Miller-McCune: ALS, neurodisease generally, cyanobacteria, and a maverick amino acid. Heard this before?
Freelance writer Wendee Holtcamp – we’ve tracked several of her pieces here and have enjoyed them (examples here and here), currently has the most-read story on line at Miller-McCune Magazine. As is common in science journalism when a story takes off, it concerns something that everybody worries about: Their health and things that may threaten it. If a dreadful, high-profile disease is involved. so much the more readers. One cannot get much more insidious, mysterious, and disturbing than amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS, aka Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and other conditions that cause nerves to go progressively off line.
The story is a long and deeply-reported dive into the lab and history of a hypothesis - it clearly and repeatedly says it is just a hypothesis – of possible metabolic derangement in human nerves due to a neurotoxin called BMAA. It is a natural product of cyanobacteria that can easily form enormous colonies (also known as blue green algae, although they are not algae) in soil, public waterways, and even reservoirs from which towns and cities draw tap water.
The merit of the story arises largely from the time she spent in the lab and company of Paul Alan Cox, the man most identified with suspicion that BMAA, an amino acid but not one of those from which DNA-ordered proteins are normally made, might bio-accumulate in some foods or even in some people. The piece opens vividly with a visit to Yellowstone National Park and its wild, unearthly hot springs painted by sprawls of cyanobacteria. The park is not far from the Jackson Hole Laboratory where Cox, an accomplished botanist, a winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize, and a few colleagues pursue evidence that to make or break the case against BMAA.
It is no wonder this story is getting readers. While Holtcamp repeatedly assures them this is a suspected and not yet proven link, she also assembles the case for it. She describes a small but growing number of researchers looking into it, the accumulation of evidence in scientific papers, the disturbing spectre of this odd amino acid getting accidentally incorporated into human protein and causing all sorts of folding errors and other mischief. She shares her own growing worries that maybe the protein shakes she drinks are made with too much cyanobacteria. She reports that she took water from the reservoir near where she lives in Houston and mailed it to Cox for analysis. Uh oh. BMAA.
So, we have a story from a believer, or at least a strong suspecter, but an honest one. The caveats are here. It recognizes that the notion has strong critics. But there is no way to read if without concluding it is also an argument, if a subtle one, that one should worry about cyanobacteria that are nearly everywhere on Earth. One flaw in the piece is that it does not point out that if a potential cause is nearly ubiquitous, then it easily foments the common confusion of correlation with causation.
The story is new to many readers – as one gathers from the comments that accompany the story. So it ought also to have made clearer that the hypothesis has already received wide airing in popular media (it does tell them of a New Yorker Article). Holtcamp herself, one finds, has written on it before – although in a rather obscure publication, the July 2009 issue of Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine. The photo top right is from one of Holtcamp’s blog posts, put up while she was researching the piece now at Miller-McCune. This is not some potential revelation only now emerging into the sunlight. Authorities have known about it for years.
For instance, ksjtracker posted less than a year ago on a similarly large feature story that ran in Discover Magazine, by Kathleen McAuliffe.
A search finds several other general media stories that have run over recent years:
- Scientific American (May 28, 2010) Katie Mosse: A Batty Hypothesis on the Origins of Neurodegenerative Disease Resurfaces ;
- Fosters Daily Democrat (Dover, N.H., June 18, 2009 ) Leslie Modica: Willand Pond plays part in ALS study: Bacteria examined for linke to Lou Gehrig’s Disease ;
- New Scientist (Aug 2, 2004) Michael Le Page: Dietary neurotoxin linked to Alzheimer’s ;
- Medical News Today (April 10, 2005) : Cyanobacteria (“blue green algae”) produce toxin with possible connection to neurodegenerative disorders ;
- Boston Globe (Sept 14, 2009) Terry J. Allen: Did a lake trigger a deadly disease? ;
It appears there has been and continues to be enough work on this idea that sooner or later medical science will get to the bottom of it. Your tracker notices no overt assertions that crackpots are involved in the core work. And as there is no industry I’m aware of making big money that would take a hit if the hypothesis is proven, there is reason to expect we’ll see no conspiracy-paranoid element among ALS and similar disease support groups of the sort that drove the vigilante-tinged activism around vaccinations and autism. One does hope the hypothesis holds water – it’d give focus to research into therapies for several severe and near-intractable diseases.
LATE AMENDMENT: I am reminded that the spirulina and blue green supplements industries do have something to worry about if the public starts thinking their products are assocated with neurodegenerative diseases.
- Charlie Petit
