From Boston.com:

In the ongoing battle between pathogens and humans, bacteria have an unusual survival tactic: playing dead.

Scientists in Boston and elsewhere are increasingly interested in mysterious “persisters’’ — a small number of cells in a bacterial population that are not growing, but are also not dead. They exist in an inactive state that allows them to survive antibiotic treatment, only to awaken later and grow again.

“Persisters are thought to go into deep dormancy. They become zombies of a sort . . . resistant to killing by everything, because they don’t have active targets [for drugs] to attack,’’ said Kim Lewis, director of the Antimicrobial Discovery Center at Northeastern University. “It’s a safety valve for the population.’’

Infectious diseases that are invulnerable to common drugs have become a major public health problem, especially in hospitals, spurring major efforts to combat mutant strains of bacteria that can resist antibiotics. But scientists think persisters probably help bacteria thwart modern medicine as well. They may play a role in recurrent infections — including tuberculosis and urinary tract infections.

Persisters were first reported in 1944, when Dr. Joseph Bigger, a physician from the University of Dublin, used penicillin to kill bacteria, but found survivors that were not antibiotic-resistant. He thought those persister cells might be dormant, but not much attention was given to them over the ensuing decades.

James Collins, a professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University, said that as recently as 2003, scientists who studied infectious disease weren’t all that interested in persisters. But research has accrued since then, he said, making them a hot topic in microbiology. Scientists have found that persisters do not grow like normal cells and are examining the role they play in biofilms, communities of bacteria that form a slimy layer and can cause recurrent infections.

Lewis received a $5.5 million grant last year from the National Institutes of Health, through a program that focuses on supporting innovative and risky research projects that have the potential to transform current thinking. The project will examine whether super persisters, mutants that produce more persister cells, might cause untreatable, chronic infections. Last month, Lewis and colleagues described in the journal PLoS Biology how ciprofloxacin can cause the formation of persisters in E. coli, a common bacterium.

There are believed to be multiple mechanisms by which persister cells form, but the paper described one way. Lewis and colleagues administered ciprofloxacin, an antibiotic that damages the DNA of bacteria, to E. coli cells in a dish. That damage induced a repair response, activating a number of genes that carry the instructions for the bacteria to make specific proteins. But researchers found that in addition, there was a different protein that, when overproduced, caused persisters to form — suggesting that administering antibiotics that damage DNA might have the unintended effect of sending cells into a dormant state that could allow them to survive all antibiotics.

“We’ve discovered what we think is the first molecular mechanism by which persisters are formed,’’ Lewis said.

Dr. Stuart Levy, a professor of microbiology at Tufts University School of Medicine and president of the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics, said the paper raises intriguing follow-up questions. Will other antibiotics have the same effect, for example? Will research in animal models reveal how dormant cells play a role in recurrent infection?

“I think the studies are fascinating — they’re of interest in terms of their broader, long-range impact on understanding bacterial survival,’’ said Levy, who was not involved in Lewis’s research.

He and others pointed out that Lewis is one of a small number of people who have studied persisters, which turn out to be a difficult subject to study because they are so rare.

Nathalie Q. Balaban, a biophysicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who also studies persister cells, said her lab is focused on basic research questions, including grappling with how persisters are different from cells that grow normally.

“In the lab, we can really put them in the same conditions and look at them, and we always observe some bacteria that — despite the uniform conditions and uniform genetic background — behave differently,’’ Balaban said.

Steve Projan, vice president and global head of infectious diseases for the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, said that he had long been following Lewis’s work and thought that persisters had been underappreciated.

“They are like the living dead — they can still come back to do a lot of damage,’’ Projan said. “Our ability to eradicate not only rapidly growing bugs, but also bacteria that remain around after we seem to have killed most of them, is going to be critical in positive patient outcomes.’’

It's amazing that no one was killed in this accident. Car racing technology at its best!

Another government agency trying to take our rights away.

From Chron.com:

The Food and Drug Administration said Friday the highest available dose of Zocor, a component in cholesterol drugs, can cause muscle damage as well as severe and potentially lethal kidney damage.

The agency said statin drugs like Zocor are known to cause muscle damage in some patients, but the risk is more severe when patients are taking 80 milligram doses of Zocor, which is the highest FDA-approved dose.

The side effects include rhabdomyolysis, a form of muscle damage that can lead to kidney damage or failure, and death.

Zocor is the brand name for the drug used by Merck & Co. of Whitehouse Station, N.J. Its chemical name is simvastatin.

Simvastatin, which is also part of Merck’s cholesterol drug Vytorin and Abbott Laboratories’ drug Simcor, is sold by 11 other generic drug makers including Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, and Novartis’ Sandoz division.

FDA-approved doses of Zocor range from 5 milligrams to 80 milligrams.

The FDA said the warning is based on clinical trials, studies, reports of side effects by users and prescription data

I have been taking Resveratrol for the last 3 years and can only say "This stuff is awesome." I have read many of the neuroresearch articles on Resveratrol and have not seen any negative studies. Make sure you get a high quality Resveratrol.

You can help decrease your pain by limiting your caffeine intake, taking enzymes, omega 3, magnesium, seeing a chiropractor, Acupuncturist, and a Massage Therapist.

I always knew there was a reason the AMA was backing Obama care. Most doctors were not for the Health care bill, despite what many have been told.