Get up off your arses!

Are you comfortable there with your improved health? Not dead because of some penicillin-sensitive bacteria? Good. Now get up and support Australian medical research because less money means fewer medical discoveries that keep you comfortable and alive.

A cut of $400M (absolute peanuts with respect to the size of the Austrlian budget of ~$354600M) over 3 years is being slated for the major federal medical science funding body, NHMRC. To put that in perspective, the NHMRC has an annual budget of ~$700M,  and that’s only after scientists had worked hard for 10 years previously to get up to that competitive rate.

It won’t affect everyone equally. Money gets handed out first to those continuing grants. Those really affected are those young researchers going for new grants; researchers who are more likely to up and change jobs. This would leave a gaping hole in continuing line of researchers and disrupt the entire structure of research. Stop/start funding has huge effects.

Not only that, investment into science is investment into your well-being: pennicilin, cochlear implants, cancer treatments, discovery of the cause of stomach ulcers are all things that have been made possible with Australian research. This is all pretty obvious stuff that has been covered in much better detail by others and still others.

It’s time to do something. Rallies around Australia against these cuts have been planned. Get along to them if 1) you value further medical discoveries that will make your life much more comfortable and 2) are not a jerk. Please visit Discovery need dollars for more details and fliers.

MELBOURNE - State Library – Tuesday 12 April @ 12:45-2PM
SYDNEY - Belmore Park – Tuesday 12 April @ 12:45-2PM
ADELAIDE - Steps of Parliament house, North Terrace – Tuesday 12 April @ 12:30PM (Adelaide time)

Click here to get signs in a printable format

 

TT

Halitosis – Your mouth smells like your arse

Sometimes I’m going to write about rare cancers or blood diseases and sometimes I’m going to write about bad breath. That’s just the way I roll.

Halitosis literally means “condition of the breath” and has many causes and just as many home remedies. Original therapies (and by original I mean 1550 BC) like heavily herb infused wines didn’t remove the bad breath but like mints and other modern treatments they just attempted to cover the bad smell with something more pleasant.

Halitosis can be divided into two distinct problems, transient halitosis (morning breath) and chronic halitosis. While the difference between these conditions is the time frame of affliction both have the same root cause. Sulphur.

For more head to diseaseprone.fieldofscience.com

2010 in review thanks to WordPress.com

WordPress.com sent us this summary of our year at WordPress. Some interesting stats for those that are interested

 

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 34,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 4 days for that many people to see it.

 

In 2010, there were 117 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 135 posts. There were 194 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 131mb. That’s about 4 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was April 8th with 1,269 views. The most popular post that day was The Wednesday Post (7/4/10).

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were stumbleupon.com, researchblogging.org, facebook.com, reddit.com, and twitter.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for exploding head, biofilm, pneumococcus, ulcerative colitis, and disease of the week.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

The Wednesday Post (7/4/10) April 2010
4 comments

2

Exploding Head Syndrome – No pun required June 2010
13 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

3

P. aeruginosa, Biofilms and Honey July 2010
23 comments and 2 Likes on WordPress.com

4

Crohn’s Disease – Your Body Hates Your Guts February 2010
3 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

5

The Pneumococcus: “Captain of the Men of Death” January 2010
3 comments

(Merry) Christmas Disease

Hello there DiseaseOfTheWeek-ers! This is a small excerpt of a post that has been posted at my new home diseaseprone.fieldofscience.com. I wanted to wish you all a happy holiday period and I hope you enjoy this post.

So I was feeling a little lazy and thought I should find a disease related to Christmas, that way it’d be topical and I’d look like a genius. Well maybe not a genius, as all I did was type “Christmas” and “disease” into google and it returned “Christmas disease”. Don’t worry though, the disease itself is pretty cool!

Contrary to popular belief Christmas disease is not limited to just drunkenness

Unfortunately for me my attempt at topical blogging reveals that Christmas disease is not named after the holiday but instead after Mr Stephen Christmas, a British migrant  who immigrated to Canada, who was diagnosed at the age of 2 in 1949 with haemophilia. On a return visit to England in 1952 Stephen was again hospitalised and a sample of his blood was sent away to the Oxford Haemophilia Centre where it was determined by Rosemary Biggs and R.G. McFarlane that Mr. Christmas did not have a normal case of haemophilia, he had something that had never been described before.

For the rest of this post head over to Disease Prone

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The bacteria in your belly Pt. 3 – Disrupting the balance

In the previous two posts we have established how the microbiome is established and then the pressures the host puts on it to maintain a balance between the required functions and the commensal bacteria providing them. In this post I want to look a little deeper at what happens if this balance is disturbed or never properly forms at all.

The bacteria in your belly Pt. 2 – Adults

In the last post I talked about babies eating poo how babies develop a gut flora. In this post I wanted to look at how that flora matures into adulthood.

As a baby grows it interacts with its environment and after about a year an infant’s flora will resemble their parent’s. This becomes particularly important as the baby starts to eat solid foods and no longer survives on a milk diet. Now any and all bacteria can have a shot at colonising. So what shapes the bacterial population from this point onwards? Tolerance dictates this uneasy state of play.

The Wednesday Post (27/10/10)

With Halloween around the corner I thought I’d have a look to see if there was such thing as ‘Halloween Disease’. There isn’t it would seem but there seems to be a lot of literature showing links between Halloween and flares in celiac disease severity and diabetic diagnoses. But I did find one other paper that I thought was interesting.

Science blog + Halloween = DNA carved into a pumpkin = WIN!

What’s in a vaccine?

Waaaaaay back in the first post of my sub series on vaccines I said I would cover vaccine styles, how they work (and Pt. 2) and why we can’t rely on therapeutics alone. I promise I’ll get to the last one at some point but after a couple of weeks writing about vaccines something occurred to me that I hadn’t really thought about before, what is actually in a vaccine?

The Wednesday Post (15/09/10)

Even though I’m a PhD student and I have been at Uni for more years than I care to calculate I can still be made to feel insignificant by a particularly applied child or teenager. It’s completely unreasonable but I’ve always disliked overachieving children, particularly if they are aware of their overachieving-ness. Junior Masterchef is a great example, I can not and will not watch that show. Stupid kids.
Having said that today will be different because as much as I hate smarmy little kids with gelled-up hair who can temper their own chocolate I’ve always been amazed by kids who ‘get’ science early on. I kind of drifted into science by following what I liked but there are those kids who from the outset seem to know they are scientists. Today I get to meet a bunch of them.

I stole this from your program of events - please don't sue

The Australian Science and Mathematics School is hosting the International Students Science Fair this year where more than 200 students from 15 countries will gather under the banner of ‘Science and Social Responsibility’ and present their own research. This is the 6th annual ISSF to be held with previous Fairs being held throughout Asia and next year they are off to Thailand and then Canada the year after that!
It’s by no means a picnic or a holiday. 7 am starts with days running till, in some cases, after 9pm and all the days are chock full of activities from lectures to hiking to what I am attending today, a poster presentation series.
So if you’ve got some spare time today do what I’m going to do and wander up the The Royal Institution of Australia and check out what promises to be very high quality science from some very clever school kids.

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The Wednesday Post (09/06/10)

In April (slightly as a result from my and James’ appearance in The Advertiser), I was invited to Walford Girls’ College to give a talk to their Year 11s. The talk was to convince them to keep studying science later down the track. This is what I came up with:

TT