The Bubonic Plague Rewired Your Immune System

How bubonic plague rewired the human immune system

By David Cox, BBC Online, February 20, 2024

Of course, you never have had the Bubonic Plague; nor has there been anything like a major breakout since the Middle Ages. Yet, if your ancestry includes Europe, or other region of the world, effected by the famous plague, well then, the plague of centuries ago has had positive impact on your immune system.

When you stop and ponder how that might be, you’ll come up with the answer. Or, you can click on this BBC article for the scientific explanation of how and an explanation of the effect itself. At the very least, you’ll find it interesting and useful party conversation. w/c

We Have No Miracles But We Have Science

Gene therapy eyedrops restored a boy’s sight. Similar treatments could help millions

By Laura Ungar and Freida Frisaro, Associated Press, July 24, 2023

FDA Approves First Topical Gene Therapy for Treatment of Wounds in Patients with Dystrophic Epidermolysis Bullosa

FDA Press Release, May 19, 2023

One of the more distressing and dangerous aspects of false and disinformation is how it has persuaded too many people to reject science and one of the products of science, modern medicines, among them vaccines and gene therapies.

Vaccines are one of the great triumphs of humankind, freeing people worldwide from some of our greatest scourges. Yet they only work if we all participate, and sadly participation is dropping due to disinformation.

Gene therapy holds great promise for curing some disorders and diseases once thought incurable.  Of course, this will happen only if people, religious groups, and politicians don’t throw up barriers to development and testing, which often happens with new therapies, such as germline genetic therapies.

These two articles, one from the Associated Press and the other an FDA press release, report on a drug called Vyjuvek, approved for treatment of an inherited disorder called  dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa (DEB). The FDA release explains the drug and the disorder. The Associated Press article describes how the drug, developed as a topical gel, was adapted to droplet form for use in a young male patient blinded by DEB.

Some might regard restoring the boy’s eyesight as a miracle. In fact, it resulted from scientific research and oversight from the FDA, a government agency much maligned recently over public health issues related to Covid.

The next time you hear or read science and medicine attacked by those who know little of the subjects, think about this article and press release, and as importantly, how these fields of study have improved you and your families’ lives. Ask yourself, where would we be today without them? w/c

The Biggest Killer in History Could Kill Again

The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

By John M. Barry

Humankind likes to think it is in control and rests comfortable in that thought. When something unknown and uncontrollable strikes, panic ensues. Just that happened when influenza struck the world in 1918, a world already weary of the first total world war, a war that led to a near suspension of democracy in the United States as Woodrow Wilson and his administration prepared to enter the conflict. John Barry not only tells the story of a disease raging rampant across the U.S. and the entire world but how humankind’s own deadly squabbling and compulsion to control, restrict, and distort information contributed to worldwide panic and, probably, millions of unnecessary deaths. His is at once a tale of terror, inspiration, and caution. It’s one that readers should pay particular heed to in light of the demoralizing beating truth and honesty are taking today in American society.

To truly appreciate the 1918 influenza, readers need an understanding of biology, chemistry, public health practices, medical practices, and the political and social milieu of the period. While a lot to ask, what makes Barry’s history so brilliant is how he weaves all these disciplines into the story to the point where you acquire a basic working knowledge of virology and bacteriology, in addition to a greater appreciation of modern medical science.

Barry begins with the state of medical practice and education and scientific research a century before the great influenza attack. Indeed, what a sorry state it was with no standards in sight. Over time, though, and with great skill and insight, dedicated, curious, and exacting people wrought the kind of modern medical world familiar to us today. It arrived just in time to face off with the influenza plague. What will strike you in particular is just how small the research community was, concentrated in a few institutions in the U.S., especially Johns Hopkins and the Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller University) and a few men and a woman, among them William Welch, Simon Flexner, Oswald Avery, William Park, Anna Williams, and a handful of others. Little known today, except to those involved in medicine and research, you learn just what giants they were and how they contributed a modern life we take for granted today.

You can’t fathom influenza without understanding something of virology and bacteriology. Barry does an excellent job of explaining and illustrating how viruses and bacteria work and how researchers isolate these organisms and devise methods for combatting them. Concomitant with this knowledge is an understanding of public health policy and techniques, which Barry threads throughout the story.

In many ways, the early part of the 20th century proved a perfect breeding ground and killing field for influenza as the Great War caused great concentrations of soldiers in camps, ports, ships, and battlefields in less than healthful conditions. As readers will learn, the times accounted for an accelerated dissemination of the influenza virus and its mutations. What also contributed to the disease, especially its capacity to strike raw terror into the hearts of people so overpowering and crippling that sister would not help sister or brother brother, is that the American government, from Washington straight down to local districts, lied to the American people about the severity and cause of the health crisis, and enlisted the media of the day to participate, all in the name of patriotism and the drive to focus and marshal resources on entering and fighting the Great War. In other words, something we find ourselves confronted with again, manipulation of our free press. Along with from 50 to 100 million deaths, two other casualties of the Great Influenza were Truth and Trust.

If you have never read this book, there’s never been a better or more important to change that. Needless to say, highly recommended. w/c

Joyce Carol Oates, Now Neuroscientist

The Man Without a Shadow

By Joyce Carol Oates

As neuroscientist Margo Sharpe, the protagonist in Joyce Carol Oates’s latest novel, learns, you can’t live and interact with someone without at least bits and pieces of their psyche insinuating into your own. Likewise with Oates, a writer whose wide-ranging curiosity has yielded a couple library shelves of first-rate, and often adventurous, novels; her second husband is a neuroscience professor emeritus at Princeton University. Perhaps readers should give him a little nod for this always engaging and regularly frustrating fiction about a man, Elihu Hoopes, who cannot remember anything for more than seventy-seconds, and thus cannot form new memories, his condition the result of an encephalitis infection at the age of thirty-seven. But that’s somewhat misleading, for the novel really focuses on Margo, a bundle of insecurity and neuroses involving her hunger for love, her questionable research decisions involving a human subject, her concerns about how she’s perceived professionally, and beyond her, the tricky business of ethics in research involving human beings.

Margo first meets Ehilu Hoopes, known as E.H., when she begins working toward her PhD under and in the clinic run by Milton Ferris at the University Neurological Institute at Darven Park, Pennsylvania. The year is 1965, the eve of the feminist revolution, meaning the clinic and the PhD program prove a lonely place for a lone young woman. Ferris takes a liking to her and involves her in the research on E.H. from the beginning, giving her more responsibilities over time, including the design of experiments and top-ranked authorship on the all-important journal papers. She becomes romantically involved with Ferris, an affair that continues over years, until he breaks it off. This intensifies her feelings for E.H., who for her is more than simply the subject of experimentation. She insinuates herself into E.H.’s family and imagines herself married to him, even though her rational self understands nothing can develop because he can’t remember who she is one minute to the next. Margo’s thoughts, perceptions, and actions, some bizarre in the context of her profession and her subject, occupy most of the novel.

As for E.H., you’ll find it quite amazing how much of a character Oates creates from a person who exists only briefly in the now. She uses repetition effectively to help us imagine how maddening, outside the intellectual challenge of accumulating knowledge about the human mind, interacting with E.H. must be, and in particular how desperate must be Margo for love and affection that she turns to a man who cannot remember her (a metaphor for marriage; let’s hope not). However, E.H. isn’t just a man of the now; he has had a whole life up to his thirty-seventh year. We learn some of it, in particular an incident that occurred as a boy when his cousin Gretchen went missing and turned up dead. A sense of responsibility haunts him.

Additionally, E.H. is more than a mentally crippled man: he is an invaluable research commodity, a one of a kind. Other researchers would love a piece of E.H. However, Ferris and then Margo, after she assumes control of the lab, will not share, will not allow any other researcher near their prized subject. You certainly can understand why but you wonder how a person can be regarded as so much lab property and even larger how having the same team working with him constantly advances the cause of research. Might not others add an additional dimension to understanding other aspects of the human mind? And, anyway, how can this possession, almost slavery, be ethical? While fiction, you wonder, how often does behavior like this happen?

So, lots here for the reader and all handled with Oates’s usual skill. w/c

The American Healthcare Mess …

… It May Get Messier

June should be on the radar of millions of Americans who currently receive subsidized health insurance as part of the Affordable Healthcare Act (ACA). (We’re not talking about the vast majority of Americans who receive subsidized healthcare insurance without realizing they do; that is, employer-sponsored plans.) In June, the U.S. Supreme Court should hand down its decision regarding the legality of the federal government providing subsidies to low income people. Truthfully, though, all Americans should be concerned because, ultimately, a decision against the subsidy provision can potentially increase the already astronomical cost (currently just shy of 18%, nearly double that of the UK, Canada, France, and others [World Bank, 2014]) for everybody.

ACA from its inception has proven very divisive. The vociferous caterwauling of those opposed to the law is hard to avoid and seemly unending. Less heard from are those campaigning for a real American healthcare system; they, too, find ACA an inadequate law and an incremental improvement at best.

It would appear that part of the healthcare problem is reality. Americans have a hard time accepting reality, especially when it counters their notion of being the best at everything. For instance, when you tell people that our country has the highest number of incarcerated citizens and the second highest rate of incarceration, exceeded only by the Seychelles, (International Centre for Prison Studies), many are surprised and many flat-out don’t believe it.

Same holds with healthcare. Of 11 developed countries, the U.S. comes in dead last when rated on efficiency, equity, and outcomes (Commonwealth Fund, 2014 Survey). For many reasons, some of them ideological, many people continue to insist we have the best healthcare in the world (or had, before ACA).

Admittedly, understanding what’s wrong with healthcare in America isn’t easy. Yes, it’s a big, complex machine with many moving parts. That invested parties do their damnedest to confuse and distort the basic facts makes the task no easier. Combined with people wondering how they benefit from helping others obtain affordable healthcare throws up more barriers to accepting the reality of the situation: that a healthier population helps everybody to healthier lives and lowers the overall cost to everybody, too.

We can’t do anything about the pending Supreme Court decision. We can, however, suggest two ways to learn more about our current situation and how we got the inadequate half-baked solution we now have.

First, take a look at “8 facts that explain what’s wrong with American healthcare” based on research by Sarah Cliff of Vox. It’s as close to reality as you’re going to get on the subject. It also includes some video, amusing at that, so it’s not all drudge.

Second, for a good examination about how we got the employer-based health insurance system we have today and how we ended up with ACA to fill in some of the gaps, read Steven Brill’s

America’s Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Back-Room Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System. Brill explains why we went wrong, when we went wrong, how we attempted to rectify our mistakes, why we failed, and how what we ended up with, the ACA, has left pretty much everybody disgruntled.

Blame it on the vested money interests: hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, and pharma; blame it on politics and our historical ideological divides (like the socialism bugaboo); blame it on a generally uninformed population, many of whom are happy to work against their own best interests. There are certainly plenty of places to point to.

You can hold any opinion you wish on healthcare in America and how to pay for it. But opinion without fact isn’t worth much. So take a look at sources we suggest that avoid most of the polemics. c/w

Get Your Shots

On Immunity: An Inoculation

By Eula Biss

It seems pretty clear to me and probably you why we should get vaccinated, vaccinate our children, and encourage those we care about to follow suit. Biss presents a literate and intelligent case for vaccination; that is, self protection and the protection of those around us, even those far afield. However, some would not agree. They see vaccination as invasive and as a transmitter of disease.

Biss’s book has value on two scores. First, it educates you on the history of vaccination, and gives you an idea of what life was like before we began developing ways to protect ourselves. Any of us alive in the 40s and the 50s only has to cast back to the summers of terror when polio, now virtually eliminated, scourged us; people lived in fear of paralysis and the iron lung. The book also shows how inquisitive and brave individuals discovered and developed vaccination, often in the face of fear and opposition.

But, then, if vaccinating against diseases that wiped out populations of our forebears is good, why do some people see it as bad? And why do even those who believe in the benefits of vaccination sometimes suffer pause?

That’s the second value of Biss’s book: helping us understand the gray areas of vaccination–of most any endeavor, when you think about it–and how these can give rise to doubt. She employs Dracula as a metaphor for the injection of evil into us. After all, things can and do go wrong, as we’ve witnessed on many occasions. While rejection of tested methods seems silly and, more important, dangerous, complete and blind acceptance isn’t always best either.

Biss helps you understand the history of vaccination, why it frightens some people, and helps you understand that nothing is absolutely certain, not even scientifically tested and endorsed methods. On balance, however, it’s the best chance we have for leading longer and more productive lives, something that history has clearly demonstrated. So, make sure you and your loved ones get your shots. w/c