Emergency Physician, Educator, Researcher, interested in the microbiome, evolution, and medicine
The 2014 UNM Evolutionary Medicine course meets for the first time today in Castetter Hall room 258. (The illustration above shows a timeline of first antibiotic use and date of first recorded antibiotic resistance – from Clatworthy et al. 2007 Nat Chem Biol 3, 541-8). In this class we will […]
“Maybe the microbiome is our puppet master” So writes Carl Zimmer, reporting on a paper that Athena Aktipis and Carlo Maley and I wrote about microbial manipulation of human behavior. Zimmer’s article appears in the New York Times Science section. Update! Alcock, Maley, and Aktipis was featured on the Evolution […]
This is part two of a post on the evolution and adaptive value of fever and whether physicians should be treating it . Read Part 1 here first. Sir William Osler wrote: ‘Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine and war; of these by far the greatest, by far […]
I visited evolutionary biologist Michael Hochberg at the Santa Fe Institute today. After a tour of the SFI facilities which are inhabited by permanent and visiting fellows, students, and transients like myself, we talked about his recent research involving bacteriophage control of human bacterial pathogens. Since antibiotic resistance is a […]
Chikungunya sounds exotic, but in fact it is the name of a mosquito-borne viral syndrome that is increasingly found to the New World (closer to home for me and many readers of this blog). Originally from West Africa, Chikungunya has been common in that continent and Asia for many years. […]
This year’s course in evolutionary medicine will tackle the most fascinating questions in human health and disease. Once again, we will spend the semester exploring how tradeoffs involving natural selection and evolutionary history influence diseases of all sorts. Each session will involve a case study in which evolutionary concepts are […]
Ashley and colleagues have recently published work in the New England Journal of Medicine showing an increase in resistance of Falciparum malaria to the most effective remaining agent: artemisinin. Click here for the original NEJM article. The mechanism of resistance to artemisinin is conferred by a single point mutation of […]
How evolution is applied to diseases changes over time. At least three ideas have been pitched to explain why we have an appendix, from an evolutionary perspective. 1) The appendix is a vestigial organ, no longer useful, that is derived from a larger structure in a common ancestor shared by […]
Maybe we should be taking antibiotics on a random schedule. Check out this recent study: A First: Scientists Show That Bacteria Can Evolve a Biological Timer to Survive Antibiotic Treatments
From David Anderson in JEMS patient care: “Recent research in sepsis has also hinted at a phenomenon thus far not even considered—that hypotension is an adaptive response, honed over millions of years of evolution, which may mean that we are actually making patients worse when we thought we were helping […]
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