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Can Anthrax Be Controlled?
coolphysco1010 writes "Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin discovered why lung, but not skin, anthrax infections are lethal. Neutrophils, a form of white blood cells, play a key role in anthrax infections. This discovery might now pave the way towards the development of new therapies for the fatal lung form of anthrax."
"Anthrax spores were sent in envelopes and inhaled and resulted in the death of 5 people in the USA." with numbers like that I think the problem will die off before a control plan is formulated :)
Cocaine and anthrax both look alike and both are VERY hazardous to one's health. Is there a difference? You be the judge.
I've read that people who are routinely exposed to anthrax spores don't come down with it. Why? Because they're handling material that carries it (wool, etc), not sniffing it like somebody with a cocaine addiction. And what about those people who don't get STD's because they don't exchange bodily fluids with STD carriers? What a concept!
It has to be true; it's from a movie!
A guy walks into a bar... well, I forgot the joke, but the punchline is that he's an alcoholic.
Control it by simply not producing it. the after effect of 9/11 showed the world that teh US military is guilty of having and selling anthrax while having stores of it outside of the country.
2 /www.worldgame.org/wwwproject/index.shtml
And it also showed how the US military can be abused by as little as one person with enough military athority to not have to deal with security protocals but to use it to help the Bush administration to terroriseand threaten the American media which inturn then helpped the bush administration to terrorise teh American public to support an erronious war on iraq. Which had nothing to do with 9/11.
It gets worse too. If you know the real reason for 9/11, then you will also know the US wrongful world stock market manipulation was in fact the motivation and excuse of fanitics born out of the oil industry to be able to convince enough to follow.
simply start with a google search on "trillion dollar bet" and then realize who teh big losers were (enron, worldcom, etc.) and who benefitted from investment firms needing to put the enormus gains somewhere and found the dot coms...)
Anthrax? Who really needs it, but to play unneeded war games by the idiots who simply don't know better how to spend tax payer money. Of the 6 billion plus people on this planet, what fractional percentage are responsible for the hardships of the rest of us?
http://www.unesco.org/education/tlsf/theme_a/mod0
Anthrax? To control it, get rid of the all the war mongers and power mongers responsible for creating it and worse..... we do know who they are! Just like indonesia knew it was the Americans who were draining their economy, but they just didn't know how (CNN did a story... so did ABC, but ABC removed their news link around teh time war on iraq started)
There are people in power in Washington who perpetrated this despicable attack to pump up the frenzy for invading Iraq over WMD's.
Let's please not go accusing a small group of people of being murderers until we have something better than "it would have worked out well for them." It's just not cool.
"Right wing nutjobs", I'm okay with. There's enough of them to absorb that, but if it was an Iraq thing, then the order would have had to have come from one of a very small group of people, and that's a big accusation to make.
Maybe I'm just being ignorant, but I see these types of articles as fuel for our current atmosphere of fear. Our current administration pushes this fear on us everytime they want something done. Fear of anthrax, terrorists, and WMDs pushed us into war in Iraq, got the patriot act passed, and allows our government to take more and more control of our daily lives. I guess I just don't want /. to be part of that same cycle. If I want to feel scared I'll watch some dipshit on the local news tell me how my cell phone is going to give me cancer, or how the world is coming to an end with the natural-disaster-au-ju. Enjoying life involves some inherent danger. That's what makes it worth living.
The abstract is interesting, but it's WAAAAAY too early to start predicting this as a cure for anything.
Evolution is a very good learner. If the level of neutrophils is held lower, there's probably a valid reason. It may be unrelated (i.e. always having low levels is better than having occasional high levels in response to soot/allergens), but based on the 1918 flu pandemic (where strong immune systems attacked vigorously in the lungs and contributed to the cause of death), I think that it's plausible that extreme immune responses in the sensitive areas of the lungs may be a generic bad thing.
If so, that's not to say that this research is not useful. If we know that we can't up the response or rely on the host's higher immune response, then we need to focus our energy elsewhere. We can either mimic the response (provide protein via inhalation) or work on cooperative response (bacteriostatics, give the slow and steady approach more time). I'd tend towards the latter, with combinations of various classes of bacteriostatics to prevent selection of resistant strains.