Disinfectants are the first line of defense against the spread of hospital-acquired infections and effective cleaning of surgical instruments is vital to beating them.

The German formula works against a wide range of germs, including some that survive ordinary disinfectants, such as Mycobacterium avium bacteria which can cause a tuberculosis-type illness and enteroviruses that may cause polio.

Drug-resistant bacteria, the so-called “superbugs,” are a growing problem in hospitals worldwide and poor hygiene among staff is often blamed for the spread of such infections. They kill about 25,000 people a year in Europe and about 19,000 in the United States.

In previous studies, the German team found a simple alkaline detergent that could eradicate prions — disease-causing proteins that are particularly hard to get rid of because they can become fixed onto surfaces through the use of some conventional disinfectants.

In their new study, Michael Beekes and Martin Mielke from the Institute’s hygiene department mixed the alkaline with varying amounts of alcohol and tested its ability to rid surgical instruments of bacteria, viruses and fungi and prions. They found that a mixture with 20 percent alcohol was best.

Beekes said he thought the new disinfectant could have a huge impact on hospital safety protocols.

“Standard formulations that eliminate prions are very corrosive,” he said in the study published in the Journal of General Virology.

“The solution we’ve come up with is not only safer and more material-friendly, but easy to prepare, cheap and highly effective against a wide variety of infectious agents.”

A Dutch study published last week found that the methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) superbug, which can cause blood poisoning, spreads not freely but in clusters, suggesting it is spread through healthcare systems by patients being repeatedly admitted to different hospitals.

The material contains cobalt atoms arranged in long chains and each atom acts like a tiny bar magnet that can point either ‘up’ or ‘down’.

When a magnetic field is applied at right angles to the aligned spin directions, the spins can ‘quantum tunnel’ between the ‘up’ and ‘down’ orientations. At a precise value of the applied field these fluctuations ‘melt’ the ferromagnetic order of the material resulting in a ‘quantum critical’ state.

‘You might expect to see random fluctuations of the spins at this critical point but what we uncovered was a remarkable structure in the resonances of the magnetic spins indicating a perfectly harmonious state,’ said Radu Coldea from Oxford University’s Department of Physics who led the team.

As the critical state was approached the researchers observed that the chain of atoms behaved like a ‘magnetic guitar string’.

Radu added: ‘The tension comes from the interaction between spins causing them to magnetically resonate. We found a series of resonant modes. Close to the critical field the two lowest resonant frequencies approached closely the golden ratio 1.618…, a characteristic signature of the predicted E8 symmetry.’

He is convinced that this is no coincidence and it reflects a subtle form of order present in the quantum system.

The resonant states seen experimentally in cobalt niobate may be our first glimpse of complex symmetries that can occur in the quantum world. “The results suggest that similar ‘hidden’ symmetries may also govern the physics of other materials near quantum critical points where electrons organize themselves according to quantum rules for strong interactions,’ Radu told us.

The research was supported by EPSRC and Radu aims to use a new EPSRC grant to explore the physics of materials near quantum criticality.

The team included Dr Radu Coldea, Dr Elisa Wheeler and Dr D Prabhakaran from Oxford University’s Department of Physics, as well as researchers from Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin, ISIS Rutherford Laboratory, and Bristol University.

“Here is a bacterium that we know is sometimes harmful and that is clearly associated with cancer,” Solnick said. “But it’s not that simple.”

Solnick explains that up until the 20th century, when public health improved and antibiotic use was widespread, virtually everyone was infected with H. pylori. That remains the case today in most developing countries, implying that H. pylori may have evolved with its human host because it confers some selective benefit.

“These new findings suggest that one such benefit may that H. pylori provides protection against tuberculosis, and perhaps other infectious diseases as well,” he said.

Tuberculosis is second only to HIV as a cause of death due to a single infectious agent; an estimated one third of the world population has latent TB infection. But only 30 percent of people exposed to TB ever become infected, and only 10 percent of those infected will develop active tuberculosis disease.

“One explanation may be the presence of chronic infection of the stomach with H. pylori,” Solnick said. The findings also may eventually aid in managing TB, since H. pylori infection may help determine whether someone infected with TB gets a latent, asymptomatic infection or active disease.

The collaborative research effort began with the hypothesis that a person’s immune responses to individual infections are modified by the existence of other infections, said Sharon Perry, an epidemiologist at Stanford University, and the study’s lead author.

Early studies funded by the National Institutes of Health showed that a patient infected with H. pylori had elevated immune responses to TB antigens. Perry’s work expanded to test the hypothesis in patients from immigrant populations in Santa Clara County, then in households in Gambia and Pakistan, where TB is prevalent. In the two-year study, they found that individuals exposed to TB who then progressed to active disease were less likely to be infected with H. pylori than those who were not infected with H. pylori. Protection against tuberculosis may have been a result of enhanced immune responses to TB antigens in those infected with H. pylori, since H. pylori induces expression of interferon gamma and other cytokines, which are important for immunity against viral and bacterial infections.

At this point, Perry and Stanford University professor Julie Parsonnet wanted to test the theory in non-human primates. They enlisted Solnick at UC Davis, in conjunction with JoAnne Flynn of the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics and Immunology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

With a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Solnick, Parsonnet, and Flynn looked at the role of H. pylori in 41 monkeys challenged with TB. Again, the findings were striking. Of the 30 monkeys that tested positive for H. pylori, only 5 developed active TB, but 6 of 11 monkeys that were negative for H. pylori developed active disease.

“The one-disease, one-pathogen paradigm doesn’t tell the whole story,” said Perry. “It is incomplete as an explanation of the clinical outcomes of chronic infection. In fact, the thousands of organisms that live with us play a role in shaping our immune response to specific infections.”

Solnick cites the “hygiene hypothesis” as one possible explanation. That theory suggests that a reduction in exposure to infectious diseases can make the immune system less able to fight other challenges. Conversely, exposure to certain pathogens may aid immune response to other infections.

The authors acknowledge the findings are preliminary and propose several follow-up studies. First, Solnick, Parsonnet and Flynn have proposed research to test whether experimental infection of H. pylori will protect monkeys from TB, and whether it will enhance the protective effect of immunization. If successful, they will test a recombinant H. pylori strain that expresses TB antigens for possible immunization against TB. These studies will be performed in collaboration with Ondek Ltd, founded by Barry Marshall, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2005 for the discovery of H. pylori.

Queens of the ant Mycocepurus smithii reproduce without fertilization and males appear to be completely absent, report Christian Rabeling, Ulrich Mueller and their Brazilian colleagues in PLoS ONE this week.

“Animals that are completely asexual are relatively rare, which makes this is a very interesting ant,” says Rabeling, an ecology, evolution and behavior graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin. “Asexual species don’t mix their genes through recombination, so you expect harmful mutations to accumulate over time and for the species to go extinct more quickly than others. They don’t generally persist for very long over evolutionary time.”

Previous studies of the ants from Puerto Rico and Panama have pointed toward the ants being completely asexual. One study in particular, by Mueller and former graduate student Anna Himler (now at Arizona State University), showed that the ants reproduced in the lab without males, and that no amount of stress induced the production of males.

Scientists believed that specimens of male ants previously collected in Brazil in the 1960s could be males of M. smithii. If males of the species existed, it would suggest that—at least from time to time—the ants reproduce sexually.

Rabeling analyzed the males in question and discovered that they belonged to another closely related (sexually reproducing) species of fungus-farmer, Mycocepurus obsoletus, thus establishing that no males are known to exist for M. smithii.

He also dissected reproducing M. smithii queens from Brazil and found that their sperm storage organs were empty.

Taken together with the previous studies of the ants, Rabeling and his colleagues have concluded that the species is very likely to be totally asexual across its entire range, from Northern Mexico through Central America to Brazil, including some Caribbean islands.

As for the age of the species, the scientists estimate the ants could have first evolved within the last one to two million years, a very young species given that the fungus-farming ants evolved 50 million years ago.

Rabeling says he is using genetic markers to study the evolution and systematics of the fungus-gardening ants and this will help determine the date of the appearance and genetic mechanism of asexual reproduction more precisely in the near future.

Recently, neuroscientists at the Mayo Clinic campus in Jacksonville, Fla., demonstrated that brain waves, focusing on a matrix of letters, can project letters onto a monitor – with the goal of eventually typing out words and sentences. For example, by concentrating on the letter “q,” that “q” will appear on the screen.
The technique requires a craniotomy – that is, a surgical incision into the skull – to place electrodes directly onto the surface of the brain. The implanted devices then record electrical activity produced by the firing of nerve cells.

The research is preliminary. However, it potentially could help millions of people with disorders that result in speech loss, such as, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis – Lou Gehrig’s disease – a progressive deterioration of voluntary muscle movement; spinal cord injuries that require a breathing tube; and “locked-in syndrome,” where patients are awake and aware – but are paralyzed everywhere but the eyes. Even certain stroke patients could benefit, the researchers said.

“We want to emphasize that this really is at the beginning,” said Jerry Shih, MD, the Mayo scientist who, with Dean Krusienski, PhD., of the University of North Florida, studied the technology in six epilepsy patients. Still, “I think the potential applications are wide-ranging,” he added. “We want to make this a practical type of device that will have an impact on their function, and quality of life.”

While researchers have used the technology in the past to see whether such signals could control prosthetic devices, such as arms, this is believed to be the first research that examines its potential for language.

The researchers studied the technique in epilepsy patients with existing electrodes that had been implanted earlier to monitor their seizures. “These people already had electrodes in their brains, so we didn’t have to subject them or anyone else to invasive brain surgery,” Shih said.

The scientists wanted to see whether the process was more effective when electrodes were implanted directly onto the surface of the brain – electrocorticography (ECoG) – compared with those placed only on the scalp, known as electroencephalography (EEG.) The ECoG technique proved faster and more accurate.

“There was a big difference in the quality of information,” Shih said. “With EEG, the electrical signals are significantly distorted as they pass through the skin, the scalp fat, the bony skull – all those layers. There just wasn’t as clear a signal, compared to ECoG. Imagine someone with Lou Gehrig’s disease trying for five minutes to type out a word, and finding errors in that word. The accuracy wasn’t optimal.”

In the study, patients sat in front of a monitor that was hooked to a computer running the researchers’ software, which was designed to interpret electrical signals coming from the electrodes. The patients looked at the screen, which contained a 6-by-6 matrix with a single letter inside each square. Each time the square with a certain letter flashed, and the patient focused on it, the computer recorded the brain’s response to the flashing letter. Then the patients focused a specific letters and the computer software recorded the information.

The computer then calibrated the system with the individual patient’s specific brain wave and – when the patient then focused on a letter – the letter appeared on the screen.

If perfected, the technology could help people “with any neurologic disease that impacts a person’s ability to effectively communicate, as long as they can attend to the task,” Shih said, adding: “It won’t work, for example, in people who are demented.”

Even certain stroke patients – those whose attack occurred in the brain stem – could benefit, Shih said. “Those patients can’t talk because the pathway to the speech area has been interrupted by the stroke, but the actual center that produces language – the cerebral cortex – is not involved,” he said.

It might even be possible to apply the technology to stroke victims whose language center has been injured. Other areas of the brain may be able to compensate, Shih said. “We actually found that these types of signals can be reported not only from the language center, but from other portions of the brain,” he said. “So this still might work even for people whose language area has been destroyed.”

The researchers hope to study more patients, but are likely to confine their research – for now – to patients who already have implanted electrodes. Ethically, they cannot justify performing a craniotomy on people who don’t otherwise need it, Shih said. Still, “we want to do this with more people and refine the process so that the communication route can be improved,” he said.

Ultimately, once the technique is perfected, patients will have to undergo the surgery; also software would have to calibrate each person’s brain waves for the desired action – language, for example, or the movement of a prosthetic arm.

“These patients would have to use a computer to interpret their brain waves, but these devices are getting so small, there is a possibility that they could be implanted at some point,” Shih said.

“We are only limited by our understanding of the technology,” he added. “I foresee, if we make this technology really work, we can safely implant it in a small area of the brain – and any person who needs it will be able to use it.”
The research, presented at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Epilepsy Society, was funded by the National Science Foundation.