The breakthroughs on new antibiotics, like penicillin were spectacular. All too soon, however, resistance kicked in, funding dried up, and here we are in a fine old mess. But-can we reuse any of those old antibiotics? The people at antibiotic research UK seem to think so. Here is a summary of their work on resistance breakers. See what you think.

#Antibiotics #AntibioticResistance #AntibioticResearch

Antibiotic Resistance Breakers (ARBs)

Recently, friend of mine bought a house near London which has quite a tidy sized stream running through the garden. Being possessed of a number of children, this friend is anxious to do something about climate change wherever and whenever he can. Being furthermore a rather gifted engineer and mathematician, he began to make the measurements and plans necessary to create his own hydroelectric power station in his own back garden-a noble aim indeed. He estimated a potential yield of 7000 kw per year- a useful contribution to running an electric car, to say the least.

Just like a government building a dam, he called in consulting engineers. And here come the problems. Installation costs-£50 000. Licence to proceed-£1500. And much, much more. Enough to make the eyes water of all but the richest, And however, ever, ever would you extract enough power to pay back the investment?

At this point, an unreflective person would throw up their hands, decry a brutal, inflexible bureaucracy, and perhaps turn to the comforts of alcohol.

If we are going to cure global warming, we must get everyone onside, welcome their new ideas, and help them to decentralise power production. Surely? Huh? Common sense, guvnor?

But as our man dug down, he realised the true explanation is deeper, and actually more problematic. The power grid systems of advanced countries were designed long ago, when electricity was pulsed out from huge central generating systems. The poor old cables will let you bleed off power, but they cannot cope when we are all feeding in from our little solar , hydro and biomass schemes. If local power is going to work, we shall have to dig out all those old cables, and put in new ones. And that will mean big bucks.

Developing countries who are still putting in their systems, should be able to avoid the worse of these sunk costs. Which means Britain will have to find the money from somewhere. Or fall behind.

Does too much stress make us ill? Intuitively, most of us would say yes. (confession: most of my nineteen nineties, trying to run two jobs were just cold after fever after cold!) Now I am no medical man, but the team at the top-The Prime, Minister, Messrs Cummings, Gove et al have all been working incredibly long hours under appalling conditions of stress, and we cannot be surprised they have succumbed (see news media). However, if you are reading this, you are probably the curious sort who wants a proper scientific explanation of what’s going on. If you don’t, you have just wasted sixteen years in school and University.

Now a team ay Nagoya University led by Kazuhiro Nakamura, have come up with a well defined link which seems to bear how and why our suspicions are true (Marta Pulido Salgad Investigacion y Ciencia– How Stress can provoke Fever see English ref. below and article)

They have found that, in rats, stress stimulates the sympathetic nervous system ,which affects both cardiac function and body temperature. They have even identified a key area of the neuronal cortex, called the Dorsal peduncular cortex and the Dorsal tenia tecta( I bet you suspected they were going to be in there somewhere) According to Nakamura, they link directly to parts of the hypothalamus that control the functioning of brown fat-the one you use to control temperature. And their tests in stressed rats showed higher temperatures in regions like the back and the abdomen-where we mammals keep a lot of our brown fat.

It’s always good to have guessing knowledge confirmed. The team have given us an important new piece of the jigsaw puzzle. This way we may be able to better control stress, design it out, or treat it with drugs, if we really have to. And how much money could that save the Health Service in the long run?

A central master driver of psychosocial stress responses in the rat N Takoaka et al Science 367 (6482) 1105-1112 6 3 2020

https://www.investigacionyciencia.es/noticias/cmo-el-estrs-puede-provocar-fiebre-18502

The news that Cath Kidston are in trouble(see various news media) is disturbing. This was quite a successful business, with strong growth, a distinctive brand, and a nicely targeted market- adult women. OK, not my bag-but if you saw inside their shops, it was well designed, and the whole seemed more that the sum of the individual parts.

The issue here is not whether they survive or not, but that they and so many other brands and stores are in trouble. What happens next?

Any retail brand emerging from the corona virus crisis will need money. The trouble is that investors may look at the successful new parts of retail-distribution, storage and on line marketing. Many retail companies trade from premises owned by someone else, and so it’s hard to see where the collateral for big loans will emerge from. Certainly, funds will have to be competed for.

Which brings us to the second point of angst- investor portfolios may well look shy of retail property, and even parts of commercial property altogether. It is no exaggeration to state that retail shop clusters (that’s High Street to you and me) have been at the centre of our lives for at least eleven hundred years. They provide the very focus for communities, where things like charities, politics and just simple social networks thrived. For a very, very long time.

Of course all societies change. But the sheer size of such a change in such a very, very short time, may be very hard to manage indeed. Ideas, anyone?

Some of the most intelligent people on the planet are making heroic efforts to develop a vaccine for the SARS-Cov-2 virus. You can find good coverage of their efforts in all the best media, New Scientist, Guardian, Mail…you name it. We know they are doing their best, but safe manufacture and production take time, and there’s no point offering an easy target for antivaxxers. Eighteen months seems a pretty good estimate, and anything that comes in ahead of that would be good indeed.

But there’s one thing that worries and concerns: could this virus mutate, and jump away from the vaccine? I am not a virologist. but here’s my scenario, for what it’s worth.

I start with that excellent site Live Science http://www.livescience.com/coronavirus. Way way back in February (seems a lifetime now, doesn’t it?) they reported how Chinese scientists in Wuhan had identified two strains of SARS-Cov 19, which they called S and L. Other experts criticised the extent to which these variations were significant, and assert that virus mutation rates are quite slow. Slow enough to ensure that a vaccine will protect a very large number of people for a very long time.

It’s certainly true that some viruses never seem to overcome our vaccine defences. As the article points out, measles , mumps and yellow fever have stayed largely under control, where a vaccine is deployed.

However, and this is where my speculation takes over, some don’t. We all have to get a new flu virus every winter. Partly this is due to a slight decline in the efficacy of our immune system. But, it’s also due to mutations in proteins in the outer coat of the flu virus, due to a process called antigenic drift. Your immune system no longer recognises the slight change in the virus, and -bingo-you either get a new vaccine or you get the flu.

Most people will object that the influenza virus belongs to the family orthomyxoviridae, whereas our friend SARS Cov 19 is in the coronaviridae family. (see Wikipedia).

Well………. The Devil whispers in my ear, thus. Both viruses have a an RNA core. They both have glycoprotein coats. The transmission mechanisms are eerily similar. So why would one mutate, and not the other? Watch this space, gentle readers. Watch this space.

en.//Wikipedia.org/wiki/coronavirus

That most excellent scientist, Professor Colin Garner makes an excellent case why the Corona virus crisis would be a lot, lot worse in the absence of good antibiotics. I have taken the liberty of cherry picking the key points from his recent newsletter here

“A recent scientific paper from Wuhan, China published in the well-known medical journal, the Lancet, reported that sepsis was responsible for all the deaths in the study group. Of this group, half had a secondary bacterial infection that failed to respond to antibiotics. How heart-breaking. Sadly secondary bacterial infections are very common in coronavirus victims as the COVID-19 virus attacks the body’s immune cells. It is vital therefore that antibiotics keep on working and that new ones are found. Eventually a vaccine will be developed for COVID-19 in contrast to antibiotics where no new ones are on the horizon. This is why we believe our research to be so important.”

I have highlighted the key learning points.

This man’s battle is on behalf of us all

To gather ideas from intelligent people from all walks of life who can make things better.

Are you a teacher who can really transfer learning? Tell us here!

Are you a carer who is holding society together in the face of crisis?

A scientist with a new idea? A manager who thinks it’s wrong to bully and scream at people?

Or just got your own mind?

WE WANT TO HEAR! WE WANT YOUR STORIES!

I once had the honour and privilege of meeting Anthony Hilton at a certain party in a certain building. He should be anybody’s first go to on all matters political and economic. And as an avid reader of his column for many years, I slowly began to appreciate his advice on how important the small to medium sized business is, as an engine of innovation and dynamism. Count me among the converted for the rest of this read.

Now with the coronavirus crisis, this sector is in real, real trouble. We should all give full marks to the government for trying to help http://www.gov.uk covid 19 support for businesses. But….in a worse case scenario , what if it isn’t enough? Imagine your favourite little local restaurant deciding it can’t, it really just can’t, go over to take-aways. So it stops buying from suppliers of food, IT and labour. They in turn do the same. As the businesses shrink, the banks can no longer lend—oooops it’s 1933 all over again. And once a business is gone-well, it’s gone, there is no simple re start

So how do you jump start an economy that is completely and utterly dead. Stalled. Kaputt? I am afraid that the answer could very well be by Direction of Labour. Picking projects. And putting the recovered to work on them. Consider the following. Not far from where I live is a large wind farm .It stretches along the outshore waters from Brighton to roughly Worthing. Imagine that you took a lot of unemployed workers and made them extend it all the way to say Chichester. First, you would have created real wealth, in the form of extra power. It’s not as efficient as how capitalists would have done it, but it’s done. Secondly you put unemployed people back to work. They then take their wages and spend them in local businesses on beer, chips and goodness knows what else(this is a family blog) At this point, with money circulating again, a capitalist economy begins to reboot. Far fetched?It’s actually what happened between 1939 and 1951. After a dozen years of socialist planning, the economy was beginning to tick over so well that a Conservative Government was able to take over again.

Now the point of this blog is to generate ideas: I bet I have missed something. So….what do you think?

Firstly, apologies, we slightly misspelt the name of Professor Colin Garner in the last post

What Professor Garner has done is to :

-identify an urgent need and formulate a thoroughly professional response

-create a linked “ecology” of researchers and experts, who can now be redeployed to help with the COVID 19 crisis. If you look below, you will see how he has responded to this

If a society is to thrive and grow, it needs a few more like Professor Garner and a few less whizz kids who just want to make a million!

Below, I give the charity website link- although I cannot seem to preview it

Homepage New

The great Covid 19 crisis, however bad it gets, will one day pass. It is a serious medical emergency; yet it masks an equally great one- our utter deficiency in new antibiotics. Without them, all surgical interventions become terrifyingly hazardous-whether it is routine surgery, childbirth,or major interventions like cancer surgery.

A few years ago, a great man called Professor Colin Gardiner set up a charity called antibiotics research UK. Their aim is to promote new research, and to encourage best practice . To help him, Professor Gardiner has worked with some of the finest minds in the country, including Dame Sally Davies and Lord Jim O’Neill. In the coming months, I will be covering more of the work of this most timely charity. As soon as possible, I will post a link to their website, which I cannot reach now for technical reasons

http://www.antibioticresearch.org.uk