Living on the Edge - Those clever bacteria

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C R Y P T | L I N K S | H O M E Living on the EdgeThose clever bacteriaBacteria genes far outnumber our human cells and we have a symbiotic relationship with this other world which for the most part we don't even realize is there but there are 100 trillion bacteria, about 3 pounds worth, in our gut to your 10 trillion cells there. The bacteria in your bowels outnumber the cells in your body by a factor of 10 to one. We are really outnumbered. Bacteria is life and it lives in us and everywhere else. Another words there is 10 times more bacteria DNA in your gut than your own DNA.To take one example of how clever bacteria is, consider Vibrio fischeri which lives in deep water. It produces a protein which glows; it emits light - and it is called lux, but it takes a lot of energy to make this lux so the bacteria doesn't make it unless other bacteria join with it in the manufacture of lux. I signals other microbes using a hormone called lactone and V fischeri sense when there is enough bacteria density so the energy expense is low and at the appropriate density level for ambient lactone there is at that high level a triggering of lux production - and an entire population of Vibrio fischeri glows at once. A bioluminescence occurs when the population reaches that threshold and where it resides in the organs of deep sea fish, it causes those organs to then glow. The fish uses the glowing bacterium so they can see and hunt their prey. When V fischeri is not in the fishe organs and living in low density states it does not need light and does not waste limited resources to cause this bioluminescence to occur.And when bacteria lives in colonies in your gut, about three pounds worth, where it lines your intestinal tract, it is an extremely complex living system that aggressively protects your body from outside offenders. Nothing is DeadViruses are not technically alive. But they may not be dead either? They're chunks of genetic material and they only activate themselves when they get inside cells where they use hijacked cellular machinery to replicate more virus material. Then they are probably alive. I say there is a probability they are then alive because this is one of those fine points that is still being debated by microbiologists. Bacteria and Eukaryotes are alive; they are self-sustaining and replicate. Archaea, which is anerobic, is the third Kingdom and is also alive. You cannot build an antigenic blueprint without the virus. It takes immunity from either your mother when you are a child - which is not complete and will dissipate quickly or it takes exposure to infection. There is no natural immunity. All immunity is learned by the immune system. Genes don't code for specific antibodies. There must be an immune response to an antigen.Recovery from the influenza virus creates immunity to that particular strain of influenza, but the frequent genetic variation of the virus prevents life-long immunity. Vaccines that include prevalent strains circulating in the population reduce the incidence and severity of infection, if the HA and NA of the virus used for immunization match the infecting strain. Current vaccine consists of 3 strains, influenza A (H1N1) influenza A (H3N2) and influenza B. The H and N refer to proteins on the surface of the virus and affect virulence and efficiency. (neuraminidase and hemagglutinin) Your immune response often causes discomfort. A fever kills a virus but it is still unpleasant to have a fever. Everyone experiences it though some may be slight and you might barely be aware that you have had the flu. A flu attacks your respiratory system, but there are other viruses which can be far worse. But plagues throughout history have had devastating effects. In 79 A.D. malaria may have been the cause of the downfall of Rome. In 166-180 the "Plague of Antoninus) was most likely smallpox and killed as many as one third of the population of Italy.In 542 - 543 the "Plague of Justinian" was ratbourne Bubonic Plague and caused a major extinction of humans life. Propocopius, the Byzantine historian wrote that 10,000 people died daily. The disease spread from Constaninople to Denmark.And from 1346 to 1350 A.D. as many as one third of the population of Europe was wiped out from Bubonic Plague and the disease spread from Asia to Europe by Mongol armies and fleas carried the disease. Slave ships carried yellow fever in mosquitos in the 16 and 17 centuries.Smallpox was carried to the New World by Spanish Conquistadors and killed millions of natives in the Americas. Europeans also brought with them smallpox and measles. 95% of all pre-Columbian Native Americans were wiped out. And the sexually transmitted bacteria disease Syphilis was carried to Europe from the Americas. During the Industrial Revolution Tuberculosis killed tens of thousands and diseases caused by contaminated food and water, Typhoid and Cholera was rampant. In 1918 the Influenza outbreak killed as many as 50 million people.I N F E C T I O NPinworms and other worm infestations were less a problem for hunter-gatherers than the era which began with the agricultural period. Hunting and Gathering communities were practically entirely free of intestinal parasites. There were other differences also. "...Pinworm infection is caused by a small, white intestinal worm called Enterobius vermicularis about the length of a staple, that live in the rectum of humans. While an infected person sleeps, female pinworms leave the intestines through the anus and deposit eggs on the surrounding skin which causes itching. It was at this time that my mind turned to the anthropology of pinworms. How is it that humans have suffered from these parasites for so long and when did pinworms indeed first become a human health problem? To answer my questions I turned to the research of Karl Reinhard--a legendary figure in the anthropology of pinworms and anthropologist at the University of Nebraska. Reinhard has spent years examining human fossilized feces (coprolites) recovered from many regions of North and South America." (The paleoecology of pinworms (Medical Anthropology) from the Townsend - Letter for Doctors and Patients (5/1/2005), by Tim Batchelder) "In general, forager cave sites were occupied by small groups of people (less than 50) who subsisted on wild plants and animals while agricultural sites were occupied by large groups of people (several hundred) who subsisted in part on cultivated plants and in part on wild plants and animals. Pinworms never favored humans as hosts while they were still highly mobile and because of behavioral plasticity, humans have been a risky target for parasites throughout their evolution. The low human population size and small band size that were typical of humans for most of their evolutionary history made it hard for parasites such as pinworms to really gain a foothold in these populations. However, once groups settled down and turned to farming, they became heavily infected. High population densities, poor sanitation, and the compactness of living spaces in small farming villages and pueblos skyrocketed the infection rates of nearly a dozen types of intestinal parasites including pinworms, tapeworms, and thorny-headed worms. As human populations migrated from tropical and subtropic areas to northern and southern latitudes humans became even less attractive to parasites. The fact that humans could easily adapt to a wide variety of climates made life difficult for more sensitive parasites. There were in fact, few parasites during the bulk of human evolution that could survive in all the wide geographical ranges of human survival. The only ones that could survive were parasites that specialized to live off humans and had highly co-evolved infection mechanisms. The most successful parasites were those that could maintain infections as humans migrated through Beringia and into the New World, such as pinworms (Enterobius vermicularis), whipworms (Trichuris trichiura), and giant intestinal roundworms (Ascaris lumbricoides) which were found in prehistoric mummies and coprolites in the Americas and were the most successful of the human specific nematodes (parasitic roundworms). In the long run pinworms have proven themselves highly adaptable and today they parasitize all human populations from the Arctic to the Tropics." (ibid)Pinworms, like other parasites live off their host. They don't necessarily want to kill their host but they do want to enslave their host. A parasite lives off the resources of someone else. Some might say how bad can they be if they don't kill us? Well, they might kill us - after they have enjoyed the fruits of their labor. AND, meantime they own you. They use you. They can make you very sick. You may very well indeed feel like crap and nobody will be able to figure out why, including your very competent doctor - who is trained to treat disease, not to test for various parasites. (That is generally a job for the National Institute of Health's Center for Disease Control ) You doctor looks for the obvious, if you are low on iron and need to be treated for iron deficient anemia OR SOME SUCH - but does not always see the obvious, those parasites which are causing those deficiencies, etc., NOT necessarily what is really making you sick. And besides, it is also advantageous to your doctor to have you coming back for more aspirin or whatever placebo he can give you to make you think he/she is doing something (notice how doctors always have to write a script whether you need one or not?) - and you may get better or not - which is what you would do anyway in spite of what your doctors does or does not do. You might be better off shining a flashlight on your ass, looking for pinworms. A barnacle looking parasite named Sacculina carcini is born with a head, a mouth and a tail and it has legs of sort. It is a crustacean. BUT instead of joining the hunt itself for food, it finds itself a crab. It wiggles and bores into the snail's shell and sheds it's legs, tail and mouth and it then grows root-like tendrils which grow and fill up the crab's body. It doesn't need all those other appendages anymore because it will obtain it's food from the crab in now inhabits. It is fully invested in the crab as a parasite. I couldn't tell you how the crab feels, but if it feels anything, it most certainly doesn't feel very good. P A I NIf you have pain and you are not feeling so good, at least that is a sign you are still alive. When I had my Tic Douloureux and it was really bad, before my brain surgery, when the pain was practically unbearable, it seemed; at least I could say by the pain I was still alive. Maybe that sounds silly to you, but it was not silly to me at the time, nor is it untypical for others who have had to live with chronic pain. Our immune systems are as incredible as they are complex with their multiple cells for doing different things. These are the warriors which flow regularly through our blood stream attacking and hopefully winning the battles against disease and germs. We don't always feel so good when they're doing their job but we have to be glad they are it is like pain. When I have pain I know I'm alive. When I feel like crap I know my warrior cells are working to keep me alive. The pain and the feeling like crap goes with the territory. Sweating is another sign that we are alive. If we couldn't sweat we would really be in a pickle. We humans sweat to keep our body temperature controlled. Dogs sweat through their paws. We sweat through our skin. It is an evolutionary anatomical physicological adaptation to the stress we feel when we work or exercise hard. The skin is our radiator for those small veins and arteries within which blood flows and the heat is radiant energy. Evaporation of salty water manufactured in our sweat glands over our entire thermo-regulatory body surface keeps our temperature where it needs to be for the rest of our biology to work right. They are for some also sexual. Sweat is secreted from the skin. Hair follicles are present in the skin of all of us mammals and there are apocrine glands which secret a fluid which appears as lather on horses but also exude an order on us humans, especially on our armpits, and around our nipples, our belly button and our genitalia. Those apocrine glands are not about controlling body temperature but rather the heat of emotion. The true sweat glands are eccrine glands which are widely distributed over our entire body. Incidentally, being able to sweat over our entire body helped our ancestors to be able to hunt in the middle (during the hottest) part of the day. The downside meant we were also bound to water and had to be near water sources most of the time so we could replenish what we sweat and peed. We can't just hold it almost forever, like a camel (g). And, our enlarged brain enables us to figure out how to outsmart predators and opposable thumbs facilitate holding a gun or swinging an axe or pulling the bow string back on a bow. The assault on our biology by various attackers is fought off by hand to hand combat by phagocyte components of our white blood cells; macrophages, dendritic cells, granulocytes, complement cells, lymphocyte T and B cells and TK cells, and chemical cytokines, etc. We have a symbiotic relationship with parasites and they have become dependant on us - as we are on them. It is a fragility which can have lethal consequences at times. Actually if you think about it very much - as I have - you will understand - and I don't want to depress you - that all of life is a story of death. They are both very closely intertwined. Every species has gone through a transition with variations which through natural selection enabled it to survive for a time and every species has changed or died. We are not our ancestors but we owe them our existence. All of us are made up of variants, of life forms, some which have done better than others - and for the most part they want to keep us alive if we are their natural host so they may continue to life but they won't live peacefully. There is no peace on the planet. There is only constant battle and an unending race for survival. It is not a ladder. There is no progression. It is just diversity. Darwin understood this. It is a lateral move that life takes and as long as we can survive we have only one purpose which we can think of - to try to define for ourselves that which will make us happy on that journey to nowhere. It is becoming more difficult, not less, that we will have cures for many more viruses. We have managed to eliminate some of them but often they reemerge and due to rapid mutation rates, genetic drift, changes (favorable to infectious agents and unfavorable to us) in environments we will see an increase in all kinds of viral, bacterial, including eukaryotic parasitic diseases. Between disease and the proliferation of reactive molecules ("free radicals"), a result of the mitochrondria cellular respiration process - and lengthing telemeres (those tails on the ends of our chromosomes), our days are numbered and time is running out. The transhumanists hope to change all that but I doubt there is much more juice to squeeze out of the orange. And how many of us are really willing to run more marathons and go on the kind of calorie restrictive diets to make our bodies obey our hunter-gatherer nature and ignore the urge to eat more and die faster? BUT, while we are worrying about another 1918 like flu pandemic which is entirely possible and it is worthy of our concern, there is still the ongoing, neglected diseases in the Third World, like Marburg Virus, Ebola, haemorrhagic fever, and AIDS. While money is being wasted on stupid, unnecessary wars (aren't they all?) there is an urgent need for funding for Africa's forgotten diseases. The World is a VillageThe world has shrunk to a village and now there will be more outbreaks of disease and plague. Washing our hands won't protect us. Neither will immune systems which have never been tested. I must admit to having some admiration for the beasts that live inside us. We complain about our environment but it is not nearly as hostile as the one that parasites have become adapted to where they actually glide through our skin and our gristle and they make their way through the dark, dank, murky labyrinth of muscle and sinew and through the cauldron of our stomachs. They can live anywhere they set up shop and they feed on our tissue, our blood, our guts, our liver, and even swim in our bile. They are extraordinary animals. Take a tiny blood fluke, called Schistosoma mansoni. It waits in a pond of water, when it isn't making its temporary home in a snail. It is waiting for a human ankle. It senses molecules from human skin. It swims rapidly and drills and burrows in. Chemicals released from the fluke soften the skin so it can plunge into its new host as if it was slipping into mud. Once inside of us, it continues to swim for a capillary. The fluke is barely small enough to fit in that capillary so it pulls itself along the using suckers to inch forward. Then it reaches a larger vessel, a vein and then a larger one - finally into a stream of blood which carries the fluke along toward its intended destination. The fluke rides the stream of blood to the lungs. It moves from veins to arteries by way of a lung capillary and then to a major artery and finally the blood fluke comes to rest in the liver. There it has its first meal since it left the snail and there it begins to mature. If a female a uterus forms. If a male eight testes form - like grapes. The fluke grows dozens of times bigger in just a few weeks. Then it is ready to find a partner. If lucky the host has been infected with several blood flukes from that pond. The females are slender; they are delicate and the males are shaped like a canoe with a spiny trough. Their blood borne odors lured them together and she enters his spiny trough and locks herself in. The male then carries his bride out of the liver. In a period of weeks they will make this next journey together from the liver to veins and then across the stomach. While they travel the male will pass molecules into the female body and she will become sexually mature. They stop near the large intestine. If the fluke was a Schistosoma baemotobium, it would stop in the bladder. And if a Schistomsoma nasale it would go to the nose. There they, a coupled male and female fluke for the rest of their lives. The male consumes the blood of the host and messages his female partner helping blood cells to flow into her mouth and through to her gut. He consumes is own weight in glucose from blood every 5 hours and he passes most of it to his mate. Even after the female dies, the male will continue to clasp onto her. If you uncouple them, they will continue to reunite. Their relationship is forever. Hank RothWill we have a major pandamic in your lifetime which may kill millions of peopleand will these microscopic killers; viruses, bacteria and other parasites, survive us.We evolved because of bacteria, Mitiochrondria and archaea and they were here forbillions years before we were. Are we being manipulated and doomed in their world? Or will we continue to share a symbiotic relationship with them?Post your comments here:| Related Content Excerpts provided here per the Fair Use Doctrinefor educational and discussion purposes per Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, Copyright Law.Permalink: http://pnews.org/ArT/ZuLu/Edge.shtml «¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»§ - PULSE ON 21st CENTURY ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE! §Subscribe:......... - «¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»