Search Results for: vaccine

After Water

Susie Cagle | Longreads | June 2015 | 21 minutes (5,160 words)

 

The sun was going down in East Porterville, California, diffusing gold through a thick and creamy fog, as Donna Johnson pulled into the parking lot in front of the Family Dollar.

porterville-2-donna-truck_1200

Since the valley started running dry, this has become Johnson’s favorite store. The responsibilities were getting overwhelming for the 70-year-old: doctors visits and scans for a shoulder she injured while lifting too-heavy cases of water; a trip to the mechanic to fix the truck door busted by an overeager film crew; a stop at the bank to deposit another generous check that’s still not enough to cover the costs of everything she gives away; a million other small tasks and expenses. But at the Family Dollar she was singularly focused, in her element. Read more…

The Rise of ‘Mama’

Photo: arileu

Elissa Strauss | Longreads | May 2015 | 15 minutes (4,006 words)

 

I first noticed “mama” while pregnant with my son in 2012. I was browsing on the internet—familiarizing myself the different types of mothers out there, trying to figure out what kind of mother I might become—when I noticed a number of alternative moms who referred to themselves as “mama.” This was the radical homemaking, attachment parenting, extended breastfeeding bunch, and “mama” was right at home with their folksy, back-to-the-earth approach to motherhood.

This use of mama can be traced back to women like Ariel Gore, who began publishing her alternative parenting magazine “Hip Mama” in 1993. Inspired by her experience as an urban single mom, the magazine became the source of parenting advice for riot grrrl types, tattooed and pierced women who wanted to find a way to embrace parenthood while simultaneously rejecting much of the bourgeois accouterment that comes along with it.

This fringe quality of “mama” stuck, leading to websites like the “Wellness Mama,” the home of a popular alternative lifestyle guru named Katie who is into stuff like, “cloth diapering, natural birthing, GAPS dieting, homeschooling, not eating grains, making my own toothpaste, drinking the fat and more.” For her, being a mama isn’t just about parenting one’s kids, but seeing parenting as a medium through which one can change the world.

“Here’s the thing, I can’t change the health of the world alone, but I’m absolutely convinced that as a group, women and moms can. … Not only are we raising the next generation, feeding them, teaching them, etc but we control the majority of food dollars spent around the world.”

She continues by explaining that being a “Wellness Mama” is a way for women to counter any criticism they might receive for being a stay-at-home mom. “I hope to make being #justamom just a little easier for you.” Mama isn’t just a pet name, it’s a manifesto. Read more…

‘In the Name of Our Own Fear’: Eula Biss on Vaccination, Privilege and Fear

In light of the recent measles outbreak in California, I want to share this excerpt from an interview with Eula Biss, author of On Immunity. After the birth of her first child, Biss’s research turned to vaccination, and she ruminated on a culture in which no man, woman or child is an island. Michael Schulson interviewed Biss at Salon:

Salon: You point out that people who oppose vaccination tend to be wealthier, whiter and more educated than the population at large. Why does this kind of social (but not medical) immunity hold a particular attraction for this demographic group?

Eula Biss: I should say that there are a few different demographics that tend not to vaccinate.

I think there’s a lot going on there, actually. Maybe the largest component is the kind of thinking that attends privilege. What I mean is a pattern of thought that’s been developed over a long period of time.

One of the favorite narratives [of privilege] is that we’ve just worked harder, so we deserve more. But there’s another narrative. It has to do with vulnerability, and that’s a narrative that I first started thinking about and noticing when I was writing about race. It justifies certain ways of wielding privilege, on the argument that the person who is privileged is actually not powerful but very, very vulnerable and needing protection, and that the people who are dangerous are the people who are less privileged. There’s a story line that runs something like this: vaccination may be OK for some people, but my child is uniquely vulnerable. My child is actually too vulnerable to receive this preventative medicine, and therefore I’m going to opt out of this public health initiative to spare my child this risk.

Salon: The healthcare system is large and confusing. To what extent does anti-vaccination sentiment involve individuals trying to reckon with these enormous systems that are just so hard for us to comprehend?

Biss: I think there are many, many facets to this question, and I think that is one facet. In some cases, lack of information and lack of understanding is compounded by the fact that vaccination works quite differently from other medical interventions. Just because you understand something else, like how stitches or aspirin work, it doesn’t mean you’ll understand vaccination in great detail without having it explained to you.

One of the shortcomings of our medical system is that doctors have very little time with their patients. There isn’t really the time for a doctor to sit down and carefully explain to you how the vaccines are working, what each of the different diseases are that your child is being vaccinated against, why those diseases are of concern, who they’re of concern to, and basically the whole public health strategy or justification behind mass vaccination.

Read the interview

The New Science of Evolutionary Forecasting

Longreads Pick

Scientists may not be able to predict what the world may look like 100 million years from now, but they may be able to look at how diseases like the flu will evolve in a few months, which has the potential to save lives: “Lässig hopes to be able to make predictions about future flu seasons that the World Health Organization could consult as they decide which strains should be included in flu vaccines. ‘It’s just a question of a few years,’ he said.”

Source: Quanta Magazine
Published: Jul 17, 2014
Length: 21 minutes (5,407 words)

How Malaria Defeats Our Drugs

Longreads Pick

Anti-malarial drugs are quickly becoming ineffective as Plasmodium parasites from western Cambodia evolve resistance to them. The writer travels to the Thai-Burmese border to interview a French researcher named François Nosten who is working to eliminate malaria before the resistant parasites spread to other countries:

Nosten thinks that without radical measures, resistance will spread to India and Bangladesh. Once that happens, it will be too late. Those countries are too big, too populous, too uneven in their health services to even dream about containing the resistant parasites. Once there, they will inevitably spread further. He thinks it will happen in three years, maybe four. “Look at the speed of change on this border. It’s exponential. It’s not going to take 10 or 15 years to reach Bangladesh. It’ll take just a few. We have to do something before it’s too late.”

Hundreds of scientists are developing innovative new ways of dealing with malaria, from potential vaccines to new drugs, genetically modified mosquitoes to lethal fungi. As Nosten sees it, none of these will be ready in time. The only way of stopping artemisinin resistance, he says, is to completely remove malaria from its cradle of resistance. “If you want to eliminate artemisinin resistance, you have to eliminate malaria,” says Nosten. Not control it, not contain it. Eliminate it.

Author: Ed Yong
Source: Mosaic Science
Published: Apr 4, 2014
Length: 21 minutes (5,338 words)

Dr. Hoffman vs. the Mosquito

Longreads Pick

Dr. Stephen Hoffman has been searching for a way to eradicate malaria for the past 30 years. He may have found a vaccine to do it:

There was no way Hoffman was going to ask US Marines to line up for a thousand mosquito bites each. But he decided to repeat the irradiated-mosquito experiments to understand the science better.

Once again, Hoffman signed himself up for the study. In the mid 1990s, he returned to the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research to stick another pint-size container of insects against his arm. This time, the cylinder swarmed with hundreds of malaria-infected mosquitoes, each having been buzzed with a dose of radiation. The bloodthirsty insects left a circle of swollen red skin on his arm, but Hoffman didn’t stop until he had been bitten by 3,000 mosquitoes.

Weeks later, when he was infected with malaria, he didn’t get sick.

Source: Washingtonian
Published: Oct 23, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,718 words)

The Woman Who Counted Fish

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Jon Mooallem | Wild Ones, Penguin Press | May 2013 | 11 minutes (2,605 words)

 

Below is the opening chapter of Jon Mooallem’s book Wild Ones, as recommended by Maria Popova. Read more…

Medical Research: Cell Division

Longreads Pick

Fifty years ago, a microbiologist named Leonard Hayflick developed a strain of cells named WI-38 from the lungs of an aborted fetus. The strain of cells have been used to produce life-savings vaccines worldwide, but have also had a history riddled with controversy:

“The cells have played ‘a very critical role in studying cellular senescence,’ adds Rugang Zhang, who works in this field at the Wistar Institute. That’s because they so reliably stop replicating after about 50 divisions and because scientists have, over time, built up a wealth of knowledge about the reasons why. In the 1990s, for instance, WI-38 was used to discover the most widely used marker of cellular senescence10. More recently, Zhang’s team used the cells to discover a pathway by which the complex of DNA and proteins known as chromatin controls cell proliferation11.

“But the controversies surrounding the cells have rumbled on. Back in July 1973, Hayflick received a call at home from a senior medical officer at NASA. Skylab 3 had taken off several hours earlier from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, bound for the Space Station. The NASA physician was contending with anti-abortion demonstrators who were protesting about the presence aboard of WI-38 cells, which were going to be used to detect the effects of zero-gravity on cell growth and structure. Once Hayflick explained that the abortion from which the cells were derived had occurred legally in Sweden, the physician said that he would defuse the situation — but concerns among anti-abortionists about WI-38 have lasted to this day.”

Source: Nature
Published: Jun 28, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,468 words)

While Gates’ vaccine-based giving—closing in on $6 billion to fight measles, hepatitis B, rotavirus and AIDS, among others—is part of the largest, most human-driven philanthropy in the history of mankind, what’s missing in his language are the individual ­humans.

In many ways that’s the point. Gates’ clipped manner in discussing the children he and his wife met in India and Africa (“Melinda and I spend time with these kids, and we see that they’re suffering; they’re dying”) disappears when the underlying numbers come up, his speech getting more rapid, his voice ever higher. “A 23-cent vaccine,” he says, “and you’ll never get measles,” a disease that “at its peak was killing about a million and a half a year; it’s down below 300,000.” Gates rattles off milestones in the history of global health and the prices of vaccines down to the penny, but blanks on the name of one of his favorite vaccine heroes, John Enders, the late Nobel laureate, or Joe Cohen, a key inventor of the new malaria vaccine Gates helped bankroll.

“With Vaccines, Bill Gates Changes The World Again.” — Matthew Herper, Forbes

See more #longreads about Bill Gates

While Gates’ vaccine-based giving—closing in on $6 billion to fight measles, hepatitis B, rotavirus and AIDS, among others—is part of the largest, most human-driven philanthropy in the history of mankind, what’s missing in his language are the individual ­humans.

In many ways that’s the point. Gates’ clipped manner in discussing the children he and his wife met in India and Africa (“Melinda and I spend time with these kids, and we see that they’re suffering; they’re dying”) disappears when the underlying numbers come up, his speech getting more rapid, his voice ever higher. “A 23-cent vaccine,” he says, “and you’ll never get measles,” a disease that “at its peak was killing about a million and a half a year; it’s down below 300,000.” Gates rattles off milestones in the history of global health and the prices of vaccines down to the penny, but blanks on the name of one of his favorite vaccine heroes, John Enders, the late Nobel laureate, or Joe Cohen, a key inventor of the new malaria vaccine Gates helped bankroll.

“With Vaccines, Bill Gates Changes The World Again.” — Matthew Herper, Forbes

See more #longreads about Bill Gates