More deadly than Lyme Disease… In 1958, a five-year-old boy from Powassan, Ontario, Canada presented to a children’s hospital complaining of dizziness; his parents also described tremors of his left arm. Electroencephalogram readings showed a widespread disturbance in the patient’s brain. The patient’s condition began to rapidly decline, and within six days he died. Portions…
COVID-19 has dominated our lives for the better part of a year and yet we are left with more questions than we are answers. One of these questions most frequently brought up is how long will the antibodies be effective after a vaccination is given?
The discovery of a cause, as well as treatment, for Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) may involve our commensal gut bacteria. Millions of adults suffering from RA experience chronic pain, chronic inflammation, and often severe functional disability of the joints. Onset in older populations is a well-known risk factor, and RA is three times as likely in…
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Why We Inspect Food Before Consumption, From Contamination to Cause We have all heard the phrase, “The way to a person’s heart is through their stomach.” While taking that concept with a grain of salt, most people would not want their appetite spoiled with the thought of consuming rotten or tainted food. In the United…
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Ocean bacteria and viruses take up residence, but for a limited amount of time. As an individual initiates their first stride into the piercing cold ocean, our lungs are not the only part of our body greeted by the shock of the drastic change in environment. A brutal battle, invisible to the naked eye, has…
Read More “What happens to your skin microbiome after a day at the beach?” »
Hans Christian Gram, credited as the inventor of the Gram staining technique, was a pioneering biologist who devised the system of classification which led to as many as 30,000 formally named species of bacteria being investigated. Gram, working with German pathologist and microbiologist Karl Friedländer, devised the technique in Berlin in the early 1880s. Today marks…
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Is a New and Better Vaccine Coming Soon? A new player in the field of COVID vaccines could be arriving soon. The trials so far are encouraging for both safety and efficacy. It even has some advantages over the Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J vaccines that have become so familiar to us. Novavax, headquartered in Maryland,…
In 1884, Danish microbiologist Hans Christian Gram discovered that crystal violet irreversibly stained certain bacteria but can be washed from others. The Gram stain technique identifies bacteria as gram-positive (the stain is retained) or gram-negative (the stain is washed away.) Gram found that his stain worked for visualizing a series of bacteria associated with disease…
Want to lower your risk of contracting a MAP-related malady? Here’s how. Emerging research is implicating Mycobacterium avium paratuberculosis (MAP) as the etiological cause of various diseases including inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn’s disease, Type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, multiple sclerosis and autism.(8) This species of bacteria is a relative of M. tuberculosis and belongs…
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The Gram stain is the most widely used staining procedure in the field of microbiology. It differentiates bacteria based on staining characteristics due to differences in cell wall compositions. The Gram stain was first used in 1884 by Hans Christian Gram, a Danish bacteriologist. Gram was searching for a method that would allow visualization of…
Is there a correlation between the end of mask mandates and the rise in cases of the common cold and influenza? The start of the summer is aligning with another new beginning, one in which many around the world make a return to the “New Normal” and relearn what life was like before COVID-19. While…
