Anthrax, rewards and adverse effects at the end of the year – 12/25/2023 – Luciano Melo

A young man, in 1876, dedicated himself to painting Christmas cards and added a special effect. He knew of a green paint that caused a pleasant visual sensation. Carefully, he took care that this color predominated in his figures.

In the name of his craftsmanship, the 22-year-old almost died from poisoning. The coloring was Scheele’s Green, technically copper hydrogen arsenite, more poison than decoration.

A hamster would be the gift to spread cuteness in a home at Christmas in 1974. The little animal, however, was a reservoir of the lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus. And what she disseminated was the microbe.

In total, 57 people were infected in New York. In the same year, a young photographer bought bongos in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to distribute as Christmas gifts in her country, the USA. She, with a heart full of good intentions, did not even suspect that the drums made from goat leather were full of spores of the Anthrax bacteria.

This bacillus is endemic to Haiti, and lives mainly in ruminants. The girl was infected and spent the end of the year festivities in a hospital. These clinical reports, year-end adverse effects, were published as scientific articles in very important medical journals.

Times are different. The editions have changed and, currently, less particular and less specific themes are those that are preferentially present in the indexes of influential periodicals. Therefore, what is in vogue is the published evidence that, towards the end of the year, weight gain and an increase in blood cholesterol concentrations are spreading.

Another small problem revealed: 22% of cardiac arrhythmias caused by excessive alcohol consumption, whose friendly nickname is “holiday heart syndrome”, occur during the last annual celebrations. The publications do not let us forget that sharp decorations and their metallic clips have found their way into the bronchi and pharynx of young children and become demands for endoscopic or surgical interventions.

Scientists can take advantage of Christmas to test very complex questions, such as the impact of festivities on brain biochemistry. Measuring brain chemical changes is a challenge, especially outside of laboratories. However, invasive treatments against Parkinson’s disease open the way.

Stimulating electrodes are sometimes surgically implanted in the brains of people with this disease, for therapeutic purposes. These devices also monitor and record a neural electromagnetic wave, which from deep within the brain emerges as an objective parameter of disease severity.

The more of these waves, the less dopamine and more symptoms. But there is something more: the brain reward systems, responsible for bringing us the experience of satisfaction, are strictly dopaminergic.

Researchers studied the dynamics of those deep waves during dinners and gift exchanges and found an increase in dopaminergic activity. This way they quantified the biochemistry of the festival, which even led to an improvement in some parkinsonian symptoms.

However, sometimes dopamine is not enough to appease the sentimentality typical of the petit bourgeois, which comes to the surface in someone when, finally, they confront the lack and deprivation of so many with the festivities around them. Another source of bitterness is facing the end of the deadline for promises launched 365 days ago.

Promises are one of the oldest – and specific – human psychic mechanisms, important for shaping cooperation and trust between individuals. Missing them is demanding. To do this, the brain increases its inhibitory forces, probably to avoid opening the game and confessing to anyone that there will be disappointment.

When the moment to give up is inevitable, motivational nerve centers highlight the reasons for breaking the commitment and begin to value the expected benefits. They also compensate for discomfort caused by possible feelings of guilt or aversive sensations, if the lack of words leads to a confrontation.

These movements calm the sensations caused by failures and also the psychic consequences of unmasked lies, at the expense of a lot of brain energy. You, smart reader, have just concluded that human brains are very well adapted to consistent or inconsistent breaking of promises, you already knew that this is how people continue.

Remembering what was not honored and renewing dispositions is traditional in the December passages.

But what is all this in the face of the hope of eternal life and other meanings of this time? A prosperous New Year.

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