

Martyn is involved in “green chemistry”, the idea of making chemicals more cleanly and with less waste. He tells a tale of visiting Ethiopia 15 years ago and pointing out to an audience at a lecture that a plastic bag was made from petrol. So a poor country like Ethiopia was buying petrol products from Abu Dhabi, one of the richest nations, and are then throwing the bags away. In the market where the bags came from, there was a surplus of sugar cane - if the bags could be made of sugar cane waste [i.e. as a "bioplastic"] a then the petrol would no longer be required and cows could eat the waste. This is the idea of green chemistry. 15 years later and plastic bottles are now being made from sugar in Brazil. As a follow up when one of Martyn’s friends at Procter & Gamble heard his anecdote about the bags in Ethiopia, he made him a bag from sugar. This is possible because when humans eat too much, we get fat but when bacteria eat too much they produce plastic. Hence, feeding them on sugar can lead to plastic bags.

 
Containers made from Bioplastic

Most of the chemicals that we use are organic and are based on carbon. These require a lot of solvents in order to make chemical reactions. So, one of the other aims of green chemistry is to reduce the amount of solvent required. For example when Viagra was first produced, it required 1,300 litres of solvent to produce 1 kilogram of product. Now, it requires just 6.5 litres. One of the ways of cutting down on solvent use is through super-critical fluids. If you heat liquid in a bottle then the density of the liquid goes down while the density of the gas increases. Eventually, the densities equalise and the line between liquid and gas disappears - the gas can now be used as a solvent in chemical reactions.

CO2 phase diagram

  Back in 1912, Ciamician had an article published in Science magazine entitled The Photochemistry of the Future and it is only now that the importance of his work is becoming apparent. We know that sunlight fades the colours of things such as book and curtains. Well, Ciamician was talking about the idea that coal is just fossilised sunlight and we all know that we will fun out of coal and oil long before we run out of sunlight. So, he postulated the idea of using radiant energy when looking for new methods of doing photo-chemical reactions.

Giacomo Luigi Ciamician

So, we're not quite there with green chemistry but it's encouraging the amount of work that's being put into it, especially right here in Nottingham.

Café Sci returns to The Vat & Fiddle on the 12th of February at 8:00pm when Liz Sockett will speak on Predatory Bacteria To Treat Infection. For more information, check out the Café Sci Meetup page:
https://www.meetup.com/nottingham-culture-cafe-sci/?_cookie-check=Kiib7d0FMSY4cKgw

Image Sources
Population, Circuit Board, Bottle, Phase Diagram, Ciamician

Wednesday 17 January 2018

24hrs on an Anti-Vaccine Facebook page

NSB recently spent 24hrs on an anti-vaccine website and was saddened by what was being posted there - some examples later but first wanted to mention three lessons that NSB learnt:

i) Parents (overwhelmingly mothers) who visit these anti-vaxx facebook pages do not really stand a chance. The fear, uncertainty and doubt that is sown in parents minds by these sites is relentless.

ii) It is MUCH harder for parents to find the authoritiative data on vaccince effects than it is to find the anti-vaccine memes, websites and Facebook pages. Google is actively presenting fake and misleading data over accurate and authoritative data.

iii) Authoritative health sources are simply failing to provide counter information to that on anti-vaccine sites.

All of the posts below are from one single anti-vaccine Facebook page (and it's public sister page) and they are not the result of scrolling through the pages timeline, they are simply a small subset of what was posted over a 24hr period.

Worried parent asks for positives and negatives re vaccination. Gets told "Vaccinations do not work. They do not work at all"
In fact, vaccines clearly and very significantly reduce disease incidence.(link)


Worried mum to be asks for advice regarding HPV. Gets told that "lemon balm" gets rid of HPV.
In fact, so far as NSB can tell, there is no evidence that lemon balm eliminates HPV.



Poster treated unvaccinated childs whooping cough (pertussis)with "oatmeal baths, homeopathic remedies and herbs". Note also misleading claim that the vaccine increases the likelihood of getting pertussis. We will come to this later.

In fact, whooping cough is horrific. The coughing, which lasts several weeks, is so severe the child's ribs can be broken.Tens of thousands of children die from whooping cough around the world every year."Oatmeal baths" are unlikely to cure the symptoms.



A poster claims that Vitamin C can treat Whooping Cough.

In fact, and in contrast to the repeated claims in the posted link, the pertussis vaccine is, very effective. And even the article itself only claims (without evidence) to reduce the severity of the coughing, adding that Vitamin C "does not prevent or stop the disease".
Even the link itself admits that Vitamin C will not reduce the length of the infection, and it presents not the slightest data in support of the claim that Vitamin C is helpful.


Poster provides link saying that "People say measles is a deadly disease, but it's not"

In fact, the World Health Organisation comments that "In 2016, there were 89 780 measles deaths globally – marking the first year measles deaths have fallen below 100 000 per year. Measles vaccination resulted in a 84% drop in measles deaths between 2000 and 2016 worldwide.


Really struggle to understand the worldview of someone who has just seen doctors save their premature childs life through state of the art NTU care - and then call the exact same doctors "monsters" because they want to vaccinate the exact same child against diseases.


Again, apparently no problem with doctors providing life saving kidney transplant surgery (and the subsequent lifelong anti-rejection drugs) but refuse to believe the same doctors when it comes to vaccination. Bizarre.


Poster asked for advice for elderly relative regarding pneumococcal vaccine. Gets told flu shot is "killing elderly people at an alarming rate."

In fact, the NHS specifically states "You can't catch flu from the flu jab".Thousands die from the flu in the UK every year. The elderly are at particular risk.



Apparently, there is a whole story (without links or references) showing how polio is caused by metal poisoning.

In fact, the history of polio is very interesting, but not at all like the post claims.


Similarly, this post implies that smallpox occurs independently of vaccination level

In fact, smallpox is a horrific condition, to the extent that NSB thinks it would be too disturbing to post an image of what it does to a person. Worldwide eradication of smallpox is one of medical sciences greatest achievements. The events in the posted timeline appear to be drawn from multiple continents and, in some cases, simply made up.


Many posts like this one that talk about "shedding", where allegedly, vaccinated adults and children "shed" viruses to infect those around them. A number of posts suggest that the only reason we have some viruses is that they are "shed" from vaccinated people. There is no evidence for "shedding".


Poster willfully ignores dangers of a number of viruses.
The reality? Viruses are dangerous



This poster chooses to omit the fact that if children with rubella pass it on to a pregant woman in the first 20 weeks of pregnancy, it can cause miscarriage, stillbirth or birth defects in unborn babies.



See also this post.


Another recurring theme:
Vaccinated children who get ill - any type of ill - are "vaccine injured".
Unvaccinated children who get ill are "strengthening their immune system".



It's not really surprising worried parents are getting biased information on this page - it's against the rules to post pro-vaccine information.




Oh yes, meant to talk about that whooping cough (pertussis) data!

Firstly, here is a link to the page, and it does indeed show many more vaccinated children getting pertussis (2950 cases) than non vaccinated children getting the disease (556 cases)

So slam dunk, yes? Vaccination increases the risk of getting pertussis?

Well, not really. And to explain why, let's step back and take a hypothetical example...

Imaging there is a population of 1000 unvaccinated children and 1000 vaccinated children and that 1 in 10 get pertussis, say.

And let us presume that the vaccine is useless. It does nothing. Neither makes the child more nor less likely to get pertussis.

So what would we expect - we would expect 100 unvaccinated children to get pertussis and 100 vaccinated children to get pertussis.

And we can see that, as expected, it doesn't make any difference if you are vaccinated or not.

Now, and this is the important bit, let us imagine that only 60 children are unvaccinated and 2940 children are vaccinated (97%, about the level of pertussis vaccination in the general population)

Again assuming that the vaccination does not do anything, and that 1 in 10 children get pertussis, how many cases will be see?

Well, it will be 6 from the unvaccinated group and 294 from the vaccinated group.

OMG! Does this mean that vaccination increases the liklihood of getting pertussis?

As I am sure you can see, dear reader, no it does not. The high number of vaccinated cases is simply due to the fact that most of the population is vaccinated.

A couple of links:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/toxic-myths-about-vaccines
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/straight-talk-about-vaccination
https://medium.com/@visualvaccines/why-dr-suzanne-humphries-an-anti-vaccine-activist-is-lying-to-you-about-measles-ce446d0a7e0f

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Update May 2018
Fascinating stories of the three women who developed the whooping cough vaccine. : Grace Eldering, Loney Gorden, Pearl Kendrick.

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Update Oct 2018
Flu related illnesses killed nearly 16,000 in England in 2017-2018, (source).




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Update Nov 2018
Emotional manipulation by crying kids

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Update Nov 2018
The scary ingredients in a Peach

The "causes" of Polio

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Update Dec 2018

"Do not trust Big Pharma. Do not trust the CDC. Do not trust the FDA. The are liars and deceivers.
Except when listing side effects on vaccine inserts. These are flawless and perfect."

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Story about a "crunchy Mom" who changed from anti-vaxx to pro-vaxx when she say how science and medicine repeatedly saved the life of her unwell child.

"Unfortunately, he contracted pertussis at one year old. He had been exposed to the disease. Because he spent so much time in the hospital as an infant, his vaccine schedule got delayed. Pertussis was horrifying. When he coughed, he vomited all over himself. His respirations were fast and inconsistent. His body temperature spiked over 104 degrees. There was nothing minor about whooping cough. After his illness, I realized I was wrong about vaccines. Vaccines prevented children from suffering through diseases like pertussis, rubella, measles, and rotavirus. Children mortality greatly decreased with the introduction of vaccines into our society. My son’s disease could have been prevented with proper herd immunity. However, the anti-vaccine movement reduced the rates of immunized children. Herd immunity had been compromised."

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/withoutacrystalball/2018/12/how-my-sons-life-threatening-illness-stopped-my-belief-in-pseudoscience2/ ********************************************

An example of very shaky logic (replace "vaccines" by "cars", "computers" or "Space travel" to see how it is a poor argument)

"I just decided to just google what the bible says about vaccines. There’s nothing in the bible that talks about vaccines. I just want you to think about that. So if God knew in the future that he was going to create these amazing things that were going to be the best scientific advancements, like oh, my God, they’re so great, why isn’t there anything, any inkling of talk about these things called vaccinations coming into being later to save people? If that was really God’s plan and they’re so amazing, then why isn’t it in there at all? Maybe there’s a chapter where they talk about something like an injection, like this health injection, right? Like, why didn’t God talk about that if he knew that it was going to come and save the world?”

https://vaxopedia.org/tag/brittney-kara/

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Apr 2019
Hey @Tesco, hoping you can help me with a question! Noticed, to my surprise, that you still stock that public health menace of a publication "What Doctors Don't Tell You". I had a quick look inside and noticed that it advises ineffective "aromatherapy" treatments for serious diseases and pushes an anti-vaccine agenda and says that "Medicine isn't a science".My question to you, @Tesco, is how many children have to be hospitalised from vaccine preventable diseases before you ditch this dangerous magazine?

Tesco response "Hello Ash, the items quoted are opinion pieces within the magazine and not intended to be interpretd as fact. WDDTY advise consulting your Doctor before following a course of treatment and carries a page of professionals who support their publications. If you have concerns over the content, I invite you to raise this directly with the publisher, or via IPSO Independent Press Standards Organsiation). Hope this helps."

What Doctors Don't Tell You....

....say that "Medicine isn't a Science"

..and that arompatherapists can treat Lyme disease

Tesco are chill with selling this kind of misinformation

And try to transfer the issue from one of THEIR responsibility to one of MY "concern"