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New Links Found Between Bacteria and Cancer
Shipud writes "A recent study by a group at the University of Maryland School of Medicine shows that bacterial DNA gets transferred to human cells, in a process known as lateral gene transfer, or LGT. LGT is known to occur quite commonly between bacteria, including bacteria of different species. In fact, that is how antibiotic resistance is transferred so quickly. The team has shown that certain types of tumor cells acquire bacterial DNA that may play a role in tumor progression. Another group at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill has shown that gut inflammation leads to a radical change in the microbial population there, which encourages growth of E. coli that can disrupt the inflamed cells' DNA, leading to cancer. Both studies enable us to ask new questions such as: how does inflammation change the landscape for bacterial colonization? Can bacteria indeed harness inflammation — and then cancer — to flourish and remove competitors from their newly found ecosystem? And can we use this information to fight cancer?"
Is there some difference between LGT and HGT? If not, why deviate from the clear standard on this topic?
I always knew the gays were behind cancer.... LesbianGayTransgender=LGT...... the republicans were right all along
How long until the entire human race is put on antihistamines now that we've figured out it's the number one cause of death of all time?
Not the question I have. My question is how can I use this to cause cancer in my enemies.
At first, I thought the title was "New Linux Found Between Bacteria and Cancer".
#DeleteChrome
"And can we use this information to fight cancer?"
Live a healthier life so you have a robust immune system?
Please don't suggest giving more money to cancer-cure scammers to "fight cancer" when education and changing your unhealthy lifestyle will do more for the world than any "cure" ever will.
Has everyone forgotten "an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure"? Our society's biggest disease is ignorance and arrogance.
Stop giving the bacteria ideas!
Oh, thanks. I've just learned something. I have used resistance to antibiotics as an example of real-time observable evolution. If it is actually lateral transfer, then this example won't hold. Good to know!
I don't have any proper medical education, so can someone tell me why so much of modern medicine involves controlling or preventing inflammation? It seems to cause or contribute a lot of dangerous conditions.
What is the natural biological benefit (Why did we evolve it?) that inflammation is supposed to achieve?
Can they therefore derive that people who have had to take much antibiotics throughout their lives for other conditions, statistically have less cancer?
It would help explain why the paleo diet is supposed to cut caner risk drastically: Without all the etra carbs there is less inflammation in the body. Food for thought :)
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Specifically taking probiotic supplements, yogurt, etc?
Bark less. Wag more.
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Fox News called it... Gay marriage is going to kill us all!
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Said gut inflammation nearly all of the time comes from highly concentrated sugar/starch.
Exactly what happens to your teeth/mouth, happens to the rest of your digestive system too. The predominant bacteria change, and grow massively and uncontrolled, because of the huge amount of ready-made/predigested energy.
I'm not saying anything about the cancer link myself. But more and unusual bacteria... over decades (of eating stuff not fit for human consumption)... draw your own conclusions...
The immune system, innate and acquired, is sort of your own personal military-industrial complex, and has a nasty tendency to sometimes go off the rails and start killing civilians in an increasingly paranoid response to minimal or nonexistent security threats, giving us autoimmune disorders.
Consider the evolutionary theory of pathogen Molecular Mimicry -- infectious agents that adopt motifs that resemble normal host antigens should have a selective advantage. In an absolute form, the theory is not completely accepted -- immunological cross-reactivity between host and pathogen could be due to evolution, or it could be due to chance -- and examples exist that support either case. But I think it is likely that the mechanism operates at least some situations.
The consequence is that a somewhat over-active immune system may actually be the optimum state, with the particular degree of paranoia being the amount that best balances the trade-off between autoimmune disease risk against infection outcomes.
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Those aren't new questions.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If some, any, cancer were transmitted through bacteria , then it would produce a infectious footprint in the epidemiological record.
Where is that footprint?
The researchers I read published this stuff 10 years ago. Not only cancer, either. E. coli in the gut can give you a heart attack. Anyway...
you might be able to read, but if you cant comprehend you might not want to so much.
english and many languages evolve according to what makes communication efficient.
when someone says, ' i have a phlemy irritated throat after eating those supermarket muffins', i wouldnt say' it could be a batch with too much preservative, or perhaps the flour in the warehouse while it was fumigated', i certainly wouldnt jump right to 'now that bromine fumigants are recognised as potent green house gasses and cause endocrine disruption in humans the world has gone back to vikane and so homogenised trade agreements to allow flour and egg products, which are then used as ingredients in all kinds of products without mentioning residue levels, to contain surprisingly high levels of residue, over 100ppm in the case of 'flour' and 'dried egg white', and the accounting of the residue has even been doctored as toxic breakdown products which can never be metabolised to a safe form because they are elemental toxins remain and do not count towards the legally agreed thresholds, and fumigation of warehouses while loaded with produce is allowed (although not in picky europe), and that this may possibly result in food sensitivities and allergies.", that would be overly verbose, knowing that communication is only effective if the recipient remains engaged i'd just start with "perhaps its the chemical additives in the muffin", of if i was australian "mate its the chemicals".
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
"Interventional cardiology and cardiovascular surgery is basically a scam based on a misunderstanding of the nature of heart disease. Searching for and treating obstructive plaque does not address the areas of the coronary vascular tree most likely to rupture and cause heart attacks. If there was never another CABG or angioplasty performed or stent placed, patients with heart disease would be better off. Doctors would be forced to educate our citizens that their heart disease risk is determined by what they place on their forks. Millions of lives would be dramatically extended. To abandon the theory of stretching and cutting out areas with plaque would shut down interventional cardiology, nearly all cardiovascular surgery, and many suppliers of the biotechnology. In many cases, interventional cardiology is the major income generator to hospitals. The ending of this ill-conceived, out-dated and ineffective technology would dramatically downsize hospitals in the United States and free up over $100 billion annually in medical care costs. Besides being ineffective, interventional cardiology places the responsibility in the hands of the doctor and not the patients. When patients finally realize they must take control of their heart problems with aggressive dietary modifications (and when needed medications for temporary periods) we will essentially solve the health crisis in America.
The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportunity to choose and just corralled into these surgical interventions.
Trying to figure out how to pay for ineffective and expensive medicine by politicians will never be a real solution. People need to know they do not have to have heart disease to begin with, and if they get it, aggressive nutrition is the most life-saving intervention. And it is free."
The original article is yet another reason for eating a high quality anti-inflammation mostly-plant-based whole-foods diet of the type that MDs like Joel Fuhrman or Andrew Weil suggest. Still, it can be hard to overcome the "Pleasure Trap" on your own,
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.bluezones.com/
Fuhrman suggest a diversity of phytonutrients helps prevent cancer. But the original article is a different angle on the actual operating principle of such prevention.
"Eat For Health -- The Anti-Cancer Diet"
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx
"As reported by the U.S. government and Center for Disease Control (CDC), cancers of the colon, breast, prostate and lung are the top four deadliest cancers in the modern world. After billions of dollars devoted to researching drug treatments for cancer and minimal increases in life expectancy for those undergoing chemotherapy for most common cancers, many authorities such as the National Institute of Health and the American Cancer Society, have been issuing a stronger voice advocating more preventive measures to reduce cancer incidence. Diet has become a key element in the fight against cancer.
The most recent scientific advancement in the anti-cancer research is the identification of specific foods and food elements that offer powerful protection against cancer. These foods are essential for both prevention of cancer and also inc
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
This debate about what kills us, especially about what is toxic and kills us through cancer, is a discussion about the Frakenstein world business and the government has created for us. We are lab rats. It isn't a matter of who has knowledge and who shold regulate, or what we should know about outr health. It is that we are babes in the woods about decisions that are not driven with our best welfare in mind.
The greatest gains in human longevity were made by advances in public health, mostly, not treatment of chronic diseases. It is true that the medical profession and the regulatory agencies can claim some success in the safety of the food and drug supply and treatment of disease, but our form of government in the U.S. is to blame for many of the current risks and failures discussed in this thread.
People of Conservative politics love to pit government against business and blame the ills of the world on too much red tape. In the case of drugs and food additives and the risk of cancer, the problem is too much intimacy between business interests and the regulators and the political fact, in the under funding of the FDA, to investigate and enforce sanctions against mistakes, The Congress has sacrificed the general welfare in order to please business interests who have greater access to them and who fund their reelection and who want to rush poorly tested products into the market and into our bodies. That includes drugs and food additives. America is not run by a democracy or even of representative republic but by what i call an "entrepanocracy" in which the duopoly is in joint support.
The American Beverage Consul, a trade organization, lobbyist, for soda and soft-drinks, has been running a pair of ads on TV here in San Francisco Bay Area. One ad pats themselves on the back for providing calorie per serving data, which they are required to by law anyway, the other ad had this woman, in the produce aisle BTW, claiming the government is trying to take "free" choice away from consumers by passing laws and taxing beverage makers. Sounds good until you realize that marketing excels at giving the illusion of choice under what is in effect a cartel of two or three suppliers, all of which use the same basic formula under sanction of the FDA, and all federal agencies, cabinet level posts, have the built-in conflict of interest that they promote the interests of a constituancy at the same time has having to regulate it. This is why the denizens of K Street in Washington DC are so powerful. The other problen with the above ad campaign is that the FDA rushed approval for the use of High Fructose Corn Syrup in the 1990's before it was implicated in the spike of obesity we are seeing how, because it was adopted by agribusiness in response to a spike in sucrose prices. HFCS is an ingredient in lots of processed foods and our bodies convert most of it to fat, and obesity is one of the major risk factors for cancer. The other problem with the ad is that if something they are doing contributes to the burden of the government to have to treat chronic diseases of aging, such as type II diabetes, cardio-vascular disease, even just through the 30% or so of the total health care cost in Medicare outlays, the government has a right, and even a duty to mitigate the known risk from HFCS and remove it from the market by product liability suits.
Of course this sorry state of affairs wouldn't be so acute if conflict of interest wasn't built into the US Constitution, itself, through the way the legislative branch is formed, and through the imposition of bad law that allows special interests in business to impose their will on us.
It's != Its
Casteism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone
http://www.bluezones.com/programs/blue-zones-communities/albert-lea-mn/
Overcoming "The Pleasure Trap" can be hard, and it helps when you have community support.
Your point illustrates how good health is becoming a geeky info-tech thing?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.