#a new infection

[apocalypsewriters]

12 days of writer self love day 4: blood

This is an angsty piece I wrote 3 years ago, and was the first thing I thought of with the prompt. When I wrote it I was super proud of it, so now is its chance to see the light of day.

Bella was making breakfast in the kitchen when it happened. It came out of the blue since she hadn’t had a blood surge in a while - the last one happened a few days ago before she met Zach. As unexpected as it was, she’d had some warning; a slight dizzy spell which prompted her to set down the pot she’d been preparing on the paraffin stove which she’d found in a junkyard and miraculously managed to salvage.

She let out her breath in a huff as her joints and muscles tightened. She tried to keep herself upright, but the pain surged and she collapsed with a dull thump, which alerted Freddie, who was reading on the couch waiting for breakfast.

“Bella?” he called out, concerned. Through the fog of pain, Bella heard the creak of the couch as he got up and the padding of his feet on the metal floor. With what little concentration she had left, Bella tried to reach for the chair near her to prop herself up before Freddie saw her helpless form sprawled out on the floor. She didn’t want to worry him, he had enough problems; even if he didn’t share them she could see the melancholy in his eyes. Unfortunately, another wave of pain washed over her and her outstretched arm hit the floor, creating even more agony. She groaned quietly. A gasp moments later told her that Freddie finally found her.

“Oh my goodness,” Bella heard the panic build in his voice. His book fell to the floor with a thud, not helping her throbbing head. “Zach? Uh, Zauch?! Can you come please? Now!”

Zach tottered out from his section of the bunker. Grumbling and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. “Freddie, what is it? I just woke up. Can’t this wait?” Zach’s footsteps stopped abruptly, before growing louder and faster, banging across the floor, slightly increasing Bella’s pain.

“Shoot! What happened, Freddie?” he sounded more awake now.

“I have no idea,” Freddie replied. “I heard a thump and come over, and she was just lying on the floor.”

The next surge brought the pain level close to the blood surge, which had made her black out. Her ears started ringing, and the boys’ voices grew muffled. She caught the words “move” and “couch”, before feeling pressure by her ankles, a light touch behind her head and a sudden weightlessness. Mere moments after leaving the cold, hard ground she barely felt the embrace of the couch while her pain level peaked. Lights and voices swam about in her mind, memory and present mixing together, imagination and reality becoming an indistinguishable blur as she flitted in and out of consciousness.

Slowly, the pain reduced and Bella regained some control of her muscles. She opened her eyes gradually, not realising she’d shut them under her body’s stress. She sat up gingerly, propping herself against the back of the couch, swinging her legs onto the floor, and twisted her neck slightly, hearing the joints pop. Bringing her attention in front of her, she saw Freddie and Zach sitting cross-legged on either side of her feet, looking expectantly up at her. Freddie looked lost and a little traumatised, his world shaken up by Bella’s weakness, while Zach seemed concerned and somewhat angry.

“What the heck was that?” Zach demanded hotly.

“Uh, to be honest, I’m not really sure,” Bella answered honestly and vaguely, grimacing at the scratchiness of her voice, which sounded like she’d been gargling nails and only amplified Freddie’s uneasiness.

“Well, tell us what you do know,” Zach’s tone took on what Bella could only describe as an air similar to an official interrogation, which was a skill she attested to being learned from his police officer father.

“Give me a second,” Bella stalled as she got up, wincing at the lingering ache in her muscles. She grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, taking a swig as she sat down with a hiss, her body protesting at the movement. She waved Freddie away, who’d gotten up to help her, before continuing.

“I call them blood surges. It’s the most accurate description I could come up with - it feels like my blood is boiling in my veins, and there are random surges of pain during it.” Zach frowned at Bella’s words. She kept speaking, disregarding the older boy’s darkening expression, before continuing her explanation.

“I lose most sometimes all control over my body, which is why I collapsed before.”

Zach cut her off before she could continue, “So this isn’t new. It’s happened before.”

Bella nodded, “The first time was right after the green gas was released and I had a few more after that, sometimes while running from the infected.” After grimacing at the memory of the panic she’d felt in those situations, she gave Freddie a weak smile, hoping to cheer him up by using his terminology. However, his expression remained shell-shocked.

“So this happens regularly?” Zach tried to specify.

Bella shook her head no, “This is the first time it’s happened since you’ve arrived. So it’s pretty irregular, and I generally have little to no warning beforehand.”

“Why didn’t I notice?” Freddie spoke up for the first time since the incident started.

Bella shrugged, “You were out scavenging I think.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?!” hurt and heat built up in his voice.

“It was unimportant.”

“But I could’ve helped. Saved you some pain. Something!” Freddie’s voice cracked.

Trying to remain calm, but struggling slightly Bella replied, “I had it under control. It didn’t endanger us. Besides, we’re all entitled to some secrets. Don’t pretend that you’ve told us everything about you, I’ve seen it. You’re not the only genius around here!”

“Yeah, well-”

“ENOUGH!!” Zach interrupted, sensing the situation escalating. Freddie took a calming breath, he seemed to be tense, a little jarred after losing his cool. Bella saw the wheels start turning in his mind, thinking over solutions for a problem he was yet to share, and she smiled slightly, comforted by the return to order.

“What do you think this is linked to?” asked Freddie. “The gases perhaps? Seeing as that’s when you said it first occurred.”

Bella’s curiosity was kindled. She tilted her head back to rest on the back of the couch and started to ponder the seemingly endless possibilities for her “affliction”.

Zach awkwardly cleared his throat, intimidated and isolated by knowledge he didn’t understand, and interrupted Bella’s train of thought. “Is something burning?”

“Oh no!” she cried. “Breakfast!” She started to stand up, but Zach pushed her down gently.

“I’ll get it. Don’t strain yourself after what just happened.”

“No, don’t worry about it. I’ll be fine,” Bella reassured both boys, brush Zach’s hands off and standing up fully. She staggered, what she hoped was the last of the pain hitting her like a wall. Zach shot up and grabbed her shoulder, stabilizing her. He seemed skeptical of her proclamation.

“Really,” she insisted. “It’ll be okay. You don’t know how to do breakfast anyway.” With that she strode off to the kitchen leaving behind a frowning Zach and Freddie reading on the couch once more.

[reasonsforhope]

"When bloodstream infections set in, fast treatment is crucial — but it can take several days to identify the bacteria responsible. A new, rapid-diagnosis sepsis test could cut down on the wait, reducing testing time from as much as a few days to about 13 hours by cutting out a lengthy blood culturing step, researchers report July 24 [2024] in Nature.

“They are pushing the limits of rapid diagnostics for bloodstream infections,” says Pak Kin Wong, a biomedical engineer at Penn State who was not involved in the research. “They are driving toward a direction that will dramatically improve the clinical management of bloodstream infections and sepsis.”

Sepsis — an immune system overreaction to an infection — is a life-threatening condition that strikes nearly 2 million people per year in the United States, killing more than 250,000 (SN: 5/18/08). The condition can also progress to septic shock, a steep drop in blood pressure that damages the kidneys, lungs, liver and other organs. It can be caused by a broad range of different bacteria, making species identification key for personalized treatment of each patient.

In conventional sepsis testing, the blood collected from the patient must first go through a daylong blood culturing step to grow more bacteria for detection. The sample then goes through a second culture for purification before undergoing testing to find the best treatment. During the two to three days required for testing, patients are placed on broad-spectrum antibiotics — a blunt tool designed to stave off a mystery infection that’s better treated by targeted antibiotics after figuring out the specific bacteria causing the infection.

Nanoengineer Tae Hyun Kim and colleagues found a way around the initial 24-hour blood culture.

The workaround starts by injecting a blood sample with nanoparticles decorated with a peptide designed to bind to a wide range of blood-borne pathogens. Magnets then pull out the nanoparticles, and the bound pathogens come with them. Those bacteria are sent directly to the pure culture. Thanks to this binding and sorting process, the bacteria can grow faster without extraneous components in the sample, like blood cells and the previously given broad-spectrum antibiotics, says Kim, of Seoul National University in South Korea.

Cutting out the initial blood culturing step also relies on a new imaging algorithm, Kim says. To test bacteria’s susceptibility to antibiotics, both are placed in the same environment, and scientists observe if and how the antibiotics stunt the bacteria’s growth or kill them. The team’s image detection algorithm can detect subtler changes than the human eye can. So it can identify the species and antibiotic susceptibility with far fewer bacteria cells than the conventional method, thereby reducing the need for long culture times to produce larger colonies.

Though the new method shows promise, Wong says, any new test carries a risk of false negatives, missing bacteria that are actually present in the bloodstream. That in turn can lead to not treating an active infection, and “undertreatment of bloodstream infection can be fatal,” he says. “While the classical blood culture technique is extremely slow, it is very effective in avoiding false negatives.”

Following their laboratory-based experiments, Kim and colleagues tested their new method clinically, running it in parallel with conventional sepsis testing on 190 hospital patients with suspected infections. The testing obtained a 100 percent match on correct bacterial species identification, the team reports. Though more clinical tests are needed, these accuracy results are encouraging so far, Kim says.

The team is continuing to refine their design in hopes of developing a fully automated sepsis blood test that can quickly produce results, even when hospital laboratories are closed overnight. “We really wanted to commercialize this and really make it happen so that we could make impacts to the patients,” Kim says."

-via Science News, July 24, 2024

[shehzadi]

so israel simultaneously bombed: an ambulance convoy going to the rafah egypt-palestine border that was transporting the most severely injured, the main entrance to al-shifa hospital, the vicinity of al-quds hospital and the indonesian hospital. in doing so, they’ve martyred at least dozens of people, with the numbers still climbing, only to then bomb the osama bin zaid UNRWA school barely an hour later, and the scenes coming out of there are literally those of children blown to pieces. they are unrecognisable as humans. may Allah accept them all as martyrs. and if that wasn’t enough, al-shifa, which is now completely overwhelmed with martyrs’ bodies and even more injured people than before since it’s sheltering and treating those from 1. the ambulance bombing and 2. the entrance bombing, is now totally blacked out. no more light or electricity.

while all this was happening in ghazzah, israeli settlers, aided by the israeli military, were/have been continuously forcing palestinians from their land in the west bank by burning their land and shooting palestinians.

this is only what has happened today (03.11.23) in a period of about 2-3 hours. remember, this has been the last 75 years for palestinians.

[halorvic]

Futurama S11E07

[kray-zay]

designs for a Transformers horror AU thing I was working on but shelved for the time being to work on my other main tf au project.

Thought I just shared these freaks without context. rest of the art and writing for this project prob not gonna be posted until/if I start working on it again.

Bonus little dude, he a part of a diagram explaining some lore but it doesn't make a ton of sense without knowing other lore from this AU I haven't shared.

[destielmemenews]

Dragoneer died of complications from a lung infection. His last social media posts detail a frustrating ordeal with his insurance and have ignited criticisms of the US healthcare system.

source 1

source 2

source 3

[lupiclaws]

It has. been a while since i posted actual art huh.

[spookkismookkis]

I hope he dies

[shummthechumm]

my take on this challenge

[markscherz]

check out this neat little guy i found in a park in northern california! he was iridescent, so cool!

Pretty sure this is a Sceloporus, which are just awesome lizards. Did you get a chance to see the belly? Because it can be just *stunning*.

[src]

[reasonsforhope]

"A large clinical trial in South Africa and Uganda has shown that a twice-yearly injection of a new pre-exposure prophylaxis drug gives young women total protection from HIV infection.

The trial tested whether the six-month injection of lenacapavir would provide better protection against HIV infection than two other drugs, both daily pills. All three medications are pre-exposure prophylaxis (or PrEP) drugs.

Physician-scientist Linda-Gail Bekker, principal investigator for the South African part of the study, tells Nadine Dreyer what makes this breakthough so significant and what to expect next.

Tell us about the trial and what it set out to achieve

The Purpose 1 trial with 5,000 participants took place at three sites in Uganda and 25 sites in South Africa to test the efficacy of lenacapavir and two other drugs.

Lenacapavir (Len LA) is a fusion capside inhibitor. It interferes with the HIV capsid, a protein shell that protects HIV’s genetic material and enzymes needed for replication. It is administered just under the skin, once every six months.

The randomised controlled trial, sponsored by the drug developers Gilead Sciences, tested several things.

The first was whether a six-monthly injection of lenacapavir was safe and would provide better protection against HIV infection as PrEP for women between the ages of 16 and 25 years than Truvada F/TDF, a daily PrEP pill in wide use that has been available for more than a decade.

Secondly, the trial also tested whether Descovy F/TAF, a newer daily pill, was as effective as F/TDF...

The trial had three arms. Young women were randomly assigned to one of the arms in a 2:2:1 ratio (Len LA: F/TAF oral: F/TDF oral) in a double blinded fashion. This means neither the participants nor the researchers knew which treatment participants were receiving until the clinical trial was over.

In eastern and southern Africa, young women are the population who bear the brunt of new HIV infections. They also find a daily PrEP regimen challenging to maintain, for a number of social and structural reasons.

During the randomised phase of the trial none of the 2,134 women who received lenacapavir contracted HIV. There was 100 percent efficiency.

By comparison, 16 of the 1,068 women (or 1.5%) who took Truvada (F/TDF) and 39 of 2,136 (1.8%) who received Descovy (F/TAF) contracted the HIV virus...

What is the significance of these trials?

This breakthrough gives great hope that we have a proven, highly effective prevention tool to protect people from HIV.

There were 1.3 million new HIV infections globally in the past year. Although that’s fewer than the 2 million infections seen in 2010, it is clear that at this rate we are not going to meet the HIV new infection target that UNAIDS set for 2025 (fewer than 500,000 globally) or potentially even the goal to end Aids by 2030...

For young people, the daily decision to take a pill or use a condom or take a pill at the time of sexual intercourse can be very challenging.

HIV scientists and activists hope that young people may find that having to make this “prevention decision” only twice a year may reduce unpredictability and barriers.

For a young woman who struggles to get to an appointment at a clinic in a town or who can’t keep pills without facing stigma or violence, an injection just twice a year is the option that could keep her free of HIV.

What happens now?

The plan is that the Purpose 1 trial will go on but now in an “open label” phase. This means that study participants will be “unblinded”: they will be told whether they have been in the “injectable” or oral TDF or oral TAF groups.

They will be offered the choice of PrEP they would prefer as the trial continues.

A sister trial is also under way: Purpose 2 is being conducted in a number of regions including some sites in Africa among cisgender men, and transgender and nonbinary people who have sex with men.

It’s important to conduct trials among different groups because we have seen differences in effectiveness. Whether the sex is anal or vaginal is important and may have an impact on effectiveness.

How long until the drug is rolled out?

We have read in a Gilead Sciences press statement that within the next couple of months [from July 2024] the company will submit the dossier with all the results to a number of country regulators, particularly the Ugandan and South African regulators.

The World Health Organization will also review the data and may issue recommendations.

We hope then that this new drug will be adopted into WHO and country guidelines.

We also hope we may begin to see the drug being tested in more studies to understand better how to incorporate it into real world settings.

Price is a critical factor to ensure access and distribution in the public sector where it is badly needed.

Gilead Sciences has said it will offer licences to companies that make generic drugs, which is another critical way to get prices down.

In an ideal world, governments will be able to purchase this affordably and it will be offered to all who want it and need protection against HIV."

-via The Conversation, July 3, 2024

[no-regretz]

The kasper situation

[ryomaandgundhamkin]

Infection AU Doodles

idk why the quality sucks uh anyways (fixed)

here are the infection AU doodles!! YAYAYY!! I found your solstice design😈-

I didn’t know what to put and I ran out of ideas I’m sorry don’t ask why there’s a beaker it’s totally relevant to the story

guess who’s arm that is💖 :3

HERE YOU GO @sunny-inajar eat up 🗣️

please I love this au need more lore👹👹.. anyways uh yeah nexus as a princess soon❤️❤️

tap for quality boom increase improvement

[halorvic]

[hibikiloserl]

i literally just thought of an entire au in 2 minutes who knew i was this creative

i think ill make a comic out of it

[lokittystuckinatree]

Out of every single relationship in the Whoniverse, whatever the Doctor and the Master have going on just hits different. Like a rock. I’m sure everyone feels this way about their fave Doctor ship, but my experience is that once you go Thoschei, you cannot go back. Given the narrative symmetry, character foiling, interwoven parallels, tragically dramatic irony, frustratingly unspeakable ambiguous romance that defies traditional ship canonization in the true chaotic spirit of Doctor Who, and a unique backstory setup that allows the characters to have history that other individuals cannot match, while fate (and the format of the show) pushes them together over and over again indefinitely, without hope of lasting reconnection lest the setup break, the Doctor and Master’s codependent anti-soulmate life or death partnership arguably (narratively) cheapens every other pairing beyond comparison. Their tragedy never leaves you. (And keeps you up at night)