Focus on fungus

Not long ago, “superbugs”—drug-resistant bacteria—were all the news. Now its fungi. A new one, called Candida auris, has been identified. It’s particularly dangerous because it can kill people whose immune systems are compromised (they die from blood stream infections). Most alarming is the fact that it’s resistant to major antifungal medications and is extremely hard to eradicate. In one hospital where it had taken hold, one doctor reported that “everything tested positive:” the walls, bed, doors, curtains, poles, mattress bed rails, and on and on.

Apparently, C. auris is sweeping the world: Venezuela, Spain, England, India, Pakistan, South Africa and now New York, New Jersey, and Illinois. The CDC calls it an “urgent threat.” Yet the CDC, under its agreement with states, is not allowed to make public the location or name of hospitals involved in outbreaks. Local governments and hospitals are keeping quiet. They don’t want to scare people away. No one knows where the fungus originated. They also don't know how it developed drug resistance, although some theorize it's the overuse of agricultural fungicides. (With bacteria, it’s the overuse of antibiotics.)

By the way, fungi, like bacteria, are a normal part of our bodies’ ecosystems—our microbiota. They live in everyone's guts and on everyone's skin. On your skin, a fungus sometimes shows up as a red patch. Nothing to worry about. Our guts are populated by hundreds of thousands of fungi. Sometimes the balance of the various bacterial and fungal populations gets out of whack and cause disease. At the moment, for example, scientists are trying to determine whether there’s a link between an intestinal fungus called Malassezia and Crohn’s disease (Malassezia is also responsible for dandruff).

I know. Just one more thing to worry about. But I'm not.

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Sniffing for Parkinson’s

People with Parkinson’s disease give off a distinctive odor years before their symptoms appear. This discovery was made by a woman who noticed a “woody, musky odor” emanating from her husband twelve years before he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. She didn’t make the connection until, when attending a support group, she noticed the smell on others in the group. They, also, gave off an odor she could detect. (The woman attributes her keen sense of smell to synesthesia.)

The woman, a nurse, mentioned this phenomenon to a neurobiologist who verified that the woman could indeed distinguish people with Parkinson’s based on their scent. First, researchers tested her sense of smell by asking her to classify 12 shirts worn by a mixture of healthy individuals and patients diagnosed with the disease. The results were impressive: Not only did she identify all six of the shirts belonging to Parkinson’s patients, she also picked out a shirt worn by a test subject who wasn’t diagnosed with Parkinson’s until eight months after the experiment.

For further verification, the research team swabbed the upper backs of 64 people to collect sebum, the oily substance that keeps our skin moisturized. Forty-three of these people had Parkinson’s and 21 were healthy. After analyzing the chemical makeup of the samples, they noticed that four of the chemicals in the Parkinson’s patients were in higher concentrations than those of the healthy people and that one chemical was lower.

It looks like scientists may be on the verge of early detection of Parkinson’s by swabbing the skin and analyzing the chemicals. In the meantime, sharpen your sense of smell and see what you might discover!

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Defrauding Medicare

Many insurance companies make most of their money administering Medicare and Medicare Advantage plans. Many also defraud the government by scamming the system. Between 2008 and 2013, insurance companies received nearly seventy billion dollars in undeserved Medicare Advantage payments.

Traditional Medicare is a fee-for-service program: the government pays fixed amounts to doctors and other health-care providers for each service. The more health care you provide, the more money you are paid—an easy system to abuse. Medicare Advantage was supposed to mitigate abuse by harnessing the prudent management of the private sector. In this system, the government pays health-insurance companies, such as Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and United Health Group, to provide the insurance coverage.

 It’s no surprise that private companies routinely overbill Medicare. Bigger bills make for bigger government reimbursement. A whistleblower at one company documented the following strategies for increasing the profitability of health insurance businesses:

• Get rid of the sickest seniors (“lemon drop”) and recruit healthy ones (“cherry pick”).
• Misrepresent the number of health-care providers in your network to expand your service area.
• Select the most profitable diagnosis and treatment codes. (In this whistleblower’s company, eighty percent of the diagnosis codes were unjustified).
• Pressure doctors to schedule unnecessary appointments and assign additional codes.

As some analyists have determined, unchecked fraud could lead to the destruction of government health-care programs. The increased costs that result by theft creates cost inflation, which increases political pressure to make cuts. As one analyst said, fraud “will grow like a cancer and destroy your program.”As it is, health-care spending increases every year. Now it represents about eighteen percent of our GDP. If we want "medicare for all," it better be an improvement over this!

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You can sense the Earth's magnetic field!

Everybody knows that many animals, such as migratory birds, can tap into the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate for long distances. In fact, magnetic sensory systems seem to occur in virtually all organisms. Scientists have often wondered whether humans also tap into the Earth’s magnetic field. As one scientist said, “If we don’t have it, we would need to explain how we lost it.” Apparently, we haven’t lost it.

Recently, some Cal Tech scientists set up an experiment that shows how we sense magnetic fields. To do this, they built a cube that shielded unwanted electromagnetic radiation but that mimicked the Earth’s magnetic field in a way that scientists could manipulate. Study participants sat for an hour in the dark and quiet cube, wearing EEG caps that t allowed the scientists to eavesdrop on their brains. (As a control, the scientists also set up a similar-looking cube that was devoid of the magnetic fields.)

What the scientists discovered were changes in participants’ alpha waves. Our alpha waves are always present but are more prominent when we’re at rest. Whereas beta waves represent the arousal of an actively-engaged mind, alpha waves represent non-arousal. They are slower than beta waves and higher in amplitude. In the experiment, when the magnetic field was downward-oriented and swept counterclockwise, the scientists observed a significant decrease in the alpha wave amplitude. In some cases, the brain’s rhythm dropped by up to 60 percent before returning to normal. One scientist interpreted the dip as the brain "freaking out” upon realizing that the magnetic field has moved while the body didn’t. (Not all magnetic wave conditions elicited this change.)

Basically, what this experiment shows is that we unconsciously sense the Earth’s magnetic field. The scientists haven’t figured out how it works, but they do conclude that “the brain evolved over half a billion years to pull out information from the magnetic field just like any other sensory system.” Now what?

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.