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Entries in the ' disease ' category
In today’s MBE, Origins of Human Malaria: Rare Genomic Changes and Full Mitochondrial Genomes Confirm the Relationship of Plasmodium falciparum to Other Mammalian Parasites but Complicate the Origins of Plasmodium vivax (doi:10.1093/molbev/msn069):
Despite substantial work, the phylogeny of malaria parasites remains debated. The matter is complicated by concerns about patterns of evolution in potentially strongly selected [...]
The NY Times has a fascinating article by Alex Kotlowitz on how organisations like CeaseFire are having success at reducing gang violence in Chicago by treating it like a disease:
CeaseFire’s founder, Gary Slutkin, is an epidemiologist and a physician who for 10 years battled infectious diseases in Africa. He says that violence directly mimics infections like tuberculosis and AIDS, and so, he suggests, the treatment ought to mimic the regimen applied to these diseases: go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source. “For violence, we’re trying to interrupt the next event, the next transmission, the next violent activity,” Slutkin told me recently. “And the violent activity predicts the next violent activity like H.I.V. predicts the next H.I.V. and TB predicts the next TB.” Slutkin wants to shift how we think about violence from a moral issue (good and bad people) to a public health one (healthful and unhealthful behavior). (More at NYT)
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A new Homo erectus find has shown that Tuberculosis is much older than originally thought. Previously, the earliest definite proof of TB’s existence dates to around 18,000 years in fossilised Buffalo, but this new skull shows small lesions that are characteristic of Tb and dates to around 500,000 years ago. This suggests that TB has [...]
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