Disease management in space colonies

Actimel could also start bottling Bad Bacteria aswell as Good Bacteria, keep everyone used to everything

" 2 bottles of mystery food poison please "

Unfortunately, Ekkehard, whatever lessons we might gain from the twin World Wars from the atrocities committed by both sides are mostly forgotten here: I've had more than one person ask what the Holocaust was.

I singled out Germany for this particular example, but I also remember that America and Britain are not exactly free of guilt; they refused to grant fleeing undesirables political asylum, and many Allied leaders went on record in support of the Holocaust. The Soviet Union was arguably the equal of the National Socialist government, organizing political dissidents into batallions and forcing them to march across minefields to clear a path for regular troops. The Empire of Japan was also guilty of the same types of "medical research" as I cited with that link (they experimented on the citizens of occupied China).

I did not intend to give you a lesson in the Holocaust, Ekkehard, merely to give you the same reference that I myself used -- I'm at least peripherally aware of the effort that the Federal Republic has put into educating its citizens to help do its part in ensuring that such acts are never again committed.

Back on topic:



No argument; the chances that any sort of alien life that we ever encounter will be remotely compatible with Terrestrial life (either symbiotic or parasitic) are so remote as to be practically zero.




Now that's a good idea.

Thats the whole plot of the aliens Quadrilogy is that Corporate interest might rank above human life.

It's not exactly a stretch.

Hello, spacecowboy,

I may have written something misunderstandable.

Really an experiment by infecting a human with martian microbes and bacteria will cause this human the danger to die by the microbes etc. - you are right.

But I don't think that any scientist would infect a human with these microbes and bacteria as well as no experiment on new methods to kill cancer is done on humans in the first step but only in the last step.

The research will be done by tissues, by closed-loop-ecologies and by experiments on mice and rats as today is done in testing new medicines etc.

Additionaly martian life will be researched directly in labors - the scientists will take a few martian microbes and decrypt their DNA. They will keep them in quarantine and observe their working, behaviour etc. by instruments and they will have results before by rovers able to detect martian life.

Noone will see any need or requirement to infect a human to do experiments I suppose.



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

Actually, it is. A company or corporation requires the support of its consumers. That tends to go away when you kill people. And yes, conditions for the workers truly sucked during the Industrial Revolution. But also realize that trying to get people to work under unreasonable conditions now will be much harder, especially when they have the kind of training that first-wave colonists and orbital construction workers will require. Later colonists will be just so many uneducated civilians, but the first group will have to establish liveable areas on the planet.

Ekkehard: That's basically the situation. Probably all of the cases of human infection by alien diseases will be due to accidents. Of course, my initial point still stands: the chances that any form of alien life is in any way compatible with Terrestrial life is basically zero.

Yep, the ones doing the contamination will be us. If anything is going to be killed, it'll be the as yet undiscovered little Martian. We here on Earth enjoy a rich diversity in every living organism all of which fight for they're spot. Anything still surviving on Mars is going to be hardy, but limited, and certainly not up for a fight with our Terran life. (this is my opinion of course). Perhaps they can be friends?

Or maybe they could be plankton... who knows? I think that unless martian life has surpassed our technology and manages to live completely underground, i think we would have already detected them...

Of course, they could already be here, disguised as familiar people, or everyday objects. Watch out for them!!!



There may be a lack of living life, but there could be dormant life, just waiting for the right conditions. Sort of like seeds in a fridge. If we go there, we might discover something that could be re-awakened. That would be really amazing.

Concerning the compatability of martian life to earthian life here is another point of view:

Earthian life may have its origin in space as some scientists have worked out. All ingredients of earthian life can be found in meteorites and asteroids. As Earth at least partially is formed by these objects Mars will be too. From this follows a non-zero-probability that the ingrideints the meteorites and asteroids have brought to earth have been part of meteorites too that impacted and/or formed Mars.

When all these meteorites and asteroids still had been in space all the ingridients will have been distributed among these objects like the Gauss-distribution.

So if there really microbes etc. found on Mars that are incompatible to earthian life this microbes etc. may be found on earth too one day.

And there have been found new strange microbes in the past few years on earths really - archaeobacteria for example. Waht is known about theier compatibility to normal plants and animals or to the bacteria to be found in the human stomack?

All this might be a good preparation for searching and researching martian life.



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

A few moments ago I read of a plastic going to be developed by european scientists which can detect martian life.

The plastic's surface will bear the negative imprints of molecules which would indicate life.

Such plastics may be used to prevent martian colonists from being infetced or incubated by martian microbes etc. I suppose.

What about that? Which further developments of them, which improvements would be required? Can they used for warnings only or can they initiate automatic countermeasures against alien microbes for protection of colonists too?

Dr_Keith_H, what do you think about it? Which way do the plastics work really?



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

Today I read an article under www.wissenschaft.de saying that Parkinson-disease could be healed by using nanoparticles carrying repair-genes to neurons. There is a team around the researcher Bharali which had success by using a particle of 30 nanometers size. The particles consist on a Silicium-based molecule.

The method is said to be as effective as the virus-method at least. Viruses have the disadvantage of the viruses mutating back into their damaging versions after being used - according to that article.

Could a way to handle health- and disease-problems caused by alien environments like those on mars be developed out of this success? I am thinking of decades here. Could it turn out to be a "breakthrough" concerning health in space?

Could it especially be a counter-measurement against the impacts of radiation in space too?



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

EDIT: One link has been listed where I myself didn't find te english article: www.pnas.org doi 10.1073/pnas.0504926102

Last time I waded into this sort of stuff the thread mutated into an Incredible Worm of Fury and for all the energy generated it did less good than an asthmatic gerbil could do inside it's excerise wheel, asleep.

So if you don't mind Ekke ... I think I'll sit this one out ...

DKH

(my thinking being that a little disinformation is surely less stupid than a lot)

Retrovirii and Nanomachines are very very cool if they work as advertised, and damned scary if they don't. Of course, that's assuming they're possible or practical to build at all.

I thought I'd post this because radiation does increase the risk of cancer and therefore we need effective methods of treating cancer especially... Although the risk of getting cancer goes up exponentially at a certain age. Radiation in space can certainly cause cancer much earlier in ones life.

Nanoparticles could also be used and coated onto clothes and items so that when the virus or bacteria gets onto something they will be killed or deactivated. We already have the coatings to do this and are being applied today on some new Mobile phones and clothes and will have future applicaiton for space.

We are already seeing the first applications of Nanotechnology being used to treat disease already. Although they arnt really smart, they are very capble of delivering drugs where you want them to go by simply coating the nanoparticles with certain molecules that the disease needs in order to multiply, grow etc.. So by coating the nanopaorticle with the vitamin Folic acid the nanoparticles has used a " Trojan horse " to get into the cancer cell. Then using near-infra-red light from a laser the nanoparticles will heat up and destroy only the cancer cell.

There has been a few developments the other week that some may of heard about:



This one looks really interesting and brilliant... I can't wait to here the results of these therapies on humans.

Ugh, here we go again...



Uhm, doesn't that mean that the things will cause blood clots? Those are Bad Things, right?



Damned glad I'm not a mouse. 3.25 times the control (untreated, 2.17 times treated) duration is Good; the fact that they still crapped out after 65 days is still Bad, though. That must've been some hellacious dose of carcinogens they gave those mice.

And I don't see any real basis for their claim that this "could transform many cancers from killers into chronic, treatable diseases". The other 20% of the mice given the new stuff didn't last that long, and they all still died. If you gave 'em the worst dose of carcinogen possible, put 1mg of the stuff in their system, and they all recovered with no trace of cancer in a couple of hours, then I'd be dancing in the streets. The biomed scientists still have a lot of work to do before they can claim a true breakthrough, much less the magical, oft-hoped-for Cure for Cancer.

Oh, and how exactly does this dovetail into the general topic of disease management in space colonies anyway? Radiation poisoning is easy enough to counter: add more shielding. Your biomed posts are approaching CSP's, so watch out.