The skinned knee is a hallmark of childhood summers. After the tears are kissed away, a time-honored ritual follows: a few squirts of a pain killing spray, a good slather of antibiotic ointment, an adhesive bandage, and then back to the neighborhood for more rites of passage.
The venerable tools of this healing ceremony may take the form of commercial consumer products but they are rooted deeply in the chemistry and pharmacy of nature.
Flying about 460 meters above the seas off Alaska in 2004 on the hunt for bowhead whales, federal wildlife biologist Charles Monnett and colleagues spotted four white blobs floating in the water. The white blobs were polar bears , which drowned in the open ocean following a powerful Arctic storm. Two years later, Monnett and his colleague Jeffrey Gleason published a note about the drowned polar bears in the peer-reviewed journal Polar Biology , speculating that the ongoing retreat of sea ice in the Arctic forced these polar bears to swim longer distances and potentially left them too exhausted to survive the storm.
Chikungunya is a scary-sounding virus with some scary symptoms: joint pain so excruciating that patients often can’t stand or even sit upright for months. The mosquito-borne virus got its start thousands of years ago in southeastern Africa, where it generally caused a slow but steady stream of cases. About 50 years ago a mild strain of the virus spread to Asia. Then, following a drought in Kenya in 2004, cases of chikungunya in Africa soared and spread eastward across the Indian Ocean, causing severe disease and affecting hundreds of thousands of people across Asia.
This new strain of chikungunya is apparently replacing the older, milder strains that previously circulated in Asia. But how? In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA , researchers have figured out that as it traveled, the virus picked up a single mutation that allowed it to be transmitted much more efficiently by Asian mosquitoes.
