Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and other institutions have identified a novel strategy that can eliminate bacteria in a specific location before they cause an infection. The strategy uses a phage, a virus that infects and destroys bacteria, that can specifically locate in the same place the bacteria live in the gastrointestinal tract. The proximity between phage and bacteria facilitates the phage's attack and subsequent elimination of the bacteria.

This strategy has the potential of becoming a game changer in the fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria that live in hard-to-reach places, such as the mucus layer of the gut. The study appears in the journal mBio.

"Phages are very specific in their ability to infect and destroy certain species or strains of bacteria and not others, such as good bacteria. In the U.S., phage therapy is increasingly becoming an available option to treat antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, a serious health concern," said first author Dr. Sabrina Green, director of research and development for TAILΦR labs at Baylor.

Ever wonder how this covid pandemic is affecting your mental health? Not the virus, but the constant fear of the virus? Locking us in our homes, feeding constant fear of a lurking virus through the mainstream media, only seeing others outside your family with their faces half-covered, the zealously encouraged view that all your fellow humans are disease carrying death vectors - there is no question that this overreaction to an overhyped virus is taking its toll on our psychology.

But the thing is, having a less than stellar psychological framework has a direct effect on our physical health. The central nervous system is directly connected to the immune system, providing a suspected pathway to exist between thoughts and emotions directly affecting the robusticity of our immune response. In other words, negative thoughts and feelings can actually make us sick.

There's also the concept of the "nocebo effect," sometimes referred to as the evil twin of the placebo effect, which has been talked about in the literature since the 1960s'. It's the well documented phenomenon where someone's negative expectations can lead them to manifest negative symptoms, even if they're not exposed to the treatment (or the virus). You might be sick if you feel sick, but then again, it might be your head playing games with your body.

Join us on this episode of Objective:Health as we look into the psychological consequences of the covid "pandemic" - how the constant fear and disconnection is affecting our collective mental (and therefore physical) health.





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An award winning spinal surgeon and former president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons believes that current coronavirus vaccines are dangerous bioweapons being deployed against the people.

Dr. Lee Merritt, who previously studied bioweapons while serving as an orthopedic surgeon in the United States Navy for 9 years, sat on the board of the Arizona Medical Association, and has published numerous peer-reviewed papers, believes that mRNA-altering coronavirus vaccines currently being distributed in the United States are rewriting our genetic code to make us vulnerable to a second virus later on.

"I believed early on in February that this was a biologically manipulated bioweapon because the minute that anybody popped up with data suggesting that they were censored," she said in an interview last month with The New America.

Common fungi, often present in the gut, teach the immune system how to respond to their more dangerous relatives, according to new research from scientists at Weill Cornell Medicine. Breakdowns in this process can leave people susceptible to deadly fungal infections.

The study, published Feb. 5 in Cell, reveals a new twist in the complex relationship between humans and their associated microbes, and points the way toward novel therapies that could help combat a rising tide of drug-resistant pathogens.

The new discovery stemmed from work on inflammatory bowel disease, which often causes patients to carry larger than normal populations of fungi in their guts. These patients often develop strong antibody responses against mannan, a molecule common to a wide range of fungal species. However, Dr. Iliyan Iliev, associate professor of immunology in medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at Weill Cornell Medicine, noticed that healthy controls in these studies also had some level of anti-fungal antibodies. "There was no actual evidence for fungal infections in the healthy individuals that we examined, so we started thinking about the possible function of those antibodies," said Dr. Iliev, who is senior author on the study and a member of the Jill Roberts Institute for Research in Inflammatory Bowel Disease.

South Africa will put on hold use of AstraZeneca's Covid-19 shot in its vaccination programme, after data showed it gave minimal protection against mild-to-moderate infection caused by the country's dominant coronavirus variant.

Health Minister Zweli Mkhize said on Sunday that the government would await advice from scientists on how best to proceed, after a trial showed the AstraZeneca vaccine did not significantly reduce the risk of mild or moderate Covid-19 from the 501Y.V2 variant that caused a second wave of infections starting late last year.

Prior to widespread circulation of the more contagious variant, the vaccine was showing efficacy of around 75 per cent, researchers said.

I'm sure we've all heard at one point or another that red meat is bad for our health. It's one of the dogmas that's been spouted by government health authorities for decades. Back in 2015, the WHO declared red meat to be a carcinogen. Here in Sweden, the Public Health Authority recommends that people limit intake of red meat to 500 grams per week. Personally, I probably eat at least twice that, so I guess I'm in big trouble.

The problem with these recommendations is that they are based on little to no evidence, mainly very low quality observational studies that show a marginally increased risk of cancer with increased red meat consumption, and debunked hypotheses, such as the cholesterol hypothesis (a.k.a. the diet-heart hypothesis), which states that saturated fat and cholesterol in the diet causes heart disease.

If saturated fat and cholesterol in the diet cause heart disease, then foods that contain a lot of these things, like red meat, should logically cause heart disease. But we now know that the cholesterol hypothesis is nonsense, as I've written about previously (although it lives on as a kind of zombie-hypothesis, in accordance with the principle that science advances one funeral at a time).

I think you can already guess what my personal biases are on the red meat issue. I'm inherently skeptical of the idea that red meat is unhealthy, for the simple reason that it has constituted a major part of our diets for at least the last couple of million years. Evolution generally doesn't produce animals that become sick from the main components of their diets.

But maybe evolution decided to make an exception when it comes to humans. Luckily, three articles were published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in November 2019, all by the same group of researchers, that help shed light on whether red meat is bad for our health. The researchers received no specific funding and reported no conflicts of interest. Just to be clear before we begin, in case anyone is uncertain of the definition, red meat is meat that comes from mammals, in other words, cows, pigs, sheep, and so on.

High intake of highly processed (refined) grains is associated with higher risk of heart disease and death than whole (unrefined) grains, finds a study published by The BMJ today.

Cereal grains, such as oats, rice, barley and wheat make up around 50% of daily caloric intake across the world and up to 70% in low and middle income countries, particularly in Africa and South Asia.

Whole grains tend to be higher in dietary fibre, vitamins, minerals, and essential fatty acids than refined grains. Previous studies have shown that higher whole grain intake is associated with lower risk of cardiovascular disease and death, but no clear associations were found for refined grains.

A 19-year-old was hospitalized with myocarditis - inflammation of the heart muscle - five days after receiving his second dose of the coronavirus vaccine, Terem emergency medical clinic reported Monday.

According to the clinic, it has still not been confirmed that the inflammation was developed as a side effect of the vaccination. However, a number of COVID-19-related myocarditis cases have been reported, according to the US National Institutes of Health.

"The fact that the symptoms started immediately after the vaccination raises the suspicion that an immunological reaction may have caused the inflammation," said Dr. Abdulhadi Farojeh, a Terem medical director.

The foods we eat may have a direct impact on our cognitive acuity in our later years. This is the key finding of an Iowa State University research study spotlighted in an article published in the November 2020 issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.

The study was spearheaded by principal investigator, Auriel Willette, an assistant professor in Food Science and Human Nutrition, and Brandon Klinedinst, a Neuroscience PhD candidate working in the Food Science and Human Nutrition department at Iowa State. The study is a first-of-its-kind large scale analysis that connects specific foods to later-in-life cognitive acuity.

Willette, Klinedinst and their team analyzed data collected from 1,787 aging adults (from 46 to 77 years of age, at the completion of the study) in the United Kingdom through the UK Biobank, a large-scale biomedical database and research resource containing in-depth genetic and health information from half-a-million UK participants. The database is globally accessible to approved researchers undertaking vital research into the world's most common and life-threatening diseases.

The good news is that frequent hand-washing, masks and physical distancing work. Falling daily COVID-19 case counts in Ontario and across Canada testify to that.


The bad news? Being hyper vigilant about hygiene could have some serious health consequences down the road.