This article describes finding little brown bats in areas where we thought they'd all (or pretty much all) died out. The assumption is that these may represent populations of resistant bats, which would be great news, especially if there's enough of them to effectively repopulate (though bats don't reproduce all that fast; being a flighted mammal means you can't carry a giant litter of pups).

What we know about this thing so far, is that it does seem to be caused by a fungus, Geomyces destructans, and that was probably imported from Europe. Likely by human cavers. European bats are resistant; it's there, but they don't become ill from it. Not unlike chestnut blight, really, which was also imported, devistated the American chestnut, and does not affect old world varieties. There's a theme here. It would be easy to say that we need better biosecurity and we need to stop transporting pathogens around the globe because the outcome is so often bad, but it's much more difficult to actually accomplish this. We do reasonably well when we have a known pathogen, with a reliable test. We have managed to control a decent number of livestock diseases (foot and mouth, african swine fever, rabies in nonendemic areas), through quarantine, vacciene protocols and screening, but unknown pathogens are anouther story entirely, especially when they can be spread by fomites. Do we put shoe baths in airports? Radiosterilize baggage? Realistically, this is going to keep happening until we've mixed up the microbes, flora and fauna of the globe to the point where everything we can't spot and exclude is already everywhere. My hope for the bats is only that in the long term they manage to adapt, and we have a local resistant population, because the fungus is here to stay. And that we don't lose too much diversity in that process. Because I'm an optimist, and I can't imagine a world without bats.

Really? I have no idea whether this is real, credible, or even possible, but I have *hope*.
W dohat you think, lj? I'm at work, reading stuff surreptitiously from my phone, and so not in a position to fact-check.
http://www.rimmell.com/bbc/news.htm

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Got to work this morning, and was just getting surgeries checked in and calculating drug doses, when I got an email alert about a shooting on VT campus. Several hours later, I find out that an officer was killed, and then the shooter is presumed to have shot himself. No explanation. This sucks. It could never be a good thing, but with the recent history at VT, the awful is magnified, and still-raw wounds are re-opened. WTF, Blacksburg? Why does this small, sleepy college town seem to be such a lightning rod for tragedy?

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It is possible that Peregrine will no longer allow me add Satan's Blood to the guacamole without direct supervision in the future. It makes my mouth burn, but it is so tasty I can't stop eating it.

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I'm very pleased that SJ Tucker has written a selkie song that is not a tragic love story. It's possible that the selkie in the song is not exactly nice, but I'm somewhat tired of the tragic love story selkie trope. And we're not always nice, it's true. Even those of us raised inland enough that we're otter rather than seal.

MIT researchers have come up with a sweet-sounding antiviral that couples double-stranded RNA detection with caspase activation. In laymans terms, this means that if double stranded RNA, which is produced by replication viruses, and not by normal cells, is present in a cell then the 'death switch' is flipped, and the cell self-destructs and dissasembles itself. This is the forst ever broad spectrum antiviral. Ever. Way more potentially useful than the protease inhibitors for HIV (which target one enzyme produed by the virus, and to which the virus eventually develops resistance), or tamiflu, or acyclovir, all of which only work against a single or small number of viruses, and not that well at that. The thing appears to work in mice. Here's hoping it pans out in humans. I'm sure it will not prove to be the panacea for all viral diseases that it sounds like, nothing is ever as good in practice as in theory, but damn we need some better tools for viral infections, and it wouldn't take all that much for it to be better than what we have.

At faerieworlds, hoping it stops drizzling today. Yesterday was gorgeous, but today is bad faerie day, and bad faeries are more fun. Also, I've painted ursuscelticus, looky!

The CDC seriously does have a web page on how to prepare for a zombie apocalypse (or, in more technical terms, neurodegenarative ataxic satietiy deficience syndrome). When I first encountered this, I had to go to the main CDC website and check to see if it was really them, or just a site made to look like theirs, and yes, it's legit. Though pretty tongue-in-cheek, really.

Actually, it's more a schtick to promote disater awareness, in general, and make reading about what you ought to have on hand more fun. But still...a CDC zombie page! Now I need to go fill some jugs of water and beef up out first aid kit, because my disaster preparedness does not measure up. At least with a third story apartment, once we lock the door we're ok as long as we have food and water; zombies suck at climbing balconies.

I am so very besotted with the current flora and fauna that I wouldn't change anything about them. This is an absolutely gorgeous planet. I would, however correct the sad current lack of trilobites and pterosaurs, assuming, if I can do the designing, that I can also make this not drastically alter any ecosystems. Also, the culture would have been such that we'd not have caused the extictions of any species, so we'd still have passenger pigeons, thylacines, and carolina parakeets, and wealth would be distributed evenly enough that actual poverty was an unknown thing.

There's an article in the Seattle Times about a recent food safelty study showing that 80% of supermarket chickens test positive for pathogenic bacteria, mostly salmonella and camplyobacter, with antibiotic resistant staph making a showing as well. This isn't really news, other studies have had similar findings (a colleague of mine at VT did a study on pig livers in local grocery stores, and found about 20% harbored Hepatitis E virus). And this is why we cook our food, and avoid cross-contaminating salads with raw meat juice. But, of note, organic meats are just as likely to contain pathogenic bacteria, so just because you get expensive organic chickens, don't assume they're free of scary bugs (though they might plausibly be less likey to be antibiotic resistant bugs, at least). The only sorbitol-negative E. coli I ever saw at necropsy was in an organic-raised lamb (the nasty strains of E. coli are all sorbitol-negative).

I'm sort of ambivalent on the whole organinc meat thing. On the one hand, using antibiotics as 'growth enhancers' is, I think, poor practice, and promotes antibiotic resistance. On the other, judicious, medically correct use of antibiotics in food animals is a good idea. We have withdrawal periods on these drugs, and if they're followed (and someone's license is at stake if they aren't), we shouldn't be seeing significant drug residues in meat. On the whole, I'd rather we focused on animal welfare, and appropriate (lack of) density in raising food animals rather than cramming them shoulder to shoulder in deep poop, than on being organic per se. That should result in less morbidity, anyway, and in the end less need for antibiotics. But I object to the idea that just because something was raised organic and free range, that the meat is therefore 'clean'. It's not. Bacteria don't care about the organic label on the package.

This particularly alarms me when I hear folks talking about raw meat diets for their pets, and these are the same folk who tend to associate organic with safe. Dogs are more resistant to salmonella than we are, but I lost a canine patient who'd eaten a raw chicken to salmonella; there was just too much damage to her gut. It's a very nasty bug, once it gets hold; it kills the gut lining, and then lymphatic tissue, so you're less able to mount a defense.



Yes it's been a slow day so far, why do you ask?