Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs

Moving house again…

Well almost, moving addresses anyway. It wasn’t that long ago I moved from Disease of the Week to here at Disease Prone to take advantage of an offer from Field of Science. While I have been super happy here, an amazing opportunity has opened up for me to move the blog over to the Scientific American’s new community and so now I can be found at Disease Prone. I know a few others from FoS are moving too and I’ll let them say their own goodbyes but for me, I wanted to say a big thank you to FoS, it’s bloggers, readers and admin for helping me set up and being so supportive when this offer was extended to me.

At some point in the future this page may be removed so if you would like to continue following me you can find me here at SciAm with my new RSS feed or here on Facebook or here on Twitter.

Thanks FoS, I’ll see you ‘round.

To Tattoo or Not To Tattoo

Is it something you should do or is it taboo? What about a tattoo of a kazoo?

Okay, I'll stop now.

Recently I’ve been considering getting another tattoo or more work done to complement my existing tattoo. Its not terribly scientific like the Carl Zimmer’s Science Tattoo Emporium but it does mean something to me. I think I’ll probably wait until I finish my PhD, which means I’m looking at getting it in about a year.

Ignore my camera in the top left, the tattoo is too close to my shoulder making it very difficult to get it of of shot. Anyway, it's a raven.

Yes We C(r)an(berry)!

That title is awful I know but I'm tired. Cut me some slack :)

 

I ran into a something that I have heard about before but assumed was rubbish and never really looked into it properly. A friend of mine insisted it was the case so I looked it up and I have to say, I was a little surprised.

So this is what cranberries look like. I never knew.

Exploding Head Syndrome - No pun required

This is an old post from my previous blog. Recently it has been seeing a lot of activity so I thought I'd play around with it a bit and re-post it here. Enjoy :)

Sometimes when searching for disease to write about a wonderful thing happens. The clouds part, cherubs descend, angels play intricate harp-based musical compositions, and a beam of light illuminates the link to a wonderful disease. This happened to me the other day, and now, without further ado, let me introduce you to Exploding Head Syndrome. Best. Disease. Name. Ever.

Acute Exploding Head Syndrome sufferer (screenshot from the 1981 movie Scanners)

Capsular Polysaccharide and Pneumococcal Disease

This week looking at the capsular polysaccharide of Streptococcus pneumoniae. Want to know how I know? I wrote it :)

Insert stock photo of pneumo. Check.

It seems a little wrong to blog my own paper but in reality more people will read this blog entry than will read the paper itself, and that’s fine. Its relevance is very narrow and the work very preliminary but really it’s the drive behind the work that is important. So lets talk about Streptococcus pneumoniae (aka the pneumococcus or simply pneumo) for a second to set the scene.

What a week!!!

I have grown accustomed to the largely monotonous and repetitive life of a PhD student recently. Wake up, go to Uni, set up experiment, experiment fail, go home, sleep, rinse and repeat ad infinitum. But this week has been different.

There is significantly less Kung Fu in science than I was led to believe. Turns out its mostly repetitive bench work.

Third hand smoking - Can we ban this poison already?

I’m not going to write a post on why smoking is bad, it’s too obvious and if you don’t understand why then your probably never going to find this post anyway. I’m not even going to talk about second hand smoking, ie. blowing your death cloud at me on the street. Again it’s obvious why it’s bad and may even be worse than smoking the cigarette itself as second hand smokers don’t get the benefit of a filter. No, this post is about third hand smoking, a fun new way smokers can harm those around them long after they have butted out.

Yeah. That looks healthy.

Halitosis - Your mouth smells like arse

Sometimes I'm going to write about rare cancers or blood diseases and sometimes I’m going to write about bad breath. That’s just the way I roll.

Halitosis literally means “condition of the breath” and has many causes and just as many home remedies. Original therapies (and by original I mean 1550 BC) like heavily herb infused wines didn’t remove the bad breath but like mints and other modern treatments they just attempted to cover the bad smell with something more pleasant.

Jumping Frenchmen of Maine Syndrome

Well I’m back! I’m not going to pretend like you missed me but I hope your glad to see another post out of me. I did a bit of writing during my time off to build up a bit of a backlog so hopefully I can keep posting regularly for a while. Anyway, without any further ado…

Jumping Frenchmen of Maine Syndrome

Best. Disease. Name. Ever.

This disease was first observed in 1878 by the neurologist Dr. George Miller Beard, a guy I will definitely talk about again, in French-Canadians, lumberjacks and presumably some French-Canadian lumberjacks living in northern Maine. So that explains the “Frenchman” and “Maine” parts but lets look at what makes this a “Jumping Syndrome”.

(Merry) Christmas Disease

So I was feeling a little lazy and thought I should find a disease related to Christmas, that way it’d be topical and I’d look like a genius. Well maybe not a genius, as all I did was type “Christmas” and “disease” into google and it returned “Christmas disease”. Don’t worry though, the disease itself is pretty cool!

Contrary to popular belief Christmas disease is not limited to public drunkenness

Saturday Night Palsy

This time of year is party season. Just in the last 2 weeks I’ve been to three Christmas parties, a retirement party and a 21^st with Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Years and my birthday (24^th, I think?) to look forward to inside the next month. So alongside all the other important health notices like trying to avoid over-eating and binge drinking I’d like to present another disease that deserves its own PSA. Saturday Night Palsy.

Sickles, blood disease and the Greek god Priapus

I saw the Carnal Carnival was coming up and this month’s theme is Blood. Blood disease, that shouldn’t be too hard I thought.

So I started thinking about blood diseases and remembered a disease I learnt about in undergraduate genetics classes called Sickle Cell Anaemia.

Mucous Cancer - The mess of Pseudomyxoma peritonei

This post is very important to me for two reasons. First of it’s my very first proper post at my new home here at Disease Prone. Secondly it is a post I have been in the process of putting together for a while after it was suggested to me by my lovely wife, a nurse whose insights in to disease and treatment I hope to include as regularly as possible. I hope you enjoy it and all future posts as much as I enjoy writing them. Peace out.

The last time I wrote about cancer it was for the Scientific American regarding how bacteria can be used as treatments so really it wasn’t even cancer I was talking about but when I was told about this doosey of a cancer I couldn’t help but write about it. This is significant for me as I am a bacteriologist who has spent a long time trying to avoid cancer (developing or writing about it), too many signalling pathways (imagine trying to memorise dozens of images like this), ick.