How HALF of all flying insects found in NHS hospitals carry superbugs (UK)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/artic...rbugs.html
EXCERPT: Half of all flies, moths and midges found in NHS hospitals may be carrying antibiotic-resistant bacteria, research suggests. Scientists collected 20,000 insects from seven different NHS sites across England, catching them in food storage areas and on actual wards. They found nine out of ten carried potentially harmful bacteria, such as strains of E. coli and salmonella. Both bugs can cause diarrhoea. Some 53 per cent of the strains of bacteria were shown to be resistant to antibiotics, which often prompts the label of 'superbug'. And of those, around a fifth were resistant to multiple antibiotics, according to the researchers at Aston University in Birmingham. (MORE)
Breakthrough: Why women get so many autoimmune diseases
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archi...cy/591901/
EXCERPT: . . . Autoimmune diseases turn people’s own immune systems against their bodies. In the United States alone, women represent 80 percent of all cases of autoimmune disease. Women are 16 times more likely than men to get Sjogren’s syndrome, in which the immune system goes after the glands that make tears and saliva, and nine times more likely to have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, in which it sets its sights on the thyroid. Sjogren’s forced Venus Williams to drop out of the U.S. Open in 2011. The singer Selena Gomez underwent a kidney transplant after suffering complications from lupus, which is eight times more common in women than in men.
Some scientists now think the placenta itself might be the reason why women are so disproportionately affected. In a paper published last week in the journal Trends in Genetics, Melissa Wilson, an evolutionary biologist, along with her colleagues from Arizona State University, put forward an explanation called the “pregnancy-compensation hypothesis.” It suggests that women’s immune systems are engaged in a fierce tug of war with placentas, even when the organs aren’t actually present.
Here’s how the theory goes: Women—and all other placental mammals—evolved such that they would be pregnant for many of their adult years. Before the advent of birth control, that was pretty much the fate of the female sex. In modern hunter-gatherer populations, Wilson told me, it’s not uncommon for women to have eight to 12 children each.
Though bearing so many babies might sound grueling, women’s bodies evolved to cope. When the placenta grows during pregnancy, the organ sends signals to the mother’s immune system to change its activity so that the mother’s body doesn’t eject the placenta and the fetus. This might even mean turning down the immune system in some ways, or for some periods of time. Turning down the immune system too much, though, risks leaving women sensitive to pathogens, which would also be bad for the fetus. So instead the mother’s immune system ramps up in other ways throughout adulthood, Wilson and her colleagues think, so as to remain vigilant against germs even when some of its parts become dormant during pregnancies.
Things get complicated, however, when those pregnancies don’t actually occur. Women today tend to have far fewer children—fewer than two on average in the United States, according to the CDC. Wilson reasons that without a more or less constant pushback from placentas during pregnancies—the pushback that women’s immune systems have evolved to anticipate—the immune system can get too aggressive, too ramped up. It starts looking for things to attack that aren’t dangerous, which is how autoimmune diseases set in.
For millions of years, minus the past 100, “the immune system was expecting to have exposure to a placenta,” Wilson says. Imagine if you’re pulling on something heavy, and then the rope snaps. “If you suddenly don’t have that heavy thing anymore,” she says, “you’re gonna go off the moon.”
This is certainly not the first theory for why women suffer from more autoimmune disease than men do.... (MORE - details)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/artic...rbugs.html
EXCERPT: Half of all flies, moths and midges found in NHS hospitals may be carrying antibiotic-resistant bacteria, research suggests. Scientists collected 20,000 insects from seven different NHS sites across England, catching them in food storage areas and on actual wards. They found nine out of ten carried potentially harmful bacteria, such as strains of E. coli and salmonella. Both bugs can cause diarrhoea. Some 53 per cent of the strains of bacteria were shown to be resistant to antibiotics, which often prompts the label of 'superbug'. And of those, around a fifth were resistant to multiple antibiotics, according to the researchers at Aston University in Birmingham. (MORE)
Breakthrough: Why women get so many autoimmune diseases
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archi...cy/591901/
EXCERPT: . . . Autoimmune diseases turn people’s own immune systems against their bodies. In the United States alone, women represent 80 percent of all cases of autoimmune disease. Women are 16 times more likely than men to get Sjogren’s syndrome, in which the immune system goes after the glands that make tears and saliva, and nine times more likely to have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, in which it sets its sights on the thyroid. Sjogren’s forced Venus Williams to drop out of the U.S. Open in 2011. The singer Selena Gomez underwent a kidney transplant after suffering complications from lupus, which is eight times more common in women than in men.
Some scientists now think the placenta itself might be the reason why women are so disproportionately affected. In a paper published last week in the journal Trends in Genetics, Melissa Wilson, an evolutionary biologist, along with her colleagues from Arizona State University, put forward an explanation called the “pregnancy-compensation hypothesis.” It suggests that women’s immune systems are engaged in a fierce tug of war with placentas, even when the organs aren’t actually present.
Here’s how the theory goes: Women—and all other placental mammals—evolved such that they would be pregnant for many of their adult years. Before the advent of birth control, that was pretty much the fate of the female sex. In modern hunter-gatherer populations, Wilson told me, it’s not uncommon for women to have eight to 12 children each.
Though bearing so many babies might sound grueling, women’s bodies evolved to cope. When the placenta grows during pregnancy, the organ sends signals to the mother’s immune system to change its activity so that the mother’s body doesn’t eject the placenta and the fetus. This might even mean turning down the immune system in some ways, or for some periods of time. Turning down the immune system too much, though, risks leaving women sensitive to pathogens, which would also be bad for the fetus. So instead the mother’s immune system ramps up in other ways throughout adulthood, Wilson and her colleagues think, so as to remain vigilant against germs even when some of its parts become dormant during pregnancies.
Things get complicated, however, when those pregnancies don’t actually occur. Women today tend to have far fewer children—fewer than two on average in the United States, according to the CDC. Wilson reasons that without a more or less constant pushback from placentas during pregnancies—the pushback that women’s immune systems have evolved to anticipate—the immune system can get too aggressive, too ramped up. It starts looking for things to attack that aren’t dangerous, which is how autoimmune diseases set in.
For millions of years, minus the past 100, “the immune system was expecting to have exposure to a placenta,” Wilson says. Imagine if you’re pulling on something heavy, and then the rope snaps. “If you suddenly don’t have that heavy thing anymore,” she says, “you’re gonna go off the moon.”
This is certainly not the first theory for why women suffer from more autoimmune disease than men do.... (MORE - details)