It’s one thing to have antibiotics. It’s even better if you can find clever new ways of delivering them so they do even more good to the patient. According to a report by the tireless Grace Wade of New Scientist, Chinese scientists have done exactly that.[1]
Junliang Zhu of Soochow University noticed that layers of mucus in our lung tissues are inhibiting the effective distribution of antibiotics. To overcome this they created nanoparticles from silica, which they coated with an antibiotic called ceftazidime, which they used to treat mice with COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease). So, what were the results? You had better look at Grace’s article, hadn’t you?
The reason we picked on this was not just because of the antibiotics trope. Widespread COPD is a classic result of having too many vehicles, particularly old fashioned diesel and petrol ones, which fill our air with particulate matter. It’s a major contributor to all kinds of health horrors. Just getting on top of one of them like this will be a major alleviation to millions. It’s so nice once again to see someone thinking outside of the box to do it.
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We often talk about the Charity Antibiotics Research UK on this blog.[1] Since 2015, they have been doing invaluable work. Not only have they pointed to the need for new antibiotics. They have also tried to fund research. But they do a lot more than that.
Now, many people think “Disease-Diagnosis-Antibiotic-Cured-bosh!” is the way it works. That’s the ideal of course, and in many cases, it’s true. But all too often people have long term chronic conditions. [2] Such poor souls need all kinds of advice on treatments, health care, contacts-and sometimes just someone to talk to. And that is where antibiotic research UK’s brilliant patient support services comes in. If it’s done properly, it will eke out the effectiveness of our dwindling supplies of antibiotics, and , who knows, have support networks in place if new ones are developed. And now, gentle reader, is where YOU come in. To quote their appeal
We’re currently seeking volunteers to review the information we provide, whether it’s directly from our website or in response to enquiries. We’re looking for two types of reviewers:
Lay reviewers: Individuals without a healthcare background who can assess whether our articles are easy to understand and digest.
Expert reviewers: Professionals with a background in science or health who can provide insights into the accuracy and comprehensiveness of our content.
Come on, it’s not as if we’re asking you to climb Mount Kanchenjunga backwards, or swim the English Channel while dressed as the Red Queen from Alice Through the Looking Glass, is it? We bet a few of you reading this are retired after a successful career and are now sratching round for something useful to do. Could this be it?
There’s something about the dark and cold of February that chills like no other month we know. But do not be disheartened, gentle readers! For today we offer not one, but two stories that promise hope, optimism, and , who knows, maybe even a long term cure for the terrible disease of cancer. So, without further ado:
Welsh Wizard You may have heard of Duran Duran, but what about Sir Christopher Evans? According to Maria Lally of the Independent, [1] Sir Christopher has been on the trail of a cancer cure since he was six years old, when his family in Port Talbot bought him his first chemistry set. Not only has he been working with Andy Taylor, a key member of Duran Duran. but he and his organisation are at the forefront of research, pioneering new techniques such as Lutetium-177. In an age of selfish aggression and violence, it’s nice to come across someone who has devoted his time to the public good!
Rwanda hope Cervical cancer is a deadly killer, blighting lives and quashing the hopes of millions. One sure way to eliminate it is better vaccines. But how to get a vaccine programme underway in world full of ignorant superstition, where all the money is spent on armaments and SUV motor cars? One country showing the way ahead is the plucky little East African State of Rwanda who realised the solution was social, not medical. To quote Nature, [1] the key insight was
As Rwanda shows, strong, trustworthy and reliable collaboration between all stakeholders is key
For us, the key concept is stakeholder. Get everyone onside, and you’ll be amazed what you can achieve. Degrading, despising and turning people into others is the sure way to fail. In anything.
So before you utterly surrender to the late winter blues, here are two stories to show that someone, somewhere out there is refusing to bend. And, maybe, Spring is just around the corner after all.
We do quite a lot of pollution stories here. Too much carbon dioxide and methane are wrecking the climate. Too much sewage is turning the seas toxic. But there’s one area we haven’t covered enough. The effect of air pollution directly on our lungs. According to the latest report from the UK Government (which, after 14 years of Conservative rule can hardly be a bastion of woke tofu-eating commie liberals):
Epidemiological studies have shown that long-term exposure to air pollution (over years or lifetimes) reduces life expectancy, mainly due to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases and lung cancer. Short-term exposure (over hours or days) to elevated levels of air pollution can also cause a range of health impacts, including effects on lung function, exacerbation of asthma, increases in respiratory and cardiovascular hospital admissions and mortality.[1]
It is estimated that air pollution in the UK may be causing up to 36000 excess deaths per year.
The combined effects of all those cars, lorries, aeroplanes, factories, fossil fuel power stations and goodness-knows-what-else, produce quite a cocktail of potentially deadly things for us to breathe. But most experts agree that the Two Big Killers are particulate matter, the so-called PMn series and nitrates, mainly NO2. But which is worse? If we got rid of PM2.5 for example, would the NO2 still be murdering us? An ingenious study by Joshua Bateman and Martin Clift, reported in the Conversation, seems to suggest an answer. The researchers have created laboratory models of the alveolar epithelium, the key tissue of the human lung which interacts with the atmosphere. For the first time it was possible to expose these cells to different levels of pollutants, both singly and together.
The results suggest the Two Big Killers are at their worst when they act together. And this has a important implications in the struggle for clean air. Just like early attempts to reduce smoking, attempts to clean up the air have run into enormous resistance, which can be bolstered by generous funding from various interest groups which seem to have little interest in clean air. Might it be possible to concentrate first on reducing one of the Big Two Killers first? That would not save as many lives as eliminating both. But it is a much more achievable, and feasible, start.
In his masterwork Reflections on the Revolutionin France, Conservative philosopher Edmund Burke identified the dangers of fast, uncontrolled change.[1] He also laid out the well-run, well- policed state as the only basis for a secure and prosperous life. The imperfection of human nature required that all should be safeguarded from each other. That in turn requires armies, police forces, and where necessary laws to safeguard the existing moral and social order. It is an honourable tradition; the experience of the French Revolution showed that it worked. And many contemporary Conservatives can site it- justifiably, for example in the restriction or even prohibition of seriously dangerous substances, such as alcohol, nicotine or cocaine. And for this reason, millions of ordinary, decent Conservative voters trust only this party to restrict the highly dangerous, possibly addictive drug cannabis. Read the Daily Mail if you don’t believe us.
Which is why it seems odd at first site that former Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss should seem so opposed to a Conservative Government’s attempt to restrict the sale of vapes. [2] The explanation is, of course, that Truss belongs to a second Conservative tradition. That free markets are the only certain guarantee of human happiness. That restrictions and red tape are not only the sure brakes on enterprise, they are an immoral intrusion on the freedom of the individual. Again, an honourable tradition, rooted essentially in the works of Smith, Ricardo and Hayek. And proved right in the experience of the Russian Revolution and the tragic, genocidal decades which followed it. Which is why think tanks like the Adam Smith Institute advocate the legalisation of cannabis [3] Impeccably Conservative-well they were such inspirations not only for Truss, but for her predecessor Margaret Thatcher as well.
For any law, however much it claims to be for the public good, is also Red Tape. Any regulation is a restriction on someone’s freedom somewhere. To exalt the monarchy, as many Conservatives do, is at once to exalt the state. and thereby an endless flow of taxes, regulations and laws. Someone has to pay for the Monarch’s dinner-so why not everyones? A true belief in the efficacy of markets would allow the universal sale of vapes everywhere, to anyone. To oppose that is to admit that the goodness of free markets is not true everywhere, at all times. And a law that is not universal at all times cannot be true, as science shows. (Example: the atomic number of Iron is the same wherever you go in the Universe) So-should a Conservative before or against the free sale of vapes?
Of course it’s terrible when a family hears the dread news that Alzheimer’s disease, or dementia, has started to afflict one of their members. But until today, when we spoke with a most educated young woman from Alzheimer’s Research UK, we thought it was a disease of the elderly. We had no idea that it can affect relatively young people, that is to say, in their thirties or forties.
But it can and does, as our links for you make abundantly clear. [1] [2]. We apologise for using UK statistics, but Alzheimers UK estimate that there are 70, 800 cases of one of the various dementias in people who are under 65. You can scale that up or down according to the size of your own country with a simple calculator app (UK population 2024=67.33 million) Meanwhile, we invite you to browse the links, as you will be riding on the frontier of one of the great unresolved research questions of our time.
And what to take away from all this? Firstly, you never know when you will learn something unexpected. Especially when you have access to intelligent people. (If you can’t find any to hand right now, we hope this blog will go some way to ameliorating the deficit) Secondly, keep your brain alive. Puzzles, maths, learning a foreign language or even studying the rules of logic might help. Or at least stave the thing off, for a while [3]. So might keeping fit. And finally-if by some miracle we save the scientific method from the various fanatical culture warriors who are currently afflicting the globe, we might just one day find a method to find that no one ever has to live with it again.
Which of the following is a true statement of the facts it purports to covey? Jesse James meets Frankenstein’s Daughter?[1] Billy the Kid meets Dracula? [2] Antibiotic Resistance meets Global Warming?[3] The answer is: the last one. As film fans will know, the first two are films, representing the final Directorial offerings of the late, great William “one-shot” Beaudine. As for the third: its truly scary. Here’s how Nature Briefings sum it up: Climate Change worsens Drug Resistance
Climate change and antibiotic resistance are both major threats to human health, and the risks multiply when they intersect. Increased average minimum temperatures have been linked to higher rates of antibiotic resistance — maybe by making it easier for them to evolve. And extreme temperatures can force people to spend more time indoors, where infection can spread. Tackling these issues together will require global action — and recognition of inequity between richer and poorer nations. Some public health researchers argue for a new UN treaty, similar to existing climate treaties, calling for a 35% reduction in drug-resistant infections by 2035.Nature | 9 min read
But we urge you-no, we will get on our knees and absolutely beg you-to read the linked piece, gentle readers, for it concerns the safety and futures of each and every one of us. Just so you have no excuse, we’ve hyperlinked it again at [3] below.
And now some advice. Much of the science we cover here comes from Nature Briefings, as our more astute readers will have observed, If you want tip-top, up to date science news, culled from the world’s most prestigious science journal, all you have to do is subscribe via this link. It’s free, by the way.
More news from the antibiotics front. And this time, it’s overwhelmingly good. The first of a new class-type antibiotic, Zosurabalpin, is now in early trials. Today, our lead comes from the tireless Linda Geddes of The Guardian. [1] We urge you to read her excellent story, while picking just a few of the key points
From our earliest days Facebooking, then blogging in this area the great problem has been the gram negative bacteria with tough, almost leathery cell membranes which could exclude any antibiotic we could put up against them. The carbapenem class brought us few years respite. But systematic over prescription brought soaring levels of resistance. And this is what gave long faces to the scientists and doctors we used to chat with back around ’16 and ’17
As you will learn from Linda’s article, Zosorubalpin and other new antibiotics under development hope to weaken those cell walls by targeting the flow of lipopolysaccharides, thereby precluding their formation. It’s an ingenious way of re-thinking the problem, and we offer the researchers involved [2] our most heartfelt thanks. However, don’t think humanity is out of the woods. The same problems which wrecked the last generation of antibiotics could recur. Heedless over-prescription, driven by demand from ignorant, hysterical patients. Mass misuse in agriculture, in search of of short term production targets. Failure to develop successor molecule as resistance builds to Zosurabalpin and its peers. All these mistakes are out there, waiting to happen again. The scientists have given us one last chance. Have we the brains to take it?
Reason is the tool we use to turn facts into knowledge. Societies which use reason will have better lives, on the whole, than societies based on belief. Here are three stories which illustrate the practice of reason, by scientific research, demonstrate exactly that.
Cohort Studies of Cancer It’s nice when wet chemistry work in a lab, all white coats and benches, is combined with data analyses and number crunching- both sides get more out of their skills. Here, Cancer Research report on their programme TRACERxEVO which looks at the long term evolution of lung cancer in a group of patients, It’s already throwing up findings like molecular markers which might indicate when a tumour could return, helping treatment patterns and diagnoses in all kinds of ways. That has to be better than applying crystals, right?
Zapping the the Zombiesto stay young The Science desk at the Mail never sleeps, not even over Christmas Here’s one about a new protein called HKCD1 which seems to work at the level of mitochondria and lysosomes, thereby removing tired old cells from the body’s metabolism and allowing fresher, younger ones to come on through, as t’were. Has to be more value long term than all those extravagantly priced creams you see advertised in all those glossy magazines!
INTERLACE-reducing the fear of Cervical Cancer We’ll let Cancer Research speak for themselves here, and just embed a link for the hyper-interested:
Over the last decade, the number of deaths from cervical cancer has decreased by around a sixth (18%) in females in the UK (2017-2019). Thanks to INTERLACE, a clinical trial we funded, that rate could decrease even further. INTERLACE showed that giving people six weeks of chemotherapy before standard cervical cancer treatment of chemoradiation (CRT) could cut the risk of death or of the disease progressing by 35% when compared to CRT alone.“This is the biggest improvement in outcomes in this disease in over 20 years,” said Dr Mary McCormack, the lead investigator of the trial.
Surely this is better than just praying?
For over twenty years now, we have made a small but steady donation to Cancer Research UK The individual monthly sums are tiny. But their steady accumulation, above all as a stream that CRUK can rely on, makes a tangible difference. If everyone did it, it would pay for no end of new scientists and techniques like the ones above. And, as have said before on these blog pages, discoveries in one area have a happy way of spilling over into others. And so our last link is to their donations page Go on, give them a go. Even £2.00 a month will slowly build, and you won’t know you’re doing it.
Overseas readers-is there something like this in your country?
Learning, Science and Society 