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Finally, a celebrity has spoken to counter all that Jenny McCarthy crap!
Amanda Peet, in a recent interview in Cookie Magazine, said that “parents who don’t vaccinate their children are parasites.” (Peet is the mother of an 18-month-old.)
Then, in a follow-up letter to the magazine, she apologized for the “mean and divisive” use of the word “parasite,” but didn’t back down from her original message:
However, I still believe that the decision not to vaccinate our children bodes for a dangerous future. Vast reductions in immunization will lead to a resurgence of deadly viruses. This is as indisputable as global warming. I know a lot of parents who secretly use as a justification, “Well, enough other people are vaccinating, so therefore, we don’t have to.”
Hooray!
(Hat tip: Sullivan)
Many cases of autism originate not in the brain, but in the gut, according to a few controversial studies published in the past year.
Stomach upsets are among the most frequent and puzzling symptoms of autism. About 70% of children with autism have gastrointestinal problems throughout their lives, including frequent abdominal pain, constipation and vomiting, compared with 28% of typically developing children, according to a 2006 study.
Many parents of these children say that tailored diets — lacking wheat and gluten, dairy or both — dramatically improve language skills, or decrease tantrums and hyperactivity, although few studies have borne out that hypothesis.
Still, the anecdotal evidence has led some researchers to ask whether the brain and behavioral abnormalities associated with autism — and perhaps the dramatic rise in autism diagnoses — stem from problems in the gut.
“We cannot ignore the fact that these children don’t just have something wrong with their brain. A lot of them have something wrong with their gut,” says Derrick MacFabe, director of the Kilee Patchell-Evans Autism Research Group at the University of Western Ontario.
Over the past year, MacFabe has published two studies showing that in rats, fatty acids produced by gut bacteria can cause abnormal behavior and brain patterns.
Few others are rigorously studying the gut’s link to autism, and many are skeptical of its ties to the field of alternative medicine. But as mounting evidence points to the heterogeneity of autism spectrum disorders, many experts agree that it’s time to start looking at possible environmental factors.
“Some of my geneticist colleagues think we’ll have to study the genes first, before we start the environmental part — that’s a mistake,” says Martha Herbert, a pediatric neurologist at Harvard Medical School. “Each one is going to give us clues about the other, and the whole thing will move faster if we work together.”
…read more of my latest at Simons
COOL WEBSITE OF THE MONTH—WOOT!
Jennifer just sent me a link to some of the most striking animations I’ve ever seen.
Go there for up-close views of (among other things): a T4 bacteriophage targeting E. Coli; the DNA double helix; Xeloda, the first oral chemotherapy drug, targeting a tumor cell; or a human heart filling up with blood (pictured above).
In Sub-Saharan Africa, about 1.5 million pregnant women live with HIV.
Without antiretroviral drug treatments, the likelihood that these women will pass on the virus to their child is around 15 to 30 percent, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). If the mother breast-feeds, which most do for at least 18 months, that risk of transmission jumps even higher–up to 45 percent.
Because of this risk, babies born to women with HIV in Western countries are only fed formula to prevent virus transmission through breast milk. This isn’t an option in poor countries. Not only is formula expensive, but making it safely requires electricity, refrigeration and clean water.
Moreover, if an HIV-positive mother doesn’t breast-feed in these regions, then her child will not receive the enormous immunological benefits of the process, and have a much greater chance of dying from pneumonia, diarrhea, or malnutrition.
“The outcome is the same: whether HIV infection or another disease, both will kill the infant,” says infectious disease epidemiologist Taha Taha of Johns Hopkins University. “So the main challenge is: how can we make this breast-feeding period safe?”
The answer may lie in the results of two large clinical trials published 4 June in the New England Journal of Medicine. The first, led by Columbia University epidemiologist Patricia Kuhn on 958 HIV-positive mothers in Zambia, found that abrupt weaning–a common practice previously recommended by the WHO–did not improve survival rates of babies who were not infected with HIV, and actually increased the mortality rates of babies who were infected with HIV.
The second study, led by Taha on 3,016 infants in Malawi, found that giving an inexpensive antiretroviral drug to infants during the first 14 weeks of breast-feeding significantly reduced the number of HIV infections recorded at 9 months old.
Read more of my latest piece from Nature Medicine
Malaria is the leading cause of death and disease in developing countries, according to the CDC, killing more than one million people every year.
Malaria is caused by protozoan parasites of the genus Plasmodium, and transmitted to the human blood stream by mosquitoes.
Parasites are notoriously, well, parasitic. Their cells look a lot like our own, making it extremely difficult to design drugs that target them but not us.
But a new study from immunologists at the University of California, Berkeley, finds that the human response to one parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, is surprisingly simple. The researchers say this may mean that making a vaccine for other parasitic diseases, such as malaria, may be much easier than previously thought.
“The entire immune response can be boiled down to one protein,” lead author Nilabh Shastri said in a press release. “This could be a general principle of immunity to parasites—that the immune system focuses on one or a few particular proteins.”
Toxoplasma gondii, the parasite that causes encephalitis, is made up of more than 8,000 proteins. But Shastri found that the mouse immune system responds responds to only one of these proteins. With an understanding of this (relatively) simple mechanism, his team made a successful vaccine against Taxoplasma.
They’re now working on testing the same vaccine in people.
“If these findings hold true for other parasites, then the identification of these proteins would be key to making vaccines,” Shastri said.
Read his Nature Immunology study.
