The Febrile Muse Portrayal of Infectious Diseases in Literature and the Arts

Tracing the movements of nature..lovely images

oliveargyle:

likeafieldmouse:

Tim Knowles - Tree Drawings (2006)

Artist’s statement:

“A series of drawings produced using drawing implements attached to the tips of tree branches, the wind’s effects on the tree recorded on paper. 

Like signatures each drawing reveals the different qualities and characteristics of each tree.”

This has floated across my dashboard many a time, but I don’t think I’ve ever reblogged it. Why not? I love seeing trees as artists. I’d like to tie some inky markers to the two impressive ginkgos across the street… and perhaps crayons to their spanish moss visitors…

(via bearpope)

jtotheizzoe:

Coming of Phage

Everything you’ve been taught about phage is wrong. Well, maybe not everything. Heck, maybe you’ve never been taught anything about phage in the first place! But if you’ve ever encountered a story about this family of bacteria-infecting viruses, I’m willing to bet it included a picture much like this:

That geometric lunar lander is the standard illustration of phage such as T7. It looks exotic and alien, a freakish example of biological symmetry, but it’s pretty accurate to hte actual biology: The icosahedral protein head, the protruding neck that it uses to pierce the membrane of its victim so that it can inject its genetic material … and the legs.

Wait a sec, those legs need revising. Some really cool new research by Ian Molineux (who taught my graduate school molecular bio class, btw) says that all those “legs-out”, moon lander drawings of phage probably aren’t right.

In the video above you see that, according to the electron imagery they report in their Science paper, those legs stay tucked up next to the body for most of the free-floating life of the phage. It sort of drags one or two along, waiting to hook onto an appropriate bacterium that it can infect, at which point it extends the rest of the legs to go into full infection mode. To give you an idea of how hard this was to observe, a single phage is only around 20-30 nanometers wide, which means you could fit about 4,000 of them across the width of a single human hair!

It might seem like a small, ho-hum tidbit of research at first, since who really cares about a virus that infects bacteria? But phage are incredibly important. Phage have driven a great deal of the evolution of life on Earth. They are vehicles of gene swapping that have allowed genomes to expand and become more complex. They are veterans of 70+ years of biology research, from back when we first identified DNA as a genetic material to today’s exotic synthetic biology applications. A great deal of what we know about molecular genetics is because of these little guys, and we’re still making the most basic discoveries as to how they function.

Never let anyone tell you that there’s nothing left to discover! We have scarcely begun to fill in the colors, even for the most basic parts of biology’s palette. 

jhellden:

Via biomedicalephemera:

Acute Osteomyelitis - Historically known as “Bone Fever”

Osteo-: Bone
-myelo-: Marrow
-itis: Fever

Top: Acute supperative osteomyelitis in femur - note the purulent cavities and pus-filled medullary canal at A, B, and C. In this case, the epiphysis (E) and conjunctive cartilage (D) are uninfected.

Center Left: Acute osteomyelitis of tibia, cicatrices showing common position of sinuses in bone.
Center Right: Acute epiphysial separation due to osteomyelitis following typhoid fever.

Bottom: Early stage of acute osteomyelitis in tibia. Note site “A” - where the infection passed from the periosteum to the interior of the bone. The articular cartilages (C) are sodden with pus from the infected joint.

Acute osteomyelitis is most commonly seen in children and those with diabetes. It is rarely “spontaneous” - the bacteria that infect the subperosteum and marrow have to be introduced into the bloodstream somehow, and there is usually a known source.

Systemic infection or traumatic injury are the most common ways that bacteria (today, most commonly Staphylococcus aureus) can get to the bones. Historically, scarlet fever (caused by group A Streptococcus pyogenes) and typhoid fever (Salmonella typhi) were known to cause a large number of osteomyelitis cases in their wake.

When children develop osteomyelitis, the long bones of the body (the femur, humerus, etc.) are most often affected, whereas the spine and pelvis are most commonly affected in adults. This is because there is much greater bloodflow to the growing long bones in kids, and as such there’s much more opportunity for bacteria in the blood to infect the site.

Early symptoms of what used to be called “bone fever” are fever and bone pain (as one might assume), as well as local warmth and swelling, and an overall malaise. The bone infection usually presents after a patient appears to have recovered from a disease or wound, as it takes several days to become established enough to cause symptoms. Later on, if left untreated, extreme pain and open, often purulent, wounds above the infection may occur, as the bacteria bore canals through the affected bones.

Without treatment, osteomyelitis can lead to sepsis, complete breakdown of affected bones, or gangrene. When the epiphysis is affected by the infection, growth of that bone can be significantly stunted.

Today, the condition is usually treated with long-term, high-dosage, IV antibiotic therapy. If it’s not caught at the start of the infection, debridement of the bone (removing the infected tissue) may be required, and in extreme cases, bone resection (cutting out an entire chunk of infected bone) or amputation may be required. Prior to antibiotics, resection was the most common cure.

Source: Diseases of the Bones, their pathology, diagnosis, and treatment. Thomas Jones, 1887.