GustoReads - Health and Science

Ellie Lobel was ready to die. Then she was attacked by bees. Christie Wilcox hears how venom can be a saviour. “I moved to California to die.” Ellie Lobel was 27 when she was bitten by a tick and contracted Lyme disease. And she was not yet 45 when she decided to give up fighting for survival. Caused by corkscrew-shaped bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi , which enter the body through the bite of a tick, Lyme disease is diagnosed in around 300,000 people every year in the United States. It kills almost none of these people, and is by and large curable – if caught in time. If doctors correctly identify the cause of the illness early on, antibiotics can wipe out the bacteria quickly before they spread through the heart, joints and nervous system. "Lyme Disease Bacteria, Borrelia burgdorferi" by National Institutes of Health (NIH) is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 But back in the spring of 1996, Ellie didn’t know to look for the characteristic bull’s-eye rash when s...

More than a century after their discovery, we still don’t really know what blood types are for. Do they really matter? Carl Zimmer investigates. When my parents informed me that my blood type was A+, I felt a strange sense of pride. If A+ was the top grade in school, then surely A+ was also the most excellent of blood types – a biological mark of distinction. It didn’t take long for me to recognise just how silly that feeling was and tamp it down. But I didn’t learn much more about what it really meant to have type A+ blood. By the time I was an adult, all I really knew was that if I should end up in a hospital in need of blood, the doctors there would need to make sure they transfused me with a suitable type. Blood type, why exactly do we have them in the first place? (Image by 200 Degrees from Pixabay ) And yet there remained some nagging questions. Why do 40 per cent of Caucasians have type A blood, while only 27 per cent of Asians do? Where do different blood types ...