Tag: infectious disease
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How Pregnancy Tests Led to the Decimation of Frog Populations
With readily available pregnancy tests stocked across drugstore shelves, it is hard to imagine a time when determining pregnancy was not so simple a task. Instead of the easy-to-use plastic cartridge we commonly imagine, the earliest reliable pregnancy tests utilised Xenopus laevis, also known as the African clawed frog (Nuwer, 2013). This method for identifying…
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Squirmy Brains
There are many layers within the skull that protect the brain from injuries, but is there an organism that can worm its way into the brain. Neurocysticercosis (NC) is caused by an infection of the larval cystic form of Taenia solium in the central nervous system (CNS) (Gripper and Welburn, 2017). It is one of…
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Phantom Sounds in the Pandemic
Do you ever hear a sudden ringing in your ears that no one else does? You are not alone. In fact, roughly 10% of American adults experience this chronic condition called tinnitus (National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), 2017). Tinnitus is often distressing as it disrupts focus and relaxation. To make matters…
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A Silenced Disease
Chagas disease is referred to as a silenced disease as it typically affects low-income communities, leading to a lack of motivation to find effective treatments (Alonso-Vega, et al., 2019). As a result, many people suffering with Chagas disease are driven into the cycle of poverty. This condition affects approximately 7 million people, mainly in Latin…
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Tree Man Illness
The name ‘tree man illness’ is a reference to the yellow-brown growths, as seen in Figure 1, which resemble tree bark that develop as a symptom of Epidermodysplasia verruciformis (EV) (Swati, et al., 2017). EV is a disease that results from a mutation on the EVER genes (McDermott, et al., 2009). Mutations that occur in…
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Combating the Crippler
In the early 20th century, the world was plunged into a state of frenzy. Poliomyelitis, or polio for short, was a formerly sporadic disease caused by poliovirus that had grown to become a global pandemic. At its height, 22000 people in the US alone were left paralysed each year, their motor neurons destroyed (Trevelyan, Smallman-Raynor and…