Glass bugs

Ah. Microbiology. Dontcha just love it?

Yeah – me too. And so does artist Luke Jerram – he’s made some amazing glass sculptures of protozoa, bacteria and viruses:

Made to contemplate the global impact of each disease, the artworks were created as alternative representations of viruses to the artificially coloured imagery we receive through the media. In fact, viruses have no colour as they are smaller than the wavelength of light. By extracting the colour from the imagery and creating jewel like beautiful sculptures in glass, a complex tension has arisen between the artworks’ beauty and what they represent.

Personally, I couldn’t see the “complex tension” – that sounds a bit unnecessarily arty-farty to me. But they are pretty special to look at:

T4Phage-Phage_artwork

Ecoli_sculptureThat’s a T4 Bacteriophage at the top, and my old friend E.coli on the bottom – check out those flagellae – hello big boy! But of course, they’re (thankfully) not actual size. The real things are far smaller then this, hence “micro”biology. I know you knew that.

There are a whole lot more images to look at on Luke’s website too: SARS, HIV, Smallpox, Malaria etc etc.

The beautifully detailed collection has now been bought for permanent exhibition at the The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Donor Everything

Oh dear, we’re heading “down there” – again.

If you follow me on twitter, you may have seen that I tweeted about this last night after I saw it via a doctor friend on Facebook. Well, because my lab flooded overnight and I have no time to do anything at all today, it is going to serve as today’s blog post, especially for those that… er… didn’t see it last night.

From the New England Journal of Medicine, I give you: Donor Poo!

We randomly assigned patients to receive one of three therapies: an initial vancomycin regimen (500 mg orally four times per day for 4 days), followed by bowel lavage and subsequent infusion of a solution of donor feces through a nasoduodenal tube; a standard vancomycin regimen (500 mg orally four times per day for 14 days); or a standard vancomycin regimen with bowel lavage. The primary end point was the resolution of diarrhea associated with C. difficile infection without relapse after 10 weeks.

Putting that into English for you, they found some patients with diarrhoea and split them into three groups. The first lot got antibiotics, the second lot got antibiotics and a bowel wash and the ever-so-lucky third lot got antibiotics, a bowel wash and then some “healthy” poo squirted into their bowels via a tube in their nose.

Yes. You read that last bit correctly. But why would you do that?

Infusion of feces from healthy donors has been reported as an effective treatment for recurrent C. difficile infection in more than 300 patients.

Indeed, because it assists in restoring the “good bacteria” in the gut. So why isn’t this done more often?

Experience with this procedure is limited by a lack of randomized trials supporting its efficacy and the unappealing nature of the treatment.

No sh… er… no kidding.

And here’s how it was done:

Feces were collected by the donor on the day of infusion and immediately transported to the hospital. Feces were diluted with 500 ml of sterile saline (0.9%). This solution was stirred, and the supernatant strained and poured in a sterile bottle. Within 6 hours after collection of feces by the donor, the solution was infused through a nasoduodenal tube (2 to 3 minutes per 50 ml). The tube was removed 30 minutes after the infusion, and patients were monitored for 2 hours.

#OverlyHonestMethods, right there. Seriously, what twisted individual thought that up?
Far, far more than I needed to know. Or maybe just enough for you to try it at home. Which I am clearly advising you not to do.

But hey – here’s the really important bit – it worked!

Overall, donor feces cured 15 of 16 patients (94%). Resolution of infection occurred in 4 of 13 patients (31%) in the vancomycin-alone group and in 3 of 13 patients (23%) in the group receiving vancomycin with bowel lavage.

Isn’t science brilliant?

Real Life Location

Spotted this on Pulse over lunch and thought it was worth sharing:

Twitter is modern day people watching. Anytime you check it, you see what a person is thinking or doing or saying. But it’s not all happening in a digital vacuum, they’re on break at work tweeting about their boss, they’re outside a hospital tweeting about their day, they’re somewhere tweeting about something. This photo project, Geolocations, by Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman show where people are when they send out tweets. It’s completing the picture.

The photos are revealing—sometimes you have tweetable thoughts in the dumbest places. Your bathroom, the subway stop, the back alley. Other times the tweet locations are powerful—you’re tweeting about trying to start a relationship… from a motel. Larson and Shindelman dig through public Twitter feeds that tag a location and then travel to those spots to photogram them. It’s funny to see a place for the thoughts (er, tweets) that existed there rather than the place itself.

Adding a photograph doesn’t necessarily assist in painting the whole picture behind the tweet:

Tell me I'm not making a mistake. Tell me you’re worth the wait. #fb
Tell me I’m not making a mistake. Tell me you’re worth the wait. #fb

In fact, if anything, it merely adds to the intrigue. Appetites whet, curiosity piqued, suddenly we want the gaps filled in t’s crossed and i’s dotted.

But there’s more to it than that – before social media, we interacted with one another on a far more intimate level. Take the artists’ example of the very first photograph they took:

The first one we shot was three years ago in downtown Chicago just as the financial crisis was getting really bad in the United States. At that moment, this particular Tweet was by someone who had apparently lost his job at an investment bank. When we stood at the base of that investment bank, it really connected with us and made it clear what it is to be a part of that tragedy or event.
We were also thinking a lot about how people were relating to each other in this way. Rather than going to a bar and crying it out with close friends, he is posting it on Twitter where anybody could access this information.
This points to a big shift about how people relate to each other in this day and age.

I completely agree. Cape Town being what it is (a small and intensely interwoven community under a rock), I regularly recognise people who Mrs 6000 deals with at work and I state that I “know” them. In actual fact, I don’t “know” them at all; I see them on Twitter, I may occasionally interact with them online. But that’s as far as it ever goes. So there’s actually a huge difference, and just as the word “Like” has taken on an entirely new meaning on the last few years, so we have also changed our interpretation of  “knowing” someone.

While these sort of changes don’t trouble me (and nor does keeping a distance from people who I actually don’t “know”), I’m still looking for a more descriptive and compact terminology for this phenomenon of online acquaintance.
I’m sure there’s some ever so trendy phrase out there for exactly this situation, but I don’t often do ever so trendy.

Anyway, there’s more of their work and more of that interview on the link above. Go see.