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WORK TITLE: Catching Breath
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://catching-breath.net/
CITY: London
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Imperial College, London, Ph.D., 2006.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Science writer. Worked formerly in tuberculosis research and for the National Institute for Medical Research.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Kathryn Lougheed is a British science writer. She received her Ph.D. from Imperial College London in 2006. Prior to this, she worked in tuberculosis research for over ten years. Her area of research was the biological mechanisms of latent tuberculosis and small molecule drug discovery. After Lougheed graduated from Imperial College, she began working at the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR). At NIMR, she collaborated with industrial partners to develop inhibitors targeted against Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Catching Breath: The Making and Unmaking of Tuberculosis is her first book.
In Catching Breath, Lougheed utilizes her many years of tuberculosis research experience to describe the history and nature of the infectious disease. Loughreed explains how the virus has evolved alongside humanity, adapting and changing to ensure survival just as the human immune system adapted and evolved to fight it off. Loughreed describes the history and growth of the disease, explaining in detail its remarkable survival strategies.
Loughreed goes into great detail describing the nature of the infectious disease. She explains the interaction between the bug and the human body. Tuberculosis travels from one host to another through small droplets that are released from an infected person via a cough or sneeze, and are then breathed in by another person. When tuberculosis bacteria lands in the lungs of a new host, the immune system detects the foreign body and sends macrophages, a type of white blood cell that engulfs and digests foreign objects, cellular debris, cancer cells, and microbes, to engulf and digest it. The tuberculosis respond by infesting the macrophage and essentially turning it into a squat. The bacteria live on various immune cell lipids and the inhabited macrophages group into granulomas that form clusters in the lung. These tuberculosis macrophage clusters develop particularly thick walls, making it very difficult to fight the disease. Additionally, antibiotics can only fight tuberculosis when it is active. When it is sleeping, antibiotics have no effect, and therefore the disease can go latent for years and then pop back up again, causing an unexpected infection. Some strains of tuberculosis have developed antibiotic-fighting mutations, which means numerous types of dugs and antibiotics must be administered over long periods of time to effectively fight the disease.
Loughreed notes that throughout the majority of human history, the human immune system was able to adequately combat tuberculosis. She cites the industrial revolution as the essential shift that gave tuberculosis the upper hand, providing it with condensed populations and low immune systems that allowed it to rapidly spread. She describes how medical advancements in the 1900s seemed to promise the extinction of the disease. However, the disease responded with mutations that resisted antibiotic advances. Additionally, continued overpopulation and poverty alongside the spread of immune system-depleting HIV has given tuberculosis many stages to continue to thrive.
Loughreed discusses current research on tuberculosis, describing the modern state of tuberculosis and the environments that encourage its spread. Poverty, malnutrition, and crowded living conditions are all great environments for tuberculosis, which is why it is so common in migrant and refugee camps. Loughreed highlights social and racial inequalities and how these injustices cause certain populations to be disproportionately effected by the disease.
Tony Miksanek in Booklist wrote Lougheed’s “surprisingly entertaining discussion of tuberculosis is imbued with a quirky sense of humor, weird facts, lots of science, and a healthy respect for the illness.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews described the book as “not just a medical history, but a call to action.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly noted Lougheed’s “cheerful anecdotes and jokes do not always succeed,” adding, she is “at her best when describing the research done in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 1, 2017, Tony Miksanek, review of Catching Breath: The Making and Unmaking of Tuberculosis, p. 6.
Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2017, review of Catching Breath.
Publishers Weekly, June 26, 2017, review of Catching Breath, p. 167.
About
KLougheed_photo
Kathryn Lougheed is a science writer and friend to bacteria. She worked in tuberculosis research for more than ten years, focusing on the biological mechanisms of latent tuberculosis and small molecule drug discovery. She completed her PhD at Imperial College London in 2006, before moving to the National Institute for Medical Research where she collaborated with industrial partners to develop inhibitors targeted against Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Catching Breath is her first book and is out now.
Catching Breath: The Making and
Unmaking of Tuberculosis
Tony Miksanek
Booklist.
114.1 (Sept. 1, 2017): p6+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Catching Breath: The Making and Unmaking of Tuberculosis. By Kathryn Lougheed. Sept. 2017. 272p.
Bloomsbury/Sigma, $27 (9781472930330); e-book (9781472930361). 362.19699.
Microbiologist Lougheed aims at "rebranding TB as a modern monster rather than a mothballed relic of
history." Her surprisingly entertaining discussion of tuberculosis is imbued with a quirky sense of humor,
weird facts, lots of science, and a healthy respect for the illness. TB is a bigger killer than HIV/AIDS and
malaria. It has gone by many names (consumption, the white plague, phthisis); been romanticized; and
infected many famous figures, including Keats, Chopin, Gauguin, and Kafka. It is curable but hard to kill,
and "TB treatment is a bitch." Typical cases require 6 to 9 months of multiple medications; drug-resistant
cases necessitate antibiotic therapy of 20 months or longer. HIV and poverty are TB's partners in crime.
Lougheed's biography of this tough mycobacterium includes a discussion of the BCG vaccine, molecular
archaeology, sputum culture, drug discovery, and GeneXpert molecular diagnostic testing. She also finds
room for giant African pouched rats trained to sniff TB's smell print, an Egyptian mummy, and the peculiar
susceptibility of elephants to tuberculosis. A successful introduction to the continued challenges presented
by perhaps the deadliest infection in human history.--Tony Miksanek
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Ed
4/23/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Lougheed, Kathryn: CATCHING
BREATH
Kirkus Reviews.
(July 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Lougheed, Kathryn CATCHING BREATH Bloomsbury (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 9, 5 ISBN: 978-1-4729-
3033-0
An exegesis on tuberculosis, a scourge that continues to threaten humanity: in 2015, there were 10.4 million
new cases and 1.4 million deaths.London-based microbiologist Lougheed left the TB field after years of
drug research that yielded few results. Indeed, her text makes clear that Mycobacterium tuberculosis is a
bug that has co-evolved with humans since the birth of our species, acquiring extraordinary survival
strategies. When the bugs land in a lung, the immune system sends macrophages to engulf and eat them, but
they convert the macrophages to squats and live on various immune cell lipids. In turn, these infested
macrophages group into granulomas that cluster in the lung, each with its own ecology. Further
complicating the problem of combatting the disease is the fact that M. tuberculosis has an especially thick
cell wall. Antibiotics only work against actively growing cells, so if the TB bug is sleeping, it can persist
and then become the source of reactivation of a latent infection. Then there are the bugs with mutations that
have resulted in multiply drug-resistant TB. Lougheed examines all these microbe-immune system
interactions by dissecting current research papers as though readers were part of a weekly session of postdoctoral
candidates keeping up-to-date. (The book could have used further editing for a general audience.)
The author also explains the need for daily treatment regimens of multiple pills or injections that can last for
years. As Lougheed notes, as well, TB flourishes in the presence of poverty, malnutrition, crowded living
conditions, and co-infections. Unfortunately, this makes certain areas particularly vulnerable to the disease,
including migrant and refugee camps. Not just a medical history, but a call to action. TB is not some quaint
19th-century romantic tragedy but rather a very real and present danger that requires investments in
diagnostics and new drugs and greater attention to social and racial inequities.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Lougheed, Kathryn: CATCHING BREATH." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497199557/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f7516a43.
Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A497199557
4/23/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1524519567885 3/3
Catching Breath: The Making and
Unmaking of Tuberculosis
Publishers Weekly.
264.26 (June 26, 2017): p167.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Catching Breath: The Making and Unmaking of Tuberculosis
Kathryn Lougheed. Sigma, $27 (272p) ISBN 978-1-4729-3033-0
British medical researcher Lougheed creditably covers the long, painful history of tuberculosis, the world's
leading infectious killer, and the impressive recent advances in combatting it. The slow-growing and tough
TB bacterium has infected humans since prehistory, but our immune system largely kept it under control up
until the industrial revolution, when humans packed into cities and their health and immune systems
declined. Improvements in public health after 1900 reduced infections, and it was widely believed that antiTB
antibiotics--which were developed after just after WWII-would eliminate the threat. But resistance
appeared; widespread poverty in the developing world, combined with other diseases attacking the immune
system such as HIV, has produced a worldwide epidemiological crisis. Lougheed delivers an expert account
of this history, although her efforts to enliven a dismal subject with cheerful anecdotes and jokes do not
always succeed. She is at her best when describing the research done in the late 20th and early 21st
centuries. Dazzling technical advances, new drugs, the development of genomics, insights into the
bacterium's metabolism, and massive but halting political efforts may eventually turn the tide, but as
Lougheed writes, TB is "very much a disease of the present and, sadly, the future." (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Catching Breath: The Making and Unmaking of Tuberculosis." Publishers Weekly, 26 June 2017, p. 167.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497444418/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a3e8d41b. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A497444418