The Wonders of Clean Water
thechart.blogs.cnn.comIt is amazing to me how important water is for the human body and how toxic it can be when that precious water is contaminated.
Bizarre Victorian fact of the day...
In England in 1849 a coin was issued which was given the nickname the ‘Graceless’ or ‘Godless’ florin. This was because unlike all previous coins it did not carry the traditional inscriptions D.G (Dei Gratia - By God’s Grace) and F.D (Fidei Defensor - Defender of the Faith). A virulent cholera epidemic during that year was blamed on the Godless Florin and as a result the coin was withdrawn from circulation.
How Cholera Bacterium Gains a Foothold in the Gut
sciencedaily.comA team of biologists at the University of York has made an important advance in our understanding of the way cholera attacks the body. The discovery could help scientists target treatments for the globally significant intestinal disease which kills more than 100,000 people every year.
The disease is caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, which is able to colonise the intestine usually after consumption of contaminated water or food. Once infection is established, the bacterium secretes a toxin that causes watery diarrhea and ultimately death if not treated rapidly. Colonisation of the intestine is difficult for incoming bacteria as they have to be highly competitive to gain a foothold among the trillions of other bacteria already in situ.
Scientists at York, led by Dr. Gavin Thomas in the University’s Department of Biology, have investigated one of the important routes that V. cholera uses to gain this foothold. To be able to grow in the intestine the bacterium harvests and then eats a sugar, called sialic acid, that is present on the surface of our gut cells.
Collaborators of the York group at the University of Delaware, USA, led by Professor Fidelma Boyd, had shown previously that eating sialic acid was important for the survival of V. cholerae in animal models, but the mechanism by which the bacteria recognise and take up the sialic was unknown.
The York research, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), demonstrates that the pathogen uses a particular kind of transporter called a TRAP transporter to recognise sialic acid and take it up into the cell. The transporter has particular properties that are suited to scavenging the small amount of available sialic acid. The research also provided some important basic information about how TRAP transporters work in general.
The leader of the research in York, Dr. Gavin Thomas, said: “This work continues our discoveries of how bacteria that grow in our body exploit sialic acid for their survival and help us to take forward our efforts to design chemicals to inhibit these processes in different bacterial pathogens.”
Cholera epidemic spreads in west, central Africa: U.N.
The virulent diarrhea disease is spreading quickly along waterways between and within countries, causing an “unacceptably high” rate of fatalities, the U.N. Children’s Fund UNICEF said.”The size and the scale of the outbreaks mean the region is facing one of the biggest epidemics in its history,” UNICEF spokeswoman Marixie Mercado told a news briefing in Geneva.Chad is experiencing its largest cholera outbreak ever recorded, 9 out of 10 districts in Cameroon are reporting cases and the case fatality rate in western Democratic Republic of Congo is above five percent, she added.The acute intestinal infection, often linked to contaminated drinking water or food, causes severe diarrhea and vomiting, leaving young children especially vulnerable to death from dehydration. Malnourished children are especially at risk.Aid agencies say that with proper treatment, fewer than one percent of cholera patients should die.Five countries — Cameroon, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Nigeria— account for 90 percent of overall cases and deaths in more than 20 countries, spokesman Tarik Jasarevic of the World Health Organization (WHO) said.UNICEF said that many outbreaks had begun outside of the typical cholera season and now affected countries where the disease is not endemic. It feared further spread in coastal areas of central Africa where higher than normal rainfall was expected till year-end.It identified three major cross-border cholera outbreaks: the Lake Chad Basin (Chad, Cameroon, Nigeria and Niger), the West Congo Basin (Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic) and Lake Tanganyika (Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi).UNICEF said it was providing treatment kits and conducting community awareness campaigns on hygiene as poor sanitation is the underlying cause for cholera outbreaks.The WHO is providing technical assistance and helping authorities improve disease surveillance to detect cases, Jasarevic said.Every year there are an estimated 3-5 million cholera cases worldwide and 100,000-120,000 deaths from the disease whose short incubation period of two hours to five days enhances the potentially explosive pattern of outbreaks, the agency says.
