Tag Archives: roller derby

Unforgiving Bunny: 6 sick with rabbit plague in Germany

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We’re going to a birthday party Saturday a.m. at the park across the street from us.

I got to know the mom by hanging out at Sorenne’s school – in a drop-off-and-pick-up way, not a creepy way – and at some point heard she was into roller derby, with her two daughters.

unforgiving-bunnyWith my 5 daughters in (ice) hockey, I sparked up a conversation.

Seems that Unforgiving Bunny – that’s her roller derby handle – is a lawyer by day, and avid roller woman by night.

I thought of Unforgiving Bunny when I read the health authority of the district Mainz-Bingen is currently investigating several diseases of humans with the exciter of the hare plague (tulareämie).

And that’s our other roller derby friend, Abby of Manhattan, Kansas, (left) who got into the game once she moved to France (she was a student of Amy’s and great with little, bald Sorenne. Girl power.)

Hare plague can be transmitted from the animal to humans. A human-to-human transplant is nearly impossible and not known. Tularemia is highly treatable, but can take more severe curves in the individual case.

A common feature of the six affected that they had participated in early October on a vintage in the northern district. A few days later they got high fever and complained of a severe general feeling of illness. Three people had to be treated in the hospital. All have now been released as well again.

The case is unusual because infection with the pathogen in Germany are very rare and heaped even more rarely occur. Man is infected by direct contact with diseased animals, their organs or excretions. The pathogen can also be transferred through contaminated food.

abby-roller-derbyThe Health Authority is assisted in the search for causes of Landesuntersuchungsamt (LUA). It is investigated how the villagers could have come into contact with the pathogen. In parallel, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) examines samples from the vineyard. The focus is on food, rabbits, rabbits and other environmental samples. The bacterium Francisella tularensis triggers a tularemia disease. It usually begins with an ulcer at the entrance of the pathogen, followed by flu-like symptoms such as fever, lymph node swelling, chills, malaise as well as headache and limb pain. The disease can be treated with antibiotics.

Doctors in Mainz-Bingen district are asked also to consider tularemia in patients with high fever and swollen lymph nodes into consideration, especially if the cause of these symptoms is unclear. Suspected cases are also subject to reporting under the Infection Protection Act at the Health Authority.

sorenne-hockey-puck-nov-15

Roller derby players swap bacteria on the track

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My grandfather used to call my sister Skinny Minnie Miller, because she was skinny, and in praise of his favorite roller derby star.

kansas.city.bomberThat was the early 1970s.

Roller derby has gone through some sort of nostalgic renaissance of late, or Australia is, as I suspect, stuck in the 1970s, and the wife of one of Amy’s colleagues plays for a touring team out of Brisbane.

Katherine Hobson of NPR reports that Jessica Green, also known as “Thumper Biscuit” for the Emerald City Roller Girls, is also the director of the Biology and the Built Environment Center at the University of Oregon. She and her colleagues just published a study in the journal PeerJ looking at the bacteria that live on the skin of roller derby team members and how they’re swapped around during competition.

According to the official rules of the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association, players are allowed to make contact at the arms, chest, hips and thighs when jockeying for track position.

Researchers swabbed the exposed upper arms of roller derby players on three teams from different cities before and after “bouts” at a tournament in Emerald City’s home base of Eugene, Ore. They found that before a bout, the different teams had distinct populations of skin microbes.

“We could have picked out one player at random, and just by looking at the bacteria on her upper arm, we could have told you what team she played for,” says James Meadow, a postdoctoral researcher at the BioBE Center who led the study.

It’s not entirely clear why the teams had such distinct bacterial communities. It might be because their hometowns of Eugene, San Jose, Calif. and Washington, D.C. have different climates, urban settings and plants and animals, the researchers said. Or the players might have picked them up from some other common environment, like a team van.

But after a bout, the microbes on the players’ arms had more overlap. “We could still tell which team she played for, but with a lot less accuracy,” says Meadow. The results point to person-to-person transmission, though Green says it’s also possible that the bacteria were transmitted by contact with the ground or even through the air. It’s not clear how long the changes seen after a bout would persist, though; that would require looking at players’ skin bacteria over days or weeks.

Noah Fierer, an associate professor at the University of Colorado who studies microbial communities, says the results are in line with other studies showing that bacteria are swapped between people who make other kinds of contact, like shaking hands. (He reviewed the study for PeerJ, a new peer-reviewed, open-access journal at which Green is an academic editor.)