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The superhero in your vagina

While it’s healthy to have a variety of bacteria in our guts, there’s one place where a single dominant type is best: the vagina. Kendall Powell meets the researchers trying to make the world healthier, one vagina at a time. The aisle is marked with a little red sign that says “Feminine Treatments”. Squeezed between the urinary incontinence pads and treatments for yeast infections, there is a wall of bottles and packages in every pastel shade imaginable. Feminine deodorant sprays, freshening wipes, washes for your “intimate area”. Vaginal odour might be the last taboo for the modern woman. I’ve actually driven to the SuperTarget two towns away from where I live so as to not run into anyone I know while scrutinising the various products that exist for cleansing, deodorising and re-balancing the pH of your vagina (I still bumped into another PTA mom in a neighbouring aisle). The companies behind these products know that many women are looking for ways to counter embarra...

Testing times: four emerging STIs that you can’t afford to ignore

Although gonorrhoea, chlamydia and syphilis grab most of the headlines, public health officials are warily watching the emergence of other bacterial sexually transmitted infections. New diseases emerge all the time, and sexually transmitted infections are no exception. Here are four bacteria that could become serious public health threats. ( Warning: contains a description of animal auto-fellatio. ) 1. Neisseria meningitidis Scanning electron micrograph of a single N. meningitidis cell (colorized in blue) with its dense meshwork of pili (colorized in yellow). The scale bar is 1 µm. Arthur Charles-Orszag / CC BY-SA N. meningitidis can cause invasive meningitis, a potentially deadly infection of the brain and spinal cord’s protective membranes. More commonly, it’s gaining a reputation as a cause of urogenital infections. (One remarkable study from the 1970s described how a male chimpanzee contracted a urethral infection after passing the bacteria from its nose and t...

How a bee sting saved my life: poison as medicine

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...

One billion people worldwide stop breathing while they sleep. Are you one of them?

If you have sleep apnoea, chances are you don’t realise it. But it’s linked to diabetes, heart disease and other conditions, and it can put your life at risk. I thought I was dying. During the day, I was so tired my knees would buckle. Driving the car, my head would dip and then I would catch myself. My face was lined with exhaustion. At night, I would sleep fitfully, legs churning, then snap awake with a start, gasping for breath, heart racing. My doctor was puzzled. He ordered blood tests, urine tests, an electrocardiogram – maybe, he thought, the trouble was heart disease; those night-time palpitations… No, my heart was fine. My blood was fine. He ordered a colonoscopy. It was late 2008 and I was 47 years old – almost time to be having one anyway. So I forced down the four litres of Nulytely to wash out my intestines so a gastroenterologist could take a good look inside. My colon was clean, the doctor told me when I regained consciousness. No cancer. Not even ...

Why do we have blood types?

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 ...

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