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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...

Violent crime is like infectious disease – and we know how to stop it spreading


Headlines scream about “epidemics” of shootings and stabbings – but what if we took that literally? From Chicago to Glasgow, treating violence as a public health problem has produced great results. Usually, facial trauma doesn’t kill you, but it can cause significant disfigurement. Working as a maxillofacial surgeon in Glasgow in the early 2000s, Christine Goodall treated hundreds, if not thousands, of patients with injuries to the neck, face, head and jaw. Sometimes, the injuries were caused by a baseball bat, with shattered bones and bruising as bad as that from a car accident. More often than not, it was a knife. A slash across the forehead or cheek, leaving a scar etched across the face; a machete wound to the jaw, slicing through the skin and breaking the bone underneath. image / Creative Commons Zero - CC0 One young man came into the hospital in the middle of the night, with a knife wound across his face. Goodall dreaded the morning ward round the next day, when s...