P D Ball’s Newsletter No. 11

Hello! We finally made it through the world’s hottest summer on record! Though I imagine many people are still having hot days. I certainly am! I hope you are doing well and can stay cool.

Contents:

First Words

Behind the Scenes

Two Group Promos and Two Authors To Check Out (the last one is free)

First: Progress

Book 5 is really taking shape. It’s now larger than Books 2 and 3 (each at 65k words), but not as big as Book 4 (100k words). This is the first series I’ve written and, I have to say, writing the conclusion is hard. It’s much easier to introduce mystery than provide explanations for them – but the explanations are coming!

Behind the Scenes (BTS)

I was wracking my brain trying to come up with a topic for this month’s BTS and thought perhaps I should write about the history of whiskey, since it’s important to Cayce. But then I thought, why not write about the history of fermented alcohol? That’s where I realized that the history of alcohol is, at least in the East, where wet rice farming was invented, intimately tied to the rise of malaria. That’s how this discussion came to be about malaria and how strange it is.

Malaria is a single celled organism that reproduces inside blood cells. It requires the iron to make more of itself. It gets into a human body, infects blood cells, then hijacks the cell, forcing it to manufacture many copies of itself. Once that is done, the baby malaria mature and the cell bursts open, dumping them into the blood stream.

Malaria requires mosquitoes to pass it on from individual to individual and so induces high fevers in us.  The fevers motivate people to rest – or forces them to – making them easy targets for the mosquitoes. The parasite times its maturation cycle to the activity cycle of mosquitoes. People will therefore be most sick from malaria at dawn and dusk, when mosquitoes are most active. Malaria is awful.

Now to the interesting part. Have you ever enjoyed a night socializing, drinking a bit, and one of your friends, or perhaps you yourself, turn red because of alcohol, perhaps as little as one glass of wine or beer? In the medical literature, this is called “facial flushing,” and it’s typically described as the result of a “faulty gene.” Specifically, it’s a mutation on the aldehyde dehydrogenase 2 (ALDH2) gene (it’s technically an “allele,” which is a gene competing for space on the chromosome; either this mutation or the unmutated gene is taking that space).

The medical professionals are incorrect. It’s not a faulty gene. It’s doing exactly what it evolved to do, which is change how human metabolic processes work. The obvious process that’s affected is the ability to fully metabolize alcohol. It takes at least 11 steps to process ethanol, the second last of which produces acetaldehyde, a toxin, with the last step detoxifying the toxin. People with this mutation do not reach that last step and so do not detoxify acetaldehyde, which causes inflammation and thus the facial flushing. These people therefore suffer more deleterious effects from drinking alcohol.

Additionally, the mutation causes a decrease in vitamin A absorption, about 40 times less. So, you can see why medical science describes the mutation as a faulty gene – it appears to be causing all manner of problems for people with it.

But, like the production of alcohol, this mutation arose with the invention of wet rice farming. And that brings us back to malaria, which also dramatically increased because of wet rice farming.

Because of the intense fevers malaria causes, the disease has high mortality rates, especially among children under 5 and adults over 65. It has therefore produced high selection pressure on human populations, resulting in a number of mutations that offer protection against malaria. The most famous of these is cycle-celled anemia, where people carrying 1 copy of the gene have increased protection against malaria. People with 2 copies of the gene develop anemia, which is usually fatal. In this case, the cycle shape of the red blood cell prevents overwhelming malaria infection.

Let’s go back to the malaria life cycle. Because it forces your red blood cells to produce lots and lots of new malaria, the red blood cells are pushed to their limits of breaking. It doesn’t take much to burst red blood cells at this point. And, if they break before the malaria mature, then those malaria die without being able to reproduce.

Antioxidants protect our cells, and iron protects red blood cells. If you give a malaria patient iron supplements, they develop much worse fevers. Early medical teams tested malaria patients and found them to be anemic, so gave them iron supplements, resulting in many of their patients dying. Likewise, if a malaria patient takes in lots of antioxidants and vitamins, they aren’t helping their disease course out. Well, they are helping the pathogen by keeping their red blood cells intact.

Therefore, lots of cultural groups in malaria-infested regions developed food cultures that decreased antioxidants and increased oxidants in their foods coinciding with malarial seasons. The Hausa, for example, increased oxidant-rich foods like fava beans during malarial times of the year.

So, the ALDH2 gene decreases vitamin A absorption, which then puts greater stress on red blood cells, making them more likely to burst when infected with malaria. The gene therefore functions to protect people against malaria. It won’t stop those with it from becoming infected, but it does decrease malaria reproduction, which prevents dangerous infection.

If you’re ever in a situation where someone turns red from alcohol, you can assure them that their gene is not faulty and is acting as it evolved to do, protecting them against malaria.

If you want to learn more about the history of wet rice farming, here’s an interesting video (50 min runtime):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndLfhXoRJo0

Fall Group Promos

Epic Magic and Stellar Sorcery (storyoriginapp.com)

Epic Magic and Stellar Sorcery!

Fall Fantasy Books (storyoriginapp.com)

Fall Fantasy Books!

Authors to check out!

https://storyoriginapp.com/swaps/f91b06b0-51de-11ee-a288-13f013689ef1

A Balm of Healing

Sydney Winward

Emeric Dalena believes his life is over.

For years, the forest fae has been bound to his wheelchair after being brutally injured by those in his village. But when he fakes his death and escapes the horrors tying him to his past, he finds he is lost once more, not knowing how to move forward when he is confined to his chair.

Gweneth Caddell has lost everything.

The High Healer sun fae sells nearly everything she owns to pay off her father’s debts, leaving her destitute. The only way to stay afloat is to become the nurse to a wheelchair-bound man who wants nothing to do with her. At least until he learns of her healing magic.

For the first time in years, Emeric has hope for a brighter future. But can Gweneth heal his legs and give him back the life he’s always wanted? Can they fight the attraction they have for one another?

Or will hearts break when fate threatens to tear them apart?

This next one is free!

https://storyoriginapp.com/swaps/cc54eeb6-51de-11ee-9e9a-77c2123962b9

EXE

Nick McPherson

When a robot suffers a catastrophic system failure and is revived by a young man, it begins to piece together it's primary purpose. But as a reboot signal is simultaneously downloaded, the robot must quickly decide which program is superior; its default programming or the one it created for itself.