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Going to the hospital is usually bad news. Catching C.Difficile is worse considering that most hospitals in Canada have this nasty bug roaming around, not to mention the stuff already resides in most of our colons. When things get ugly is when antibiotics have killed all the helpful bacteria in our guts allowing C.diff to throwdown and start raising the roof causing fecal mayhem for all those involved. However, all is not lost.
“A unique antibody from a llama could prove to be a key weapon against C. difficile, a nasty infection that is a growing problem in many hospitals throughout North America.
Clostridium difficile is a common cause of infectious diarrhea in nursing homes and hospitals and usually occurs in patients who have been taking regular antibiotics for an infection.”
The one of the usual treatments is fecal bacteriotherapy which is finding compatable donor feces and repopulating
your intestinal gut-flora so the C.diff house party can stop. Of course, having a reverse enema with someone else’s poop somehow seems a little disquieting to most…
“New research from the University of Calgary and the National Research Council in Ottawa suggests that simple antibodies from the llama can interfere with the disease-causing toxins from the infection.
U of C professor Dr. Kenneth Ng said that discovery moves them a step closer to understanding how to neutralize the toxins and create novel treatments for the disease.”
Thank you our lovely, albeit smelly, Llama friends; for possibly preventing reverse-poop enemas in a hospital near you in the future.
We’re missing parts of DNA that code for spiky penises and that inhibit brain development. It took sometime, 6 million years or so, but definitely worth the wait.
“In a paper published Thursday in Nature, the Stanford University researchers show the differences between humans and our nearest relative, the chimpanzee, are the result of DNA sequences lost since our divergence from a common ancestor about 6 million years ago.
Women of the world will be particularly grateful that among the ditched DNA is the penile spine enhancer, which gives chimpanzees spiky-spined penises.”
Evolution in action. Thank goodness we did take the love-dart route either.
“Kingsley [an author of the paper] says they are continuing to work through the lost sequences to identify links with other anatomical differences such as sweat glands, walking upright, s-shaped spines and skin changes.
He says the two sequences in DNA highlighted in the paper were lost sometime between when humans and chimps split from each other 6 million years ago and before humans and Neanderthals diverged about 600,000 years ago
“Both of the losses are also lost in the Neanderthal,” says Kingsley.
“The Neanderthal brain was already big and there is a lot of interest in whether Neanderthal and humans interbred – the loss of the penile spine was the anatomical change that would allow interbreeding.”
Kingsley says although the modern genome is evolving, our understanding of evolution will also change the way the genome continues to evolve.”
The answer if you have played any sort of video game where women fight is quite clear. Provocative perhaps, but possible in real life?
A nice thought though, but I’m thinking that no amount of fact can lift the veil of ignorance religion has cast about the eyes of so many.
Well okay, maybe a little.
Homeopathic remedies (also see sugar water) still are ineffective and generally do not work, unless their intended effect is to part foolish people from their money, in that case they are a most excellent product.
“WINNIPEG – Skeptics of homeopathic medicine have downed entire bottles of the remedies at demonstrations in several Canadian cities in an effort to prove the concoctions don’t work.
Gem Newman, who consumed a whole bottle of St. John’s Wort at an event in Winnipeg, says the capsules were mostly comprised of sugar and water and didn’t affect him.”
This is anecdata, but for a more data points please see James Randi as he has been downing homeopathic remedies in quantity for years and is still with us.
“According to the Homepathic Medical Council of Canada’s website, the active ingredients in homeopathic medications are taken in highly-diluted form to avoid toxicity.
But Newman says the product’s heath claims are unproven, and the doses are so small that they are useless.”
It surprises me that in modern countries like Canada the woo peddlers are given so much respect (they have their “medical” council).
I highly recommend you take an hour of your time and arm yourself with the facts about cosmology and physics. Lawrence Krauss does a masterful job of describing how the Universe works and why no creator is necessary for our existence in the here and now.


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