Ellie Irwin seemed to have it all. She was beautiful, she was highly intelligent, she had graduated from medical school to what should have been a productive and fulfilling life. Instead, she was going blind in one eye, with terrifying possibility of losing sight in the other. Her life was an endless round of appointments, treatments and interventions. None seemed to come near to resolving the problem. At one point she had to have a cataract operation, and in despair, actually considered the possibility of having the problem eye removed.
But there turned out to be one last chance, as Fergus Walsh reports for the BBC. [1]Because thanks to a new science called metagenomics[2], doctors were able to identify the cause of her problem. To quote Fergus:
Metagenomics technology uses cutting-edge genomic sequencing, which can identify all bacteria, fungi or parasites present in a sample by comparing them against a database of millions of pathogens.
The cause turned out to be a rare bacteria of the leptospirosis family which Ellie had picked up while swimming in the Amazon river on a student holiday. The cure was simple: a good dose of antibiotics, as regular readers of this blog will have guessed. Today Ellie is a fully cured, happily functioning doctor. Recently, she even got married. Fergus knows how to end a story on a happy note!
For us there are a number of learning points here, faithful readers. One-what a good job antibiotics can do, Two-look what happens when you combine them with cutting edge techniques like metagenomics. Three-if you want new cutting edge techniques, it might help to employ a few well educated scientists to think them up, and universities to put them in. And four? No point going on with four. Everybody’s getting the drift.
[1]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czx45vze0vyo
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metagenomics
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