The Story
“The mysterious culprit behind ‘water on the brain’ in Ugandan babies”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/hope-emerges-for-preventing-water-on-the-brain-in-ugandan-b
by Anne Pinto-Rodrigues
The Telegraph, September 4, 2023
The Pitch
This pitch is about a team of Ugandan and American neurologists and researchers, who after nearly 2 decades of work, have finally confirmed the organism that is causing hydrocephalus (water on the brain) in newborns there. With this finding, the researchers are hoping to be able to identify preventive measures and shape public policy.
Each year in Uganda, nearly 4,000 infants who are born normal suffer from a serious infection in the weeks after birth. They survive the infection but then go on to develop hydrocephalus (water on the brain). In this condition, the heads of the infants enlarge with each passing day, due to the excessive build-up of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) in the brain’s ventricles. This puts immense pressure on the brain tissue of the infants, causing neurological problems, and other complications that could even lead to death.
For more than a decade, challenges in cultivating the bacteria in the lab, along with systemic problems in Uganda, prevented the researchers from identifying the microbe responsible for causing the initial infection and the subsequent pediatric hydrocephalus.
By 2020, the researchers had found that among children who had survived the initial infection and were then suffering from hydrocephalus, the bacteria Paenibacillus thiaminolyticus – previously thought to be harmless – was present in their CSF. This led to the conclusion that this bacteria is causing the post-infectious hydrocephalus and that it was resistant to the broad spectrum antibiotic being given to treat the initial infection. A paper confirming Paenibacillus thiaminolyticus to be the infection agent was published in June.
The researchers also found that this bacteria thrives in wet environments, which directly correlates to the higher number of hydrocephalus cases from swampy areas and during the rainy seasons. The researchers are now looking to understand how the bacteria gets to the children, in an effort to identify preventive measures and shape public policy. The researchers hope to take the learnings from this program in Uganda, and apply them to other countries in Africa and Asia where post-infectious hydrocephalus is prevalent.
For this piece, I plan to interview the Ugandan neurologists and researchers involved with this program, as well as an unrelated expert for thoughts on what this finding signifies. Would this story be of interest?