Alpha Gal

Kitty O'Neil stunt 1979: LA Times photo

   To just hear the term these days seems a bit dated, or perhaps sexist.  Honey, darling, sweetie, gal.  Or even the "alpha" title itself, one generally appropriated to a male as in wolf packs, the alpha male.  But consider such "strong" women as Donna Strickland, the Nobel Prize winner in physics (the first woman in 50 years to win the prize) and her puzzlement at the world's reaction; she told Bloomberg Businessweek: I was a little blown away by how much has been made about me being a woman in science.  I've heard from many, many women just thanking me for being a flag bearer.  I feel like it would be nicer to focus on what scientists could do for the world...When you go to Asia, they revere their scientists.  They're putting a tremendous amount of money into science.  North Americans in particular have to be careful about that.  Or there's the late Kitty O'Neil, 5-foot-2,  stuntwomen extraordinaire (her land speed record still stands) and deaf.  She once told the Chicago Tribune: Deaf people can do anything.  When I was 18, I was told I couldn’t get a job because I was deaf.  But I said someday I’m going to be famous in sports to show them I can do anything.  Or the unsung hero Khadija Bahram who decided to defy the threat of Kalashnikov rifles that murdered her fellow aid workers in 2009 and chose to return to Afghanistan to teach other women (she held a graduate degree in chemistry); said a piece in National Geographic, Bahram was guiding...an educational program that stretches across five provinces in Afghanistan.  Her army of teachers reaches more than 10,000 pupils, most of them girls.  Unfortunately, even the group she worked with, the International Rescue Committee, has no further information on her so she was likely later killed by the Taliban.  Or Windie Jo Lazenko who continues to risk her life to help other girls and women escape the grips of sex traffickers (she was once caught in that cycle).  Said a piece in TIME: Most people cannot comprehend what it means to be trafficked, says Knoblauch (Danielle Knoblauch, a 41-year-old mother of three from Chicago), which contributes to a sense that victims are complicit in their captivity.  “The first question is ‘Well, why didn’t you just run?’  It’s the dumbest question you can ask a survivor.  Because believe me, they probably asked themselves that a million times.”  Knoblauch stayed partly because of threats her captors made against her children.  Traffickers use many tactics to destabilize their victims, from sleep deprivation to starvation, violence and drug addiction.  They disorient victims by alternating demonstrations of love with violence or neglect. In psychology, this is called a trauma bond.  The point is to take away any sense of free will.  “All you know is what they tell you,” says Knoblauch.  “There is nowhere to turn.  There is no one to cry to, no one to ask for help.”  

   Those women --and more-- are all alpha females, not in the sense of an alpha male which one associates with dominance and a defensive posture, but rather alpha in the sense of leading the pack and setting an example.  But you rarely hear the term of alpha female, much less the term alpha gal.  Which brings us full circle, since the term alpha gal has nothing to do with women, even as it begins to circle the globe and almost invisibly enter into our lives.  By now you've likely read about the recent pig Ebola virus affecting 30% of pig herds in China (with humans, the simple act of touching a person infected with Ebola can be fatal); said the Financial Times: In the truest sense of the word, the outbreak has already gone viral, spreading to Mongolia, Vietnam, Cambodia and farther afield.  The strain of African swine fever kills virtually every pig it infects with a bloody death reminiscent of Ebola, although it is not known to infect humans.  “It’s the biggest thing to affect the animal-protein market this year, and will probably have a lasting effect for a number of years,”said Angus Gidley-Baird, a commodities analyst with Rabobank in Sydney.  “It will move markets and possibly influence geopolitical situations.”  Official estimates in China count one million culled pigs so far but many expect 100 times that number will be eradicated in 2019.  That's One Hundred Million... 100,000,000.  Couple this with a recent finding in Nature that a single spoonful of seawater contains millions of viruses and that a new discovery founds hundreds of thousands of virus "communities" throughout the world's oceans: The revelation that viruses form communities in the world’s oceans emphasizes how little we know about them, says Curtis Suttle, a marine virologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver...The results, published on 25 April in Cell, provide scientists with a foundation for understanding how viruses affect marine ecosystems -- including the effect they have on the way organisms interact and the ocean’s response to climate change.  Which brings us to Alpha Gal...

   A report from Mosaic* gave more detail about this new meat allergy that has a circuitous path to the human body.  Said part of the article, it began with a drug called cetuximab:  People were reacting to the drug because they had a pre-existing sensitivity, indicated by a high level of antibodies (called immunoglobulin E, or IgE for short) to a sugar that is present in the muscles of most mammals, though not in humans or other primates.  The name of the sugar was galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose, known for short as alpha-gal...  Alpha-gal is a sugar; alpha-gal patients tolerate meat for years before their reactions begin; and alpha-gal reactions take hours to occur.  Plus, the range of reactions is far beyond what’s normal: not only skin reactions in mild cases and anaphylaxis in the most serious, but piercing stomach pain, abdominal cramps and diarrhoea as well.  Scientists are now finding that this allergy may all begin from a bite from a tick.  And one might say, well I don't have ticks in my area...mosquitos maybe but not ticks (these ticks activate when near carbon dioxide [our breath] and can bite as adults, nymphs and larvae).  But here's the frustrating part of their spread: Alpha-gal allergy was not just an odd occurrence in one part of the USA.  It had occurred in the opposite hemisphere, making it literally a global problem.  And so it has proved.  Alpha-gal reactions linked to tick bites have now been found in the UK, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Japan, South Korea, Sweden, Norway, Panama, Brazil, Côte d’Ivoire and South Africa.  These cases trace back to at least six additional tick species.  And once you get the allergy, can you just stop eating meat?  Not quite, because animal protein is everywhere; continues the piece about a woman experiencing more severe symptoms: She Googled, and then she asked her doctor to order a little-known blood test that would show if her immune system was reacting to a component of mammal meat.  The test result was so strongly positive, her doctor called her at home to tell her to step away from the stove.  That should have been the end of her problems.  Instead it launched her on an odyssey of discovering just how much mammal material is present in everyday life.  One time, she took capsules of liquid painkiller and woke up in the middle of the night, itching and covered in hives provoked by the drug’s gelatine covering.  When she bought an unfamiliar lip balm, the lanolin in it made her mouth peel and blister.  She planned to spend an afternoon gardening, spreading fertiliser and planting flowers, but passed out on the grass and had to be revived with an EpiPen.  She had reacted to manure and bone meal that were enrichments in bagged compost she had bought.  

   Viruses and their spread are virtually everywhere and either do or can cause lymphoma and other cancers said a review by Annie Sparrow in the New York Review of Books, one highlight of which was defining the difference between an epidemic and a pandemic, the latter meaning a disease which quickly affects the world population vs. a more localized one.  But here is what she reported on the variety of viruses mow facing us: Viruses lie behind at least 25 percent of all cancers.  Cervical cancer, for example, the second-most-common cancer among women worldwide, is caused by human papillomavirus (HPV).  Infestation by the bacteria Helicobacter pylori is a common cause of ulcers, but also causes gastric cancer and lymphoma.  Epstein-Barr virus causes Burkitt’s lymphoma, leukemia, and gastric, breast, and ovarian cancer.  Hepatitis B and C cause liver cancer.  Herpes virus can cause brain tumors and Kaposi’s sarcoma.  Even psychiatric diseases are linked to pathogens: a few years after influenza outbreaks, schizophrenia is more commonly diagnosed.  Babies exposed to flu and herpes in utero are at greater risk of autism.  Lyme disease can cause depression and dementia.  Herpes is especially virulent and can invade the nervous system and enter the brain and the temporal lobe where it can change or alter your language, as told in a story in Discover.  And polio or the rare version of it (acute flaccid myeliyis) is back as 62 cases were confirmed last year...in other words, viruses and bacteria are adapting, perhaps faster than we realize.  The question now becomes, are we ready?

    It was reported that an antibiotic-resistant gene first discovered in India has now been found in the Arctic, said The Week: At least 700,000 people die from superbug infections each year.  And as more bacteria evolve to fight off antibiotics—a phenomenon fueled by their overuse in medicine and farming—that annual death toll could hit 10 million by 2050.  A review of the book Superbugs by William Hall, Anthony McDonnell, and Jim O’Neill (in the New York Review of Books) noted: Our environment is becoming contaminated with antibiotics and their residues in several ways.  The first is a result of body waste—from both animals and humans. According to Hall, McDonnell, and O’Neill, “Studies suggest that as much as 75 to 90 percent of antibiotics may be excreted from animals without being metabolized.  This waste goes into the soil and is then washed into the water systems.”  Second, when pharmaceutical factories dump their untreated waste that contains the active ingredients of antibiotics into the water supply, they save money on expensive disposal.  Such practices encourage the development of antibiotic resistance, since we are thus exposed to low and varying amounts of the drugs, as Fleming warned.  "A wastewater system that eradicates all traces of antibiotics does not yet exist, partly due to the high cost of development.  This issue is especially prominent in hospital waste..."  The authors go on to add: ...over 70 percent of medically important antibiotics in the United States, by volume, are sold for use in farm animals.

   So what happens when that next plague hits, when something as transmissible as the swine Ebola virus makes its way into the human chain (so far, that hasn't happened but keep in mind that the term swine flu exists for a reason).  Said a piece in The Atlantic, we're not ready.  As Bill Gates (the Gates Foundation works to alleviate many worldwide diseases) told the author: Bill Gates, whose foundation has studied pandemic risks closely, is not a man given to alarmism.  But when I spoke with him upon my return from Kikwit, he described simulations showing that a severe flu pandemic, for instance, could kill more than 33 million people worldwide in just 250 days.  That possibility, and the world’s continued inability to adequately prepare for it, is one of the few things that shake Gates’s trademark optimism and challenge his narrative of global progress.  “This is a rare case of me being the bearer of bad news,” he told me.  “Boy, do we not have our act together.”  As the author notes: On average, in one corner of the world or another, a new infectious disease has emerged every year for the past 30 years: mers, Nipah, Hendra, and many more.  Researchers estimate that birds and mammals harbor anywhere from 631,000 to 827,000 unknown viruses that could potentially leap into humans.  More worrisome might be a Pentagon study to purposefully spread some viruses using insects, said The Washington Post (currently the studies of using such insects are meant for positive means).

   There is indeed life out there, much of it far too small for us to see.  But perhaps in this micro- and nano-world of life, we need to look at the bigger picture.  Here's one closing thought from Forbes: In an interview with Adam Bryant of the New York Times, Charles Schwab CEO Walt Bettinger shared a lesson he learned in college during a business strategy final exam.  Bettinger needed to ace the test so he could graduate with a 4.0.  He spent hours reviewing formulas and case studies.  On the day of the exam, his professor handed out just one sheet of paper and asked the class to turn it over.   It was blank.  He explained, “I’ve taught you everything I can teach you about business in the last 10 weeks, but… the most important question is this: What’s the name of the lady who cleans this building?” Bettinger was stunned.  It was the only test he ever failed.  He told Bryant, “…I got the B I deserved. Her name was Dottie, and I didn’t know Dottie. I’d seen her, but I’d never taken the time to ask her name. I’ve tried to know every Dottie I’ve worked with ever since.”  The experience taught him “…you should never lose sight of people who do the real work.”  Bettinger’s lesson in humility impressed me.  By revealing his failure to Bryant, he chose to be vulnerable.  Instead of pounding his chest in the interview, he opened his heart.  Acknowledge people, certainly.  But we may need to begin acknowledging viruses and bugs as well...or ignore them at our peril.


*If you haven't checked out Mosaic, now might be the time; their free subscription exposes you to well-researched and well thought out articles on subjects missed by much of the rest of the reporting media.  And Mosaic is not afraid to dive into subjects some consider taboo, such as this recent one of the rise of STIs (Sexually Transmitted Infections), including this scary note: N. meningitidis can cause invasive meningitis, a potentially deadly infection of the brain and spinal cord’s protective membranes...Roughly 5 to 10 per cent of adults likewise carry N. meningitidis in the back of the nose and throat.  Informative and engaging, words such as these might used a bit too often but they are words which accurately describe this site...