Category: health – Page 375
“Medieval” Diseases Flare as Unsanitary Living Conditions Proliferate
Typhus and other infectious illnesses hit homeless communities.
- By Anna Gorman, Kaiser Health News on March 15, 2019
Fungi cause brain infection and memory impairment in mice
We are learning more about fungal infection and neurological diseases. Recently we learned of gingival diseases and Alzheimer’s. My wonder is how plants such as Moringa in one’s diet, that have antifungal properties, can help.
Fungal infections are emerging as a major medical challenge, and a team led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine has developed a mouse model to study the short-term consequences of fungal infection in the brain.
The researchers report in the journal Nature Communications the unexpected finding that the common yeast Candida albicans, a type of fungus, can cross the blood-brain barrier and trigger an inflammatory response that results in the formation of granuloma-type structures and temporary mild memory impairments in mice. Interestingly, the granulomas share features with plaques found in Alzheimer’s disease, supporting future studies on the long-term neurological consequences of sustained C. albicans infection.
“An increasing number of clinical observations by us and other groups indicates that fungi are becoming a more common cause of upper airway allergic diseases such as asthma, as well as other conditions such as sepsis, a potentially life-threatening disease caused by the body’s response to an infection,” said corresponding author Dr. David B. Corry, professor of medicine-immunology, allergy and rheumatology and Fulbright Endowed Chair in Pathology at Baylor College of Medicine.
Policies designed for drugs won’t work for AI
It won’t be simple. As with the advent of the car, many serious implications will be emergent, and the harshest effects borne by communities with the least powerful voices. We need to move our gaze from individuals to systems to communities, and back again. We must bring together diverse expertise, including workers and citizens, to develop a framework that health systems can use to anticipate and address issues. This framework needs an explicit mandate to consider and anticipate the social consequences of AI — and to keep watch over its effects. That is the best way to ensure that health technologies meet the needs of all, and not just those in Silicon Valley.
Health authorities are overlooking risks to systems and society in their evaluations of new digital technologies, says Melanie Smallman.
The Future of Mental Health
THE FUTURE OF FLOW — from my recent keynote at Mindvalley’s Afest.
Linking bacterial populations with health
The biggest source of variability in the microbiome is the person-to-person variability. It’s a problem if you’re looking for causality. That’s a red flag word for us – causality – meaning something about the bacterial community causes some disease. You actually don’t know whether it’s the bacteria or whether the bacteria are a sign of something that happened before. It’s very much individualized, so everybody’s history matters.
We are all teeming with bacteria that help us digest food or fight disease, but two people might play host to a very different array of bacteria due to diet, where they live, hobbies or even medical histories.
As a result, scientists have struggled to understand which bacteria are linked to disease and which protect against it. Studies comparing people’s bacterial companions – known as the microbiome – to explore what that variation means might disagree because they analyzed different groups or didn’t sample enough people.
Statistics Professor Susan Holmes thinks one way of teasing out which differences are relevant to disease and which are just differences between people could come down to statistics and repeating studies.