Posted on September 17th, 2009 by Craig Maltby, Editor
Bacteria are kniving, scheming, smart little devils
Several years ago, when I worked for a human nutraceutical company, I recall one of the senior scientists there talking about skin cells and sunburn. To overly simplify his tutorial, he explained that when your skin turns red after prolonged sun exposure, a lot of that redness is not actual sunburn cells, but rather healthy cells preparing for sun damage by turning red. They had communicated with the damaged cells and were told, “get ready for a big dose of sun radiation.”
A story this past week in the Wall Street Journal goes into detail about how bad bacteria cells in the body communicate with each other when planning for a conquest. They are cunning warriors and all-around bad dudes. In short, when the immune cavalry are on their way to find the enemy bacteria, the bacteria hold back and hide, scouting the immune cell battalion size, all the while dividing and multiplying. When they figure they’ve got enough warriors to overwhelm the immune forces, they come out of their bunkers and attack. You’d think you were watching a Lord of the Rings episode.
Maybe a balanced immune system would direct those immune cells to send only one or two reconnaissance troops or not show up at all, let the bacteria expose themselves, then quickly rush in with endless brigades of NT (natural killer) cells to wipe out the enemy with shock and awe.
September 20th, 2009 at 10:53 am
Hey Craig. Nice site. I will check it out in more depth. I know the seriousness of bacteria all to well and wrote about it somewhat extensively in my new book Live Smart available on Lulu.com. MRSA is a serious problem that continues to grow more serious every year. It was ultimately responsible for my mothers death and many people don’t even realize that MRSA kills more people each year in the US than AIDS yet gets no real attention. Probably because the growth of the problem can be directly tied to the indiscriminate use of antibiotics in the meat and dairy farming industry as well as over prescribing antibiotic medication by the drug and medical industry. We have a ways to go to improve this situation but unfortunately it is progressing in the wrong direction. I wrote a piece about MRSA on this site http://www.squidoo.com/livesmart if anybody is interested.
September 20th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
Thanks, Tim. I wrote about MRSA briefly a few months ago. I recall some outbreak zones in Florida and Pennsylvania. Don’t know if it’s still presenting problems now at the level it was then. I imagine new incidents can arise anytime.