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13-Year-Old Finds Fungus Deadly To AIDS Patients Growing On Trees
An anonymous reader writes Researchers have pinpointed the environmental source of fungal infections that have been sickening HIV/AIDS patients in Southern California for decades. It literally grows on trees. The discovery is based on the science project of a 13-year-old girl, who spent the summer gathering soil and tree samples from areas around Los Angeles hardest hit by infections of the fungus named Cryptococcus gattii.
AIDS patients grow on trees now?
As great as that sounds, it's actually not the case here. The article states that the girl's father is an infectious disease researcher at UCLA and she was sending the samples to a lab at Duke to be DNA-sequenced. It seems like most of what she did was collect samples of the fungus for her father - an interesting summer project, but not exactly hard science.
Tenured professors at universities get their names on papers for less work than that.
Except that killing off people with a disease tends to make people who have the disease a good bit quieter about it, which is harmful to eradication. If you want to throw down blame, it would be those that didn't do anything to stop it because it was a disease that seemed to only affect socially undesirably groups.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
So why didn't the hard scientists already know where the fungus was coming from?
That's right, because they didn't do the science. The girl in TFA did.
My father in the mid-south had a 3 year long struggle with this infection. It has left him a completely different person (three tumors in his brain). This is a nasty disease that was previously sub-tropical and is making its way into North America. The treatment is really nasty.
Amphotericin B has terrible common side effects and the nurses had a nickname for it that was something like "Ampho the Terrible."
Flucytosine is also used and it has a dramatic effect on the mental state of the patient.
During the time my father was taking these medications he suffered kidney failure, massive weight loss, constant nausea and vomiting, poor impulse control (to the point that it was like he had no filter to stop him from saying or doing anything). I'm very glad my father is still alive but even two years removed he still is suffering the effects of this illness.
The girl did not do the science. She just assisted the scientists with the manual labor.
So she's, what, a grad student?