{"id":1048338,"date":"2010-06-03T08:16:41","date_gmt":"2010-06-03T08:16:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.immortalitymedicine.tv\/asms-anthrax-attacks\/"},"modified":"2024-08-17T17:54:54","modified_gmt":"2024-08-17T21:54:54","slug":"asms-anthrax-attacks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/chemistry\/asms-anthrax-attacks.php","title":{"rendered":"ASMS: Anthrax attacks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright alignnone\" style=\"padding-left:10px; padding-right: 10px;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.immortalitymedicine.tv\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-o-matic\/cache\/601a5_Daschle_letter.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"249\" height=\"139\">Ever since the infamous <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/2001_anthrax_attacks\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">US anthrax attacks of 2001<\/a>, where envelopes containing anthrax spores were mailed to a number of media outlets and two US Senators, there has been a push to develop new ways of determining the severity of anthrax infections.<\/p><p>John Barr, of the <a href=\"http:\/\/emergency.cdc.gov\/agent\/anthrax\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)<\/a>, has developed a new, more sensitive way of monitoring the level of infection in a victim. This is keenly important as the symptoms for anthrax infection start off looking much like a cold or the flu, but can then lead to a subject deteriorating rapidly &ndash; often leading to death, even after treatment. According to Barr some 40 per cent of the victims of the 2001 anthrax letters died.<span><\/span><\/p><p>The <em>Bacillus anthracis<\/em> bacterium produces two different t toxins, the oedema factor and the lethal factor. Barr has developed a way of detecting both of these using a liquid chromatography &ndash; mass spectrometry (LC-MS) approach that can provide earlier diagnosis than any other technique. This is particularly important as providing antibiotics at an early stage in the infection can increase the odds of survival.<\/p><p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright alignnone\" style=\"padding-left:10px; padding-right: 10px;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.immortalitymedicine.tv\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-o-matic\/cache\/601a5_10124_lores.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"273\" height=\"184\">His method, which uses an antibody purification step to extract the toxins, can detect the toxins at concentrations as low as 25pg\/ml in about two hours. If the antibody extraction step is left for around 16 hours, that detection limit can fall as low as 5 pg\/ml.<\/p><p>The progression of the infection tends to go through a brief remission, and the changes in lethal factor levels correlate with the clinical symptoms &ndash; and during remission other methods that rely on detecting the bacteria themselves often fail during this stage.<\/p><p>Barr believes his results should enable clinicians to predict the clinical outcome of an infection, which could prove immensely important as there have recently been a number of anthrax poisoning cases in Scotland, after heroin addicts injected themselves with anthrax-contaminated spores.<\/p><p><em>Matt Wilkinson<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ever since the infamous US anthrax attacks of 2001, where envelopes containing anthrax spores were mailed to a number of media outlets and two US Senators, there has been a push to develop new ways of determining the severity of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/chemistry\/asms-anthrax-attacks.php\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1246863],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1048338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048338"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1048338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048338\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1048338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1048338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1048338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}