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Alligator Blood May Be Source of New Antibiotics
esocid writes "Biochemists from McNeese State University have described how proteins in gator blood may provide a source of powerful new antibiotics to help fight infections associated with diabetic ulcers and severe burns. This new class of drug could also crack so-called 'superbugs' that are resistant to conventional medication. Previous studies have showed alligators have an unusually strong immune system; unlike humans, alligator immune systems can defend against microorganisms such as fungi, viruses, and bacteria without having prior exposure to them. Scientists believe that this is an evolutionary adaptation to promote quick wound healing, as alligators are often injured during fierce territorial battles."
The fact that people will misuse drugs does not mean we shouldn't make them available. If you read TFA you'll see:
Their previous research also suggests that blood proteins may help fight HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.I'd say the possible faster introduction of superbugs may be worth the risk if we can at least try.
I can't shake the image of Diana from V
http://thevisitors.info/intro.html
At least Glen A Larson didn't TOTALLY own my childhood...
Gators/Crocs are famous for having not changed much since the time of the dinosaurs.
I wonder if since they have a very strong immune system that kills viruses etc so well, if they have not denied themselves the opportunity to incorporate useful viral dna and bacterial plasmids into their own dna. It would be interesting to see if they have a different amount of viral origin genes in their genomes than other animals.
...
alligators also:
1. eat putrid rotten food
2. live in oxygen deprived standing water
3. have been doing so for hundreds of millions of years
therefore, their immune systems should be absolutely spectacular
however, some of their adaptations might be more systematic. that is, rather than fight off infecting agents, they may simply let infectious agents traverse their organ systems with impunity, without any resistance, and also without offering any safe harbor. in other words, it is one thing to have a fanatical vigilant guard at your front door who lets no one in, it is another thing to let anyone in your house who wanders by, simply offering nothing inside worth stealing
i would suspect therefore that a lot of the alligator's adaptations to remaining infection free are so very fundamentally different from our body's approach to infection as to be inapplicable to how our bodies approach the subject. they're way of life is so different and ancient as compared to ours, some of their adaptations may be inapplicable to our own bodies
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
check out the horseshoe crab. They were going to be completely destroyed until the medical industry offered to pay more for keeping them alive than the fishermen were paying to use them as bait. The species will actually continue only because of their medical uses. Maybe this will help.
There are already decent protections for legal hunting gator, and this may increase the pressure against poaching.
What's funny is that the whole concept of advantageous traits is a shifting thing. I listened to some NPR reporters asking why native trees from New York had big thorns on them. It turns out they're very similar to thorns on some trees in Africa, which evolved to minimize predation by elephants. Well, it turns out these trees from New York evolved these spikes to fend of mammoths, though it seems like a silly waste of energy now.
The trees that didn't have the spikes were all eaten. The alligators who couldn't heal quickly all died. That's evolution for ya.
I am a Muslim, and I can say that in Islam, there is a blanket overruling of all prohibited substances in the course of saving a life, such as eating pork in starvation situations or deriving medicine from alcoholic sources. Deriving medication from pigs would be allowed, and so too would medicine from alligator blood.
Most opiate analgesics and anaesthetics are, for example, prohibited under the intoxication rule (the one that prohibits alcohol), but are allowed in medical situations. Same for alcohol used in field treatment of hypothermia and other emergency situations.
I'm not sure about the Kosher rules in Judaism, but in Islam, any substance of medicinal value is permitted if necessary for the health of the patient.
This rule is conscience based I guess, for all of you thinking of that Simpsons episode where the blind guy was smoking weed for "medicinal purposes".
I hate printers.
Well, that's a clever argument. It lacks just one thing: any correlation to what actually happened.
Farming was only economically possible after the population was sufficiently recovered that it was no longer in danger. The reason is that you can't un-ban products made from an endangered species until that species is either out of danger, or there is no credible prospect of stabilizing the wild population and controlling poaching.
Farming isn't easy. I don't know any alligator farmers, but I do know people in the aquaculture industry. You need to know a lot of practical biology, you need to understand agricultural technology, you need to provide feed, shelter, veterinary services, manage the reproduction of your breeding stock. Most of all you need capital.
Nobody with any business sense is going to invest in something like an alligator farm, if wild alligators are endangered, but still fairly easy for anybody with a little time on their hands to find. You're competing with people whose capital investment amounts to a rifle and whose marginal cost of production is a box of ammunition. What's more, you're selling a product that is tainted with their misdeeds.
The time to start investing in the farm is when the population has rebounded to the point where they're for practical purposes, pests. People are less sensitive to seeing alligator products on the market, and while there may be some wild animals on the market, lawmakers have incentive to protect their state agriculture by preventing the market from being flooded with game.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Regarding 'superbugs'.
http://www.iitd.pan.wroc.pl/phages/phages.htmlI know that it's already possible to cure that type of infections with bacteriophages with success rate above 80% (about 95% for Staphylococcus aureus). Since last 27 years Institute of Immunology and Experimental Therapy of Polish Academy of Sciences (located in Wroclaw) have been involved in curing about 1500 people with suppurative bacterial infections, in which a routine antibiotic therapy failed.
This is not a secret thing, so most likely all important people involved in that kind of science (MRSA infections) are aware of this kind of therapy.
Why in other countries (except Poland) is that treatment still not known and not available? Lot of people is dying due to 'superbugs'! MRSA infections alone are responsible for more deaths in the U.S. each year than AIDS!
Why not to let people to try this still EXPERIMENTAL therapy?
Maybe the health care industry got to big inertia or doesn't care or just prefer to cure people with super-expensive brand new antibiotics instead of something relatively cheap.
Is they business case more important then people health or life? They just want to make money instead of curing people?
The final conclusion is that we shouldn't expect anything spectacular regarding 'gator immune system'. Other treatments are already available but simply ignored.
They will not make it available if not sure that it will earn a mountain of bucks for them.
SHOW ME THE MONEY!
Two things: first, I understand that you were talking about medical drugs, and do not want to be misconstrued as a proponent of narcotic legalization. Which brings me to my second point that I was alluding to-but did not explain-in my earlier post. Our culture is a drug culture. We are convinced and teach our children that when they have a problem, an illness, there is almost always a drug that can solve that problem. Is it any wonder then that when people have problems they take a drug that will make them feel better? This counts for both legal and illegal drugs and both physical and emotional/psychological issues. It is not availability that is the real issue, it is the paradigm. We live in a drug culture, and the real war on drugs is an effort to maintain control of them by those that benefit most from them: manufacturers of non-naturally occurring and non-replicatable (without a chemistry degree and a lot of equipment) drugs that are sold at ridiculous margins. More drugs is certainly not the answer to any of our problems, medical or otherwise.
As far as I understand, the same is true in Judaism. The "laws of kashrut" are overruled when one's life or health is at stake.
It may be helpful to add that Orthadox Jews traditionally keep kosher on a voluntary, not compulsory, basis. That is, the rules are followed in order to honor god, not because there is some terrible consequence or threat involved if they do not do so. It is not a "keep kosher or go to hell" kind of thing. It is more like "God asks that we keep kosher. We love and honor god, so we will therefore, as a practice of worship and respect, keep kosher as god requests."
Give alcohol to a hypothermic person and you will kill them.
Yes indeed. There are a fair number of different animals that fight a lot and thus should be good at recovery - the Tasmanian Devil comes to mind (nasty vicious thing, currently dying out rather, due to a transmissible cancer spread by, ironically, biting each other). Being very different from the alligator is a good thing here.
... sorry, drifted off. I'm really missing my weekly dose of Buffy.
Has anyone every looked into vultures - after all, they eat dead carcasses, they must be exposed to quite astounding levels of bugs.
Not to mention other things that eat dead bodies - ants, for example.
And what about vampires
"Cats like plain crisps"