Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Scientific Meanderings

Grad school has swallowed me whole, lately. I've had a lot of interesting observations and musings I've wanted to jot down here, but I keep forgetting or putting it off. Let's get a few of these out there:
  • So, what do you do for a living?
In one of my classes, we learned of a study where researchers wanted to see whether or not gonorrhea undergoes selective mutations during an infection. How did they test this? They infected volunteers with the freaking thing and sequenced the bug at various times during the infection.

I'm not sure I can put a dollar value on what it would take to willingly get infected with an STD, regardless of whether antibiotics will treat it. I'm having enough trouble getting a date these days without something like that mucking it all up.
  • The Pertussis Scare
Today we talked a lot about bordetella pertussis, the bacteria behind whooping cough. The disease is typically included in a cocktail vaccine, including diptheria and tetanus as well. I found it interesting that, for a period of time starting a few decades ago, Europe ceased to include pertussis in the mix due to some fears of deaths that may have been related to the vaccine. It turned out that they weren't, but there was enough public fear and bad PR floating around that it was only recently that Europe began vaccinating for pertussis again. As you would expect, there's been a lot of whooping cough in Europe in the meantime.

Given everything I hear about Europe's reactions to new vaccines, drugs, and genetically modified crops (especially GM crops), this doesn't really surprise me. It makes me wonder: We hear so much about how the US is so scientifically illiterate, how we're these religious nuts who want to drag scientific progress back to the dark ages and revert medicine to the time when leeches were considered the hot new thing. Why is it, then, that our more "enlightened" cousins across the pond always seem to be so eager to break out the pitchforks and torches when a new drug weighs the same as a duck?
  • Where's it all coming from?
In a related anecdote, while talking about pertussis it was shown that pertussis infections have been ticking upward for the last 20-30 years, with a noticeable spike during the 90s. There is apparently some debate over whether this is an actual increase in cases or just better reporting of cases. The argument being that, with vastly improved technologies for diagnosis, we're just finding the infections more readily than in the past.

We didn't discuss it in class, but I can't help but wonder if it isn't related to illegal immigration. It's not news to anyone who's been paying attention that a lot of the people coming here illegally don't get vaccinated from anything themselves, resulting in upticks in diseases only rarely seen in the US. Several of the studies cited to us about the spread of the disease were centered in California, which isn't exactly a model of immigration law enforcement.

I really don't have much to add to that. Curiosity, but not much else.

4 comments:

-Murphy said...

Given everything I hear about Europe's reactions to new vaccines, drugs, and genetically modified crops (especially GM crops), this doesn't really surprise me. It makes me wonder: We hear so much about how the US is so scientifically illiterate, how we're these religious nuts who want to drag scientific progress back to the dark ages and revert medicine to the time when leeches were considered the hot new thing. Why is it, then, that our more "enlightened" cousins across the pond always seem to be so eager to break out the pitchforks and torches when a new drug weighs the same as a duck?

Isn't that more or less what's happening in America as well? Lots of parents aren't vaccinating their children because of fears of autism, or disbelief in the effectiveness of vaccines in the first place, or skepticality about Big Pharma (which is almost always unfounded and irrational). This American Life recently had an episode on this ('Ruining it for the Rest of Us'), and I think that's probably a factor in the uptick in cases. There have been outbreaks reported (the TAL episode deals with, I believe, measles) because people are under the mistaken impression that vaccines cause autism (despite the fact that the preservative, which doesn't cause autism in the first place, has been out of vaccines for a decade now). Unfortunately, both McCain and Obama were pushing this myth during the presidential election.

Comparatively, there was the outcry against the HPV vaccine, which many "family" organizations were opposed to on the grounds that by removing the threat of cervical cancer, teenage girls would be more inclined to promiscuity. I, personally, much prefer opposing vaccines because of doubts that they'll work over opposing vaccines because the threat of disease is useful in terrifying people into accepting a very specific morality.

Anonymous said...

Just to piggy back on the previous commenter's post, here's an interesting blog comment on what's really going on with the resurgence of disease:

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/03/when_the_outbreaks_begin_theyll_start_in.php

and attempting to assign this outbreak to immigration is fairly unfounded and is essentially a rash of ignorance that's impacting the disease rates in the country.

Hal said...

Hey Nonny, while I won't discount the effect of ignorant parents who refuse to vaccinate (for whatever reason), why is it "unfounded" to speculate that illegal immigration would impact this?

While children of illegals born in this country likely receive the necessary vaccines, I'm betting that children brought in, and the immigrating parents, are not vaccinated by-and-large.

Now, such a thing is probably difficult to study as illegals tend to dislike answering surveys, but I can't believe that there is NO effect from it on disease rates.

Anonymous said...

You are ignorant if you don't know what "unfounded" means. By your own admission, you are speculating. By definition speculating means little more than guessing, thus you have no empericial evidince regarding that which you are speculating about, THUS IT IS UNFOUNDED!!! For someone as eloquent as yourself one would hope that there would be education and knowledge to back up those biggoted remarks. Tool.