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Biotech News

Can Anthrax Be Controlled? 112

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the little-glass-hotels dept.
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."
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Can Anthrax Be Controlled? More

Can Anthrax Be Controlled?

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  • Article text for your convenience (Score:4, Informative)

    by Karma Troll ( 801155 ) <saturatedagony@yahoo.com.cn> on Sunday November 13, 2005 @11:15PM (#14023623) Journal
    Can anthrax be controlled?

    Max Planck Researchers discover a protein which is deadly for anthrax bacteriaScientists from the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin discovered why lung, but not skin, anthrax infections are lethal. As reported in the newest issue of PloS Pathogen (November 2005) Neutrophils, a form of white blood cells, play a key role in anthrax infections. They can kill Bacillus anthracis by producing a protein called alpha-defensin. This discovery might now pave the way towards the development of new therapies for the fatal lung form of anthrax.
    Bacillus anthracis is the causative agent of anthrax. What makes Bacillus anthracis especially dangerous is that these bacteria can form spores. The spores are extremely resistant against environmental stress and can survive for years. Think about your breathing; inhale and exhale manually. Infection with Bacillus anthracis can take place either via the lung or through the skin. Interestingly, the lung form of anthrax is almost always fatal, whereas skin infections remain localized and are rarely lethal. In contrast to the lung form, the skin form of anthrax can be treated without problems and most patients recover.

    During the past few years, Bacillus anthracis has also been used as a weapon for bioterrorism. Anthrax spores were sent in envelopes and inhaled and resulted in the death of 5 people in the USA. This was reported at Digg [digg.com] days ago.

    Fig. 1: A human neutrophil takes up Bacillus anthracis. [www.mpg.de]

    Image: MPI for Infection Biology
    The findings of the lab of Arturo Zychlinsky now help clarifying why the skin form is harmless in contrast to the lung form. After a skin infection with Bacillus anthracis, neutrophils are recruited to the site of infection. Neutrophils are white blood cells that can identify and kill microbes. In the skin, neutrophils take up the spores, which germinate inside the neutrophil to a vegetative ("growing") bacterium. This vegetative bacterium is then attacked and killed within the neutrophil. The scientists succeeded in identifying the substance responsible for the killing of the bacteria. After fractionation of neutrophil components only one protein remained which is sufficient for killing Bacillus anthracis: alpha-defensin

    This mechanism is not effective in the lung form of anthrax. Here, the number of neutrophils recruited to the site of infection is known to be low, and insufficient to kill bacteria. Thus, inhaled spores can germinate and spread through the organism. The scientists in Berlin now hope that their discovery will help to develop new drugs against the lung form of anthrax. There might be the possibility that the inhalation of alpha-defensin might kill vegetative bacteria in the lung and prevent dissemination.

    [VB]

    Original work:
    Anne Mayer-Scholl, Robert Hurwitz, Volker Brinkmann, Monika Schmid, Peter Jungblut, Yvette Weinrauch, Arturo Zychlinsky
    Human neutrophils kill B. anthracis
    PLoS Pathogen 1(3), November 2005

    PDF (155 KB) [www.mpg.de]

    Contact:

    Prof. Dr. Arturo Zychlinsky
    Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology [www.mpg.de], Berlin
    Tel.: +49 30 2846-0300
    Fax: +49 30 2846-0301
    E-mail: zychlinsky@mpiib-berlin.mpg.de [mailto]
    • I have to read this article. Frankly I thought this was old news.

    • Re:Article text for your convenience (Score:5, Insightful)

      by TCQuad ( 537187 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @03:37AM (#14024348)
      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.

  • Grim Reaper will control it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by external400kdiskette ( 930221 ) on Sunday November 13, 2005 @11:15PM (#14023626)
    "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 :)

  • Great news! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Propagandhi ( 570791 ) on Sunday November 13, 2005 @11:16PM (#14023628) Journal
    Man, this is a load of my back. I've been really worried about contracting it lately. I'm sure I speak for all of slashdot when I say how glad I am that my chance of dieing of Anthrax (some pathetic fraction of a percent) may someday be even closer to zero!
    • It could become another pandemic [slashdot.org]! Some guys at Scientific American are probably on record that it could incur 10 deaths this time, that's a 100% increase! Beware.
    • And not a moment too soon.
      I have to spend all my spare cycles worrying about a flu pandemic instead.

    • Re:Great news! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by gkhan1 ( 886823 ) <oskarsigvardsson ... m minus caffeine> on Monday November 14, 2005 @12:11AM (#14023847)
      When it comes to anthrax, it's really not about the death-count is it? Anthrax is the perfect scare weapon, remember back when people were getting the letters containing the stuff? As you say, almost no one died, but people were freaked out up the wazoo! Even here, in the cold north of Scandinavia, people started evacuating buildings every time someone got a letter with flour in it.

      And that's what terrorism is all about isn't it? Terrorism was never about killing as many as possible, that goal is futile for terrorist organizations. No, terrorism is all about Terror, and there are few better ways to freak people out if they think that the mail can kill them.

      If a letter containing just some dust can kill you, who of us is really safe?

    • Re:Great news! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by demachina ( 71715 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @01:51AM (#14024106)
      Me personally I'd really like to know how Anthrax from a U.S. lab got mailed around the U.S. right after 9/11 with a weak attempt to make it look like it was done by Islamic terrorists. It is amazing that after engaging in character assassination of one suspect who was never charged this investigation appears to have disappeared in to a black hole.

      It would seem to suggest our biggest danger from Anthrax is not Saddam or Bin Laden, but the U.S. government.

      The only two solutions to the case seem to be:

      - A lone right wing wacko working in a U.S. lab with access to deadly bio weapons, who may still be there, which is really scary, especially if you don't know what other agents this person has access to, small pox for example.

      - There are people in power in Washington who perpetrated this despicable attack to pump up the frenzy for invading Iraq over WMD's. These maybe being the same people who manipulated Judith Miller in to terrorizing the nation with books and articles about WMD's in general and in Iraq in particular.

      The choice of targets in particular screams out Republican nut case who, while engaged in this sick enterprise, couldn't resist targeting the liberal media and two Democrats in Congress they most hated, Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle.
      • 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 accu
        • 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.

          Are you talking about the GP or the GOP?

        • This isn't proof of anything, I suppose, but... this [worldnetdaily.com] is kind of curious, isn't it?

          "In October, press reports revealed that White House staff had been on a regimen of the powerful antibiotic Cipro since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Judicial Watch wants to know why White House workers, including President Bush, began taking the drug nearly a month before anthrax was detected on Capitol Hill. "

  • Hmmm (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Didn't that band die out in the 80s?
    • I thought this article "Can Anthrax Be Controlled?" was about them keeping the crappy singer instead of the good one (John Bush). Someone ought to make sure they make the right decisions! :)

  • Neutro..what? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Psionicist ( 561330 ) on Sunday November 13, 2005 @11:20PM (#14023640)
    Neutrophils, a form of white blood cells, play a key role in anthrax infections.

    And here I was thinking a neutrophil was someone who was sexually aroused by the science of food [reference.com].

  • Can Anthrax Be Controlled? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Evro ( 18923 ) <evandhoffman.gmail@com> on Sunday November 13, 2005 @11:22PM (#14023651) Homepage Journal
    Boy, am I glad this wasn't in the "Ask Slashdot" section...
  • How many other bacteria affect humans in similar methods where inhalation is deadlier than skin contact? Just curious if the same premise of narrowing down why one exposure is less lethal than another could be applied to other bacteria.

    • Re:What of other bacteria? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The black plague was bacterial, and came in two forms -- when it hit the lungs, it was nearly always fatal, and when it hit the rest of your body, it was nasty but survivable.
    • Francisella tularensis, the cause of tularemia (rabbit fever), is Not Good when inhaled. This was discovered by some poor bastards who ran over an infected rabbit with a lawnmower and inhaled the resulting infected rabbit fog. Fortunately it does not normally spread in this fashion.
    • The Plague, aka The Black Death, aka yersinia pestis, can be fatal within a day of being inhaled, with mortality reaching 80% if untreated (which, until fairly recently, was usually the case, because you were probably dead before they figured out why you were sick) whereas the other major form of infection, bubonic, takes quite a bit longer and has much more predictable symptoms. Septicemic plague is as fast as pneumonic, but it's harder to get, unless you, I dunno, run over an infected prairie dog with a
      • What's the prevalence of yersinia pestis these days? Is its acquiring relegated to the same likelihood as anthrax and rabbit fever?
        • I don't know about where you live, but we've had a consistent death every other year in the county where I grew up. I assume it's higher for the state as a whole. Way more people die of hantavirus around here than the plague, but that's mostly because doctors are expecting to see the plague and treatment is very effective once the IMVIC test comes back indicating Y. pestis. The problem is that it's SO FAST that often people feel tired and start coughing and by the time they head towards the doctor they'r

  • Who cares? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kohath ( 38547 ) on Sunday November 13, 2005 @11:26PM (#14023671)
    I hear we're all going to die in a Flu Pandemic [slashdot.org] anyway.

  • Good deal! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Ibanez ( 37490 ) on Sunday November 13, 2005 @11:27PM (#14023679)
    With all these cases of Anthrax infections going around, this will be a boon for us!
  • ...and here I was, thinking I might actually somehow inhale anthrax...you know, not working in a government building and all...Well, at least now I know I'm safe!

    *goes to scratch Anthrax off the bottom of my 'worries' list*

    oh wait, it wasn't there...oh well, thanks for helping me (or at least someone) feel relieved about this. one less death threat(or not)...

  • Original article (Score:5, Informative)

    by nucal ( 561664 ) on Sunday November 13, 2005 @11:39PM (#14023724)
    Since PLoS is an open access journal, anyone can read the original article [plosjournals.org].

    As the title of the article says, they show that isolated human neutrophils are capable of killing Anthrax. The mechanism is unusuual, the spores are first eaten by the neutrophils. Then the spores germinate inside the cells to a form of bacteria that are readily killed (vegitative) as opposed to the virulent, disease causing form which is formed in the outside environment.

    However, they don't look directly at animal models - so the leap of faith is that the lung infection is bad when the spores do not elicit a neutrophil response. How the spores avoid eliciting a host response in lung is the bigger question, which is not addressed by the paper.

    • Re:Original article (Score:3, Informative)

      by Stickerboy ( 61554 )
      "However, they don't look directly at animal models - so the leap of faith is that the lung infection is bad when the spores do not elicit a neutrophil response. How the spores avoid eliciting a host response in lung is the bigger question, which is not addressed by the paper."

      That's because that question has already been answered...

      Spores that are inhaled are phagocytized by alveolar macrophages. The spores survive or escape the phagosome, germinate, and use the macrophage as a biological Trojan Horse to s

  • A little reassurance (Score:5, Informative)

    by JonN ( 895435 ) on Sunday November 13, 2005 @11:44PM (#14023743) Homepage
    ...For those of you who are putting on your tinfoil masks, read up what the CDC has to say [cdc.gov] about anthrax.

  • ANTHRAX can be stopped (Score:5, Funny)

    by zrk ( 64468 ) <spam-from-slashdotNO@SPAMackthud.net> on Sunday November 13, 2005 @11:50PM (#14023764) Homepage
    It's simple, just power off their amps, block off the stage, leave the Green M&Ms in the mix backstage, However, as Twisted Sister sez, You Can't Stop Rock And Roll

  • Look Alike (Score:4, Insightful)

    by CriminalNerd ( 882826 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @12:07AM (#14023832)
    Cocaine and anthrax both look alike and both are VERY hazardous to one's health. Is there a difference? You be the judge.

  • No duh (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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!
    • In my epidemiology class, one of the things we talked about was the last 'major' anthrax problem in the US, which was showing up in people who owned horses in places all across the world. They finally tracked it to wool saddle blankets being shipped out of Pakistan. So materials handling can be a good vector for transport. Maybe they were all sniffing their saddle blankets: I don't know.

  • Re: Can Anthrax Be Controlled? (Score:3, Funny)

    by TiggertheMad ( 556308 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @12:32AM (#14023903) Journal
    No, Anthrax will never be controlled!

    I AM THE MAN! BRING THE NOISE!

    *Moshes violently*

  • what about asbestos (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Douglas Simmons ( 628988 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @12:35AM (#14023912) Homepage
    Asbestos. Good stuff to keep heat under control or act as an insulant in general, bad stuff to bump some lines with. One very common application of asbestos was to use it in car brakes. Do we still do that? Have we figured out a way to keep that "controlled" as it does have important features?

    Regarding skin contact, I have no trouble believing that about anthrax. Ever get some asbestos on your skin? Nasty itchy shit. It'll screw up your whole weekend.

    Essentially what I'm trying to say here is avoid dermal contact with both substances. The jury's still out on Teflon.

  • Of course not... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by chriswaclawik ( 859112 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @01:23AM (#14024036)
    The CDC said the following in a press release: "[Anthrax] can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."

    It has to be true; it's from a movie!

  • Yes anthrax can be controlled. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 3seas ( 184403 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @01:35AM (#14024067) Homepage Journal
    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.

    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/mod02 /www.worldgame.org/wwwproject/index.shtml [unesco.org]

    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)

     
    • It gets worse too. If you know the real reason for 9/11...

      You mean that radical islamics don't actually hate us? Damn, they had me fooled...
    • Control it by simply not producing it. the after effect of 9/11 showed the world that the US military is guilty of having and selling anthrax while having stores of it outside of the country.

      To be fair, the world already knew that. When Rumsfeld met with Saddam to sell him anthrax, west nile virus and the rest it was considered so un-sensitive that the receipt for them was published in the Senate Banking Commitee's report without the slightest hint of the old black marker or any need for a FoI application.

  • I really don't see why this merits attention... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anyd ( 625939 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @02:19AM (#14024184)
    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.
  • Yes, I do believe antrax can be controlled. I find envelopes work well when containing it.
  • I don't know why no one has ever really mentioned this, but there's a class of enzymes called lysins which are essentially bacterial bleach--they'll kill specific bacteria within seconds through lysis. Not just that, there's a lysin that's been found to be specific for the antrax bacteria. I find this to be a more likely and more interesting branch of research--I personally think these will be the next generation of antibiotics. Abstract: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v418/n6900/ab s/nature01026.htm [nature.com]

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