Add Fashion to Protest Passions

When protests blocked roads and polluted life with gas-filled burning tires in 2012 Lebanon, the Bokja (pronounced "bubjeh") textile house countered by rolling out a photographic display of tires covered with its elaborately embroidered fabrics.

     President Trump's red cap was followed by women donning knitted pink "Pussyhats" when they marched to protest his claim about where he could grab any woman.

     Black gowns worn at the 2018 Golden Globe Awards announced women were finished playing amateur sex object roles for Hollywood's powerful moguls.

     To demonstrate their increasing numbers and rightful place in Congress, women lawmakers joined males at the 2019 State of the Union address in Washington, D.C. wearing white outfits like those suffragettes used to call attention to their cause.

     What fashions might help call attention to the need to address climate change and other problems?

     To concoct the bugs intense heat could spawn and other dramatic protest examples, look to the Mummers who parade in Philadelphia on New Year's Day, "Miss Universe" costumes, and the beaded creations strutting in New Orleans' Mardi Gras parades.

Infection-Killing Bugs and Antibiotics

Children who like to look under rocks for bugs (See the earlier blog post, "The Bees and the Birds.") have company in the scientific community that is searching for microbes to cure drug-resistant infections from bacteria and fungi in patients all over the world.

     According to an article by David Wahlberg in the Wisconsin State Journal (April 14, 2014), soil-based microbes produced miracle antibiotics after World War II. In Alexander McCall Smith's book, The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon, for example, a character in Botswana, Africa, attributes cures to the kgaba plant. But recent soil-based research keeps rediscovering the same antibiotics.

     Consequently, kids can get in on the search for ants, beetles, bees, wasps, termites, sponges, and sea squirts that have found new microbes in bacteria that could act as antibiotics in humans.

     At the moment, the U.S. National Institutes of Health is funding a $16 million, five-year study to discover bugs, marine life, and other species that could help produce the drugs needed to treat staph and other infections. (An earlier blog post, "Medical Profession Suffers from International Conflict," tells how blue light phototherapy is being used to treat staph infections.) In January, 2015, the teixobactin antibiotic which has been shown to foil infection resistance passed animal tests without side effects.

     Young people interested in helping collect specimens or in doing a project involving the development of antibiotics from new microbes might get in touch with:
     Dr. David Andes, Chief of Infectious Diseases at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison, Wisconsin
     Cameron Currie, a bacteriology professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin, who is doing research in Florida, Wisconsin, and possibly in Hawaii
     Tim Bugin, assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin, who is doing research in Puerto Rica and the Florida Keys.

     Also see the later posts, "Global Search for New Antibiotics" and "Bacteria Talk to Each Other."