Breakthroughs Today

One of the deadly genera of bacteria that have mutating strains making invulnerable to common antibiotics is the scourge of the blood. Discover which microorganism it is. “BLOOD smelled much the same, whatever the source,” wrote David Hewson in his first book, The Seventh Sacrament (2007). The Group-A Streptococci (chainlike circles) are known among laboratory scientists for its unique ability to burst the red blood cells. And to this bloody scourges Streptococcus pyogenes belongs. If you had a strep throat or sore throat recently, Pyogenes caused that. It is a mild infection in the leagues of impetigo, erysipelas, and cellulitis. But Pyogenes can be life-threatening when it causes “necrotizing fasciitis,” a rare infection of the deeper layers of the skin. It is commonly known as “flesh-eating disease” for the obvious reason that the affected tissues simply turn violet (blisters may appear afterwards) and then die away. As high as 73 percent of patients with this dis

If you think antibiotics are all cure, think again. It can cause serious diarrhea too. THE most serious cause of antibiotic-associated diarrhea (AAD) is Clostridium difficile; rod-shaped bacteria that compete with gut bacteria, or what remain of them, after recently wiped out by broad-spectrum antibiotics. These antibiotics include clindamycin, a drug for respiratory tract infections and skin and soft tissues infection as well. A few people have Difficile residing normally in their gut. Others got it as patients in a health facility (e.g. hospital, nursing home). But as its population explodes, it results in the overproduction of toxins. They overrun the gut, and cause a painful diarrhea that can become severe. The specie is nosocomial, known to cause diarrhea in hospitals worldwide. It developed clindamycin-resistant strains detected in outbreaks in New York, Arizona, Florida and Massachusetts from 1989 to 1992. Fluroquinolone-resistant strains appeared in North America

Knowledge often supports wisdom. In the harmful impacts of certain plastic types, knowledge alone makes you a lot wiser. WITH the increasing support that local lawmakers provide on the move against plastic as used in bags, another assault on the move against plastic in its use as bottles and containers for food and food products is up. Senator Miriam Santiago filed a few months earlier Senate Bill No. 3121, which when approved into law, will become as the BPA in Baby Products Prohibition Act of 2012. The culprit is the chemical referred to as BPA or Bisphenol A, a solid but colorless organic compound. It is synthetically manufactured precursor chemical used in polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins. The polycarbonate plastics are the ones used in the production of many food and drink bottles and containers, such as water bottles and infant feeding bottles. Epoxy resins practically lacquers used in coating metal products such as food cans, bottle tops, and water supply pipes.

This is one classic case wherein ignorance can be deadly. Had I been a convert to shark-eating after that vacation morning, I could have been dead today for mercury poisoning. EATING shark meat is not in my list of preferred dishes. But when you go with youth of your age who have no qualms about that, it is a matter of time you’ll get to taste it at least for the first time. I had my first meal on shark meat decades ago together with friends I grew up with in my hometown. Those were the times when we hit the basketball court early in the morning, and then proceed to the seashore to buy fish for our breakfast, which we usually cook at home. In one of those vacation mornings, we found no excitement in the catches that the fishermen brought in. Then one of us suggested a kilo or two of medium-sized shark. I grimaced in anticipation. But a dish of hinalang (simmered chunks of shark meat cooked in lots of the usual spices and 10 to 20 pieces of red chili) convinced me it was

Sometimes knowing so much English can be a disadvantage if you do not know what certain things are called in Cebuano. Take the fish anchovy. Do you know that it is the same fish as our "bulinao"? And when translate that to what that means to our access of naturally available nutrients, such as omega-3 fatty acids, you will realize that we can miss a lot simply from translation. LIKE any average Cebuano, I could say that my knowledge of Omega-3 fatty acids reaches only as far as knowing that these renowned food supplements can be found in oil-rich, large fishes, the likes of whales and sharks. That makes me think of Omega-3 with certain surrealism. The sources are so far off in the aquatic horizon to be reachable by ordinary fish-eaters like you and me, or at least a few like us. But finding a study conducted by Dariush Mozaffariah and Eric Rimm published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (2006) changed all that. For one, large fishes do not hav