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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 ...

Medicine’s dirty secret


Bryn Nelson gets to the bottom of an emerging – and often shocking – therapy. This is how far a mother will go. Your daughter has been sick for more than four years with a severe autoimmune disease that has left her colon raw with bloody ulcers. After multiple doctors and drugs have failed, you are frantic for her to get better. Then you send her disease into remission, virtually overnight, with a single act of love. “Who wouldn’t do that for their daughter?” you say. It’s like a miracle, you say. “An overnight magic wand.” andygrayoz / CC BY-ND 2.0 You’ve agreed to do it again – twice – for strangers. You’ve seen first-hand how effective it can be and you felt so badly for the patients and their families. Had you donated blood or plasma, no one would blink. But this? You can’t tell anyone else about this because of how they might react. I don’t talk with anybody about it. I’ve told people that we replaced her… unhealthy bacteria with healthy bacteria. I didn’t go int...

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...

DIY diagnosis: how an extreme athlete uncovered her genetic flaw


When Kim Goodsell discovered that she had two extremely rare genetic diseases, she taught herself genetics to help find out why. Ed Yong tells her story. Kim Goodsell was running along a mountain trail when her left ankle began turning inward, unbidden. A few weeks later she started having trouble lifting her feet properly near the end of her runs, and her toes would scuff the ground. Her back started to ache, and then her joints too. This was in 2002, and Kim, then 44 years old, was already an accomplished endurance athlete. She cycled, ran, climbed and skied through the Rockies for hours every day, and was a veteran of Ironman triathlons. She’d always been the strong one in her family. When she was four, she would let her teenage uncles stand on her stomach as a party trick. In high school, she was an accomplished gymnast and an ardent cyclist. By college, she was running the equivalent of a half marathon on most days. It wasn’t that she was much of a competitor, exactly – ...