Archive for the ‘Prevention’ Category

LSU Obtains Grant to Synthesize Affordable Nootkatone

https://www.lsu.edu/eng/news/2024/03/che-nsf-pfi-grant-lyme-disease.php

Chemical Engineering, Biological Sciences Faculty Receive Largest NSF PFI Grant Ever Awarded to LSU

Mike Benton, Kerry Dooley, Roger Laine
Nootkatone Studies Could Lead to Prevention of Lyme Disease

March 25, 2024

BATON ROUGE, LA – Thanks to a $550,000 National Science Foundation Partnership for Innovation grant—the largest NSF PFI grant ever awarded to LSU—LSU Chemical Engineering (ChE) Professor Kerry Dooley, LSU ChE Department Chair and Professor Mike Benton, and LSU Department of Biological Sciences (Biol. Sci.) Professor Roger Laine will continue their work on a project that could bring affordable and effective insect repellent to the masses, possibly decreasing the number of Lyme disease, malaria, and West Nile virus cases around the world.

The project involves the use of nootkatone, an FDA-approved organic compound found in grapefruit skin and Alaska yellow cedar trees that is a natural deterrent for many insects, including the deer tick responsible for Lyme disease. The LSU researchers propose decreasing the cost of the nootkatone synthesis, making any products made with the compound affordable to the general public.

“The family of compounds that make up nootkatone is already proven to be both safer and more effective than existing commercial repellents,” principal investigator Dooley said. “However, it’s now too expensive for consumer insect repellents. We plan to greatly streamline, optimize, and reduce the costs associated with the synthesis.”

According to Laine, there have been few insect repellents on the market since DEET, which is found in most insect repellent sprays and creams currently available. However, a mosquito test showed that nootkatone at 5% in rubbing alcohol was superior to DEET, which usually needs to be administered at greater than 20% concentration, even six hours after application.

Years ago, Laine discovered the efficacy of nootkatone as an insect repellent while collaborating with retired LSU AgCenter Entomologist Gregg Henderson in Laine’s lab. They found that nootkatone repelled insects like mosquitos, gnats, wood ticks, fleas, termites, lice, and fire ants because the insects weren’t eating the vetivone grass that, unbeknownst to them, contained nootkatone. Former LSU Biol. Sci. Senior Research Associate Betty Zhu tested 15 other compounds that resembled the structure of the vetivone and discovered that nootkatone was the best repellent compound. Nootkatone had already been approved by the FDA at the time, with the CDC later discovering that it also repels deer ticks.

Though nootkatone was found to be the best repellent, the problem was the cost to buy it in pure form.

“Nootkatone costs $2,500/kg, which is too costly for insect repellent,” Laine said. “It should be $200-$300/kg, then you can add it to lotions and sunscreens.”

Dooley discovered that one important way to save on the cost would be to modify a step in the eight-step synthesis of nootkatone.

“I did a cost analysis of the synthesis process, and 70% of the cost is concentrated in the fourth step of the eight-step process,” Dooley said. “I decided this step in particular could be significantly reduced in cost.”

The eight-step synthesis was created in just two years by former LSU Chemistry Graduate Student Anne Sauer, who was working under retired professor William Crowe as a collaboration with Laine and Henderson. To simplify two oxidation steps in the eight-step synthesis, which is patented by LSU, Laine subsequently obtained a Board of Regents seed grant and hired synthetic chemist Xuefeng Gao to successfully modify the synthesis using ozone, now covered by new U.S. and Japanese LSU patents authored by Laine.

In the fourth step, the original paper and patent uses potassium hydride and 18-Crown-6 ether, along with tetrahydrofuran, as a solvent. Dooley read up on how people were trying to execute this step without using these expensive components and thought he and Benton should come up with a catalyst and solvent that could significantly reduce the cost of this step.

“It’s incredibly complicated and it takes a long, sustained effort to go from making a few grams of something to making kilograms or kilotons,” Dooley said. “There’s a lot of work on optimizing separations, minimizing the solvent use, getting certain impurities down, and getting yields slightly up. These things take a lot of time and effort.”

The LSU research team hopes to sell their synthesis process to a manufacturing company, who would then be able to mass produce affordable nootkatone products that could save people’s lives by preventing bites from infectious insects.

A 2024 CDC report states that there were 62,551 Lyme disease cases in 2022. Recent estimates using new data collection methods suggest approximately 476,000 people may be diagnosed with Lyme disease each year in the U.S.

“The deer tick is spreading throughout the U.S.,” Dooley said. “It’s not just prevalent in the Northeast.”

In other words, insects are going nowhere. A 2023 CDC report states there were 2,406 cases of West Nile virus across 43 states with the number of cases expected to increase in 2024. Per the World Health Organization, there were a reported 249 million cases of malaria worldwide last year.

“Sixty million people die of malaria each year,” Laine said. “It’s possible that if this eight-step synthesis process could produce nootkatone products that get to poorer countries, then WHO could possibly fund it. Mosquito nets could be covered with it, or they could have cloth ankle bands with nootkatone so ticks can’t crawl up your leg. The Department of Defense is also interested in ways to protect military personnel against tick-borne diseases. There are a lot of marketing niches with this.”

Contact: Libby Haydel
Communications Manager
225-578-4840
ehaydel1@lsu.edu

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Category:

mosquitoes, Prevention, research, Ticks, Treatment

The Dark Reality of Living With Lyme Disease

https://www.lymedisease.org/bredberg-dark-reality-lyme/

The dark reality of living with Lyme disease

By Kyle Bredberg

I have lived in New Paltz, New York, my whole life and throughout that time, have grown accustomed to many of the seemingly odd local rituals that our town performs.

One of these oddities is that in elementary school, New Paltz students learn to tuck their jeans into their socks, stuffing them full until their feet look like weird upside down sock puppets before departing on a field trip.

This is all part of the general awareness for ticks that the Hudson Valley strongly promotes to its residents. Students learn to buddy up and do tick checks and their noses often become normalized to the scent of DEET as parents worryingly spray down their clothes.  (See link for article)

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**Comment**

Bredberg admits that he became infected when tick awareness was nowhere near what it is today.  Similarly to others in Lymeland, despite severe hallmark symptoms all tests returned ‘negative.’

If it wasn’t for a relentless mother, he probably never would have gotten help.

Unfortunately he uses the wrong statistic that up to 20% go on to suffer long-term symptoms when in reality it’s somewhere between 40-60%. I also must disagree that ‘research, treatment, and awareness has come a long way from where it was 10 years ago.’

Despite climbing numbers, we are no further along in understanding why some develop chronic Lyme/MSIDS and others don’t, and how to effectively treat it.

While awareness efforts have increased, this is entirely due to sick people who have done what they can in their sphere of influence.

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Sadly, the stories are plentiful, but nothing changes in the world of Lyme/MSIDS.

Category:

Activism, Lyme, Prevention, Testing, Ticks

Army Combat Uniform’s Insect Repellent at Center of Fraud Case

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/army-combat-uniforms-insect-repellent-at-center-of-fraud-case/

Army Combat Uniform’s insect repellent at center of fraud case

The Department of Justice alleges that a contractor failed to accurately apply bug repellent to ACUs and falsified test results.

BY | 

Adefense contractor may have rigged test results on how bug repellent Army Combat Uniforms were, officials say, leaving soldiers in insect-heavy places vulnerable to illnesses like the Zika virus and Lyme disease.

A federal complaint filed by the Department of Justice on Friday alleges that North Carolina-based Insect Shield LLC and its founder, Richard Lane, who died in 2022, incorrectly tested uniforms for insect-repellent and falsified documents beginning in 2015 under federal contracts worth more than $63 million.

The DOJ alleges that the company and Lane participated in a “multi-year failure” to apply permethrin to Army Combat Uniforms and Improved Hot Weather Combat Uniforms at the correct concentration levels. They also allege that the company submitted inaccurate lab test results to the government for the contracted garments.

The DOJ alleges that the company’s conduct included more than 430 “lots” of Army Combat Uniforms, which may have affected millions of soldiers over the years. (See link for article)

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Category:

Prevention, Ticks, Treatment

Manicured Greenspaces Harbor Infected Ticks

https://danielcameronmd.com/manicured-greenspaces-ticks/

MANICURED GREENSPACES HARBOR INFECTED TICKS

greenspace-ticks

Encountering ticks has typically been thought to occur primarily in wooded, rural areas. But ticks are expanding their geographical range, not only to new areas of the country but from rural to urban greenspaces, as well.

By 

It was once thought that well-kept, manicured yards, for instance, were safe and free of ticks. No longer. As this study finds, ticks can be found even in the most well-groomed recreational spaces.

In their study, “Ticks and Tick-Borne Pathogens in Recreational Greenspaces in North Central Florida, USA,” Bhosale and colleagues examined the potential risk of encountering ticks in recreational greenspaces, particularly in groomed areas.¹

“We hypothesized that the habitat composition within greenspaces, whether it was natural habitat or manicured turf, would impact the abundance of ticks and prevalence of tick-borne disease agents,” they wrote.

Do ticks reside in well-kept, manicured yards and greenspaces?

The authors collected ticks along trails at 17 recreational areas in and near Gainesville, FL. They found 6 tick species which harbored 18 different species of bacteria or protozoa within the Babesia, Borrelia, Cytauxzoon, Cryptoplasma (Allocryptoplasma), Ehrlichia, Hepatozoon, Rickettsia, and Theileria genera.

“While tick abundance and associated microorganism prevalence and richness were the greatest in natural habitats surrounded by forests, we found both ticks and pathogenic microorganisms in manicured groundcover,” the authors wrote.

Encountering an infected tick is “measurable and substantial even on closely manicured turf or gravel, if the surrounding landcover is undeveloped.”

They found that 5 out of the 6 tick species harbored many tick-borne pathogens. Some of these have not yet been described and “could still be of emerging medical or veterinary importance,” the authors point out.

The study found, that “even in manicured turf and landscaping, infected ticks occurred along walking trails and paths, particularly when those manicured habitats were surrounded by moderate amounts of undeveloped landcover.”

The presence of infected ticks in manicured areas suggests the environmental conditions in these spaces is sufficient for ticks to thrive and pose a health risk.

The authors’ conclude:

  • “Overall, the detection of co-infections in our ticks adds to the complexity of the tick pathogen microbiome and suggests the need for continuing research on the importance of co-infections for both human and animal health.”
  • “While we found the highest diversity and abundance of ticks and pathogens in natural habitat within greenspaces, we also found a substantial subset in manicured habitats including turf lawn, picnic areas, or along paved pathways.”
Related Articles:

Infected ticks moving into New York City

Are lone star ticks in your neighborhood?

When should you worry about ticks in your neighborhood?

References:
  1. Bhosale CR, Wilson KN, Ledger KJ, White ZS, Dorleans R, De Jesus CE, Wisely SM. Ticks and Tick-Borne Pathogens in Recreational Greenspaces in North Central Florida, USA. Microorganisms. 2023; 11(3):756. https://doi.org/10.3390/microorganisms11030756

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**Comment**

Sadly, mythology continues to abound in Lymeland.  One of those myths is that supposedly we are all safe in our manicured lawns.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Until you notify all the deer, fox, rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, birds, reptiles, and more that they are all supposed to stay off your lawn, well – they are going to be dropping ticks wherever they tread.  It’s only logical that birds in trees are going to be dropping ticks there as well and when a good stiff wind comes up, can carry the ticks through the air. I’ve experienced it.

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Category:

Prevention, research, Ticks

Vaccinating Mice to Protect People?

https://www.lymedisease.org/lyme-shield-vaccine-mice/

Vaccinating mice to protect people from Lyme disease

The US Department of Agriculture has conditionally licensed an oral Lyme vaccine that targets mice.

The substance is sprayed onto pellets and distributed in natural settings to be consumed by mice in the wild.

That vaccinates the mice against Lyme bacteria, so they will not pass the infection to ticks, which in turn cannot pass it to people and pets.

According to US Biologic, the maker of the vaccine, “We’ll distribute the pellets in different ways to residences, public lands, and commercial properties. At residences, we will use the LymeShield System, which is an integrated tick-management program offered by pest-management professionals and includes the timed-application LymeShield Station. “

The vaccine is called Borrelia Burgdorferi Bacterin. The product, called LymeShield, includes a device or “station” that holds and applies the pellets.

SOURCE: US Biologic

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**Comment**

Sorry, just not excited about this at all.

There’s this thing called the law of unintended consequences and the past three years have demonstrated it perfectly.  Researchers and public health ‘authorities’ are typically very myopic and do not factor in variables that happen in real life that can affect the outcome of studies done in a lab in a petri dish.  The human body and the environment are complicated worlds where many things affect them.

For instance, what will these sprayed pellets do to other species that eat them?  What will this do to species that eat mice that have eaten these sprayed pellets?  What will this do to the groundwater that surrounds the area of these pellets and how will this affect wild-life and humans?  I mean, the questions abound here and no answers are forthcoming because we are all living in a continual experiment where we simply find out through the course of events.  Kind of like passing a bill before you read it.  (That actually happened)

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Research has become a run-away train with zero oversight and zero ethics.  The world will suffer.

Please note that Lyme/MSIDS research always focuses on “vaccines” and never upon effective tests or treatments.  Coincidence?  I think not.

Category:

Activism, Prevention, Ticks, Treatment