Dovdox

The Obama administration has announced the launch of a new website with troves of freely accessible data from across the government. The site includes major releases of several new datasets that agencies used to charge money for, as well as some that were simply unavailable to the general public. In addition, they appear to have collected direct links to a huge amount of information that was already online but hard to find, hidden behind the quirky site structures of individual agencies.

Even if you don’t need historical maps of mangrove habitats in the Southeast or detailed statistics on cancer incidence and population, it’s worth checking out the site just to get a feel for what’s now available. They certainly haven’t released everything about everything, but this is definitely a big step in the right direction.

Got data?

A paper in the latest issue of Cell Metabolism seems to promise a new generation of fat-loss drugs. The researchers knocked out sarcolemmal ATP-sensitive potassium (K_ATP) channels in mice, causing the animals’ muscles to burn more energy. As a result, the mice were thinner:

Inefficient fuel metabolism in K_ATP channel-deficient striated muscles reduced glycogen and fat body depots, promoting a lean phenotype. The propensity to lesser body weight imposed by K_ATPchannel deficit persisted under a high-fat diet, yet obesity restriction was achieved at the cost of compromised physical endurance. Thus, sarcolemmal K_ATP channels govern muscle energy economy, and their downregulation in a tissue-specific manner could present an antiobesity strategy by rendering muscle increasingly thermogenic at rest and less fuel efficient during exercise.

Of course, a fat-burning pill is the Holy Grail of the pharmaceutical industry, but if I were a drug developer, I’d hold off charging after K_ATP channel inhibitors. That’s because the abstract giveth, but the data taketh away. See, for example, Figure 7 (I don’t want to repost the figure here because Elsevier has been prickly about copyrights in the past, but the paper is open-access, so you can just click the link).

In the graph, note that the knockout mice are indeed less heavy than their wild-type colleagues on the obesity-inducing diet, but the weight curves are exactly the same. They’re both gaining. The experiment ends at 160 days, which means the mice were just hitting middle age.

There’s also the issue of side-effects, which we can practically guarantee in any potential K_ATP channel-targeting drug. The knockout mice had reduced endurance in an exercise test, but I’d bet a beer that’s not their only problem. Previous work has shown that this channel is a critical part of stress responses in both skeletal and cardiac muscle. Even taking a hypothetically perfect K_ATP channel-targeting compound for weight loss would be like popping a zit with a chainsaw: it might work, but is it worth the risk?

I’m not the only scientist skeptical of this approach, either. Greg Cooney, an Associate Professor at the Garvan Institute in Australia – who I’m guessing was a reviewer on the Cell Metabolism paper – just sent out a press release throwing some much-needed cold water on the weight-loss hype. In it, he reiterates the fundamental problem at the root of the obesity pandemic.

“The energy you use in your home can come from a coal-fired power station, hydroelectric power, or a wind turbine. You won’t know which because the end result is electricity. The energy that fuels your body can come from fats, proteins or carbohydrates. You won’t know which because the end result is ATP, or cellular energy,” says Cooney, concluding that “Your body will use the energy it needs and store the leftover fats, proteins or carbohydrates as fat. When you do the sums, it’s ultimately a matter of calories in and calories out.”

So how do you lose weight? Eat less and exercise more. Nobody likes that answer, but continuing to ask the question isn’t going to change it.

In research bound to haunt the nightmares of certain trial lawyers and state legislators, scientists at the University of South Florida have found that long-term cell phone use might actually be good medicine:

“It surprised us to find that cell phone exposure, begun in early adulthood, protects the memory of mice otherwise destined to develop Alzheimer’s symptoms,” said lead author Gary Arendash, PhD, USF Research Professor at the Florida ADRC. “It was even more astonishing that the electromagnetic waves generated by cell phones actually reversed memory impairment in old Alzheimer’s mice.”

Mice were exposed to cell phone signals from a centrally-located antenna.

Arendash’s experiment involved housing wild-type and Alzheimer’s-prone mice in cages placed around an antenna, which emitted signals near cell phone frequencies for two one-hour periods each day over the course of several months. This appears to be the first time anyone has looked at such a chronic, realistic exposure level to the same frequencies used by cellular phones, in a controlled laboratory setting.

That said, the usual caveats apply. Mice are not humans, and the Alzheimer’s mouse model in this study is an inbred strain that mimics many aspects of human dementia, but not all. Also, the experiment wasn’t really set up to detect tumors, which are the real focus of litigators’ and legislators’ ire. While the researchers did not find any visible masses in the brains of dissected mice at the end of the study, the sample size and length of the test weren’t really adequate to assess the animals’ cancer risks.

So using a cell phone might or might not increase your risk for cancer, but it might also prevent or treat Alzheimer’s disease. Choose your poison, but don’t be surprised if it turns out to be nontoxic.

As a microbiologist and drummer, I’ve been fascinated by the recent story from New Hampshire, where a woman appears to have caught gastric anthrax from an animal-hide drum:

State officials are trying to find everyone who attended the drum circle, offering to vaccinate them and hoping to gather information that will explain how one young woman contracted a case of gastrointestinal anthrax a short time after attending the event.

One paragraph, two bizarre medical events: catching B. anthracis from drumming, and getting the weird gastrointestinal form of the disease. While it’s sometimes been used as a cover story for bioweapons accidents (as during the Sverdlovsk incident), actual gastric anthrax is ridiculously rare. A PubMed search returns a whopping 15 hits from the biomedical literature about this form of the disease, and almost all of them are either reviews or basic research papers. You’re probably more likely to get struck by lightning while winning the lottery than to catch gastric anthrax.

Getting this freak disease from a drum head is just … well, there aren’t even words for this level of probability. And the weirdness just keeps coming:

On Thursday, New Hampshire officials confirmed that the strain of anthrax spores found on two drums used at the Dec. 4 drumming circle, as well as on an electrical socket at the United Campus Ministry, matched the anthrax strain that infected the woman. The officials have taken 56 other drums for testing. The woman, who is not a student, brought her own synthetic drum to the circle on Dec. 4.

Got that? She apparently ingested anthrax that must have been on someone else’s drum.

For its part, the CDC offers these tips for drum makers and drummers. They focus on the risk of catching inhalation anthrax from making drums, which is rare, but nowhere near as whack as what just happened in New Hampshire.

On Episode 64 of This Week in Virology, Vince, Rich, and I talked about the top virology stories of 2009. One of them was the discovery of an apparent correlation between Xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) and chronic fatigue syndrome (a topic I also blogged about here). As I said on TWiV, I still suspect that XMRV is just a bystander, showing up in people whose immune systems are suppressed for other reasons – I don’t believe it’s causing chronic fatigue, at least not from the evidence so far.

And now, that evidence has gotten even weaker:

Patients in our CFS cohort had undergone medical screening to exclude detectable organic illness and met the CDC criteria for CFS. DNA extracted from blood samples of 186 CFS patients were screened for XMRV provirus and for the closely related murine leukaemia virus by nested PCR using specific oligonucleotide primers. To control for the integrity of the DNA, the cellular beta-globin gene was amplified. Negative controls (water) and a positive control (XMRV infectious molecular clone DNA) were included. While the beta-globin gene was amplified in all 186 samples, neither XMRV nor MLV sequences were detected.

Conclusion: XMRV or MLV sequences were not amplified from DNA originating from CFS patients in the UK. Although we found no evidence that XMRV is associated with CFS in the UK, this may be a result of population differences between North America and Europe regarding the general prevalence of XMRV infection, and might also explain the fact that two US groups found XMRV in prostate cancer tissue, while two European studies did not.

As they say up here in New England, “ay-uh.”

George Thorogood and John Lee Hooker should take note:

Many alcoholic beverages contain byproducts of the materials used in the fermenting process. These byproducts are called “congeners,” complex organic molecules with toxic effects including acetone, acetaldehyde, fusel oil, tannins, and furfural. Bourbon has 37 times the amount of congeners that vodka has. A new study has found that while drinking a lot of bourbon can cause a worse hangover than drinking a lot of vodka, impairment in people’s next-day task performance is about the same for both beverages.

Turning to the article itself, we learn the gory details:

Methods: Healthy heavy drinkers age 21 to 33 (n = 95) participated in 2 drinking nights after an acclimatization night. They drank to a mean of 0.11 g% breath alcohol concentration on vodka or bourbon one night with matched placebo the other night, randomized for type and order. Polysomnography recordings were made overnight; self-report and neurocognitive measures were assessed the next morning.

You can get placebo bourbon? I certainly hope it’s labeled more clearly than decaffeinated coffee.

Results: After alcohol, people had more hangover and more decrements in tests requiring both sustained attention and speed. Hangover correlated with poorer performance on these measures. Alcohol decreased sleep efficiency and rapid eye movement sleep, and increased wake time and next-day sleepiness. Alcohol effects on sleep correlated with hangover but did not mediate the effects on performance. No effect of beverage congeners was found except on hangover severity, with people feeling worse after bourbon. Virtually no sex differences appeared.

That’s weird – I always notice sex differences after drinking.

Conclusions: As drinking to this level affects complex cognitive abilities, safety could be affected, with implications for driving and for safety-sensitive occupations. Congener content affects only how people feel the next day so does not increase risk. The sleep disrupting effects of alcohol did not account for the impaired performance so other mechanisms of effect need to be sought. As hangover symptoms correlate with impaired performance, these might be contributing to the impairment.

So there it is: either liquor gives you a hangover, but to minimize the pain, stick with vodka. For blues singers, though, the goal may be to maximize the pain.

I just upgraded the site to the latest version of WordPress. Normally, this takes about 15 minutes of careful work, involving a download to my desktop, some FTP monkey business, checking of config files, and so forth. This time, after backing everything up, I went ahead and tried WordPress’s “automatic upgrade” procedure. Honestly, I didn’t expect it to work, but with everything backed up I figured it was worth a shot.

Click, click, done.

Who says open source software is hard to use?

Catching up on some old news, I noticed that the November issue of the Malaria Journal has a supplement dedicated to the most elegant insecticide ever developed: the sterile insect technique (SIT). As the accompanying press release explains:

SIT involves the generation of ’sterile’ male mosquitoes, which are incapable of producing offspring despite being sexually active. Because female mosquitoes only mate once during their lifetimes, a single mating with a sterile male can ensure that she will never breed. This leads to an increasing reduction in the population over time, in contrast to insecticides, which kill a certain fraction of the insect population. The supplement features articles reviewing the history of the technique; ethical, legal and social concerns that might arise from it; and detailed reviews of all of the elements required for a successful SIT programme.

The approach was originally developed by Edward Knipling and his colleagues in the 1950s, who used it successfully to eradicate a devastating cattle pest called Cochliomyia hominivorax, or the screwworm fly. It’s been somewhat harder to use against other pests, though, including mosquitoes. To find out why, and to see the state of the science in this nonchemical pest control technique, check out the supplement – it’s open-access.

On this date 140 years ago, a British publishing firm began putting out a little magazine called Nature. Their latest volume cuts a transect through the book’s entire history, with samples at 20-year intervals. You can also see the first issue in its entirety online for free, and browse other highlights to catch up on the past 1.4 centuries of developments.

The media coverage of H1N1 flu, and many physicians’ approach to the outbreak, are really starting to annoy me. A story in today’s Boston Globe typifies the problem:

Emergency doctors at Children’s Hospital Boston began seeing an increase in what they think are swine flu cases over last weekend, Dr. Anne Stack, clinical chief of emergency medicine, said yesterday.

What they think are swine flu cases. In other words, ER docs are applying the Wagner* technique to diagnose a pandemic. Here’s the money quote:

“Normally this time in October we see 170 kids a day, but on Monday, we saw 240,’’ Stack said. “We are assuming everything that looks like flu is probably H1N1.’’

Brilliant work, Dr. Stack, just brilliant. You didn’t order any tests, didn’t bother to consider any other possible explanations for the increase in your ER census, but nonetheless found the time to blab to a reporter about your “findings.” Here’s a thought: maybe more people with flu-like symptoms are coming into your hospital because of widespread panic. In previous years, they wouldn’t have bothered to go to the ER, but this year they did, precisely because of the kind of mindless hype you’re now perpetuating. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, please keep your damn mouth shut.

There’s a real outbreak going on here, with a real virus causing real deaths. Tracking and containing it will require real data.

* Wagner = Wild Ass Guess, Not Easily Refuted.