Category Archives: Disease

The Comfort Crisis, Thoughts on one of those books that just resonated

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I have always been physical. There’s a picture of me and my brother, I must have been four or five, sitting on a pile of boulders, on a hilltop. We had raced, which was common for us, to be the first to the top. I won. I’m grinning and my knee is bloody. It didn’t matter. 

I remember another time playing football in the yard with the older, bigger, kids, being excited after tackling one of them, no pads, no helmet, with my well earned bloody nose. No tears. I wasn’t masochistic, it was a sense of physical accomplishment, of doing something, beyond myself. Such events, not generally ending in blood, but having required physical effort, the outcome unassured, became habitual, even necessary…Sometimes I did get hurt, never catastrophically, although, in retrospect, there was some degree of luck or ‘grace’ in my efforts not having ended with more permanent physical consequences. It was a regular testing of myself. These were important learning experiences, a learning of my limits, the kind of lessons that stay with you. Continue reading →

Everything is Tuberculosis: a Disease as an Object Lesson On How to Better Live Our Lives

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John Green’s, ‘Everything is Tuberculosis’ is a great piece of writing. It is also an excellent, expansive and accessible introduction to the world of tuberculosis. By number, it’s the world’s most deadly disease, but one that is often overlooked by those of us in the wealthier, western countries, where it is largely controlled. This is a history of the human experience and the way that we have gone about treating it, or not. Tuberculosis (TB), is a disease that was an undeniable fact of life around the world for the majority of ‘modern’ human existence, before germ theory and our ability to develop and implement effective treatments. There was literally no place in the world ‘untouched’ by it. It killed indiscriminately. Author Green, mostly known for his young adult fiction, tackling problems of teen angst, love, loss and grief, here goes beyond this, asking the question, that since TB is treatable and curable today, generally even those forms that have developed resistance to several of the drugs used to control it, why is it still killing 1.25 MILLION people around the world every year? The answer isn’t difficult to find, but it reveals an ugly fact of modern life. The disease still kills to the degree that it does today because of prejudice, poverty, underfunded health care systems, a misguided reliance on cost ‘effectiveness’ when deciding who is ‘worth’ treating and a pharmaceutical industry far more interested in protecting and increasing its profits than it is in working to bring about a healthier world. Continue reading →

I Contain Multitudes: An Excellent Starting Point for the Beginner to Understand this Life

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Ed Yong’s, “I Contain Multitudes” takes a different angle into the biology of organisms, looking not so much at the functioning of the individual as it does those countless single celled organisms, protists and tiny ‘critters’ that live within and upon us, bacteria, fungi, nematodes, viruses, dust mites etc. There are bacteria living within larger, multi-celled organisms with viruses living inside these….And these are not unusual relationships. Such relationships dominate all of life. Their exception is the rare event. Together, in their multiplicity, these constitute living communities, living in the very specific ‘biomes’, found on larger, seemingly independent organisms. Numbering in the thousands, millions, billions, even trillions, these tiny residents live in dynamic symbiotic, mutualistic, parasitic and antagonistic relationships with their hosts, often filling more than one role, depending on the host, the conditions and constitution of the biotic community. Whew! Yong’s book introduction, of the reader to this world, should lay to rest the idea that ‘we’ are truly ‘individuals’. The countless microbes that occupy and ‘invade’ us, have previously been considered unnecessary or consistently compromise our health, sources of disease.…The idea that we can ‘sterilize’ our way to better health denies the necessity of these organisms, or at least most of them, in the health of individuals.

No, he presents a variety of cases which illustrate the absolute dependence of an individual on these microbes, bacteria that breakdown our otherwise indigestible foods into forms that we can then absorb and utilize. Others that may live on our skin, defending us from attack, by providing a defense against other microbes that could otherwise infect us. Their are microbes that infect other microbes (see Martinez Arias’ book, “The Good Virus”), tiny ‘organisms’ that infect that disease’s vector, killing it before we become infected or blocking the disease causing microbe from infecting the vector, keeping it free from the organism which can cause disease in us. Continue reading →

The Good Virus, A Review and Thoughts About the Necessity of an Informed Public

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Every book tells a story, even the driest academic tome…or rather, utilizes the form of a story. Humans communicate through story. It’s how we give some communicable ‘form’ to our thoughts which we can share. Without it everything is disconnected reportage of facts, personal impressions, emotions. Raw data. Zeros and ones. incomprehensible. To communicate through story requires that we share enough elements of the story, its language, form and ideas, with our ‘listener’, that they can understand what we are saying/writing. If it is too alien, communication does not happen. The listener/reader, hears the words, but the meaning eludes them. Meaning and experience are not shared. Without these, connection, communication, fails. The more esoteric the topic, the more important it is that both ‘parties’ share a common language, that  each is ‘educated’ to some degree, about the world the other is attempting to communicate. As science and technology become ever more specialized and schools and social institutions become more isolated from their larger communities, communication fails more often than not. Especially when the ‘other’ is viewed in a negative light, as untrustworthy. Communication then requires a leap of faith, because as our understanding of the world becomes deeper and more complex, we cannot all become expert in all things. There is just too much to learn. This is when effort, trust and faith, become essential. We must share a commonality, a trust in the other. As shared knowledge, and ‘ways of knowing’ decline, assumptions then dominate. Intentions then become suspect and the very possibility of community and communication evaporate. What we ‘see’, is what ‘we’ see, not what someone else does. Whether or not that is shared is the crux of the communication problem.  Continue reading →

On Weeds, Disruption and the Breaking of Native Plant Communities: Toward a More Informed Working Definition of Weeds

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The bottom land in Redmond’s Dry Canyon was used for decades as low quality pasture, the native community pretty much obliterated. Those areas with surface rock are more likely to retain more of the original plant community, although Cheatgrass has invaded much of those areas as well. The is looking southerly over one of the larger ‘pasture’ areas near the disc golf course. There is very little Cheatgrass through this section south of West Rim Park. It includes a few native seral species which typically occupy disturbed sites as a site transitions, including Gray Rabbitbrush you see here. Found in this area too is Secale cereale, Annual Rye, a non-native, which appears to have been planted along more formal paths to limit Cheatgrass spread(?).  Junipers are moving in. Sagebrush hasn’t yet.

It is commonly said that a weed is a plant out of place…and of course ‘we’ are the one’s who decide this. Some will try to argue that there are no weeds, that all plants belong and if we only left weeds alone landscapes would reach a balance on their own. If one’s time frame is long enough this may be the case, though this will take considerably longer than one of our lifetimes, and then there is our inability to actually leave landscapes on their own, or to at least consciously moderate our disturbance of them. Weeds are plants. They are not a separate classification of plants. They are plants removed from their places of origin and released into another where they have competitive advantages. Most people still simply tend to refer to plants they don’t like or want as weeds. These positions are at odds with one another. This leads to confusion and a lack of clarity, undermining any urgency to take action.

Weeds have become ‘personal’, their status a matter of ‘opinion’….A weed is a weed only if “I” agree that it is, or perhaps some ‘expert’, such as when agricultural scientist identify them as an economic threat to farms and label them as ‘noxious’. Without agreement and urgency there is a tendency to do nothing about them. Plants in general are attributed little intrinsic value. For many people they are just there. Native plants we vaguely understand as belonging to a place, but most people would be hard pressed to identify and name many at all. Quite different species are often lumped together, their relationships unnoticed. Natives are reduced to being ‘background’, their status reduced to decoration, attractive or not, a ‘space’ filler, perhaps a hinderance to what we would chose to do with a place. Continue reading →

Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, A Review

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The cell is the basic, irreducible, unit of life. Whether an organism is animal, plant, fungal or bacterial, the cell is its basic unit. While it can be broken down into its ‘parts’ for examination, none of those parts are capable of independent life, none are able to continue fulfilling their functions on their own. The cell and its ‘community of parts’ operate as a ‘social’ unit, as a whole. Each ‘part’ fulfills one or more roles in the ongoing life of the cell. This book is a review of cell biology, of the development of our, human, understanding of the life of the cell and its centrality to our understandings of what it is be alive, how it has and continues to transform our practice of medicine. The author, Siddhartha Mukherjee, is a doctor and researcher who has spent his professional life studying blood and its cancers, trying to understand and treat disease. Continue reading →

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, David Quammen, WW Norton & Co.,2012; a Review

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If you were perusing the library shelves and came across this book, the title “Spillover” may leave you a little uncertain in terms of its topic, without reading the subtitle and having some understanding of the processes described in the book, the emergence, evolution and ecology of ‘new’ diseases, human diseases. When we speak of them we understand them as conditions, assaults on our health and human bodies, which result in an array of symptoms, with wide ranging severity, ranging from mild and asymptomatic; to bothersome with knowable, short lived cycles; through chronic and debilitating; to those entailing a series of feverish cycles we simply must endure; to those often painful and fatal which wreck havoc on our systems and organs. Quammen, the author, is as always, an intelligent and thorough researcher able to interpret complex topics for the layman while staying true to the science and the people whose stories he tells as he weaves together the larger narrative. Continue reading →

COVID-19, Pandemics and How They Will Change the World For the Better

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I’m not a biological ‘fatalist’, but there are several reasons why epidemiologists were attempting to plan for a pandemic and why the Obama administration was empowering institutions, creating protocols and organizing resources that could be mobilized quickly, before the COViD-19 outbreak, not for this one specifically, but one of some kind. Viruses, bacteria, mycoplasma and other microbes fill the world at a microscopic level…they are everywhere, all of the time. Our own bodies contain far more of them than we do of our own some three trillion cells. Fortunately, most of them do not cause us disease, at least as long as we remain healthy. Many of them, in fact perform valuable functions in us, beneficial ones, without which our lives would be the poorer. Disease too is part of life’s ‘plan’. Its agents are dynamic. Today’s diseases are not those of the past. We evolved together. They mutate and sometimes ‘leap’ across species boundaries. A study of biology and disease reveals a function of disease or at least a consequence to the health and evolution of a species. It may sound heartless to put it this way, but disease is very much a part of living. With this new disease, COVID-19, as with others, it is selective, affecting those whose health is compromised in some way disproportionately, killing those most susceptible, the weak and those may include those surprising to us. As in most things concerning life, nothing is so simple as our concept of strong and weak. Disease is a part of the process of natural selection that has always been in effect in the world. Continue reading →

On Amelanchier / Serviceberries: Their Susceptibility to Rust and Their Use in our Gardens

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This is a street tree planted elsewhere in inner SE. It may be ‘Autumn Brilliance’ or another variety, but there are several of them planted here, all with heavy Rust and twisted branching.
This is mine with the branches heading every which way causing a flattened oval form.
But, the flowers are worth it!

Sometimes we are drawn to plants by memories and sentiment, plants we have early associations with.  They can regularly appear in our palette, our quiver of plants, that we might choose from.  We all have our preferences, our biases.  Sometimes the mismatch might only be aesthetic other times it can be a problem related to our site conditions.  When we include these plants they may struggle, yet persist in the garden, maybe demonstrating to others their ‘ill-fit’.  When a plant is a poor fit, its inclusion can become a glaring error to others that we are blinded to.  Diseases can present such a problem, diseases that can be problematic in our area, or that our site is simply unfortunate enough to suffer from.  ‘Rust’ diseases,  Gymnosporangium spp., can be an issue here.  In the case of Serviceberries, it can be disfiguring and debilitating.  Several of these species attack Rose Family members, that include the Serviceberries, which seem particularly susceptible, though it doesn’t kill them.  Diseased, stunted and suffering, unwilling to just die and put us both out of our misery, these plants continue.  It is akin to being drawn to the wrong lover or life partner…it’s not going to work out and we simply can’t seem to help ourselves. Continue reading →