Monthly report – June 2025

We’ve finally made it to the middle of the year! To all our regular readers and our wonderful members and partner organisations, thank you for supporting Project BioLogical through our first six issues! To those who are here for the first time, why not explore our past issues and find out more articles that catch your eye?

Right now, we’ve been hard at work covering youth science events across Singapore, from the United Water Conference to the Science and Humanities Research Olympiad. Apart from that, we’re busy with the launch of the Singapore Biology Reporter’s Challenge, a permanent fixture of our movement that invites youth to submit articles to get published. Excited to win a prize and a certificate? Submit your best-written article on a topic you’re passionate about before 31st July 2025 to stand a chance at winning up to $50 in cash prizes!

But you’re here for our three news reports of the month, aren’t you? Without further ado, here’s your monthly report for Issue 6!

Autism and vaccines… again

The new United States Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Junior has been known for a great many things – among them vicious opposition to vaccines and also having had a worm eat a portion of his brain. This time, having been elected to the position of Health Secretary, he’s setting off on a new mission: to find what causes autism, albeit strongly influenced by his preconceived notions.

To understand his focus on autism, we must first go back to 1998. Andrew Wakefield, a physician at the time, was involved in the publication of a study in famed medical journal The Lancet that claimed a link between the Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine and the risk of autism in children. As many of you may know, this study was later proven to be fraudulent (turning out to be sponsored by a company selling an alternative vaccine) leading Wakefield to be disgraced and compelled to stop practising medicine.

Nonetheless, the damage had already been done. In the following years, vaccination rates dropped and measles outbreaks returned in force as people began to fear vaccinating their children, out of concern that it would “make them autistic”.

What has this got to do with RFK? Mr Kennedy believes that there is no reason for a surge in autism diagnoses like that we’ve seen in recent decades that can be attributed to genetics. To him, an environmental factor must have been introduced that has precipitated this “outbreak”, and given his history, the finger seems to be pointing at vaccination.

However, many scientists have already cautioned against leaping to such conclusions. Over the past decades, we’ve come to understand that autism is a highly complex condition that can be attributed to a wide variety of genetic causes as well as what the child experiences in the womb. Identical twins have been shown, for instance, to have a much higher chance of both children being autistic than fraternal twins that do not share more genetic similarity than ordinary siblings.

Apart from this, the simple fact that definitions of autism have evolved to become broader and encompass a wider range of support needs from low- to high-functioning autistic individuals as well as the improvement of the accuracy and accessibility of diagnostic tools means that more and more cases of autism will be detected. It’s not that there’s suddenly more autism going around, but rather that those who would otherwise have been classified as intellectually disabled or just plain “weird” are now finding their diagnosis.

Does any of this make RFK change course? Not really. If he really does reallocate a great deal of funding to his project to find an environmental “smoking gun” that causes autism, what’s most likely to happen is rather bleak. Those who are developing real treatments, such as a promising genetic therapy targeting the related SHANK3 mutation, will experience budget cuts. All this seems to point towards is the administration making these procedures that could greatly help autistic people much harder to access or even dooming them to the dustbin of failed scientific ventures.

Meanwhile, it remains to be seen what will be discovered by the Health department.

Feeling blue?

Let’s talk about something closer to home. A new Lancet study has revealed that mental disorders are the most prevalent cause of death and disability of 10-14 year olds in Singapore. In addition, out of all ASEAN countries, we are the one nation that has demonstrated the highest level of distress as a result of mental disorders.

Mental disorders affect both men and women here, with more than 10% of both being diagnosed. The most common culprits are depression and anxiety, and among teens these disorders have been perpetually on the rise. But even amongst the elderly aged above 70, the prevalence of mental illness is three times that in 1990, a statistic that might come as a shock. Much has to do with the Covid pandemic, which triggered a wave of loneliness globally with impacts that are still felt today.

These were among the findings by a study conducted through a collaboration between the National University of Singapore’s Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine (NUS Medicine) and the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).

Lead author Marie Ng from NUS Medicine attributes much of the stress teens feel to the widespread use of of social media, the primary cause of Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), as well as to a rise in academic stresses. Apart from that, many families have been strained and broken apart in recent years, causing a great deal of distress for young people.

As for the elderly, our aging population leaves us with a greater number of seniors than ever before, many of whom suffer diseases associated with old age. In conjunction with loneliness due to absent adult children and stressors related to the pandemic, many of these elderly are suffering from depression.

More disturbingly, self-harm was the number 1 leading cause of injury-related death in Singapore, accounting for 47% of all such deaths. With mental disorders being the primary driver of self-harming behaviour, one can only wonder just how far this trend will continue.

Even though we have made great strides forward in many aspects of physical health, leading the region in aspects like cardiovascular care, it seems to be that we must now turn towards ensuring both the body and the mind are healthy.

How the plague got away

Let’s talk about something a little more laidback (not really). In centuries gone by, plague broke out again and again, ravaging whole cities and foreshadowing the fall of empires. Every once in a while, plague would run rampant over Eurasia, taking on the same form over and over again – the disease would disappear and reappear in cyclical outbreaks, killing millions as it went, for pandemics that lasted centuries.

The first two recorded plague pandemics were horrific. The first, beginning in the 6th century AD, was the plague of Justinian that crippled the Byzantine empire. The second, beginning in the 14th century, was the famous Black Death pandemic that caused the only time in recorded human history where the total world population decreased.

Sometime in the 18th or 19th century, plague stopped being on the forefront of people’s minds. Of course, other pathogens ran rampant. The flu, most notably, became the deadliest pandemic humanity ever experienced. Even when a third plague pandemic struck that lasted till the middle of World War II, it didn’t make its way into our cultural memory the way the first couple rounds did, and killed “only” 15 million people as opposed to the roughly 50 million estimates placed on the first two plague outbreaks.

Where did the plague go?

A new study in Nature has uncovered the effect of the Pla gene, a sequence that has been linked to viral lethality. What they’ve discovered is that some strains of the plague bacterium, Yersina pestis, have experienced a deletion of Pla, making them a whole lot less deadly compared to their ancient ancestors.

You might wonder why this is beneficial. Isn’t reproducing as much as possible the aim of the bacterium, rather than keeping the host alive? Besides, given that it can live in and spread from dead hosts, it doesn’t make much sense for the bacterium to worry about dying with the host like many viruses would.

One of the key reasons that this mutation has propagated across the species is that it helps the bacterium travel.

One of the biggest factors that contributed to the success of a plague bacterium in the past was that it had to be able to travel long distances. Before the modern era, this meant lots of time spent in an intermediate host like a rat onboard a ship – and thus the bacterium could not afford to kill the rat before it was able to jump onto land and spread the disease (otherwise the ship would get quarantined.)

In fact, being too lethal would lead to the population being more fragmented with towns being isolated from their neighbours by virtue of their neighbours being dead or quarantined. It is not unlikely that this effect is what ended each centuries-long outbreak of plague.

Via deletion of the Pla gene, the plague bacterium might have found a way to enable itself to circulate for longer in its host rats, giving it the chance to spread further and for longer albeit with a lowered death rate. This, indeed, could be a contributed factor to the lower toll from the most recent plague outbreak, though many other factors must be considered.

Alas, antibiotics were invented, much to the misfortune of Yersina pestis (but much to our benefit). We’ll never know if this mutation made the plague more dangerous than it was before, but perhaps it is best that this question be laid to rest.

Conclusion

That’s all for the monthly report in this issue! We hope you’ve found it informative and perhaps inspires you to write something for the SBRC. And if not, time to browse through and find more ideas from our many talented writers!

References

1. https://www.vox.com/health/414740/rfk-jr-autism-kids-causes-diagnosis-meaning

2. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/lancet-study-shows-mental-disorders-significantly-impact-youth-aged-10-14-in-singapore

3. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01687-8