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Vaccine from Fly Saliva
BrentRJones writes: "Fly saliva could protect us from a dangerous disease, says this article from Nature. Reality is always stranger than fiction." This disease is one of the possible causes of Gulf War Syndrome.
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The existing treatments have adverse side-effects like creating resistant strains of malaria, are 'incompatable' with many users (a friend who lived in Kenya for a year called the weekly dosage "Friday night at the movies" because many people got hallucinations), or because they are just plain poisonous (e.g., painting the walls around an infected person with DDT).
There are other promising lines of attack on malaria as well, but this seems like it might be a good one.
Well, if you want to mass produce fly saliva, just give them some chewing tobacco and a spitoon, and they'll fill it up real quick :)
What the hell.... First post
Who wants Pork Chops?
Nature has had a few billion years to develop animals with immunities that only allow them to live a dozen years at the most. What we are doing is beyond what nature called for and extending ourselves twoward an average lifespan of 100 years and maybe beyond. Nature couldn't do that so we will with whatever it takes. Cloning, mechanical parts, synthesized medicines. Anything to keep us from slipping back into the darkness.
So when I open up this article, the fortune at the bottom of the page reads:
Eat shit -- billions of flies can't be wrong.
On a more serious note, a lot of research seems to be moving in the direction of supressed co-existence with pathogens, rather than outright destruction. A recent PBS show explored how a mild form of syphilis was quite common, and provided immunity against the nasty variety we know today. The nasty variety was only able to take over when people started living in a more modern manner, and the weaker variety was no longer transmitted.
Sure, if you take into account that "Gulf War Syndrome" has been used to describe any ache, pain, symptom, disease or syndrome shown by any Gulf War veteran for any length of time after the war.
Excuse me, but if you take almost a million people and scrutizing them hard enough and long enough, you're going to see quite a range of diseases. "Gulf War Syndrome" was invented by a buzzword-happy media to explain the completely normal distribution of naturally occuring diseases in a populace that happens to be quite large.
In fact, on the average, Gulf War Veterans are somewhat healthier than the norm, as several unbiased studies have shown. The reason people equate Gulf War vets with sickness is because they've had this stupid formula pounded into them again and again by the media.
The final report from the Institute of Medicine, which said in October that there is no "scientific evidence to date demonstrating adverse health consequences linked with [Gulf War] service other than [about 30] documented incidents of leishmaniasis [a parasitical disease caused, in this case, by sand fly bites], combat-related or injury-related mortality or morbidity, and increased risk of psychiatric [problems from] deployment."
A draft copy of the final report of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses (commonly called the PAC), leaked in November to The New York Times and The Washington Post, which found "no support for the myriad theories proposed as causes of illnesses among Persian Gulf war veterans, or even evidence there is a 'Gulf War Syndrome,'" according to the Post.
The article in the November 14 New England Journal of Medicine, which found that Persian Gulf vets had the same death rate from disease as non Persian Gulf vets, and a much lower rate than the comparable civilian population. An accompanying article looked at hospitalizations, finding Persian Gulf vets and non Persian Gulf vets hospitalized at the same rate.
And so on. Then there's Private First Class Brian Martin, who reported a range of symptoms that included vomiting up glowing fluids (no kidding, people) to "early Alzheimer's." None of the doctors who examined him found anything except for a hypochondriacal imagination, but there are a staggering number of journalists who take his story on face value.