Telomeres and Aging
GERALDINE AUBERT AND PETER M. LANSDORP
Terry Fox Laboratory, British Columbia Cancer Agency, and Division of Hematology, Department of
Medicine, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Aubert G, Lansdorp PM. Telomeres and Aging. Physiol Rev 88: 557–579, 2008;
Telomeres play a central role in cell fate and aging by adjusting the cellular response to stress and growth stimulation on the basis of previous cell divisions and DNA damage. At least a few hundred nucleotides of telomere repeats must “cap” each chromosome end to avoid activation of DNA repair pathways. Repair of critically short or “uncapped” telomeres by telomerase or recombination is limited in most somatic cells and apoptosis or cellular senescence is triggered when too many “uncapped” telomeres accumulate. The chance of the latter increases as the average telomere length decreases. The average telomere length is set and maintained in cells of the germline which typically express high levels of telomerase. In somatic cells, telomere length is very heterogeneous but typically declines with age, posing a barrier to tumor growth but also contributing to loss of cells with age. Loss of (stem) cells via telomere attrition provides strong selection for abnormal and malignant cells, a process facilitated by the genome instability and aneuploidy triggered by dysfunctional telomeres. The crucial role of telomeres in cell turnover and aging is highlighted by patients with 50% of normal telomerase levels resulting from a mutation in one of the telomerase genes. Short telomeres in such patients are implicated in a variety of disorders including dyskeratosis congenita, aplastic anemia, pulmonary fibrosis, and cancer. Here the role of telomeres and telomerase in human aging and aging associated diseases is reviewed.
Mosquito Alert
Attack of the Urban Mosquitoes
Aggressive and Hard to Kill: Two Asian Cityslickers Swarm the East Coast
http://www.mda.state.md.us/plants-pests/mosquito_control/_asian_tiger_mosquito_md.php
The latest scourge crossing the country has a taste for the big city.
The Asian tiger mosquito, named for its distinctive black-and-white striped body, is a relatively new species to the U.S. that is more vicious, harder to kill and, unlike most native mosquitoes, bites during the daytime. It also prefers large cities over rural or marshy areas—thus earning the nickname among entomologists as “the urban mosquito.”
“Part of the reason it is called ‘tiger’ is also because it is very aggressive,” says Dina Fonseca, an associate professor of entomology at Rutgers University. “You can try and swat it all you want, but once it’s on you, it doesn’t let go. Even if it goes away, it will be back for a bite.”
Swat Team: What Works
Dr. Fonseca is leading a U.S. Department of Agriculture effort to develop a cost-effective method to control the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus) population. The university is currently focusing on using larvacides, which render larvae incapable of growing into adults.
Since urban areas tend to be warmer—often by 5 to 10 degrees—than rural areas, cities are seeing tiger mosquitoes earlier and sticking around longer, often into October.
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Frequencies are much more effective than pesticides and eliminate all know side effects. For example, Freq Water Mighty Wash is a product developed by third party companies based on Frequency Foundation expertise and is cheaper than competitive products for protecting plants from insects, more effective, and with no known side effects.
Researchers who want to experiment with similar applicatons for mosquitos should contact Frequency Foundation.
Virtual Infection of Human Genome Database
Human Genome Contaminated With Mycoplasma DNA
The discovery of alien DNA in the published human genome raises important questions about preventing ‘virtual infections’
Earlier this year, molecular biologists announced that 20 per cent of nonhuman genome databases are contaminated with human DNA, probably from the researchers who sequenced the samples.
Now, the human genome itself has become contaminated. Bill Langdon at University College London and Matthew Arno at Kings College London say they’ve found sequences from mycoplasma bacteria in the human genome database.
This contamination has far reaching consequences. Biotech companies use the human genome database to create DNA chips that measure levels of human gene expression. Langdon and Arno say they’ve found mycoplasma DNA in two commercially available human DNA chips.
Anybody using these chips to measure human gene expression is also unknowingly measuring mycoplasma gene expression too.
In some ways, this is hardly a surprise. “It is well known that mycoplasma contamination is rife in molecular biology laboratories,” says Langdon and Arno. With any luck the discovery of this stuff in the human genome database will focus minds on the problem.
A key question is the nature of this kind of information transmission. These mycoplasma genes are clearly successful in reproducing themselves in silico. One possibility is that we’re seeing the beginnings of an entirely new kind of landscape of infection.
Here, genes that can masquerade as human (or indeed as other organisms) can successfully transmit themselves from one database to another. And if we think of this as virtual infection, a sure bet is that we’ll be worrying about virtual evolution in the near future.
But what to do? The level of contamination and the way in which it is spreading suggests that researchers are losing the battle to eliminate it. “We.. fear current tools will be inadequate to catch genes which have jumped the silicon barrier,” they say.
Most frightening of all is the possibility that Langdon and Arno may have only scratched the surface. “Having found two suspect DNA sequences, it seems likely the published “human genome” sequence contains more,” they say.
If virtual infection is really as big a problem as Langdon and Arno suggest, we may well need to protect databases with the genomic version of antivirus software, a kind of virtual immune system.
But this in itself is likely to trigger an evolutionary arms race that selects genes most capable of beating the safeguards.
Clearly, this is a nettle that needs to be grasped quickly. That’s if it’s not too late already.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1106.4192: More Mouldy Data: Virtual Infection of the Human Genome
CRKP: carapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae
CRKP is becoming wide spread. This week I am seeing it in the U.S., Europe, and Korea. For frequency work it is simply another anti-biotic resistant bacteria. Frequencies will be available on the Frequency Foundation subscribers list.
Antibiotics are increasingly becoming an obsolete technology. They were never good for the human body’s immune system even when they killed bacteria. I haven’t used any since 1993 and they should only be used in emergencies when nothing else works.
Deadly Antibiotic-Resistant Superbug Spreads in Southern California
An antibiotic-resistant superbug once thought to be rare is spreading through health-care facilities in Southern California, health officials say.
By KATIE MOISSE, ABC News Medical Unit
March 25, 2011
Roughly 350 cases of carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae, or CRKP, were reported in Los Angeles County between June and December of 2010, according to a study from the L.A. County Department of Public Health to be presented April 3 in Dallas at the annual meeting of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America.
“These patients tend to be elderly, they are commonly on ventilators and they often stay at the facility for an extended period of time,” Dr. Dawn Terashita, medical epidemiologist and lead author of the study, said in a statement.
CRKP joins other superbugs such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, in a league of bacteria that outwits typical antibiotics.
“We develop new drugs to defeat the infections and germs change to get around those drugs and this is one of those cases,” Dr. Richard Besser, ABC News chief health and medical editor, said today in an interview on ABC News’ “Good Morning America.”
Besser is a former acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. “It’s like an arms race and in many ways the germs are winning,” he said.
CRKP is not new to California, or the rest of the country for that matter. The CDC has been tracking it across 35 states since 2009. It is young, however, compared to MRSA, according to Dr. Arjun Srinivasan, associate director of the CDC’s health care-associated, infection-prevention programs.
“But in terms of mortality and morbidity, it’s very, very serious,” Srinivasan said. “These infections are more difficult to treat than MRSA.”
CRKP is an enterobacterium like salmonella and E. coli.
It is unclear how many cases of the 350 reported by Terashita and colleagues were fatal. It is also unclear whether the infections stemmed from improper care at long term-care facilities or the frailty of the patients they serve. But Terashita said infected patients tended to have health problems that often resulted in antibiotic use, which might have made them more susceptible.
“All of these factors contribute to a greater risk for health care-acquired infections,” she said.
Besser said, “This superbug is very dangerous. It tends to affect people that are in the hospital for long periods of time; people that have underlying medical problems; people who have been in nursing homes.”
Although healthy people in the general public are not at risk for infection, they could transmit the bacteria to sick loved ones.
“As a loved one of someone that is in the hospital, you have to be vigilant when you’re sitting there with your relative and anyone comes in and wants to touch your relative without washing their hands,” Besser said. “You have to say something. … It does come down to simple things like that, making sure no one is giving a germ to someone you care about.”
Health-care workers should be equally vigilant, Besser said. “A lot of it comes down to hospitals,” he said. “They need to make sure that health-care workers aren’t spreading it from patient to patient. That’s mainly what takes place.
Preventing the spread of CRKP is key because the infections are so difficult to treat, the CDC’s Srinivasan said. The “mainstay treatment,” colistin, is an older generation antibiotic with toxic side effects. And newer, more effective treatment options are unlikely to be developed any time soon.
Devastating new infection from ticks found in blood supply
Roz Zurko, Fourwinds.com
Babesiosis cases are on the rise, which is much like Lyme Disease, as it is contracted from a tick bite, this infection is going undiagnosed with concerns that it is being spread not only by ticks, but also in through the donated blood supply.
As if Lyme Disease wasn’t enough to worry about when spending anytime outdoors in the warm weather, now a new disease is growing in numbers that is caused by the same insect that causes Lyme, a tick, according to the website Green Living. Lyme Disease is contracted from a tick bite and can be a debilitating disease and even fatal if left untreated. Now the tick bite is causing babesiosisnce. It is a potentially devastating infection that is gaining a foothold in the Northeast. Government researchers have found this disease is becoming more predominant, especially the Lower Hudson Valley and coastal areas of the Northeast.
Babesiosis results from infection with Babesia microti and causes a malaria like illness. This parasite lives in red blood cells and is carried by deer ticks. Though the disease is far less common than Lyme disease, babesiosis can be fatal, particularly in people with compromised immune systems. One of the concerns about the spread of this disease is through the blood supply. Without a widely used screening test for this disease, this is a threat to the blood supply. Sanjai Kumar, who is the chief of the laboratory of emerging pathogens at the Food and Drug Administration says, “We are very worried about it and are doing everything in our power to address this,” according to the NY Times.
The most recent report for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has seen a 20-fold increase in cases of babesisosis. In 2001, there were six cases of this disease reported in the Lower Hudson Valley. This jumped to 119 in 2008. This is particularly of concern in areas that see the greatest cases of Lyme Disease, because it is the same ticks that carry both babesisosis and Lyme. Coastal Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Long Island are the places where Lyme Disease is endemic.
Dr. Peter Krause, senior research scientist at Yale School of Public Health said it is in these areas that see Lyme Disease where babesiosis is also becoming very common. One study done on residents of Block Island R.I. showed that babesiosis to be just 25 percent less common than Lyme Disease. Other areas are seeing the spread of this disease, like the Upper Midwest, but to a slower degree, says Krause.
Airborne Aerosol Spraying: Summary Article
OPINIONS REGARDING THE FUNCTIONS OF CHEMTRAILS/STRATOSPHERIC AEROSOL GEOENGINEERING
Chemtrails are trails of substances sprayed from devices attached on aircraft into the upper atmosphere and into the air we breathe. They differ from the condensation trails sometimes seen emanating from planes in a number of ways, including that they often linger in the sky for more than half-an-hour, and can fill an otherwise clear-blue sky with an unnatural-looking cloud cover within which the tell-tale signs of electromagnetic gravity waves emerge.
Chemtrails in a criss-cross pattern
While politicians typically tend to elude the issue of chemtrails or erroneously claim that they don’t exist, there’s a staggering amount of information available about them on the Internet to show that they do. At the time of writing there were about 1,730,000 entries at Google under ‘chemtrail,’ videos from around the world, numerous official documents related to their use and a wide variety of opinions regarding what they are used for. This article will focus on the latter.
Ralph Nader on Water Fluoridation
Major Update: Swine Flu 2011 Version 3.5
CDC flu statistics continue to rise for the 2011 flu season. The flu is a variation of the swine flu from last year. It appears to have evolved in the wild and picked up many new organisms.
The flu is transmitted by dozens of strains of microscopic airborne parasites. In Japan, infected persons wear a face mask to avoid transmitting the flu from expelling these airborne parasites which a loaded with viruses, bacteria, fungi, and other organisms.
Recent research on school children shows the flu expands in networks of friends, not so much in families or even between children sitting next to each other in school. This is likely due to the fact that the virus itself is not the main route of infection. Parasites are transmitting mainly by talking with one another face to face.
A severe, lingering flu was initially experienced in London in October and multiple clients began reporting the same symtoms in various parts of the U.S. and Europe. Constant travels through major airports in the world in November-February expanded this frequency set. It is now in all major airports. The people in my office call it the flu that never ends.
Almost two dozen strains of cytomegalovirus (HHV-5) have been identified. They have been broken out into a separate program.
Dozens of strains of parasites have now been broken out into a separate program.
chronic fatigue syndrome virus
cholera baccili
tuberculosis – now including XDR-TB
1918 swine flu strains including several new strains of swine flu
ukrainian swine flu (black lung)
cytomegalovirus (HHV-5) – many strains
epstein barr virus
cocksackie B4 virus – several new strains
superbugs (some from chemtrails and including MRSA)
lou gehrig virus
many parasites (some from chemtrails)
avian flu strains 1,2, 3 and new strain 4
herpes simplex virus (HSV2)
borna virus strains 1, 2, 3
candida – multiple strains
many other lyme viruses
Subscribers can download frequencies at http://subscribers.frequencyfoundation.com
Swiss Take Action on Complementary Medicine
Switzerland embeds CAM in constitution
On 17 May 2009 the Swiss people voted in favour of a constitutional article for complementary medicine in a national vote. 67 percent of voters supported the new constitutional article. Switzerland is the first country in Europe to set out in the constitution, authority for the state and constituent states (cantons) to take complementary medicine into consideration in the public health service.
Yes to Complementary Medicine
Over the last few years complementary medicine has been politically marginalized in Switzerland. Therefore, the complementary medicine sector, including doctors, therapists, manufacturers and specialized traders, together launched and brought about a national popular initiative. This enabled Swiss voters to obtain a referendum for a constitutional amendment if they collected 100,000 valid signatures within 18 months.