The Amoeba That Eats Human Intestines, Cell By Cell 71
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Entamoeba histolytica is a tiny pathogen that takes a terrible toll. The single-celled parasite—an amoeba about a tenth the size of a dust mite—infects 50 million people worldwide and kills as many as 100,000 each year. Now, a new report reveals how the microbe does its deadly damage: by eating cells alive, piece by piece. The finding offers a potential target for new drugs to treat E. histolytica infections, and it transforms researchers' understanding of how the parasite works."
infects 50 million, eh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Infects 50 million and kills 100000... I'll take those odds. Better than driving to work for a year.
Re:treatment (Score:5, Interesting)
The researchers did experimentally disrupt this process(once with a drug, in a second case with a genetically crippled ameoba strain) as part of demonstrating that the 'nibbling' was the mechanism behind human cell death(which can apparently cause some ghastly intestinal trouble [wikimedia.org]), so presumably there is some hope that we'll be able to weaponize the mode of attack they used, and get an elegant, selective, unlikely-to-interfere-with-other-eukaryotes-like-the-patient, drug that will prevent the horrible-death-by-intestinal-nibbling; but nothing in pill form just yet, certainly not that you could just go shoving into patients without killing some little fuzzy animals first.
(Also, if Malaria is anything to go by, the statistical answer to 'how do you treat it?' is 'On average, you don't. Protozoa are tough motherfuckers and it mostly just kills poor people in ghastly countries anyway. Let's go find a cure for hair loss and midlife limp-dick syndrome...')
Re:infects 50 million, eh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:treatment (Score:3, Interesting)
They had a show on tv called 'Monsters Inside Me' the show is about parasites that invade the human body. They also show how doctors seem to fail, or use their educated minds keep the diagnosis simple. They also show or describe the treatment.. And it is what you'd expect just use antibiotics, or antiprotozoal drugs.
Sarcasm, what could possible go wrong with that? History tells us something but we continue to go ahead with using those drugs.
Something that should be universal in health care are running tests for parasites, I really wonder how many people are being forced to go thru terrible treatments for something like cancer, or pick another illness, when it was a parasite, another failure of the medical system. Parasites have been around as long if not longer then the flu, and yet there isn't a mandatory test. Whether it is a check up or an emergency.
Re:infects 50 million, eh? (Score:4, Interesting)
Kills 100,000 *per year.* So, each year it kills 1 in 500 people that have it. That's very roughly a mortality rate of over 10% (rough math: of 500 people that have it now, approximately 50 of them will be dead from this after 50 years, and approximately 400 of them will be dead from other causes (with about 50 still alive)).
Much less than 10% of the people who decide to drive to work during the course of their lifetimes are killed by driving to work.
In the US in 1972, there were about 200 million people, and about 50 thousand of them died in traffic fatalities (about 2.5% of all US deaths that year). This was the worst year for traffic fatalities by volume and the eighth worst by percent. Let's say that roughly one quarter of the people in the US at the time displayed the symptoms of "driving to work" that year. Even if we presume that all of the traffic fatalities that occurred that year were due to driving to work, that's still a mortality of half of this mortality rate. We would need to suggest that only 1/8 of the population of the US drove to work that year to get to the same mortality rate as this pathogen.
And that's the worst year for traffic fatalities in US history. Since then, our population has increased 50%, and traffic fatalities have decreased 40%. And once again, this is all using a worst case scenario of every traffic fatality being caused by driving to work, rather than driving for any other reason.
So no, having this pathogen is *not* better than driving to work...these are not odds you would take.
Eating fat (Score:4, Interesting)