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KNOW A SCIENTIST
Italian epidemiologist Dr. Carlo Urbani was the first person who identified SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) as a highly contagious disease. He worked as an infectious disease expert in World Health Organization’s office in the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, and warned WHO against this deadly disease. As a result of his early warning, millions of lives around the world were saved. But sadly, while treating SARS infected patients, Dr. Urbani himself was infected with the virus and later on died due to complications from the condition.
Delivery mode, exposure to antibiotics and feeding method linked to change in baby's microbial communities
Birth by C-section, exposure to antibiotics and formula feeding slow the development and decrease the diversity of a baby's microbes through the first year of life. That is the finding of a study led by researchers from NYU Langone Medical Center and published June 15 in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
The study results center on the microbiome, the mix of bacterial species that live on human skin and in our guts, and that co-evolved with humans to play roles in digestion, metabolism and immunity. As rates of children's exposure to C-sections, antibiotic use, and formula feeding have increased in recent decades, the incidence of asthma, autoimmune diseases and obesity has more than doubled. Many studies have now linked these trends, but only a few experiments in mice have shown microbial differences to directly increase disease risk.
"Our results provide evidence that modern practices change a baby's microbial communities in ways that last through the first year," says Martin Blaser, MD, the Muriel G. and George W. Singer Professor of Translational Medicine at NYU School of Medicine, and the study's senior author. "The big, remaining question is whether or not changes in this timeframe, even if resolved later on, affect the founding of microbiomes with lifetime consequences for a child's immune function and metabolism.“
Source: www.news-medical.net
Impact of antibiotic treatment on infant gut microbiome revealed
A comprehensive analysis of changes in the intestinal microbial population during the first three years of life has revealed some of the impacts of factors such as mode of birth, vaginal versus cesarean section and antibiotic exposure, including the effects of multiple antibiotic treatments.
“One of the key motivations of microbiome research is that the microbial population of early childhood appears to be critical to human health, in that decreased diversity of the gut microbiome has been implicated in a number of allergic and autoimmune diseases,” says Ramnik Xavier, MD, PhD, chief of the MGH Gastrointestinal Unit and an institute member at the Broad. “Not only did our study analyze the gut microbiome at a high resolution that allowed us to identify both microbial species and strains, but by following our study participants over time we also were able to uncover findings that would not have been revealed by single samples from each patient”.
“We need to have biosafety features that allow you to ensure that when you’ve made something it’s not going to escape from the lab, or if it does it won’t be able to prosper,” Ellington told New Scientist. “In the presence of antibiotics and the absence of the [artificial] amino acid, there’s very little way for our circuitry to leave the lab.” The researchers published their results this week (January 18) in Nature Chemical Biology.
Source: www.sciencedaily.com
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