dunefarble wrote...
RShara wrote...
Please post it. Anything to encourage a cure!
As requested.
WARNING - is loooooooong-
Okay, here’s my take on Kepral’s. May be adjusted as I’m corrected by people smarted than me/get missed info pointed out to me. (Any microbiology majors out there, feel free to help me out, my degree is in business)
As of ME2, as far as we know Kepral’s is a bacterial infection that cause’s the tissue of Drell lungs to lose the ability to function in high humidity environments (they can no longer absorb oxygen).
When the effects were first realized antibiotic treatments were used to combat the effect, but quickly loosed effectiveness and other treatments such as lung transplants have so far been unsuccessful and the disease eventually spreads to other organs.
So why have efforts been so unsuccessful? Because it’s the symptom that’s been treated, not the origin.
Starting at the beginning – The Drell are busily Industrial Revolutionizing the **** out of their planet, so in swoops the Hanar to rescue them. But they don’t just rescue the Drell, they also rescue Cannotus Thinkus Ofnameus, the tiny bacteria that had evolved symbiotically in the lungs of the Drell, aiding in the regulation of blood oxygenation. See where I’m going with this yet?
So the Hanar, rather than say, “Here’s a few bucks for a hotel,” are their typical nice selves and say, “Come stay at my place!” So the Drell go from their nice, arid planet, and are introduced for the first time to a predominantly marine ecosystem. Only, whoops, looks like a huge aspect of marine ecology is the presence of bacteriophages. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria, eventually causing the infected bacteria to burst and release compounds that stimulate the growth of more bacteria for the virus to feast on (according to Wikipedia), and the ocean is full of them. Seriously.
“Viruses are the most abundant biological entity in aquatic environments[65]—there are about one million of them in a teaspoon of seawater [66]—and they are essential to the regulation of sal****er and freshwater ecosystems. [67] Most of these viruses are bacteriophages…” (http://en.wikipedia....tion_to_viruses)
So, say you’re a Hanar doctor and your buddy Kepral starts coughing like a 80 year-old smoker. You take a look at his lungs and think, “Wow! Look at all that bacteria growth! That must be causing the problem.” You give him antibiotics to cut down on the bacteria, but the virus that you don’t know about just keeps chugging away and eventually the bacterium becomes resistant and you’re right back where you started. And that gene therapy that’s not really working? It turns out that the primary way bacteria protects itself from bacteriophages is by destroying any foreign DNA introduced to its system, like the DNA that bacteriophages uses to infect the bacteria…or like the DNA from the viruses used in gene therapy.
So the solution to Kepral’s (assuming that any of this is right) is actually pretty simple. Stop looking at antibiotics and start looking at antivirals that could treat the actual root of the problem.
Anyway, that’s just my opinion, no need to spread it around.
Actually, a bacteriophage would make a lot of sense. I don't, however, think that an anti-viral would cure the symbiotic bacteria in the lungs. A stomach ulcer operates in a similar fashion, except without the bacteriophage. The only way to really cure a stomach ulcer is to kill off ALL bacteria, including the good stuff. Or do what you can to strengthen the surviving healthy bacteria and hope they kill off the bad/infected ones.
I think the only treatment you could really utilize would be to kill all the symbiotic bacteria and then reintroduce healthy organisms.
If, in fact, this is how Kepral's works.
Retour en haut
).
But hey, cloning organs should certainly be possible.
