December 8, 2023: The drinking water parasite that just won't go away, bodily organs age at different rates and extremists hate on everyone. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | For the last 30 years, the parasitic protist Cryptosporidium has continued to creep into U.S. drinking water. Even though public health officials know how to kill and eliminate the bug, 444 outbreaks of cryptosporidiosis were reported in the U.S. between 2009 and 2017, and since then the number has increased by an average of 13 percent each year. A 2019 CDC report estimates that 823,000 people get the illness each year and that fewer than two percent of cases are reported to the CDC. Infection with the parasite causes one to two weeks of nausea, stomach cramps, vomiting, dehydration and fever, but the most commonly reported symptom is watery diarrhea--up to 40 episodes a day.
What can be done: Advanced technologies that expose the parasite's oocysts to ozone or UV light destroy the bug or render it noninfectious. But not every city tests for the parasite and outbreaks happen each year. The U.S. must invest $625 billion over the next 20 years to upgrade its drinking-water infrastructure, according to a recent assessment by the EPA.
What the experts say: "Cryptosporidium isn't just spreading locally. It's spreading over multiple jurisdictions—and we might not be picking up these outbreaks," says CDC epidemiologist Michele Hlavsa. "An infection could start in one spot and move quickly to five different states." | | | Bodily organs get "older" at extraordinarily different rates, and each one's biological age can vary drastically from a person's calendar age. A team of researchers measured protein levels in blood from 5,500 patients and identified concentrations of proteins related to specific organs, including the brain, heart, immune tissue and kidneys. When the concentration of an organ protein differed from what they expected for a chronological age, that indicated aging of the organ. They found that one in five healthy adults older than 50 is an "extreme ager"—a person with at least one organ aging at a highly accelerated rate, compared with a cohort of their peers. One in 60 adults had two or more organs that were aging rapidly.
Why this matters: Depending on the organ involved, participants who had at least one with accelerated aging had an increased disease and mortality risk over the next 15 years. For example, those whose heart was "older" than usual had more than twice the risk of heart failure than people with a typically aging heart. And those with an "older" brain were at higher risk for cognitive decline.
What the experts say: This research could lead to a simple blood test that could help predict future illness, says Tony Wyss-Coray, a professor of neurology at Stanford University. "You could start to do interventions before that person develops disease," he says, "and potentially reverse this accelerating aging or slow it down." | | | • The challenges of navigating the female reproductive tract in fact help sperm swim with optimal efficiency and may guide them to their desired destination. | 6 min listen | | | • Both anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim hate is on the rise in the U.S., write Will Hobbs and Nazita Lajevardi. The psychologist and political scientist investigated how extremists target their vitriol in real life and online. They found that the same group of extremists target Jewish AND Muslim people, but at different times. "Hate groups do not see ebbs and flows in hate—but they do regularly alter which communities they target and why they say they are targeting them," Hobbs and Lajevardi report. | 6 min read | | | Our most popular stories this week | | | • NASA Lab's Workforce Woes Threaten Major Space Missions | 14 min read | | | Each year research institutions nominate and vote on names for right whales to be included with their four-digit identification numbers. This year, the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium accepted 19 out of 20 new names for whales. Check out the newest inductees here. My favorite (and, I think, most appropriately-named) is goldfish! Only about 350 North Atlantic right whales remain in the wild, according to the Consortium. | Here's wishing you a restful weekend. I've loved receiving your notes this week. Reach out to me anytime at: newsletters@sciam.com. We shall return on Monday! | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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