When you are in a hospital, what you don’t know can hurt you. Case in point: That person carrying drug-resistant bacteria as he enters with you is a potential source of germs that can kill you. One UA expert, Dr. Donna Wolk, is out to improve the odds of avoiding hidden, highly contagious threats, sometimes called “hospital superbugs,” lurking in many hospitals around the world.
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Up close, a thin slice of a human cell wall might look like the Great Wall of China, with an array of towers, tubes and molecular mailboxes. Getting a message through is tricky. The molecule must hit the right receptor, a kind of smart mailbox that regulates life, screening messages, letting only a few bind to the cell.
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For years, biomedical science has been turning individual genes on and off as way to treat gene-based maladies, and as a research tool. Now, a new challenge involves finding ways to bring the entire genetic blueprint of humans, animals and plants into play.
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This is a story about Charlotte, who is three days old at this writing, and a medical puzzle that might affect her susceptibility to many serious diseases. Or it might not. For infants, their first year is crucial. The kind of environment a child of that age needs to switch on certain molecules to lift their disease immunity is fairly well known. For example, living on a farm and being around a dog and lots of microbes are helpful factors, but only for some.
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As a doctor, John Galgiani, MD, would like to cure his coughing, feverish, sleepy patients, all 50,000 of them. That’s the number of current infections from valley fever. It can leave patients in wheelchairs, facing hospitalization or worse. In Arizona, 30 people are likely to die each year from its complications, which can include meningitis. The disease still has no cure, but he would like to change that.
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