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Tag: bacteria

  • Infected Rat Kills 10-Year-Old Boy

    Infected Rat Kills 10-Year-Old Boy

    A ten-year-old boy tragically died from rat-bite fever. Aidan Pankey was a healthy, happy child who adored his pet rat named Oreo and wanted her to have a family of her own. Aiden purchased a black male rat called Alex from a San Diego Petco in order for his beloved Oreo to have babies. Aiden’s grandmother, Sharon Pankey, spoke about the bond between owner and pet that was special for Aiden and Oreo. “He’d pop her on his shoulder and that little rat would hang on. It was like she was saying, ‘All right! Let’s go dad,’” Sharon said.

    Aidan was excited about the prospects of Oreo having babies and wasted no time sharing this enthusiasm with he grandmother. According to Sharon, “He said, ‘You know Grammy, when Oreo has babies I’m going to be grandpa and you’re going to be a great-grandma.’”

    When Aidan purchased Alex from Petco, he was not aware that the rat had rat-bite fever. Two weeks after purchasing Alex, Aiden became sick and tragically died a day after showing symptoms. Alex, the male Petco-purchased rat, was sent to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention where it took several months for the diagnosis to be determined.

    Oreo was also infected with rat-bite fever. “One of the things he loved most, his rat, ended up in him dying because the rat we bought, we found out later, had rat-bite fever,” Sharon said.

    The family is left devastated at the loss of the vibrant young boy who adored his pet Oreo. Aidan’s heartbroken father discussed his sorrow at losing the son he loved. “He was my family. I’m probably down 30 to 35 pounds since then. I don’t even get hungry. I just go until I pass out. It sounds bad but I just want him back,” he said.

    Image Via Wikimedia Commons

  • Pimple-Causing Bacteria Named After Frank Zappa

    Researchers this week revealed that they have found a new version of the P. acnes bacteria, an organism responsible for acne in humans. This new type of P acnes has evolved to rely on grapevines for survival.

    In an odd twist to the otherwise bland announcement, the discoverers of the bacterium have partly named the discovery after singer-songwriter Frank Zappa. The newly-discovered bacteria is now known as P. Zappae according to research published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

    According to the study’s authors, the fact that the bacteria is so unusual is why the satirical Zappa was chosen as its namesake. More specifically, the 1979 song “Jewish Princess” was referenced by the authors.

    “This bacteria is so unconventional in its behavior, and its new habitat is so unexpected that we thought of Frank Zappa,” said Andrea Capisano, lead author of the study, and Omar Rota-Stabelli, co-author of the study. Both are researchers at the Edmund Mach Foundation. “Indeed, at the time we were discovering it, we were both playing a Zappa album in our cars.”

    P. Zappae was found by researchers during a gene-based microbiome analysis of grapevine stems collected in Northern Italy. The bacteria was found to be colonizing bark tissues in grapevines. Using the genetic research, Capisano and his colleagues were able to trace the origin of P. Zappae to humans. It is believed that P. Zappae was introduced by humans into grapevines around 7,000 years ago through early grafting and pruning practices.

    Image courtesy Mark Estabrook/Wikimedia Commons

  • Zinc Supplements Studied For The Common Cold

    Although Americans are hit with 1 billion colds each year, most view it as some invisible enemy to which they’ll inevitably succumb.

    We wait until the running nose and sore throat symptoms set in and then head to our local pharmacy to self-medicate or hit the nearest urgent care so we can try to make it to work the next day. However, a new review from the Canadian Medical Association offers possible alternatives that might not be part of our current five point plan for the onset of sick season.

    What’s the potential panacea? Some studies are looking to zinc and hand washing.

    That’s right. To avoid colds, results from 67 trials showed that viral spread was reduced by a good soapy skin scouring. They also indicated that some of the kids who took zinc didn’t catch colds as commonly as other children. In fact, the same study suggests that some of the existing go-to protocol on which many rely may not be very helpful after all. Probiotics are still considered helpful to ward off sickness, and ibuprofen or acetaminophen will assuage the aches once it’s too late. However, traditional remedies like Echinacea, ginseng, vapour rubs, and cough medicine were found to have fewer clear benefits.

    Additionally, even the effectiveness of Vitamin C was questioned by the study. Dr. Michael Allan, a family doctor and associate professor in the department of family medicine at the University of Alberta, claimed that Vitamin C was found to have “no meaningful benefit in the average patient,” and went on to say, “The average adult would need to use vitamin C for 10 or 15 years to prevent one cold.”

    Okay, so those herbs might not be as helpful as we thought; but they certainly won’t hurt you to take when the sniffles initiate. What will do more harm than good is taking antibiotics for a cold.

    Why? First, antibiotics won’t work on viruses. Simply put, it all boils down to what kind of microbe is eating you at the moment. Antibiotics are meant to maim bacteria (which are living things); but when we catch the common cold, it’s a virus (non-living thing) causing our illness. But, since they can’t be killed, that’s why you have to just wait for it to pass and manage the symptoms. If that was too boring to follow, use this reductive analogy instead: using antibiotics against viruses is like trying to kill an android with arsenic. It does not compute.

    Also, it allows bacteria that are just hanging out and minding their own business in our bodies to mutate into super Chuck Norris bacteria. Then we’re really in trouble. Enough from the soapbox, though. Let’s look to the resolutions!

    How helpful could this Zinc be?

    It depends. Tests with zinc sulphate supplements of 10 mg or 15 mg a day resulted in fewer colds for the zinc group versus the control. However, the devil is always in the details. While those studies did indicate that zinc lessened the time adults spent sick, it was by a whopping one and a half days… and even that comes from an experiment where adults took a 23-mg zinc gluconate lozenge every two hours.

    Ultimately, the results were mixed. Allan said that, “kids in these studies did not get a benefit, but adults did,” adding that Zinc should never be used via nasal spray because “a few cases have linked it to the loss of smell.”

    Allan concedes, “I certainly don’t want to be telling parents to put their children on zinc every day to prevent the common cold. The research is not very robust.”

    In the end, the preventative hand-washing is always good advice, while the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” saying seems best with respect to any medicinal plan (especially when it comes to experimenting on your kids). If a seasonal cold is really just an annoyance your current herbal remedies resolve pretty well, it may or may not be worth trying out a new supplement like Zinc. But if you are going to give it a go, Dr. Oz suggests starting the supplements the day you begin to get symptoms and keeping it up until you’re fully recovered.

    Cold symptoms usually end between 7 and 10 days. Anyone still suffering after that, may find that a medical follow up is the best route.

    Images via Youtube

  • Raw Chicken Bacteria On 97% Of Chicken Tested

    They’re calling it the “Superbug” and it is dangerous.

    Consumer Reports announced today that 97% of the breasts tested harbored bacteria that could make you sick.

    The report found the presence of enterococcus on 79.8 percent of the poultry tested, E.coli (65.2 percent), campylobacter (43 percent), klebsiella pneumonia (13 percent), salmonella (10.8 percent) and staphylococcus aureus (9.2 percent).

    These numbers are dangerous, “There is always a risk of food borne illness,” says Keeve Nachman of Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future‘s Food Production and Public Health Program. “But when a person comes down with an infection, if the pathogen is resistant, it is more expensive to treat, there are increased productivity losses and the survival rate is lower.”

    Reports point to overuse of antibiotics in chickens raised in condensed farming conditions. They are sick and dying, so antibiotics are necessary to keep them alive until slaughter. Those same antibiotics have created a strain of pathogens and viruses that have become resistant to the current antibiotics available to animals and humans alike.

    “When antibiotics are used to treat people, they are ordered by a physician for a patient with symptoms and are given for a specified amount of time,” explains Nachman. “But with animals we still allow them to be used throughout the life span of an animal without signs of disease, and in the absence of continued oversight.”

    “The more you look at it, the more the drug resistance starts to paint a disturbing picture,” said Dr. Urvashi Rangan, toxicologist and executive director of the Consumer Reports Food Safety and Sustainability Center.

    Consumer Reports also issued letters to the FDA and USDA requesting changes to current laws that suggested limiting all antibiotics in the raising of animals, except when the animals are sick and antibiotics are needed. Currently all chickens are given antibiotics starting in the egg.

    Your best bet for staying safe? Stop eating chicken altogether is the safest route. According to Mark Bittman, New York Times – “We should all steer clear at least of Foster Farms chicken, or any of the other brands produced in that company’s California plants, although they’re not all labeled such. Costco pulled nearly 9,000 rotisserie chickens from a store south of San Francisco last week, after finding contamination — this is after cooking, mind you — with a strain of salmonella Heidelberg, which is virulent, nasty and resistant to some commonly used antibiotics.”

    There are alternatives to factory farm and free range raised chicken. Safe alternatives.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Almost All Chicken Breasts Shown to Contain Harmful Bacteria

    Chicken is one of the most widely eaten meats in the U.S. and around the world, but it could also be one of the most dangerous.

    Consumer Reports this week revealed the results of its recent tests of meat and poultry, showing that nearly all of the U.S. chicken breasts it tested were contaminated with some sort of harmful bacteria.

    Of the 316 raw chicken breasts examined in the survey, 97% of them were found to have harmful bacteria. Nearly 80% of the breasts had enterococcus, 65% of them had E.coli, 43% had campylobacter, over 13% had klebsiella pneumonia, nearly 11% had salmonella, and 9% had staphylococcus detected on them.

    In addition to the harmful bacteria, the report shows that chicken farming may be significantly be contributing to the problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Half of the chicken breasts tested in the study were found to have at least one strain of multidrug-resistant bacteria. Most of the resistances seen in the chicken were related to antibiotics used in chicken farming.

    The FDA has recently announced a plan to heavily restrict the use of antibiotics in food animals, especially the practice of using antibiotics to promote animal growth.

    “Our tests show consumers who buy chicken breast at their local grocery stores are very likely to get a sample that is contaminated and likely to get a bug that is multidrug resistant. When people get sick from resistant bacteria, treatment may be getting harder to find,” said Urvashi Rangan, executive director of Food Safety and Sustainability at Consumer Reports. “Our survey also shows that consumers are making buying decisions based on label claims that they believe are offering them additional value when that is not in fact the case. The marketplace clearly needs to change to meet consumer expectations.”

  • The Earliest Life Form Found So Far is in Australia

    The Guardian is reporting that Earth’s earliest life form has been found in Australia. An Aussie research team accompanied by some U.S. scientists discovered a series of “complex microbial ecosystems” they date to 3.5 billion years ago.

    The find was made in Australia’s western Pilbara region in rock sediments considered to be some of the oldest found. In a rock body called the Dresser formation, the scientists found entire microbe communities. Slivers of ancient rock were sampled in order to search for the microscopic life.

    Team leader and professor David Walcey of the University of Western Australia told the Guardian that the radical find “pushes back evidence of life on Earth by a few more million years.” The simpler organisms (bacterium and archaea) ruled for millions of years before evolutionary leaps led to more complex, multi-celled lifeforms.

    He added, “The Pilbara has some of the best, least deformed rocks on Earth; there aren’t many rocks older than there… I would say this is the most robust evidence of the oldest life on Earth. My team has found evidence dated at 3.45bn years in the past, so we have gone further back by a few million years.”

    Walcey’s work is slowly painting a looking-glass view into lifeforms that existed eons before the evolution of man. “Microbes and bacteria like to live in communities. Think about the bacteria in your stomach, for example. These microbes lived in layers that required different chemical gradients to survive. So bacteria that liked light would be towards the top while those that didn’t were towards the bottom.”

    Earth was so radically different in almost every way, from higher temperatures to even higher sea levels. Bacteria like those the team discovered would have been the predominant form of life for several billion years.

    “Bacteria ruled the world back then [and] it would’ve been a very smelly world indeed,” Walcey observed. “It would’ve been pretty hostile for us. There was essentially no oxygen, a lot of CO2 and methane and much warmer oceans.”

    The ramifications of the discovery could impact how we view the entire solar system. “These kinds of ecosystems could be viewed by a rover, such as the one that visited Mars,” Walcey said. “We wouldn’t know the age, of course, as we couldn’t date them. But we would know that there was life at some point on another planet, which would be pretty exciting.”

    If you’re interested in the elementary basics of life on Earth, here’s a BBC2 clip describing the evolution of the first microorganisms on our planet:

    [Image via this BBC2 clip on YouTube]

  • New Bacteria Found in NASA, ESA Clean Rooms

    New Bacteria Found in NASA, ESA Clean Rooms

    Researchers this week revealed that a new genus of bacteria has been discovered in some of the cleanest places on Earth. A paper published in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology names the new bacteria “Tersicoccus phoenicis.”

    The “berry-shaped” bacteria was found in spacecraft clean rooms on two different continents. One was a NASA clean room located at Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the other is a European Space Agency (ESA) clean room located in Kourou, French Guiana. Spacecraft clean rooms are kept spotless to ensure that no contamination from Earth escapes the planet on spacecrafts. The rooms are cleaned with chemicals, ultraviolet radiation, heat, and other methods.

    Researchers are now sequencing the bacteria’s DNA and developing methods to eliminate the bacteria from clean rooms.

    “We want to have a better understanding of these bugs, because the capabilities that adapt them for surviving in clean rooms might also let them survive on a spacecraft,” said Parag Vaishampayan, lead author of the paper and a microbiologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “This particular bug survives with almost no nutrients.”

    According to NASA, microbiologists often survey the bacteria able to survive in clean rooms. Though other new species of bacteria have been found in clean rooms, Tersicoccus phoenicis is the first to be discovered in a clean room but not outside of one. Existing bacteria databases checked by Vaishampayan and his colleagues failed to turn up the new bacteria anywhere but these two clean rooms.

    “We find a lot of bugs in clean rooms because we are looking so hard to find them there,” said Vaishampayan. “The same bug might be in the soil outside the clean room but we wouldn’t necessarily identify it there because it would be hidden by the overwhelming numbers of other bugs.”

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)

  • MRSA Staph Infection Decreasing, Really?

    MRSA Staph Infection Decreasing, Really?

    Warning: Images within this article are graphic. Staph or as it is more specifically known, Staphylococcus aureus, is a bacteria that can be found on the skin of healthy humans; however strains exist that are dangerous to people as well. Everyone may remember from history class that Sir Alexander Fleming first made the observation regarding the effectiveness of penicillin as a treatment for bacteria infections. Alexander Fleming discovered that in containers where the mold Penicillium notatum grew, the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus was unable to also grow.

    Though penicillin has been used to treat bacteria, there are cases where bacteria has become resistant to treatment. MRSA which stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus is a bacteria that has been unresponsive to typical treatments. Unfortunately, these cases have plagued health facilities and public areas for years, typically attacking individuals with weak immune systems.

    A student at Phillips Elementary School in Marietta, Ohio, was recently sent home after being diagnosed with a MRSA infection. The student remained absent from school while the infection healed. Principal Joe Finley shared with The Marietta Times, “We make sure that the room is completely sanitized on a regular basis.” The classroom area was sanitized as a result, and students who were placed within close proximity of the student were appropriately notified of the condition.

    The following is a photograph of a MRSA infection that was noted on a prison inmate.

    (image)

    The following picture, though graphic in nature, shows the extreme situation an infection can reach.

    (image)

    Fortunately, a recent study revealed that these types of infections have decreased in recent years. Dr. Raymund Dantes, a representative from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) who was involved in the study recently shared the positive news. “The good news is the most serious kind of infection that lands people in hospitals and kills people is going down in the U.S.,” he said.

    [Images Via Wikimedia Commons Janice Carr from the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention/ Bruno Coignard, M.D.; Jeff Hageman, M.H.S. from the CDC/ and Jbtank]

  • Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria on the Rise, Says CDC

    The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) this week released a report on antibiotic-resistant bacteria – and the news doesn’t look good. The CDC’s data shows that antibiotic resistance is on the rise in the U.S. The agency estimates that around two million Americans each year are infected with such germs, and that “at least” 23,000 of them die from the infections.

    “Antibiotic resistance is rising for many different pathogens that are threats to health,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the CDC. “If we don’t act now, our medicine cabinet will be empty and we won’t have the antibiotics we need to save lives.”

    Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are infections that don’t respond to normal antibiotics. Bacteria can become resistant to antibiotics simply by being exposed to them. The frequency with which bacteria are exposed to antibiotics can affect how quickly they are able to evolve a resistance.

    The CDC is warning that up to 50% of all antibiotic use in unneeded or “not prescribed appropriately.” In addition, the overuse of antibiotics on livestock is a concern for the agency. According to the CDC, improving antibiotic use (by using them only when medically necessary) is the most important factor for slowing the spread of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.

    “Every time antibiotics are used in any setting, bacteria evolve by developing resistance,” said Dr. Steve Solomon, M.D., director of CDC’s Office of Antimicrobial Resistance. “This process can happen with alarming speed. These drugs are a precious, limited resource – the more we use antibiotics today, the less likely we are to have effective antibiotics tomorrow.”

    In addition to the yearly deaths antibiotic-resistant bacteria causes in the U.S., the CDC has also compiled statistics on the monetary costs. The agency estimates that $20 billion in health care costs can be attributed to antibiotic resistance and that as much as $35 billion in lost productivity can be connected to such infections.

  • Nightmare Bacteria Becoming a Larger Problem, Warns CDC

    The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) this week warned that carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) are becoming more common. The bacteria can cause potentially deadly infections, but are also highly resistant to antibiotics, making the infections difficult to treat.

    Though the germs are a normal part of the human digestive system, some of them have evolved the ability to resist antibiotics. If these resistant CRE enter the blood or other areas of the body they can cause severe infections that kill up to half of patients who become infected. The bacteria can also pass their antibiotic-resistance to other germs, making other types of infections hard to treat.

    The CDC’s latest Vital Signs report shows that CRE are becoming more common in medical facilities, and one specific type has been found in 42 states. Though healthy people aren’t normally infected with CRE, patients on ventilators, patients with catheters, or those on long courses of antibiotics are at risk. Though The infections are still relatively uncommon, but CDC is calling on medical facilities and doctors to improve the way they prescribe antibiotics.

    Just last month a new study found that patients with CRE could take over one year to be rid of the bacteria, even after their infections have ended. This raises the possibility that patients positive for CRE could become re-infected or infect others.

    CRE infection graphic

  • Mutant Mosquito May Be The Cure For Malaria

    We brought you word yesterday that Florida residents were up in arms over a British company that intended to release genetically modified mosquitoes into the Keys region. The reason being that these mosquitoes would not be carriers of the particularly nasty Dengue fever. Florida residents were still skeptical and didn’t want any new species released that could damage the ecosystem. Well, there’s a new mutant mosquito on the block, but this one is aimed at Africa.

    It’s no secret that malaria is the number one killer in Africa. Due to lack of cheap vaccines and territorial conflicts, the people who need help the most never get it. Scientists have now found a way that attacks malaria at its source – the mosquito’s stomach.

    Malaria begins its life in the stomach of a mosquito. After biting a human, the parasite can work its way into the bloodstream of a person and begin to wreak havoc on their body. The genius solution is to introduce bacteria into the mosquito that specifically targets malaria. Technology Review explains how it works:

    The malaria parasite, called Plasmodium falciparum, must complete a crucial part of its life cycle within a mosquito’s midgut before it can be transmitted to people. So bacteria in that compartment are well positioned to deliver antimalarial compounds. When the mosquito takes a blood meal—that is, when it bites someone—bacteria in the mosquito’s midgut also proliferate, thanks to the blood nutrients.

    It’s during this stage in the parasite’s life that the bacteria triggered by the proliferation of blood can target the parasite and kill it. In studies performed by the scientists, they found that only 14 to 18 percent of the mosquitoes that were fed the malaria-killing bacteria became infected by the parasite.

    The big question facing the scientists now is how to introduce this new bacteria into the wild. As they point out, people become touchy whenever the subject turns to genetically modified organisms. It has the potential to save a lot of lives, but it can also have adverse side effects. They must do more thorough testing before they can convince local governments that this is a good idea.

  • Alzheimer’s: Easter Island Soil May Reverse the Disease

    Alzheimer’s disease runs in my wife’s side of the family, which, of course, is a cause for serious concern. It’s been proven that people who have a history of AD in their bloodline are often at risk for the disease themselves, a fact that chills me to the bone. As such, I’ve developed a vested interest in Alzheimer’s, as well as preventive measures that can be taken before symptoms manifest. After all, I’d like to keep my family around for as long as humanly possible.

    Scientists have been doing their part to combat the disease for several years, though treatment options are spotty at best. Presently, there isn’t a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, though certain medications can be used to slow the progression. In other words, once your loved one starts developing the symptoms, managing their life to provide maximum comfort is usually the only thing you can do. Certain drugs are available to help cope with aggressive, agitated, or dangerous behaviors, but, sadly, this disease cannot be properly contained.

    However, researchers have recently discovered that rapamycin, a bacteria found in the soil on Easter Island, could be used to reverse the decline of cognitive skills and, ultimately, stop the effects of Alzheimer’s on the human brain. Initially, rapamycin was used as an antifungal medication, though all of that changed when scientists discovered it could prevent organ rejection is those who had undergone transplants.

    In recent studies, rapamycin was able to improve the cognitive abilities of laboratory mice. According to Dr. Veronica Galvin of the Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies at the University of Texas, this discovery could lead the charge in the battle against AD.

    “We made the young ones learn, and remember what they learned, better than what is normal,” Gavin explained. “Among the older mice, the ones fed with a diet including rapamycin actually showed an improvement, negating the normal decline that you see in these functions with age.”

    When the mice were introduced to a high-elevation maze, rapamycin seemed to have a calming effect on its subjects. “We found rapamycin acts like an antidepressant — it increases the time the mice are trying to get out of the situation. They don’t give up; they struggle more,” Gavin continued. “All of a sudden the mice are in open space. It’s pretty far from the floor for their size, sort of like if a person is hiking and suddenly the trail gets steep. It’s pretty far down and not so comfortable. We observed that the mice fed with a diet containing rapamycin spent significantly more time out in the open arms of the catwalk than the animals fed with a regular diet. So we can measure how much and how often they struggle as a measure of the motivation they have to get out of an uncomfortable situation.”

    Much like the study which suggests anti-inflammatory medication could be used to treat the disease, it’s unclear whether or not this Easter Island bacteria will be the miracle sure millions of people are hoping for. Still, it gives one hope that the battle against Alzheimer’s is still underway.

  • Mars Viking Robots ‘Found Life’ In 1976

    Are we alone in this universe? Is Earth so unique that out of the trillions upon trillions of planets in the universe, we are the only one that harbors life? What if the nearest life to us wasn’t orbiting Alpha Centauri but was on our nearest celestial neighbor? That is what scientist are saying after reviewing data collected from the 1976 Mars Viking rovers.

    Scientists have recently started to reexamine the data that the Viking probes sent back from Mars 36 years ago. They have come to the conclusion that there was bacteria on Mars. Further, NASA doesn’t need a human expedition to Mars to nail down the claim, neuropharmacologist and biologist Joseph Miller, with the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, told Discovery News.

    “The ultimate proof is to take a video of a Martian bacteria. They should send a microscope — watch the bacteria move,” Miller said. “On the basis of what we’ve done so far, I’d say I’m 99 percent sure there’s life there!”

    Researchers crunched raw data collected during runs of the Labeled Release experiment, which looked for signs of microbial metabolism in soil samples scooped up and processed by the two Viking landers. General consensus of scientists has been that the experiment didn’t find any biological activity. They took a different approach this time by crunching raw numbers looking for the complexities caused by bacteria.

    Critics counter that the method has not yet been proven effective for differentiating between biological and non-biological processes on Earth so it’s premature to draw any conclusions.

    “Ideally to use a technique on data from Mars one would want to show that the technique has been well calibrated and well established on Earth. The need to do so is clear; on Mars we have no way to test the method, while on Earth we can,” planetary scientist and astrobiologist Christopher McKay, with NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

    The research is published online in the International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences.

  • Star Trek Tech: Handheld Plasma Sanitizer Gun

    Star Trek Tech: Handheld Plasma Sanitizer Gun

    A group of Chinese and Australian scientists have developed a handheld, battery-powered plasma-producing device that can rid skin of bacteria in an instant.

    The device could be used in ambulance emergency calls, natural disaster sites, military combat operations and many other instances where treatment is required in remote locations.

    The plasma flashlight, outlined in IOP Publishing’s Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics is driven by a 12 V battery and doesn’t require any external generator or wall power; it also doesn’t require any external gas feed or handling system.

    In the experiment, the plasma flashlight effectively inactivated a thick biofilm of one of the most antibiotic- and heat-resistant bacteria, Enterococcus faecalis– a bacterium which often infects the root canals during dental treatments.

    The biofilms were created by incubating the bacteria for seven days. The biofilms were around 25 micrometers thick and consisted of 17 different layers of bacteria. Each one was treated for five minutes with the plasma flashlight and then analysed to see how much of the bacteria survived.

    Results showed that the plasma not only inactivated the top layer of cells, but penetrated deep into the very bottom of the layers to kill the bacteria.

    Co-author of the study, Professor Kostya (Ken) Ostrikov, from the Plasma Nanoscience Centre Australia, CSIRO Materials Science and Engineering, said: “The bacteria form thick biofilms, which makes them enormously resistant against inactivation which is extremely difficult to implement. High temperatures are commonly used but they would obviously burn our skin.

    “In this study we chose an extreme example to demonstrate that the plasma flashlight can be very effective even at room temperature. For individual bacteria, the inactivation time could be just tens of seconds.”

    Plasma – the fourth state of matter in addition to solids, liquids and gases – has previously shown its worth in the medical industry by effectively killingbacteria and viruses on the surface of the skin and in water.

    Although the exact mechanism behind the anti-bacterial effect of plasma is largely unknown, it is thought that reactions between the plasma and the air surrounding it create a cocktail of reactive species that are similar to the ones found in our own immune system.

    The researchers ran an analysis to see what species were present in the plasma and found that highly-reactive nitrogen- and oxygen-related species dominated the results. Ultraviolet radiation has also been theorised as a reason behind plasma’s success; however, this was shown to be low in the jet created by the plasma flashlight, adding to the safety aspect of the device.

    The temperature of the plume of plasma in the experiments was between 20-230C, which is very close to room temperature and therefore prevents any damage to the skin. The device itself is fitted with resistors to stop it from heating up and making it safe to touch.

    “The device can be easily made and costs less than 100 US dollars to produce. Of course, some miniaturisation and engineering design may be needed to make it more appealing and ready for commercialisation,” Ostrikov continued.