Safety of Vaping

I'm sure you've seen people around campus with e-cigarettes blowing out these big clouds of what looks like smoke (it's not, it's water vapor). It's actually kind of impressive how much vapor some of these things put out.

Image Courtesy of CFCF

A surprising number of people use e-cigarettes. Per the CDC, 21.6% of people age 18-24 have used or have tried using an e-cig, a number that only seems to be rising. They're commonly touted as the safe and healthy way to get your nicotine fix, as instead of burning tobacco (which comes with a whole myriad of health consequences I'm sure you're familiar with), e-cigarettes uses water vapor as a way of delivering nicotine to the body.

Combine this rather new delivery method with almost no regulation from the FDA, and you're left with a lot of unanswered questions. And not a lot of people are there to answer those questions, as not much is known yet about the health affects of using these popular devices.

Researchers at the Penn State College of Medicine are trying to find more about what e-cig vapor actually contains, which would help indicate what the long-term health affects may be. As John P. Richie Jr., professor of public health sciences and pharmacology says, "While e-cigarette vapor does not contain many of the toxic substances that are known to be present in cigarette smoke, it's still important for us to figure out and to minimize the potential dangers that are associated with e-cigarettes."

Many of the toxic substances present in large quantities in cigarette smoke are aldehyde containing chemicals, which can restrict airways. A common chemical often referenced in this category is formaldehyde (you know, that stuff they use to preserve organs and dead animals).

Formaldehyde
Image Courtesy of Wereo

Luckily, studies have found that this particular chemical isn't present in significant quantities in e-cig vapor (yay!). However, thanks to the studies by Penn State College of Medicine, another class of harmful chemicals are: free radicals. Free radicals are atoms or molecules that have unpaired valence electrons (electrons that participate in chemical bonding). They're produced when the nicotine containing liquid is heated within the e-cigarette. You probably learned in chemistry class that valence electrons normally go in pairs. When they're not in pairs, they're kind of sad and lonely... They desperately want to find a buddy. This is leads to them being incredible reactive and unstable.

Poor guy on the end looks so lonely..
Image Courtesy of SmokeyJoe

These free radicals can react with the cells in your body, most notably DNA, causing mutations. And unfortunately, whenever you start talking about mutations, cancer comes into the equation. These free radicals contribute to cancer in cigarette smoke, and it would make sense that the same would prove true for e-cigarettes. Luckily, it was found that e-cig smoke contains 100 to 1,000 times less free-radicals than traditional cigarette smoke. Dr. Richie states that  "the levels of [free] radicals that we're seeing are more than what you might get from a heavily air-polluted area but less than what you might find in cigarette smoke." It is still not known exactly what affect these specific free radicals might have on the body, which is why further research is currently being done to identify what free radicals are being produced and how they might interact with the body. While it's no reason to ditch e-cigs for traditional cigarettes (especially when e-cigs are helping smokers quit their addiction), it shows that this new form of nicotine still needs to be looked at more closely, and potentially regulated more to ensure the safety of those using them.

If you'd like to read the full study, it can be found on PubMed here.

Skirting the Resistance

In 1928, Alexander Fleming found that the fungus 'penicillin' could be used to kill bacteria — and thus the first antibiotic was born. Since then, there has been a staggering increase in the use of antibiotics throughout medicine; unfortunately many times they are used inappropriately. For instance , many people still believe that antibiotics will help their cold or other viral infection. In reality, not only will they not do anything, they will in fact contribute to one of the largest rising concerns in medicine today: antibiotic resistance. Researchers at Penn State are trying to find out the best way to utilize current antibiotics in order to prevent antibiotic resistance.

Image Courtesy of ZME Science

In any colony of bacteria, there are likely a few of them that are resistant or immune to a certain antibiotic (due to mutations in genetic code). In this 'normal' state, these antibiotic resistant bacteria are kept at bay as they compete with the rest of the non-resistant bacteria. However, a very common practice for antibiotic administration is to prescribe a patient the very maximum dosage that they are able to handle. In some cases, as Penn State researchers have found, this practice of 'hitting hard' can in fact promote this antibiotic resistance. When these large doses of antibiotics kill off the non-resistant bacteria, they leave just the resistant bacteria to propagate now that there is no competition for resources. However, there are still cases when these large doses are the most effective option, like with HIV, where you can "kill everything by hitting it hard with a cocktail of medications."

Image Courtesy of CDC and Penn State

From mathematical models utilizing variables like probability of drug resistance by random mutation and the ability of these mutated bacteria to multiply, Dr. Andrew Read  has been able to determine what size the dose of antibiotics should be in order to reduce the proliferation of antibiotic resistance and also kill the infection as quickly as possible. From these models, he has found that the best course of action is either to give patients the maximum safe dose, or the lowest effective dose. Everything in the middle has been found to be sub-optimal. Whether a particular infection needs the maximum dose or the minimum will require individual clinical assessment.

While it may not seem like much, it may go a long way to reducing the unnecessary antibiotic resistance that is developing all of the time in the world. Antibiotics are one of the most important (if not the most important) medical tool, and it is critical that we continue to be able to use them in the decades to come.

If you'd like to read more about this study, you can find the full paper here.

Drinking the Sea

Every day, the average person uses over 80 gallons of fresh water. Combine that with the fact that only 3% of the world's water is fresh water, and only a third of that 3% is readily accessible, and it starts to seem like we might not have enough water to go around. A nice visualization of that is below.

GIF Courtesy of Julian Glander

With the increasing concern brought by the California drought, the issue of conservation and production of fresh water is becoming more and more pertinent. California has begun to try to go proactive by building desalination plants (where they turn sea water into fresh water), but these plants can end up being huge sinks of energy.

Desalination Plants in California
Image Courtesy of the Bay Area News Group

Dr. Manish Kumar here at Penn State is currently working on a project that will hopefully lead to lower cost desalination, making it a more cost-effective solution for more locations. One of the biggest steps (and the most energy hungry steps) is reverse osmosis. You likely remember osmosis from high school biology: it's when water flows through a membrane from an area of low solute concentration to an area of high solute concentration (so like the left half of the image below). The system is trying to achieve 'equilibrium', where both sides have the same concentration of solute, in this case salt.

Image Courtesy of Axeon Water Technologies 

The really important stuff happens for us when we try to reverse the process (aptly named 'reverse osmosis). By forcing the water (through an application of pressure) the wrong way through the membrane, we can force the water to flow from high concentration to low concentration, yielding more fresh water than we came in with! And just like that, we turned salt water into fresh water.

Dr. Kumar's lab is attempting to find ways for this process to be more efficient. Specifically, there are two specific areas where his lab is trying to make strides. The first is how currently, salt particles will often 'plug up' the membranes, leading to lower throughput (and higher energy costs!). By disrupting salt gradients that often form next to these membranes using little things called 'micropumps' to keep the gradient at a minimum.

Colloidal 'Fouling' (left) and Disruption (right)
Image Courtesy of Manish Kumar

The other area also involves things getting in the way of the membrane and restricting throughput, but this time the concern is biological. Little bacterial colonies love to set up shop on these reverse osmosis filters, causing a substantial decrease in performance. His lab's solution to this isn't to put in toxic chemicals to kill the bacteria, but instead to give the bacteria a little of their own medicine, and introduce beneficial bacteria growth on the membranes, bacterial growth that will prevent the harmful bacteria from growing. What's even neater is the fact that they are able to regulate themselves and control the colony's thickness in order to prevent the bacteria from having a substantial impact on the performance of the membrane.

While it might not seem like the most enthralling subject matter, the concern with fresh water and what we can do to ensure that everyone has enough water every day is only becoming more and more important. I'll probably talk again about desalination and it's potential utilization in one of my later civic issue's blogs, although maybe with a little less science.

If you'd like to read more about Dr. Kumar and his research (he's doing a lot of really interesting things!) you can find his publications here.