Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2019 August 7

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August 7

Searching for vids of living tissue under attack of bacteria

During (yet another) argue with anti-vaxer, he raised the argument that bacteria never actually kills live tissue. I have tried to find (through uncle Google) vids of bacteria kills live tissue, found none. Please help a misguided soul... אילן שמעוני (talk) 05:22, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

Its not a video, but there's a hideous photo in the article: Necrotizing fasciitis.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 107.15.157.44 (talk)

Listeria killing a macrophage. We normally don't need to videotape the bacteria killing something. Although this antivaxxer will almost certainly find a reason to reject this anyway. Someguy1221 (talk) 06:22, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

Several of the bacterial exotoxins can kill cells directly, including many of the pore-forming toxin. Klbrain (talk) 06:58, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

Gas gangrene, Gangrene#Wet_gangrene Gem fr (talk) 07:55, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

(EC) As with basically all anti-vaxer arguments, it's doubtful their argument made sense whatever or not the claim was true. I'm not really sure what they were claiming and frankly I'm not interested, but whether or not diseases like Typhoid fever, Tuberculosis or Meningococcal disease involve bacteria killing live tissue, may be beside the point given the symptoms and cause. (Although in some ways, it's difficult to argue since the disease wouldn't exist if the claim were true although you can have major symptoms without cells dying per se.) Of course many vaccines are not for bacterial diseases anyway but for viral ones and occasionally the toxoid of a bacteria like Tetanus and Diphtheria. (And for the later, whether you want to say the bacteria is 'killing' live tissue, is beside the point.) If the anti-vaxer doesn't understand that bacteria and viruses aren't the same thing, that even further illustrates the problem. Nil Einne (talk) 07:02, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

many vaccines are not for bacterial diseases anyway but for viral ones and occasionally the toxoid of a bacteria like Tetanus and Diphtheria This is important. Gem fr (talk) 07:55, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

I would say "toxin of a bacteria". Toxoid is a deactivated (but still immunogenic) form of a toxin used in some vaccines. Ruslik_Zero 08:36, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

You're right, toxin is the correct word for my point. Nil Einne (talk) 09:00, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

• "Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired." Jonathan Swift. If your friend was inclined to be swayed by evidence, reason, and logic they would have already reached the conclusion to vaccinate their freaking children. Attempting to dissuade them of their lunacy is pissing into an ocean of ignorance. --Jayron32 11:11, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

• Exactly once I managed to move someone from this type of position (he was "vaccines aren't proven to be safe" rather than "vaccines cause everything", so not the craziest, anyway...). It took a while because he was well prepared, having "studied this topic extensively", although in his years of exhaustive reading he managed to be completely unaware that clinical trials of vaccine safety even existed, but then that happens when you think research means reading blogs written by crazy people. Anyway, yeah, I managed to get him to budge from "vaccines aren't proven to be safe" down to a more reasonable "it's the doctors' fault for not educating people better also you're an asshole". I'm sure he was probably back on his antivaxxer bs within a week, maybe even later that day for all I know - I had no interest in trying that again. Is there a name for that rule about bullshit being 10 times easier to make than to refute? Someguy1221 (talk) 11:33, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

An allied sentiment: "A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on." From Terry Pratchett's The Truth, though not necessarily original to him. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.123.24.56 (talk) 12:27, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

There are times when people have an incorrect world view due primarily to incorrect information, in which case providing them with correct info from a source they trust can work. For example, there were many communists who believed that the Soviet Union was a worker's paradise, and that any info to the contrary was just "capitalist propaganda". But then Khruschev's speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" made it clear that communism was far from an ideal solution to all the world's problems. SinisterLefty (talk) 13:52, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

That may be true. However, once someone has been provided the correct information, and makes it clear that they aren't interested in basing their world view on correct information, there's not much left to do. --Jayron32 14:38, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

Let's focus. He does listens to reason providing nice and easy evidence. I already pulled him out of any anti-viral-vaccine stance. He will not read articles (specially not in English). He WILL accept direct video proof.

What I need is an easy to understand video of a clearly living cells attacked and destroyed by bacteria. I know this is problematic because most bacteria, if not all, attack via toxins. Still, I hpe there is SOME video showing clearly just this. There are bacteria strains that attack directly immune-system cells. I only found a video where the cells are already appear to be dead - in the most simple view - they are not moving. A video with the entire massacre, I think, will be enough.

A word for those here that claimed anti-vaxxers can not be persuaded. This is not true! In Israel there is an organization of doctors that go from one kinder-garden to the next, meeting the parents and the caretakers, and they have GREAT success. True, the most fanatic will not be persuaded by anything, but they are the minority. In most cases, parents DEMAND afterwords that only children with official record of vaccinations will be addmited. It came to the point where the most zealous anti-vaxxers had to open a kinder-garden for their kids.... Well, best of luck to them with this. The poor kids are likely to perish like flies, removing the parents genome from the genes pool. Sad, but efficient. אילן שמעוני (talk) 18:11, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

Above, I provided you a video of bacteria killing white a white blood cell. Someguy1221 (talk) 19:00, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

"He will not read articles" I wouldn't know how to deal with that. Collective human knowledge is built on our ability to trust experts to do their job and report their findings. If we refuse to read the findings of those experts, then there's no way we can advance our collective knowledge as a species. Demanding that only direct, visual proof of any concept is the only valid means of personal knowledge building is entirely unreasonable, and I wouldn't consider such a stance as worth working with. --Jayron32 18:24, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

An additional point, while I agree that some of those who have doubts about vaccines can be persuaded with more education etc, as you yourself agreed there are those who will never be. Your description, including from the issue highlighted by Jayron32 suggests the person you're arguing with fits into the latter not the former. Nil Einne (talk) 18:46, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

Nil Einne, your... prognosis is wrong. As I said, I already convinced him about anti viral vaccines, and I'm still working on anti-bacterial vaccines and antibiotics. אילן שמעוני (talk) 07:56, 8 August 2019 (UTC)

I understand the desire for visual proof. If I was on a jury and an expert testified that the bloody fingerprints on the murder weapon matched the defendants, I'd still like to see the prints for myself. SinisterLefty (talk) 20:17, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

I think this is deeper than that, though. This is demanding to see a video of the defendant shooting the victim, and rejecting anything short of that. Someguy1221 (talk) 21:37, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

So? What is more important: Get an anti-vaxxer off the hook, or be righteous with who's to blame? אילן שמעוני (talk) 07:50, 8 August 2019 (UTC)

It looks like your friend rejects the Germ theory of disease, not just vaccination efficacy. A few ways to address this:

• The reason medical science knows that an organism causes a disease is because it satisfies Koch’s postulates (in the Robert Koch section of Germ theory of disease). This convinces the medical community that an organism causes a disease, and it might help your friend. I think that any infectious disease with a known cause has had the series of experiments outlined in Koch’s postulates run on it, and you can probably find the publication of these experiments for every disease your friend is interested in. It does have a few caveats, with polio given as an example in the article.
• Beta-hemolytic Streptococcus bacteria rupture red blood cells, and a way to diagnose streptococcal infection is to culture a sample on blood agar. The indirect evidence of streptococcal bacteria killing red blood cells is apparent to the naked eye – blood agar turns from red to clear. There might be videos of this happening at the microscopic level.
• Some bacteria harm their hosts not by killing individual cells, but by more systemic means. The symptoms of Tetanus occur because clostridium tetani secretes a neurotoxin (similar to nerve agents used in chemical warfare). (Already mentioned by Nil Einne.)
• Some bacteria are intracellular parasites, that is they live inside the cells of the host. Salmonella, which causes typhus, and Yersinia, which causes plague (both of which have vaccines), are listed in the intracellular parasites article. Microscopic images or videos of these bacteria living inside cells might help convince your friend that they can cause disease.

--Wikimedes (talk) 16:58, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

Lagrange points

Have Lagrange points been studied above or below equatorial plane (i.e. in 3d space) and confirmed unavailable?Almuhammedi (talk) 14:19, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

A contour plot of the effective potential due to gravity and the centrifugal force of a two-body system in a rotating frame of reference. The arrows indicate the gradients of the potential around the five Lagrange points—downhill toward them (red) or away from them (blue). Counterintuitively, the L₄ and L₅ points are the high points of the potential. At the points themselves these forces are balanced.

A Lagrange point is a point where two opposing gravitational attractions balance each other, so it doesn't make any sense to have any outside the orbital plane. Looking at the diagram, objects at the L1, L2, and L3 points are all pulled back into line with the two objects. Similarly, if we looked at the same chart, edge-on, all objects would be pulled towards the orbital plane by the gravitational attraction of both objects. The L4 and L5 Lagrange points are a bit different, where an object in a (nearly) co-orbit with the smaller object (Earth in the diagram) stays in the same point, relative to the small object, as opposed to moving closer or farther from it, within the orbit. Since objects outside the orbital plane can't be near a co-orbit, those cases don't apply, either.

Now, there could be cases where there are 3 or more bodies not in a coplanar orbit which create a similar point in space where all the forces balance, but a Lagrange point, by definition, is about balancing the gravitational attraction of only 2 objects. Of course, in the real world, there's always more than just 2 objects, so what we think of as planar Lagrange points may be pulled slightly out of the plane by other objects. For example, the Lagrange points between the Earth and Moon are presumably pulled slightly out of that orbital plane and towards the orbital plane of the Earth-Sun system. SinisterLefty (talk) 16:09, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

The Earth's equatorial plane that the OP may be referring to is not coplanar with the ecliptic plane of the Lagrange points, but is inclined to it by an angle of about 23.4°. DroneB (talk) 00:22, 8 August 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. I just assumed they meant the ecliptic plane when I gave my response. SinisterLefty (talk) 15:01, 8 August 2019 (UTC)