A study of British twins appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that an adolescent’s sense of their own family’s social and economic standing is closely linked to that child’s physical and cognitive health.
In
fact, the adolescent’s perception of status was a more powerful predictor of their
well-being and readiness for further education than their family’s actual
status. The study sample represented the full range of
socioeconomic conditions in the U.K.
“Testing how young people’s perceptions related to well-being among twins provided a rare opportunity to control for poverty status as well as environmental and genetic factors shared by children within the same family,” said lead author Joshua Rivenbark, an MD/PhD student in Duke’s Medical School and Sanford School of Public Policy.
Joshua Rivenbark is an MD/PhD student in medicine and policy
“Siblings grew up with equal access to objective resources, but many differed in where they placed their family on the social ladder – which then signaled how well each twin was doing,” Rivenbark said.
Researchers followed 2,232 same-sex twins born in England and Wales in 1994-95 who were part of the Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study based at King’s College London. Adolescents assessed their family’s social ranking at ages 12 and 18. By late adolescence, these beliefs signaled how well the teen was doing, independent of the family’s access to financial resources, healthcare, adequate nutrition and educational opportunities. This pattern was not seen at age 12.
“The
amount of financial resources children have access to is one of the most
reliable predictors of their health and life chances,” said Candice Odgers, a professor
of psychological science at the University of California, Irvine, who is the senior
author of the report. “But these findings show that how young people see their
family’s place in a hierarchical system also matters. Their perceptions of
social status were an equally good, and often stronger, indicator of how well
they were going to do with respect to mental health and social outcomes.”
Study
findings also showed that despite growing up in the same family, the twins’
views were not always identical. By age 18, the twin who rated the family’s
standing as higher was less likely to be convicted of a crime; was more often
educated, employed or in training; and had fewer mental health problems than his
or her sibling.
“Studies
that experimentally manipulate how young people see their social position would
be needed to sort out cause from effect,” Rivenbark said.
The E-Risk study was founded and is co-directed by Duke professors Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt at King’s College London.
Guest Post by Pat Harriman, UC-Irvine News @UCIPat
Countless hours of lost productivity also accompany the illness. Including hospitalization costs, estimates for the flu’s total economic burden range from 10 to 25 billion dollars each year.
Flu prevention efforts have yielded mixed results. For many viruses, vaccines provide protection that lasts a lifetime, building up a network of antibodies primed to neutralize future infections. Influenza viruses, however, mutate quickly, rendering vaccines from years past ineffective. As a result, new vaccines are constantly in development.
Every year, researchers predict which flu viruses are likely to dominate the upcoming flu season. Based on these predictions, new vaccines target these specific strains. Consequentially, the effectiveness of these vaccines vary with the prediction. When a vaccine is a good match for the dominant flu strain, it can lower rates of infection by 40-50%. When it isn’t, its preventative power is far lower; in 2014, for example, the yearly influenza vaccine was only 19% effective.
Peter Palese, Ph. D, might have a better solution. Working at the Icahn School of Medicine, Palese and his team are developing a vaccine that takes a new approach to flu prevention.
Just before classes ended last month, Palese spoke at the Duke Influenza Symposium, a showcase of Duke’s current research on influenza. The symposium is part of Duke’s larger push to improve the efficacy of flu vaccination.
Palese’s vaccines work by redirecting the immune response to the influenza virus. Traditional vaccines create antibodies that target hemagglutinins, proteins found on the outermost part of influenza viruses. Hemagglutinins are divided into two regions: a head domain and a stalk domain (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1: Left: General influenza structure. Right: Hemagglutinins are divided into two regions: a head domain and a stalk. The head domain is prone to mutation and undergoes rapid change while the stalk domain is more resistant to mutation. Source: Frontiers in Immunology
In a traditional vaccination, the head domain is immunodominant—that is, the antibodies produced by vaccines preferentially target and neutralize the head domains. However, the head domain is highly prone to mutation and varies between different strains of influenza. As a result, antibodies for one strain of the virus provide no protection against other strains.
The new vaccines pioneered by Palese and his team instead target the stalk domain, a part of hemagglutinin that mutates far slower than the head domain. The stalk is also conserved across different subtypes of the influenza virus. As a result, these vaccines should theoretically provide long-lasting protection against most strains of influenza.
Testing in ferret, mice, and guinea pigs have produced promising results. And early human trials suggest that this new kind of vaccination grants broad immunity against influenza. But long-term results remain unclear—and more trials are underway. “We would love to say it works,” Palese says. “But give us 10 years.”
In the meantime, the seasonal flu vaccine is our best option.“The recommendation to vaccinate everyone is the right policy,” Palese tells us.
This is the fourth of several posts written by students at the North Carolina School of Science and Math as part of an elective about science communication with Dean Amy Sheck.
Dr. Giny Fouda’s research focuses on
infant immune responses to infection and vaccination.
Her curiosity about immunology arose during her fourth year of medical school in Cameroon, when she randomly picked up a book on cancer immunotherapy and was captivated. Until then, she conducted research on malaria and connected it to her interest in pediatrics by studying the effects of the parasitic disease on the placentas of mothers.
Genevieve Giny Fouda M.D., Ph.D.
As a postdoctoral fellow at Duke, she
then linked pediatrics and immunology to begin examining mother to child
transmission of disease and immunity.
Today she is an M.D. and a Ph.D. and a
member of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute. She’s an assistant professor in
pediatrics and an assistant research professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics
and Microbiology at Duke University School of Medicine.
Based on the recent finding that children of HIV-positive mothers are more susceptible to inheriting the disease, Fouda believes that it is important to understand how to intervene in passive immunity transmissions in order to limit them. Children and adults recover from diseases differently and uncovering these differences is important for vaccine development.
This area of research is personally important to her, because she learned from her service in health campaigns in Central Africa that it is much easier to prevent disease than to treat.
Babies!
However, she believes that it is important to recognize that research is a collaborative experience with a team of scientists. Each discovery is not that of an individual, but can be accredited to everyone’s contribution, especially those whose roles may seem small but are vital to the everyday operations of the lab.
At the Duke Human Vaccine Institute, Fouda enjoys collaborating as a team and contributing her time as a mentor and trainer of young scientists in the next generation.
Outside of the lab, Fouda likes to spend time reading books with her daughter, traveling, decorating and gardening. If there was one factor that improve how science in immunology is conducted, she would stress that preventing disease is significantly cheaper than treating those that become infected by it.
Dr. Fouda has made some remarkable progress in the field of disease treatment with her hard working and optimistic personality, and I know that she will continue to excel in her objectives for years to come.
In the midst of increasing outbreaks of vaccine-preventable disease, Duke global health researcher Lavanya Vasudevan (PhD, MPH, LPH) is investigating the reasons for vaccine hesitancy with focus on America and Tanzania.
Vaccine hesitancy refers to the refusal of or delay in accepting vaccinations, despite their availability. Vasudevan hopes to figure out what interventions will change the minds of target populations on such a heated topic.
She presented at Duke’s Global Health Institute on November 15th about her “big 5 research areas:” identification of sub-optimal vaccine uptake, contextualization of barriers to uptake, measuring parental concern, debunking misinformation, and developing and testing strategies aimed at addressing vaccine hesitancy.
Lavanya Vasudevan presenting at Duke’s Global Health Institute.
Globally, Vasudevan says that there are too many kids playing catch-up with their vaccines, meaning that even when children are getting vaccinated, the vaccinations they receive are not on time with the scheduled progression of immunizations, putting them at risk for contracting disease. Different countries measure vaccination coverage in different ways and on different timelines, which makes it harder to understand where sub-optimal vaccine uptake is happening. A better standard for assessing timeliness of vaccines is crucial. Vasudevan is working to confront this issue to gain better understanding of who and where hesitancy is coming from.
Identification of specific regions of vaccine hesitancy is crucial to navigating interventions, she added. Vasudevan wants to be able to pinpoint areas and understand the context-specific issues that vary across time, place, and vaccine type in order to be most effective.
She said that her work in Tanzania has provided insight to the problem of geographic accessibility and lack of proper supplies in the country, prompting delayed and missed vaccinations among 72% of children, according to self-reporting by their mothers. Tanzanian mothers expressed their frustrations during interviews. They frequently arrange to go to a clinic where vaccinations are offered on specific dates and travel long distances to get there. However, if there are not enough kids who come to be vaccinated, the facilities just won’t vaccinate those who did manage to show up for immunizations.
Though the qualitative data gained through extensive interviewing and group discussions has been extremely useful and rich, Vasudevan says there is a need for quantitative tools that can rapidly screen for parent’s concerns when it comes to the vaccination of their children. Qualitative data is simply not informative on a large scale.
A review of pre-existing measures evaluated 159 studies, but the quantitative scales found were often complex and context-specific, as well as designed and validated for high-income settings. On this basis, Vasudevan and her larger research team decided to design a scale for use in Tanzania because of its specificity in addressing the contexts of the region. Tailored counseling is also being used to address the local concerns and issues.
Another parallel research project that Vasudevan is involved with aims to identify common vaccine myths, creating a taxonomy to tag these myths and developing and testing an intervention that will highlight and debunk misinformation found on the internet. The current end-goal for the work being done is a “vaccine fact-checker” that could be used on web browsers to identify the myths in vaccine-related information found online.
A common example of needles and vials containing immunization products (Creative Commons).
In closing, Vasudevan identified three main areas for developing and testing intervention strategies. She says these are behavioral nudges, educational strategies, and vaccination policy and legislation.
There is a need for parent-focused strategies that recognize parental concern for their child’s safety on all sides of the vaccination issue, she said. Stringent policies are likely to alienate hesitant parents rather than increasing vaccine uptake. This is why Vasudevan is so focused on understanding and contextualizing issues specific to hesitancy among parents. It seems that increase of vaccinations and improvement of immunization timeliness lies in hearing and reconciling with parental apprehensions and underlying root causes of these hesitations.
One area of focus that Vasudevan feels is underutilized is pre-natal care. Reduction of the divide between obstetrician/gynecologists (OBGYNs) and pediatric care may be a crucial component to educate parents and enrich their understanding about vaccinations following the birth of the child.
Beyond everything else, she said, building trust is essential; simply providing information to parents is not enough. It takes time and empathy to be enable parents to make healthy vaccination choices. Providing credible resources in a safe environment while tuning in to the causes of hesitancy may be the next step to the reduction of vaccine-preventable disease, a current top ten threat to global health.
It seems like the never-ending battle against Malaria just keeps getting tougher. In regions where Malaria is hyper-prevalent, anti-mosquito measures can only work so well due to the reservoir that has built up of infected humans who do not even know they carry the infection.
In high-transmission areas, asymptomatic malaria is more prevalent than symptomatic malaria. Twenty-four percent of the people in sub-Saharan Africa are estimated to harbor an asymptomatic infection, including 38 to 50 percent of the school-aged children in western Kenya. Out of the 219 million malaria cases in 2017 worldwide, over 90% were in sub-Saharan Africa.
Using a special vacuum-like tool, Kelsey Sumner, a former Duke undergraduate now completing her Ph.D. at UNC-Chapel Hill, collected mosquitoes in households located in rural western Kenya. These weekly mosquito collections were a part of her pre-dissertation study on asymptomatic, or invisible, malaria. She visited Duke in September to catch us up on her work in Data Dialogue event sponsored by the mathematics department.
Sumner and colleague Verona Liao, in front of a sticky trap for mosquitoes
People with asymptomatic malaria carry the infection but have no idea they do because they do not have any indicators. This is incredibly dangerous because without symptoms, they will not get treated and can then infect countless others with the disease. As a result, people with an asymptomatic infection or infections have become a reservoir for malaria — a place for it to hide. Reservoirs are a group that is contributing to transmission at a higher rate or proportion than others.
Sumner’s study focused on examining the effect of asymptomatic malaria on malaria transmission as well as whether asymptomatic malaria infections would protect a person against future symptomatic infections from the same or different malaria infections. They were particularly looking into Plasmodium falciparum malaria. In Kenya, more than 70% of the population lives in an area with a high transmission of this potentially lethal parasite.
“P. falciparum malaria is very diverse in the region,” she said. “It’s constantly mutating, which is why it’s so hard to treat. But because of that, we’re able to actually measure how many infections people have at once.”
The researchers discovered that many study participants were infected with multiple, genetically-distinct malaria infections. Some carried up to fourteen strains of the parasite.
Participants in the study began by filling out an enrollment questionnaire followed by monthly questionnaires and dried blood spot collections. The project has collected over nearly 3,000 dried blood spots from participants. These blood spots were then sent to a lab where DNA was extracted and tested for P. falciparum malaria using qPCR.
“We used the fact that we have this really diverse falciparum species in the area and sequenced the DNA from falciparum to actually determine how many infections people have,” Sumner said. “And then, if there’s a shared infection between humans and mosquitoes.”
Sumner and her team also visited symptomatic participants who would fill out a behavioral questionnaire and undergo a rapid diagnostic test. Infected participants were able to receive treatment.
While people in the region have tried to prevent infection through means like sleeping under insecticide-treated nets, malaria has persisted.
One of the Kenyan staff members hanging a CDC light trap for mosquitoes
Sumner is continuing to analyze the collected DNA to better understand asymptomatic malaria, malarial reservoirs and how to best intervene to help stop this epidemic.
“We’re basically looking at how the number of shared infections differ between those that have asymptomatic malaria versus those that have symptomatic malaria.”
She and her team hypothesize that there are more asymptomatic infections that would result in and explain the rapid transmission of malaria in the region.
Whether you’re doing vape tricks for YouTube views or kicking yourself for not realizing that “USB” was actually your teenager’s Juul, you know vaping is all the rage right now. You probably also know that President Trump has called on the FDA to ban all flavored e-cigarettes to combat youth vaping. This comes in reaction to the mysterious lung illness that has affected 1,080 people to date. 18 of them have died.
At Duke Law School’s “Vaping: Crisis or Lost Opportunity” panel last Wednesday, three experts shared their views.
Jed Rose, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and director of the Duke Center for Smoking Cessation, has worked in tobacco research since 1979, focusing on smoking cessation and helping pioneer the nicotine patch. Rose also directs Duke’s Center for Smoking Cessation.
According to Rose, e-cigarettes are more effective than traditional Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT). A recent study found that e-cigarettes were approximately twice as effective as the state-of-the-art NRT in getting smokers to quit combustible cigarettes (CCs). This makes sense because smokers are addicted to the action of puffing, so a smoking cessation tool that involves inhaling will be more successful than one that does not, like the patch.
Rose also took issue with the labeling of the current situation surrounding vaping as an “epidemic.” He called it a “crisis of exaggeration,” then contrasted the 18 deaths from vaping to the 450 annual deaths from Tylenol poisoning.
Even in the “pessimistic scenario,” where e-cigarettes turn out to be far more harmful than expected, Rose said deaths are still averted by replacing cigarettes with e-cigarettes.
The enemy, Rose argued, is “disease and death, not corporations”, like the infamous (and under-fire) Juul.
James Davis, MD, an internal medicine physician and medical director for the Center for Smoking Cessation, works directly with patients who suffer from addiction. His research focuses on developing new drug treatments for smoking cessation. Davis also spearheads the Duke Smoke-Free Policy Initiative.
Davis began by calling for humility when using statistics regarding e-cigarette health impacts, as long-term data is obviously not yet available.
Davis did present some known drawbacks of e-cigarettes, though, stating that e-cigarettes are similarly addictive compared to conventional cigarettes, and that a whopping 21% of high school students and 5% of middle school students use e-cigarettes. Davis also contended that “When you quit CCs with e-cigarettes, you are merely transferring your addiction to e-cigarettes. Eighty-two percent [of test subjects who used e-cigarettes for smoking cessation] were still using after a year.”
However, according to Davis, there is a flipside.
Similar to Rose, Davis looked to the “potential for harm reduction” — e-cigarettes’ morbidity is projected to be only 5-10% that of CCs. If the main priority is to get smokers off CC, Davis argues e-cigarettes are important: 30-35% of CC smokers say they would use an e-cigarette to quit smoking, where only 13% would use a nicotine patch.
Furthermore, Davis questioned whether the mysterious lung disease is attributable to e-cigarettes themselves — a recent study found that 80% of a sample of afflicted subjects had used (often black-market) THC products as well.
Lauren Pacek, an assistant professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke, examines smoking in the context of addiction and decision-making.
Pacek stated that flavored electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) are important to youth: 61-95% of current youth ENDS users use flavored products, and 84% of young users say they would not use the products without flavors. So, banning flavored ENDS would ostensibly reduce young adults’ use, potentially keeping them off nicotine entirely.
However, Pacek pointed to the importance of flavors for adult users too: the ones that are purportedly using ENDS not for recreation or social status (as young people have been known to do), but for smoking cessation. Many former CC smokers report that flavored ENDS were important for their cessation. By banning flavored ENDS, the products look less appealing, and smokers are more likely to return to much more harmful cigarettes.
So where do we go from here?
Pacek did not take a concrete stance, but said her “take-home message” was that policymakers need to consider the impact of the ban on the non-target population, those earnest cigarette smokers looking to quit, or at least turn to a less harmful alternative.
Rose also did not offer a way forward, but made clear that he does not support the FDA’s impending ban on flavored e-cigarettes and thinks the hysteria around vaping is mostly unfounded.
Davis did not suggest a course of action for the US, but as leader of Duke’s Smoke-Free Policy Initiative, he certainly suggested a course of action for Duke. The Initiative prohibits combustible forms of tobacco at Duke, but does not (yet) prohibit e-cigarettes.
Just about every day, there’s a new headline about this or
that factor possibly contributing to Alzheimer’s Disease. Is it genetics,
lifestyle, diet, chemical exposures, something else?
The sophisticated answer is that it’s probably ALL of those things working together in a very complicated formula, says Alexander Kulminski, an associate research professor in the Social Science Research Institute. And it’s time to study it that way, he and his colleague, Caleb Finch at the Andrus Gerontology Center at the University of Southern California, argue in a recent paper that appears in the journal Alzheimer’s and Dementia, published by the Alzheimer’s Association.
Positron Emission Tomography scan of a brain affected by cognitive declines . (NIH)
“Life is not simple,” Kulminski says. “We need to combine
different factors.”
“We propose the ‘AD Exposome’ to address major gaps in
understanding environmental contributions to the genetic and non-genetic risk
of AD and related dementias,” they write in their paper. “A systems approach is
needed to understand the multiple brain-body interactions during
neurodegenerative aging.”
The analysis would focus on three domains, Kulminski says:
macro-level external factors like rural v. urban, pollutant exposures,
socio-economcs; individual external factors like diet and infections; and internal
factors like individual microbiomes, fat deposits, and hormones.
That’s a lot of data, often in disparate, broadly scattered
studies. But Kulminski, who came to Duke as a physicist and mathematician, is
confident modern statistics and computers could start to pull it together to
make a more coherent picture. “Twenty years ago, we couldn’t share. Now the way
forward is consortia,” Kulminski said.
The vision they outline in their paper would bring together
longitudinal population data with genome-wide association studies,
environment-wide association studies and anything else that would help the
Alzheimer’s research community flesh out this picture.
And then, ideally, the insights of such research
would lead to ways to “prevent, rather than cure” the cognitive declines of the
disease, Kulminsky says. Which just
happens to be the NIH’s goal for 2025.
DGHI interns, left to right: Gabrielle Zegers (C’19), Ashley Wilson (C’20), and Rachel Baber (C’20).
When Duke senior Rachel Baber began
her freshman year, she was under the impression that legitimate research had to
involve a white lab coat and a microscope.
But this summer she worked to study
human health without a pipette in sight, instead spending her time in a
computer lab, which was empty besides her and two fellow interns. A few yards
away from her shared workspace, blue metal double doors swing into a
linoleum-floored cafeteria.
As she sits at a table near the
entrance, dozens of men and women walk past in ones and twos, some with oil
smeared on their jeans and others pushing carts with cleaning supplies, talking
with one another and nodding to acknowledge Baber.
She’s been working all summer at
the Triangle Residential Options for Substance Abusers, Inc., better known as
TROSA, and everyone passing is a resident.
TROSA is acclaimed for their whole-person
approach to substance-abuse recovery and trauma resiliency, with multi-year
programming that provides treatment, educational opportunities, and vocational
training for their clients. TROSA has been providing services for 25 years and,
like most non-profit organizations, they have a running list of projects
with limited number of staff hours to commit to them.
“It’s not that they’re back-burner
issues,” explains Karen Kelley, the Chief Program Officer at TROSA. “It’s just
that we don’t have enough front burners.”
This summer, Duke’s undergraduates
stepped in to provide a little more stove space for TROSA’s needs.
Duke’s Global Health Institute
(DGHI) requires all students to spend one summer in a research training
program, which associate professor Sumi Ariely believes is a vital opportunity
for students to “work
deeply with a community partner and their vision, and to help disparities or
inequities in their community.”
Program options range from looking at health
impacts of gold mining in Ghana to screening for
glaucoma in Honduras, but 2019 was DGHI’s first season offering TROSA as a
research site, opening new avenues for students to give back to the Durham
community.
“We have a responsibility to our
neighbors,” Ariely says. “‘Global is Local’ holds two meanings. As a geographic
term, it focuses on the Triangle or Durham area. It also holds philosophical value.
We in high-resource
areas don’t have all the answers, and entering global arenas flaunting our
‘solutions’ is just hubris,” she adds. “Working to solve pockets of deep
inequalities in our state and our country allows for multi-directional learning.
Local is Global acknowledges that we are
all fundamentally the same and in it together.”
Duke University and TROSA have had
a long history of collaboration. TROSA moving services are a common sight on
Duke’s campus, and Duke Health also contracts with providers who work on-site
at TROSA to give primary, behavioral health, and psychological care for
clients.
Having three DGHI interns allowed
TROSA to begin answering questions that they’d long been speculating about: How
does cigarette smoking impact the community as a rehabilitation center? How
could the program integrate sustainable practices like recycling and composting
on an institutional scale? How accessible are the classes that TROSA offers
residents and how do they affect resident growth and recovery?
Baber spent her time tackling the last
question, first classifying the full curriculum of TROSA’s courses into three
major categories: Therapeutic, vocational, and educational. Looking at past
courses that residents had taken, she began the process of setting course standards
for residents – what number of therapeutic courses are expected to be completed
at nine months into the program compared to 15 months, for example.
This number-crunching project also
provided an opportunity for the administration to reflect on course access.
Baber was able to find some patterns in curriculum, like how most residents
register for more classes as they advance through the program, and how female
residents often register for more therapeutic courses than men.
“I’d love to qualitatively look at residents’
impressions of the classes,” Baber explains. “Some people really enjoy a
certain category of courses, while others benefit more from working on a job
and dealing with problems as they come up.” Baber envisions that question,
along with identifying which classes have the highest graduation rate and
asking why that is, as possible projects for future interns.
Rebecca Graves, TROSA’s Director of Clinical
Operations, sees data and demographic review like this as a critical means of
assessment and improvement. “As a nonprofit, we use a quarterly review to pay
close attention to demographic changes. If 80% of applicants were female and
only 20% of our population was women, we’d need to review — What’s keeping
people out of the door? Are we inhibitive in some way?”
After working with often-incomplete data, Baber
and fellow interns Ashley Wilson (C’20) and Gabrielle Zegers (C’19) were able
to realize what information is missing, refine what TROSA should keep
collecting, and find what they could from the data they did have.
“Check them off as huge successes,” Graves
reiterates. “They’re making marked achievements, finding new data,
extrapolating new information, and creating new policies here. They all took
ownership as self-motivated researchers, and my dream is that they’d all stay.”
Beyond working on their assigned projects, the
three students were eager to invest themselves in the TROSA community,
attending a dance with new women in the program, volunteering at the TROSA
thrift store on weekends, volunteering at the medical center, and helping with
GED tutoring each Tuesday evening.
“Getting to learn from residents about their
recovery and what they’re doing to help themselves has been the best part of
this job,” Baber says. In global health, students often face large and looming
statistics surrounding the opioid epidemic. “It’s easy to dehumanize that
problem. It’s easy in global health to think ‘Oh, these numbers are so huge.
I’ll never make a difference.’ But talking to individuals personalizes the
matter, it makes you realize that positive change can happen.”
For more information about TROSA, visit: www.trosainc.org
Have you ever questioned the quality of the water you drink every day? Or worried that cooking with tap water might be dangerous? For most of us, the answer to these questions is probably no. However, students from a Bass Connections team at Duke say we may want to think otherwise.
From bottle refilling
stations to the tap, drinking water is so habitual and commonplace that we often
take it for granted. Only in moments of crisis do we start worrying about what’s
in the water we drink daily. The reality is that safe drinking water isn’t accessible
for a lot of people.
Pig waste discoloring lagoon water
Images like this hog farm motivated the Bass Connections project team DECIPHER to take a closer look at the quality of water in North Carolina. On April 16 they presented their concerning findings from three case studies looking at lead contamination, coal ash impoundments, and aging infrastructure at the Motorco Music Hall.
Motorco in Durham. The talk was inside, though.
Nadratun Chowdhury, a Ph.D. student in Civil and Environmental Engineering, investigated lead contamination in water. Lead is an abundant and corrosion-resistant material, making it appealing for use in things like paint, batteries, faucets and pipes. While we’ve successfully removed lead from paint and gasoline, a lot of old water pipes in use today are still fashioned from lead. That’s not good – lead is very toxic and can leach into the water.
Just how toxic is it? Anything over a blood-lead level concentration of fifty parts per billion – fifty drops of water in a giant Olympic swimming pool – is considered dangerous. According to Duke graduate student Aaron Reuben, this much lead in one’s blood is correlated with downward social mobility, serious health concerns, diminished capacity to regulate thoughts and emotions, and hyperactivity. Lower income and minority areas are more at risk due to the higher likelihood of owning contaminated older homes.
Rupanjali Karthik, a Master of Laws student, conducted research on the intersection of water and aging infrastructure in Orange County. Breaks in water pipes are common and can result in serious consequences, like the loss of 9 million gallons of drinkable water. Sometimes it takes 8 or 9 months just to find the location of a broken pipe. In 2018, the UNC-Chapel Hill water main break caused a huge shortage on campus and at the medical center.
Excess fluoridation is also
an issue caused by aging infrastructure. In February 2017, a combination of
human and machine error caused an excessive fluoride concentration coming out
of an Orange County Water Treatment Plant. People were advised not to use their
water even to shower. A UNC basketball game had to move locations, and stores
were completely swept of bottled water.
Another issue is that arsenic, a known carcinogen, is often used as the fluoridation agent. We definitely don’t want that in our drinking water. Fluoridation isn’t even that necessary these days when we have toothpaste and mouthwash that supports our dental health.
Tommy Lin, an undergraduate
studying Chemistry and Computer Science, topped off the group’s presentation with
findings surrounding coal ash in Belmont, NC. Coal ash, the residue after coal
is burned in power plants, can pollute rivers and seep into ground water,
affecting domestic wells of neighboring communities. This creates a cocktail of
highly concentrated heavy metals and carcinogens. Drinking it can cause damage
to your nervous system, cancer, and birth defects, among other things. Not so great.
The group’s presentation.
Forty-five plastic water bottles.
That’s how much water it takes Laura, a Belmont resident, to cook her middle-sized
family Thanksgiving. She knows that number because it’s been her family’s
tradition the past three years. The Allen Plant Steam Station is a big culprit
of polluting water with coal ash. Tons of homes nearby the station, like Laura’s,
are told not to use the tap water. You can find these homes excessively
stockpiled with cases on cases of plastic water bottles.
These issues aren’t that apparent to people unless they have been directly impacted. Lead, aging infrastructure, and coal ash all pose real threats but are also very invisible problems. Kathleen Burns, a Ph.D. student in English, notes that only in moments of crisis will people start to care, but by then it may be too late.
So, what can people do? Not much, according to the Bass Connections team. They noted that providing clean water is very much a structural issue which will require some complex steps to be solved. So, for now, you may want to go buy a Brita.
Influenza is ubiquitous. Every fall, we line up to get our flu shots with the hope that we will be protected from the virus that infects 10 to 20 percent of people worldwide each year. But some years, the vaccine is less effective than others.
Every year, CDC scientists engineer a new flu virus. By examining phylogenetic relationships, which are based on shared common ancestry and relatedness, researchers identify virus strains to target with a vaccine for the following flu season.
Sometimes, they do a good job predicting which strains will
flourish in the upcoming flu season; other times, they pick wrong.
Pekosz’s work has identified why certain flu seasons saw less effective vaccines.
Andrew Pekosz, PhD, is a researcher at Johns Hopkins who examines why we fail to predict strains to target with vaccines. In particular, he examines years when the vaccine was ineffective and the viruses that were most prevalent to identify properties of these strains.
A virus consists of RNA enclosed in a membrane. Vaccines function
by targeting membrane proteins that facilitate movement of the viral genome
into host cells that it is infecting. For the flu virus, this protein is
hemagglutinin (HA). An additional membrane protein called neuraminidase (NA) allows
the virus to release itself from a cell it has infected and prevents it from
returning to infected cells.
The flu vaccine targets proteins on the membrane of the RNA virus. Image courtesy of scienceanimations.com.
Studying the viruses that flourished in the 2014-2015 and
2016-2017 flu seasons, Pekosz and his team have identified mutations to these
surface proteins that allowed certain strains to evade the vaccine.
In the 2014-2015 season, a mutation in the HA receptor conferred an advantage to the virus, but only in the presence of the antibodies present in the vaccine. In the absence of these antibodies, this mutation was actually detrimental to the virus’s fitness. The strain was present in low numbers in the beginning of the flu season, but the selective pressure of the vaccine pushed it to become the dominant strain by the end.
The 2016-2017 flu season saw a similar pattern of mutation, but in the NA protein. The part of the virus membrane where the antibody binds, or the epitope, was covered in the mutated viral strain. Since the antibodies produced in response to the vaccine could not effectively identify the virus, the vaccine was ineffective for these mutated strains.
With the speed at which the flu virus evolves, and the fact that numerous strains can be active in any given flu season, engineering an effective vaccine is daunting. Pekosz’s findings on how these vaccines have previously failed will likely prove invaluable at combating such a persistent and common public health concern.
