Here’s another study on the effects of gut bacteria: done in 2008 and cited a number of times, but still not widely known. This study treated genetically obese mice with type 2 diabetes as well as normal mice who had been overfed to induce insulin resistance with a combination of norfloxacin and ampicillin. Afterwards, their glucose tolerance and metabolic functions improved significantly despite being fed the same diet. Liver triglycerides dropped and liver glycogen increased. Plasma lipids dropped, and plasma adiponectin was increased, a sign of decreased inflammation and improved insulin resistance.
This study refers to another study in humans that showed changes in the ratios of bacteria after weight loss through dietary intervention. Specifically, the ratio to Firmicutes to Bacteroidetes was reduced. The study also refers to another in which low-grade inflammation, induced by subcutaneous injection of low doses of bacterial wall lipopolysaccharides in mice, induced insulin resistance and excessive weight gain.
Yet a third study showed germ-free mice to maintain leanness whether fed normal chow or a high-fat diet; regular mice became obese on a high-fat diet. The germ-free mice had the same caloric intake as the regular mice, suggesting that either the microbes contributed calories or that they induced low-grade inflammation which unbalanced the metabolism.
These studies, taken together, indicate a bidirectional relationship between low-grade inflammation and insulin resistance with weight gain, associated with specific types of bacteria resident in the gut. The subcutaneous injections may be thought of as a simulation of the residence of large numbers of gram-negative bacteria in the gut. Whether type 2 diabetes could be treated by antibiotics remains to be seen; it is more likely that low-calorie diets would be beneficial in changing the gut microbiome.
The 2008 study is on PDF at: http://www.farm.ucl.ac.be/Full-texts-FARM/Membrez-2008-1.pdf
It has been known for a while that most of the serotonin produced in the human body is not in the brain but in enterochromaffin cells of the gut; this is true of mammals in general. Now a research group at Cal Tech has demonstrated that a particular group of bacteria in the gut help the cells of the gut wall produce serotonin.
First of all, mice raised to be germ free with no bacteria in their guts only produce less than half of the serotonin that normal mice produce. The research group tested the various genera of bacteria that normally inhabit the mouse gut and found that a certain group of spore forming bacteria specifically induce the gut wall to produce 60% more serotonin. Finally, they were able to demonstrate that a specific metabolite produced by the bacteria modulates this effect: apparently, the enterochromaffin cells take up this metabolite, and from it, produce more serotonin.
The increase in serotonin that is found from this bacteria causes an increase in gut motility and changes in the activity of blood platelets, who depend on serotonin for clotting.
An abstract of the research article can be found at: http://authors.library.caltech.edu/56514/ and a Cal Tech news release and explainer at: http://www.caltech.edu/news/microbes-help-produce-serotonin-gut-46495
The significance of this finding is that there is a commensal relationship between the mammalian organism and the bacteria in its gut; what role the serotonin plays in behavior or illness remains to be explored.
Increasing Rate of Extremist Attacks
The New York Times (NYT) has posted a story stating the conclusion of an information-gathering group in Washington: there have been twice as many deaths in the last fourteen years (since September 11, 2001) due to attacks by Neo-Nazi or other right wing antigovernment individuals as there have been due to attacks by Muslim jihadists.
In addition, there has been a dramatic increase in the rate of attacks by both groups since 2009, starting with the Fort Hood shooting. A total of forty-eight people have been killed by right wing extremists, and a total of twenty-six people have been killed by jihadists, almost all of them in the last six years; from 2001 to 2008, attacks were rare.
The NYT story: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/us/tally-of-attacks-in-us-challenges-perceptions-of-top-terror-threat.html
South Sudan, a tiny country cut out from, obviously, the southern end of the Sudan, four years ago, has fallen back into war, with a population of a little over 11 million in two major ethnic groups at each other’s throats for no reason other than the enmity of its president and vice president. At least 1.5 million are internal refugees, many of them stuck in overcrowded United Nations encampments, afraid that soldiers from the other side will torture or kill them.
The reason I am posting this note is that the last blog post I made was about a deranged military medical instructor and his abuse of his students; reading about South Sudan made me feel a sense of disproportion and incongruity compared to the nearly private perversions of an instructor. The story about the medical classes conducted by this doctor was a tiny anecdote compared to the sufferings of millions of African people in a country torn apart by ethnic conflict. As of May, at least 4.8 million people, half of the country, are going hungry at least part of the time, and many of these are starving. Compared to the hunger of five million people, of what importance is the misconduct and perversion of a single military medical instructor?
If you want to read about South Sudan, here is a New York Times article:
Here is something (a bit dated) from CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/10/world/cnnphotos-south-sudan-abyss/index.html
As you can see from the stories, many of them a year old, on CNN, this has been going on for years and is just getting worse (if it is possible for Hell to get worse.)
There is little that the US government is doing about South Sudan, but there is also little that they can do, short of investing a billion dollars in aid and thousands of troops to protect aid convoys and medical facilities. There are also other countries with equally serious and pressing problems, Syria for one. The United Nations has people and facilities in South Sudan, but they can’t stop teenaged soldiers fighting for obsessively hateful warlords on both sides.
It is sad to think about; I thank Heaven that I am not there.
That same month, at DMI’s 20-acre facility in Pink Hill, North Carolina, Hagmann allegedly forced students to take between five and eight shots of liquor in 20 to 30 minutes, then injected a few of them with the dissociative drug ketamine. He then encouraged drunk students to perform nerve blocks on the penises of classmates who had been given ketamine, according to the report.
Yes, that’s what the article said. Fortunately, he just lost his license to practice. Unfortunately, his private contractor company that supplied “military medicine training” to the Uniformed Services University, has received $10.5 million in payment for his “services.”
This could be the most disgusting, sick, and insane individual I’ve heard about today. And “he’s still in the field, commanding troops.” (a quote from Apocalypse Now, from a scene in which a general orders the assassination of “Colonel Kurz”) Actually, his association with the Defense Department has been terminated– or so it says.
“They just didn’t see what was in it for them to look into their own industries exporting these chemicals,” said Jorge Guajardo, the former Mexican ambassador to China.
China’s chemical factories and drug traffickers have exploited this opportunity, turning the nation into a leading producer and exporter of synthetic drugs, including methamphetamine, as well as the compounds used to manufacture them, according to seizure and trafficking route data compiled by American and international law enforcement agencies.
China is now the source of a majority of the ingredients needed to manufacture methamphetamine by Mexican drug traffickers, who produce 90 percent of the meth consumed in the United States, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
As governments around the world have stepped up regulation of these so-called precursor chemicals, the Mexican cartels have increasingly turned to Chinese chemical factories.
Mr. Guajardo, Mexico’s ambassador from 2007 to 2013, said his efforts to persuade Chinese authorities to restrict the export of these chemicals, which are banned in Mexico, came to naught. Instead, he said, Chinese officials said the problem was best handled by Mexican customs agents or claimed that Mexico’s written requests for assistance had used the incorrect typeface or were improperly translated into Chinese.
“In all my time there, the Chinese never showed any willingness to cooperate on stemming the flow of precursors into Mexico,” he said in a telephone interview.
via In China, Illegal Drugs Are Sold Online in an Unbridled Market – The New York Times.
The source chemicals used to manufacture methamphetamine, a long acting analog of amphetamine which is a Schedule I (no accepted medical use, high potential for abuse) drug in the United States, used to be widely available here. One of the main ingredients would have been pseudoephedrine, an over-the-counter drug used as a nasal decongestant for colds and allergies; the market for pseudoephedrine has been controlled by a rationing system all over the US for the last few years. So the illicit manufacturers of methamphetamine switched to ordering their chemicals from China, a more convenient source in any case.
Now, methamphetamine is a popular drug on the black market in the US, one of the most popular drugs of abuse and a way for poor and mentally disturbed persons to pass the time (and lose their teeth) here. It is imported from Mexico in most cases, along with heroin; the traffic in marijuana has been greatly reduced by growers here, and was insufficiently profitable to begin with.
As the world’s largest manufacturing powerhouse, China has become the source for both legal and illegal drug precursors as well as finished drugs. The Chinese government has been passive about trying to control the illegal drug traffic and appears to blame the users and middlemen in other countries for the problem. A few malefactors in China have been arrested, jailed, or even executed, but the traffic continues unabated and large suppliers remain a ready source for almost any drug that can be used legally or abused illegally all over the world.
Ironically, this traffic is the inverse of the opium traffic of the early nineteenth century, during which England and other Western countries went to war twice to force the Chinese government to allow the unrestricted sale of opium to Chinese consumers, who became addicted in vast numbers to smoking opium. The fatally weakened Chinese government failed to prevent Western incursions, which resulted in a vast backlash among the Chinese people, a revolution which overthrew the Chinese imperial system and installed an equally weak republican government, which was unable to resist the invasion of the Japanese, and eventually a prolonged civil war and the installation of a unified and putatively communist totalitarian regime in 1949.
Attempts to control this traffic have failed, and the logical response to this problem is to end legal prohibitions on the sale and consumption of drugs. Monitoring by government agencies of the extent and types of drug trafficking is a reasonable approach, but prohibition has been shown to be worse than useless. Any readers who doubt this statement should brush up on their history: sale of potable alcohol was prohibited in the US from 1920 to 1933, with disastrous consequences. The rise and consolidation of violent criminal gangs, as well as widespread disrespect for the rule of law, is directly attributable to Prohibition. If that history is insufficient, perhaps the recent drug wars in Mexico, with the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Mexican citizens, should be studied.
Experts in drug abuse are in general agreement that the appropriate response to this problem is medical therapy for the abusers, along with education for the general public as to the true effects and side effects of known drugs. The actual initiating cause of drug abuse is mental disturbance, partly due to societal deficiencies such as poverty, childhood deprivation, and discrimination. A law enforcement response to this problem is sure to fail in the long run and produce negative effects such as increased criminal sophistication in response to prohibition.
The New York Times (NYT) published a followup on the story we noted a few days ago about Chinese hackers and their successful penetration of American databases. These databases contained all the “SF-86” (on which applicants reveal personal, health, and sensitive information about themselves) forms, apparently from every American who has ever applied for a security clearance, including retired former civilian employees and current workers. The number of forms was previously reported as between nine and fourteen million, but the exact number is simply unknown. The NYT reported on Congressional hearings in which it was revealed that multiple US agencies have serious holes in their cyber-security practices, including some computers that didn’t even have firewalls and some passwords that were absurdly easy to penetrate, such as “password” and others.
The hackers obtained “administrator” privileges that allowed them unrestricted access to all systems on multiple computer networks; even the Department of Homeland Security had serious vulnerabilities. Other agencies affected: the Department of the Interior, which had large amounts of database storage available in lightly protected archives, ” the Internal Revenue Service, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Energy Department, [and] the Securities and Exchange Commission.” The Securities and Exchange Commission was one which had no firewall or other intrusion protection systems for several months.
Inspector General reports as far back as 2010 have, or should have had, alerted authorities to the security vulnerabilities, but action has been slow at every agency. Some who spoke at the hearings blamed “legacy systems”, that is, systems that were installed at the very beginning of the computer era and then repeatedly patched instead of being replaced because replacement was thought to be too difficult.
” It was not until early last year, as computer attacks began on United States Investigations Services, a private contractor that conducts security clearance interviews for the personnel office, that serious efforts to develop a strategic plan to seal up the agency’s many vulnerabilities started.”
The same group which made these intrusions had previously entered the databases of health insurance companies like Anthem, as well as the travel industry (among many other industries from which patent and other sensitive information was taken). An unusual aspect of those attacks was that none of the data subsequently showed up on the data black market, a suggestion that the hackers were the end users of the data obtained, or government agencies.
Repeated reports by US government investigating bodies have revealed vulnerable networks in every agency looked at. These vulnerabilities have persisted despite claims that the US has spent over $65 billion since 2006 on cybersecurity. Even the Department of Homeland Security has revealed multiple deficiencies in intrusion protection. New tools installed in the last year have identified intrusions that have been taking place for some time; without these tools, investigators might never have known that the intrusions were even taking place.
Clearly, the Chinese government has successfully developed a database of US citizens, those employed by the government, those with security clearances, diplomats, and politicians (although there were claims that the politician’s data has not been breached.) What the Chinese intend to do with this information is not definitely known, although one could speculate as to the advantages this data could confer: the ability to blackmail anyone, or to recruit wavering individuals for espionage work.
This security breach is the worst, and the most embarrassing, of all the breaches revealed to date. Its full repercussions have not yet been felt.
The NYT article link: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/us/attack-gave-chinese-hackers-privileged-access-to-us-systems.html
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is thrust upon the world;
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
Yeat’s words are almost a hundred years old…
A new Finnish study has given support to a formerly discredited method of treating appendicitis: antibiotics. Surgical treatment for appendicitis has been the standard of care for over a hundred years, ever since the abdomen could be safely opened under anesthesia and long before antibiotics were even available. By the time effective antibiotics were developed, surgery was ensconced as the only reasonable treatment option.
Now, a big study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) raises questions about that standard care. 530 patients were enrolled from 2009 to 2012 in Finland; all had uncomplicated appendicitis confirmed by CAT (computer assisted tomography) scans. Patients with an appendicolith (a stony obstruction of the mouth of the appendix), perforated appendix, abscess, or other complications were judged inappropriate candidates for antibiotic therapy. After randomization, 273 patients were assigned to immediate appendectomy and 257 were admitted to hospital for three days of intravenous ertapenem followed by seven days of oral metronidazole and levofloxacin. Seventy of the patients assigned to antibiotics underwent appendectomy within 1 year and 186 did not require surgery. Of the patients assigned to surgery, all but one underwent successful appendectomy; open surgery rather than laparoscopy was performed because the study would be more generalizable to locations where laparoscopy is not available.
Most of the patients who suffered complications from surgery had wound infections, which would also have been possible even if laparoscopic surgery had been done. It has been noted that virtually all patients who have ruptured appendices already have a rupture by the time they present for treatment; almost no ruptures occur after the patient has arrived at the hospital. Of the patients assigned to initial antibiotic treatment who subsequently underwent surgery, 58 had uncomplicated appendicitis, 7 had complicated acute appendicitis, and 5 did not have appendicitis but had appendectomy for suspected recurrent appendicitis. There were no intra-abdominal abscesses and no other significant complications in the antibiotic-first group.
The surgeons who performed the study felt that the failure rate of 27% was acceptable, but in a New York Times (NYT) article about the study, “Dr. Philip S. Barie, a surgeon at Weill Cornell Medical College, noted that antibiotics were not sufficient for more than a quarter of the patients in the new study and said the failure rate was unacceptable.” Others feel that the failure rate is perfectly acceptable when the cost of surgery and the fact that no complications occurred is taken into account.
A repeat study is planned in America, with laparoscopic surgery; in addition, trials of shorter antibiotic courses are under discussion. Many of the patients in the Finnish study were asymptomatic within a day or two and asked to be sent home early. However, patients who have had one episode of appendicitis are at higher risk of a repeat episode, and there is some discussion about whether a patient who has been treated with antibiotics might go to the hospital every time he or she has a pain in the abdomen and require another CAT scan to rule out a recurrence, a potential additional expense.
There is an even more radical alternative: not treating patients with uncomplicated appendicitis at all and waiting to see if the condition would subside spontaneously. The Finnish group is planning a trial to see if this is a potentially acceptable alternative.
The abstract for the JAMA study is here: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2320315 and the NYT article is linked here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/health/study-supports-antibiotic-use-to-treat-appendicitis.html
The White House announced a further increase in the number of hacked personnel records discovered in the last few months: up to 14 million records have been exposed of people who applied for security clearances for civilian jobs with the government. These records include the background information that is requested from those who want security clearances: arrests, drug use, health information, birth dates, Social Security numbers, employment histories and pay data, military records, veteran status, addresses, health and life insurance, ages, genders, and race data, and so on. There are currently 2.5 million civilian government employees, so most of the data includes former employees and applicants. The Office of Personnel Management keeps these records, and based on briefings that employee unions have received, they say that information for all current federal employees, all retirees, and a million former employees has been exposed.
The White House has stated that the Chinese are responsible for this data breach, although the Chinese government has denied it. Whoever has the data, they are in possession of material that could be used for blackmail, for impersonation of individuals, or many other nefarious purposes.
The Associated Press story that revealed this information states that, since the defection of Edward Snowden and his revelations about American surveillance activities, it has become more difficult to recruit new government employees, especially in the security services. This new data breach will surely make it even less attractive to apply for a security-classified job with the US government.
The amount and sensitivity of the information that has been breached makes the security of government computer systems look poor indeed. There is no surprise that this embarrassing revelation has been quietly announced, in parts, over a period of weeks. Government officials do not wish to make a lot of fuss over the news and have minimized the size of the breach, only gradually admitting to its full extent with a series of partial announcements.
Now that the breach has been, apparently, fully announced, we are left with a dilemma: what, if anything, can be done about it? It appears that we have been left fully exposed to a potentially deadly weakness. From now on, security personnel must look carefully for potential uses of this information in operations that damage the country’s security in new and dangerous ways. Any improvements in information security now will be necessarily after the fact and really not very helpful, so to speak, after the horse has left the barn.
