I agree about Microsporidia.. they are fascinating! But...do you use
modified trichrome stain to screen for them? If so... is it a commercial
kit or do you make the reagents up yourself?
I was told that HIV patients are now treated prophylactically these days
depending on CD4 count - when it drops to <50 - Cryptosporidia +
Microsporidia could pose threats + the patient is treated even before
signs of infection. Even before that though - if the count drops to
<200- patients are treated with septrin incase of pneumocystosis. If the
patients CD4 count rises due to other drugs - then they are taken off
antibiotics. This also gives a huge morale boost to the patient.
Sorry for waffling!
Anne :o)
Joan Marie Shields wrote:
>> Joan Shields wrote:
> >> I was at the last ASM General Meeting (Chicago, May-June, 1999). There
> >> was a symposium about ultramicrobacteria which included a talk about the
> >> basic size requirements etc - all based on present knowledge and
> >> understanding of bacteria and what is required to preform certain basic
> >> tasks etc. Much of it boiled down to a great deal of skepetism that these
> >> organisms exist. In the audiance was a woman who is a member of a lab
> >> working on these, in blood. I admired her standing up to the prevailing
> >> attitude of ridicule. There's a lot we don't know and the assumptions we
> >> make regarding microorganisms have had a tendancy (if you look at the
> >> history) of falling apart. There is some evidence that these bugs exist,
> >> maybe not enough to absolutely prove it but enough to warrent a closer
> >> look.
>> Timothy Paustian <paustian at bact.wisc.edu> wrote:
> >Intersting, wish I coulda made it. The people who push the dogma always
> >have to withstand such pressure. Its a classic mechanism for finding the
> >truth. If her data is good and she believes it (and from what I have
> >read she should) she can withstand it.
>> It took quite a bit for her to stand up and defend her lab, I admired
> that in her (and told her so later). It's very hard to do that, especially
> in that room. The fellow giving the talk did back down a bit - he wasn't
> necessarily being mean, though he did present handwritten overheads of
> calculations he had made regarding the probability of such tiny organisms.
> I guess to him it just seemed so absurd given the assumed components of
> a cell - ribosomes and DNA etc. Given some of the sentiments around me,
> while the idea is a difficult one to immediately swallow, we do need to
> be open-minded about it.
>> I think this is very important - very important to stay open-minded. Like
> I said, if we look back at history there are so many instances where people
> were laughed at for proposing ideas we know today as fact. Just the fact
> that there are tiny organisms that can cause disease was ridiculed years
> ago. The notion of gene swapping among bacteria - the idea that viruses
> may insert themselves into genomes and cause disease, even spark cancer,
> years later is still, by some, laughed at. Yet the evidence builds. Back
> in the 1960s the US Surgeon General stated that infectious diseases would
> soon be a thing of the past and so therefore more money and resources
> should be shunted into chronic diseases like cancer and heart disease.
> A lot of people took that to heart - now here we are nearly forty years
> later and indectious diseases are not only still with us (with a vengence
> in some areas) but that some of these so called 'non-infectious' diseases
> may actually be caused by microorganisms.
>> I guess it's hard to accept that we are simply another rung in the food-
> chain and that creatures far smaller than we are a rung higher.
>> >> I'm an environmental microbiogist (that's what they tell me anyway) though
> >> I work with eukaryotes.
>> >Well are they small eukaryotes? :-)
>> Well, Cyclospora is more on the big side, though at 10microns in diameter
> they aren't as big as some of the other sporulating parasitic protozoa,
> though larger than Cryptosporidium. Microsporidia, which I also have an
> interest in (they have THE coolest method of infecting host cells), are,
> well, the ones that infect humans, are about 1-2microns in diameter.
> pretty small, for eukaryotes.
>> >> I do not purchase services or products from unsolicited e-mail
> >> advertisements.
>> >Do you find that this helps?
>> Not really but it makes me feel better.
>> joan
> --
> Joan Shields jshields at uci.eduhttp://www.ags.uci.edu/~jshields> University of California - Irvine School of Social Ecology
> Department of Environmental Analysis and Design
> I do not purchase services or products from unsolicited e-mail advertisements.
