Respiratory Career Blog

Respiratory Therapist

A respiratory therapist (RT) is a healthcare worker who treats people with breathing or cardiopulmonary problems. Among their patients are premature infants whose lungs are underdeveloped and children and adults who have lung diseases such as cystic fibrosis, asthma and COPD. After interviewing and examining a patient, and upon consultation with a physician, he or she will develop a treatment plan.

This plan may include removing mucus from a patient's lungs or inserting a ventilation tube into the patient's windpipe and connecting it to a machine that delivers oxygen. A respiratory therapist also delivers emergency care to heart attack and drowning victims or to people in shock. Some RTs work in home care.

In this capacity, one sets up ventilators and other life support equipment and instructs caretakers in their use.

Employment Facts

Respiratory therapists held about 113,000 jobs in 2010. Most work in respiratory care, anesthesiology or pulmonary medicine departments of hospitals. Others work in nursing care facilities. Some are employed by home health care agencies.

Educational Requirements

One must have, at least, an associate degree to work as a respiratory therapist. Most programs that train people to work in this field offer bachelor's degrees as well and often employers favor job candidates who have graduated from those programs. Respiratory therapy programs can be found at colleges, medical schools, vocational schools, and in the Armed Forces.

Respiratory Disease Blog

Respiratory disease is a medical term that encompasses pathological conditions affecting the organs and tissues that make gas exchange possible in higher organisms, and includes conditions of the upper respiratory tract,trachea, bronchi, bronchioles, alveoli, pleura and pleural cavity, and the nerves and muscles of breathing. Respiratory diseases range from mild and self-limiting, such as the common cold, to life-threatening entities like bacterial pneumonia, pulmonary embolism, and lung cancer.The study of respiratory disease is known as pulmonology. A doctor who specializes in respiratory disease is known as a pulmonologist, a chest medicine specialist, a respiratory medicine specialist, a respirologist or a thoracic medicine specialist.
Inflammatory lung disease are characterized by a high neutrophil count, for example, asthma, cystic fibrosis, emphysema, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder or acute respiratory distress syndrome. Asthma is one of the deadly lung diseases. Asthma is a disease that infects the airways leading to the loss of the control over the smooth muscles that line the bronchi and bronchioles. When exposed to an irritant such as dust or smoke, the smooth muscles that line airways of the asthmatic patient start to contract faster and stronger leading to difficulty breathing.
Restrictive lung diseases are a category of respiratory disease characterized by a loss of lung compliance, causing incomplete lung expansion and increased lung stiffness, such as infants with respiratory distress syndrome.
Respiratory tract infections can affect any part of the respiratory system. They are traditionally divided into upper respiratory tract infections and lower respiratory tract infections.
Upper Respiratory tract infection is the most common upper respiratory tract infection is pneumonia, an infection of the lungs which is usually caused by bacteria, particularly "Streptococcus pneumoniae" in Western countries. Worldwide, tuberculosis is an important cause of pneumonia. Other pathogens such as viruses and fungi can cause pneumonia for example severe acute respiratory syndrome and pneumocystis pneumonia. A pneumonia may develop complications such as a lung abscess, a round cavity in the lung caused by the infection, or may spread to the pleural cavity.

Poor oral care may be a contributing factor to lower respiratory disease. New research suggests bacteria from gum disease travel through airways and into the lungs.

Polygenetic Traits

What are Polygenetic Traits? 


Polygenic traits are traits that are controlled by more than one gene.  For example, height, weight, hair color, skin color (basically anything dealing with color). This allows for a wide range of physical traits. 


One good example of these traits is, if height was controlled by one gene A and if AA = 6' and Aa = 5'7" and as = 5', then people would either be 6', 5'7", or 5'. Since height is controlled by more than one gene, a wide range of heights is possible.


Polygenic traits usually produce a continuum of phenotypes.  Individual genes of a polygenic trait follow Mendel's laws, but together do not produce Mendelian ratios.  A bell shaped curve often describes the distribution of phenotypic classes of a polygenic trait.



They are recognized by their expressions that result from gradation of continuous variation.
Additive effects of two or more separate pair of genes control continuous variation.
The traits are quantified by measuring the variation, rather than counting.

They're different types of phenotypic expression which contributes to different pairs of genes.
These traits are also known as quantitative traits or multifactorial traits.  They are controlled by two or more genes at different loci on different chromosomes or it is the trait that is controlled by non-allelic genes. They are known as quantitative traits as their phenotypic expression is dependent on multiple alleles located on different chromosomes.

Phylogeny

Phylogeny is the history of the evolution of a species or group, especially in reference to lines of descent and relationships among broad groups of organisms.
Phylogeny proposes that plants or animals of different species descended from common ancestors. The are a huge number of species that have ever lived are extinct, and relatively few of their remains have been preserved in the fossil record. Most phylogenies therefore are hypotheses and are based on indirect evidence. There is universal understanding that the tree of life is the result of organic descent from earlier ancestors and that true phylogenies are discoverable.

Evidence for specific phylogenies

Most of the data used in making phylogenetic judgments have come from comparative anatomy and from embryology, although these are rapidly being surpassed by systems constructed using molecular data. In comparing features common to different species, anatomists try to distinguish between homologies, or similarities inherited from a common ancestor, and analogies, or similarities that arise in response to similar habits and living conditions.


By counting differences in the sequence of units that make up protein and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecules, researchers have devised a tool for measuring the degree to which different species have diverged since evolving from a common ancestor. Because mitochondrial DNA has very high mutation rates compared with nuclear DNA, it has been useful for establishing relationships among groups that have diverged recently. Essentially, the application of molecular genetics to systematics is similar to the use of radioisotopes in geologic dating: molecules change at different rates, with some, such as mitochondrial DNA, evolving rapidly and others, such as ribosomal RNA, evolving slowly. An important assumption then in using molecules for phylogeny reconstruction is to select the appropriate gene for the age of the taxon under study.

Sustainability

Sustainability is how biological systems endure and remain diverse and productive. Sustainability refers to the endurance of systems and processes. The organizing principle for sustainability, is sustainable development, which includes the four interconnected domains, ecology, economics, politics and culture. 


Sustainability science is the study of the concepts of sustainable development and environmental science.


Healthy ecosystems and environments are necessary to the survival of humans and other organisms. Ways of reducing human impact are environmentally-friendly chemical engineering, environmental resources management and environmental protection.


Moving towards sustainability is also a social challenge that entails international and national law, urban planning and transport, local and individual lifestyles and ethical consumerism. Ways of living more sustainably can take many forms from re-organizing living conditions.


Despite the increased popularity of the use of the term "sustainability", the possibility that human societies will achieve environmental sustainability has been, and continues to be, questioned—in light of environmental degradation, climate change, overconsumption, and societies' pursuit of indefinite economic growth in a closed system.


Sustain can mean “maintain", "support", or "endure”.  Since the 1980s sustainability has been used more in the sense of human sustainability on planet Earth and this has resulted in the most widely quoted definition of sustainability as a part of the concept sustainable development, that of the Brundtland Commission of the United Nations on March 20, 1987: “sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

Fossils

Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of animals, plants, and other organisms from hundreds or thousands years ago. Fossils are both discovered and undiscovered, and their placement in fossiliferous rock formations and sedimentary layers or strata is known as the fossil record.


The study of fossils across geological time, how they were formed, and the evolutionary relationships between taxa phylogeny are some of the most important functions of the science of paleontology. A  preserved specimen is called a "fossil" if it is older than some minimum age, most often the arbitrary date of 10,000 years.   Fossils range in age from the youngest at the start of the Holocene Epoch to the oldest from the Archaean Eon, up to 3.48 billion years old.  The observation that certain fossils were associated with certain rock strata led early geologists to recognize a geological timescale in the 19th century. The development of radiometric dating techniques in the early 20th century allowed geologists to determine the numerical or "absolute" age of the various strata and thereby the included fossils.
Like extant organisms, fossils vary in size from microscopic, even single bacterial cells one micrometer in diameter, to gigantic, such as dinosaurs and trees many meters long and weighing many tons. A fossil normally preserves only a portion of the deceased organism, usually that portion that was partially mineralized during life, such as the bones and teeth of vertebrates, or the chitinous or calcareous exoskeletons of invertebrates. Fossils may also consist of the marks left behind by the organism while it was alive, such as animal tracks or feces otherwise known as coprolites. These types of fossil are called trace fossils or ichnofossils, as opposed to body fossils.


Finally, past life leaves some markers that cannot be seen but can be detected in the form of biochemical signals; these are known as chemofossils or biomarkers.

Arboretum museum trip

The University Arboretum is the arboretum and botanic garden of the California State University, Sacramento at 6000 J Street, Sacramento, California, at J Street and Carlson Drive.


Founded in 1945 on what used to be a pear orchard and hop ranch the arboretum was originally named the Charles M. Goethe Arboretum in honor of Charles Goethe (1875–1966, pronounced "geh-teh"), a land developer, philanthropist, conservationist, eugenicist, and one of the university's founding fathers. "The name was changed without fanfare to University Arboretum in 2005" because of renewed attention to Goethe's virulently racist views, praise of Nazi Germany, and advocacy of eugenics.
 The arboretum is open daily from dawn to dusk and has some 1200 trees. Of particular interest is a wide-ranging conifer collection as well as several rare plants, including Taiwania and the "living fossil" Wollemia. The arboretum has a "Jurassic Park" section with flowering plants species dating back to the age of dinosaurs and another section for California native plants, with some 50 different species represented.
Mike Baad, a retired professor who volunteered at the arboretum since he joined the university in 1969, is the University Arboretum's longtime director