Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/fungal meningitis

  • A behind-the-scenes look at the fungal meningitis outbreak

    Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s tabulation offungal meningitis cases and related deaths as of 12/3/12. Watching the meningitis outbreak unfold has been watching a tragedy in the making. As of this writing, 541 people in the United States have developed the disease, and 36 of them have died. The source of the outbreak was fungus-contaminated injections of an immunosuppressant steroid from a compounding pharmacy. The com…

    Authored by on December 7, 2012

  • That deadly, imported, meningitis-toting snail? Isn’t.

    …y wolf snails in Hawaii. Note to humans: These kinds of efforts are always a disaster. No. Introducing. Species. [Image credit: Rosy wolf snail, by Dylan Parker, via Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 license. Originally posted to Flickr by photographer Dylan Parker.] Here’s a children’s book that one of our knowledgeable readers has recommended, all about the rosy wolf snail. It’s “big, strong…

    Authored by on May 9, 2013

  • Biology Explainer: The big 4 building blocks of life–carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and nucleic acids

    …molecules themselves break down into a surprisingly small number of building blocks. The proteins that make up all of the living things on this planet and ensure their appropriate structure and smooth function consist of only 20 different kinds of building blocks. Nucleic acids, specifically DNA, are even more basic: only four different kinds of molecules provide the materials to build the countless different genetic codes that translate into all…

    Authored by on June 8, 2012

  • After Newtown missteps, journalists get guidelines

    …almost twice as likely to say that they don’t want to live or work near a person with mental illness if they read an article about a person with mental illness involved in a mass shooting, according to a study published March 20 in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Interestingly, this tendency is the same even if the article avoids any mention of mental illness. This may be because this link between violence and mental illness is deeply engrain…

    Authored by on March 27, 2013

  • What blinded Mary Ingalls?

    …y gone, yellow fever only exists in a few parts of the world and measles is now very rare – all due to vaccines. It’s easy to forget how devastating the “usual childhood diseases” of the 19th and early 20th centuries were to families. Sanitation improvements have helped tremendously. So have antibiotics and other medical advances. And so have vaccines. This post originally appeared at Red Wine & Apple Sauce. Photo cour…

    Authored by on February 19, 2013

  • What does ‘safe’ mean when we’re talking about chemicals?

    …look at things on a spectrum of lower risk to higher risk and think about decisions as risk evaluations.  At the lower risk end, I would include things that have 1) solid, evidence-based records of few or no harmful effects, 2) relatively few/unusual circumstances in which it produces harmful effects, and 3) statistics favoring my likelihood of emerging unscathed. Here are some things I would consider lower risk  within the parameters of my lif…

    Authored by on June 4, 2012

  • Parent HPV vaccine concerns persist

    …90 percent of all genital warts, and HPV-16 and 18, which are responsible for about 70 percent of all cervical cancers. The CDC recommends that girls be routinely given the HPV vaccine at 11 and 12 years old. Those aged 13 to 26 who haven’t gotten the vaccine yet should also get it, though it will only protect them against any strains of HPV they have not already contracted. (HPV is incredibly common – about 6.2 million people contract it e…

    Authored by on April 18, 2013

  • Depressing genes

    Can depression be a matter of genetic fate? by Siobhan Mitchell          [This post is the latest installment in our I Am Mental Illness series.] What if you could know if you were fated to be depressed? With the rise of personal genotyping services such as 23andme, almost can find out what their psychiatric ‘fate’ will be, but what do you do with this information once you have it? When I first considered testing myself for depressio…

    Authored by on May 17, 2013

  • Is the bar high enough for screening breast ultrasounds for breast cancer?

    …n controversial. What’s new is the “Are You Dense?” patient movement and legislation to inform women that they have dense breasts. Merits and pitfalls of device approval The approval of breast ultrasound hinges on a study of 200 women with dense breast evaluated retrospectively at 13 sites across the United States with mammography and ultrasound. The study showed a statistically significant increase in breast cancer detection when ultrasound was…

    Authored by on September 21, 2012

  • Autism and the DSM-5

    …ial social aspect of this change, and the one thing that might, when it comes to autism, elevate the DSM-5 above the level of doorstop. [Image credit: Dave Bullock, UK, via Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 generic license.]…

    Authored by on April 23, 2013

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