Mad Cow: it's here!

Talked to U of C's Dr. James Mastrianni, one of only two doctors in the country who works with living patients with Creutzfeld-Jakobs Disease (the human version of mad cow.) Prions, which are mysterious misfolded proteins that cause CJD--they're neither bacteria nor viruses, and no one knows very much about them at all--have to be contained in a level 3 Biohazard Safety Lab. What's that involve? Check it out!

Swine flu...in Chicago

5 cases of unconfirmed swine flu in Chicago. Two of them are staff at the U of C hospitals.

The reason why it takes so long to ID swine flu is that there are no local centers for testing - the Centers for Disease Control have to do them out of their labs in Atlanta.

I've talked to a couple of University researchers about the flu. One of them studied (for kicks, apparently) the path of the 1918 flu pandemic in Chicago and U of C in particular - turns out we were hosting a garrison of WWI soldiers at the time. Here they at left, drilling on Stagg Field, the U of C's old Big Ten football stadium (with no little irony, where our library is now.)


Read about what happened to these guys here!

Swine flu

It's a public emergency. I'm sure someone in the University has studied it, so on the Biological Sciences head's advice, I'm going to talk to a professor Olaf Schneewind (with such an excellent name, I'm sure he'll be awesome) for a possible Maroon article.

There are so many unanswered questions: Why hasn't Chicago, with so many people with ties to Mexico, seen an outbreak yet? Is it going to be like the 1918 pandemic, where young, healthy people like myself were the hardest hit? (Although since it killed something like 60 million people, your odds were pretty bad either way.)

More to come.

MRSA bacteria breaks out of jail

My article on the MRSA (commonly called Staph A) epidemic, how the first doctor first noticed it in pediatric wards at the University of Chicago Hospitals, and what they did about it is up at the Maroon website.

The doctor who first noticed it is Robert Daum and he was wonderful to interview. He also says he's always looking for volunteers for the MRSA project!

Hemochromatosis and my weakness

I have a terrible weakness for one kind of evolutionary genetics theories. This is the kind where recessive gene disorders are explained by saying that 1 copy of the gene gives you an advantage over some other disease or condition. For example, 1 copy of the sickle-cell anemia gene is supposed to confer resistance against malaria, etc.

The reason why I call it a weakness is because though these theories are REALLY attractive, evolutionarily-speaking, sometimes they have holes.

So I'm writing my Celtic Societies paper on another one. This one is called hemochromatosis. It's supposedly the most common recessive genetic disorder in Europe and the U.S., although it's most common in people of Northern European descent (aka "Celtic" peoples). 1 copy helps you store more iron; 2 copies and your body builds up so much iron over a lifetime that you get heart and liver failures and maybe even turn a little gray.

It's been said, and I want to say, that the hemochromatosis mutation happened after humans switched to agriculture (about c. 2000 B.C.) because there isn't much iron in grains, so it was evolutionarily useful for people to store more iron.

And yet, geneticists have only traced the hemochromatosis mutation back 60 generations or so, which puts it after 1 A.D. or 2,000 years after that mutation would have been suddenly useful. And if it was so useful, why didn't it explode across all newly agricultural societies?

Sigh - another hole in my favorite brand of theory.