Food Ark: Will Seed Banks Save Our Sources of Food?
“Experts estimate that we have lost more than half of the world’s food varieties over the past century”. Charles Siebert writes in National Geographic:
Svalbard Vault Mountain (Cutaway). Illustration: Global Crop Diversity Trust
A crisis is looming: To feed our growing population, we’ll need to double food production. Yet crop yields aren’t increasing fast enough, and climate change and new diseases threaten the limited varieties we’ve come to depend on for food. Luckily we still have the seeds and breeds to ensure our future food supply — but we must take steps to save them.
Six miles outside the town of Decorah, Iowa, an 890-acre stretch of rolling fields and woods called Heritage Farm is letting its crops go to seed. It seems counterintuitive, but then everything about this farm stands in stark contrast to the surrounding acres of neatly rowed corn and soybean fields that typify modern agriculture. Heritage Farm is devoted…
Donors Pledge $4.3 Billion For Child Vaccinations In Poor Nations
A case of good humanitarians. Via Reuters:
International donors led by Britain and Bill Gates pledged $4.3 billion on Monday to buy vaccines to protect children in poor countries against potential killers such as diarrheal diseases and pneumonia.
“But every 20 seconds, a child still dies of a vaccine-preventable disease. There’s more work to be done.”
The funding should allow more than 250 million of the world’s poorest children to be vaccinated by 2015, helping to prevent more than four million premature deaths, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI) said.
“Today is an important moment in our collective commitment to protecting children in developing countries from disease,” said Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who attended the pledging conference in London.
[Continues at Reuters]
UN Asks The World To Put An End To AIDS By 2020
With numerous research groups inching closer to a cure for AIDS, the United Nations asks that leaders throughout the world end the pandemic by 2020. While one of the largest problems in the spread of AIDS is the lack of knowledge about the disease and access to treatment in certain areas, there is also a lack of funding to facilities that are on a progressive path towards a cure, but are stopped because of finances. The Christian Post reports:
World leaders must do everything in their power to end the AIDS pandemic by 2020, the U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said at the U.N. Summit on AIDS in New York.
“Today, we gather to end AIDS,” Ban said as the United Nations General Assembly opened on Wednesday.
The three-day summit is being held as the world marks the 30th anniversary since HIV was first discovered. Ban told delegates gathered from across the world…
Waxy Monkey Frog Skin Could Treat Cancer
Photo: Alexander Maier (CC)
Belfast Telegraph reports:
A little-known frog from South America could hold the key to lifesaving treatments for up to 70 devastating medical conditions, Northern Ireland researchers have found.
Scientists from Queen’s University in Belfast have discovered the poetically-named Waxy Monkey Frog could be used in the fight against cancer.
They also found that the Giant Fire-bellied Toad, native to China and Vietnam, has the potential to treat an array of diseases including diabetes and stroke.
It will bring hope to the 8,500 people in Northern Ireland diagnosed with cancer each year and more than 3,500 people here who are told each year they have diabetes.
The Queen’s boffins stumbled upon the amazing breakthrough – which could revolutionise the treatment of billions of patients around the globe – purely by accident.
[Continues at Belfast Telegraph]
How A Human Virus Is Killing Endangered Gorillas
Photo: FlickreviewR (CC)
Alasdair Wilkins writes in io9:
There’s fewer than 800 Mountain Gorillas left in the entire world, and their survival depends in part on people willing to pay money to go see them. But all this human interaction is bringing gorillas into contact with dangerous diseases.
Although humans are most closely related to chimpanzees, gorillas rank a very respectable second, sharing about 98% of their DNA with us. The current zoological consensus is that there are two distinct species of gorillas, western and eastern, and these are further divided into two subspecies each.
While all the gorilla species are to some degree threatened, the population levels vary wildly. There are at least 100,000 Western Lowland Gorillas in the wild, and 4,000 in zoos, while fellow western subspecies, the rarely seen Cross River Gorilla, is thought to have a remaining population of just 280. As for the eastern subspecies, the Eastern Lowland Gorilla…
U.S. Warns Of Zombie Apocalypse
Hard to believe that this is a real communication from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, but it is! From the official CDC blog:
There are all kinds of emergencies out there that we can prepare for. Take a zombie apocalypse for example. That’s right, I said z-o-m-b-i-e a-p-o-c-a-l-y-p-s-e. You may laugh now, but when it happens you’ll be happy you read this, and hey, maybe you’ll even learn a thing or two about how to prepare for a real emergency.
A Brief History of Zombies
We’ve all seen at least one movie about flesh-eating zombies taking over (my personal favorite is Resident Evil), but where do zombies come from and why do they love eating brains so much? The word zombie comes from Haitian and New Orleans voodoo origins. Although its meaning has changed slightly over the years, it refers to a human corpse mysteriously reanimated to serve the undead. Through ancient voodoo…
‘Berlin Patient’ May Be First Man Cured Of AIDS
From CBS via Radio Television Caraibes reports:
A 45-year-old man now living in the Bay Area may be the first person ever cured of the deadly disease AIDS, the result of the discovery of an apparent HIV immunity gene.
Timothy Ray Brown tested positive for HIV back in 1995, but has now entered scientific journals as the first man in world history to have that HIV virus completely eliminated from his body in what doctors call a “functional cure.”
Brown was living in Berlin, Germany back in 2007, dealing with HIV and leukemia, when scientists there gave him a bone marrow stem cell transplant that had astounding results.
“I quit taking my HIV medication the day that I got the transplant and haven’t had to take any since,” said Brown, who has been dubbed “The Berlin Patient” by the medical community.
Brown’s amazing progress continues to be monitored by doctors at San Francisco General Hospital and at the University of California at…
Drugs Help ‘Reduce’ HIV Transmission
HIV-1 particles assembling at the surface of an infected macrophage.
BBC News reports:
An HIV-positive person who takes anti-retroviral drugs after diagnosis, rather than when their health declines, can cut the risk of spreading the virus to uninfected partners by 96%, according to a study.
The United States National Institutes of Health sampled 1,763 couples in which one partner was infected by HIV.
It was abandoned four years early as the trial was so successful. The World Health Organization said it was a “crucial development”.
The study began in 2005 at 13 sites across across Africa, Asia and the Americas.
HIV-positive patients were split into two groups. In one, individuals were immediately given a course of anti-retroviral drugs. The other group only received the treatment when their white blood cell count fell.
Both were given counselling on safe sex practices, free condoms and treatment for sexually transmitted infections. Among those immediately starting anti-retroviral therapy there was only one…
The Plague Returns!
Man with bubonic plague.
I thought that the plague had been eradicated in the Old World of Europe centuries ago. Shows how much I know – it’s back, in New Mexico of all places. Phillip Caulfield reports for the Daily News:
A 58-year-old man in New Mexico was recently treated for bubonic plague, the first case of the disease formerly known as “Black Death” to surface in 2011.
Health officials in Santa Fe said the unidentified man spent a week in the hospital after suffering high fever, intense pain in his stomach and groin and swollen lymph nodes.
He was treated and released, but officials would not say when.
The results of blood tests released Thursday confirmed the man had bubonic plague, officials said.
Doctors said the man was most likely bitten by a flea carrying the plague bacteria, the most common method of transmission to humans.
Rat-borne fleas can carry the bacterium, and humans can also…
Morgellons: A Hidden Epidemic Or Mass Hysteria?
Is Morgellons disease from out of this world or all in our heads? Will Storr from the Guardian writes:
It all started in August 2007, on a family holiday in New England. Paul had been watching Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix with his wife and two sons, and he had started to itch. His legs, his arms, his torso – it was everywhere. It must be fleas in the seat, he decided.
But the 55-year-old IT executive from Birmingham has been itching ever since, and the mystery of what is wrong with him has only deepened. When Paul rubbed his fingertips over the pimples that dotted his skin, he felt spines. Weird, alien things, like splinters. Then, in 2008, his wife was soothing his back with surgical spirit when the cotton swab she was using gathered a curious blue-black haze from his skin. Paul went out, bought a £40 microscope…
Will Nanotechnology Save Us From Drug-Resistant Bacteria?
The future: injecting tiny nanoparticles into our bodies to fight the superbugs against which our immune systems are powerless. How could that ever go wrong? Via Technology Review:
Researchers at IBM are designing nanoparticles that kill bacteria by poking holes in them. The scientists hope that the microbes are less likely to develop resistance to this type of drug, which means it could be used to combat the emerging problem of antibiotic resistance.
IBM’s labs aren’t equipped for biological tests, so the researchers collaborated with Yi Yan Yang at the Singapore Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology to test the nanoparticles. They found that the nanoparticles could burst open and kill gram-positive bacteria, a large class of microbes that includes drug-resistant staph. The nanoparticles also killed fungi.
The IBM researchers believe the drug could be injected intravenously to treat people with life-threatening infections. Or it could be made into a gel that could be…
Losing The War Against Drug-Resistant Superbugs
We’ve all heard warnings that overuse of antibiotics would breed drug-resistant superbugs, but the day of reckoning seems to be approaching faster than anyone anticipated, and science is at a loss for what to do. The pharmaceutical industry is proving to be little help, having abandoned the field of medicines that cure things for the golden revenue flow of drugs that individuals consume chronically until death (e.g. antidepressants and cholesterol-controlling medicine). Are we headed for a future of human helplessness against bacterial plagues, as in the Middle Ages? Via News Daily:
Welcome to a world where the drugs don’t work. For decades scientists have managed to develop new medicines to stay at least one step ahead of an ever-mutating enemy.
Now, though, we may be running out of road. MRSA alone is estimated to kill around 19,000 people every year in the United States — far more than HIV and AIDS —…
French Doctors Announced Lung Cancer ‘Breakthrough’
This may be a breakthrough in the treatment of lung cancer, but it doesn’t mean you should pick up smoking just yet. BBC reports:
French doctors say they have made a significant breakthrough in the treatment of lung cancer.
A medical team at Bobigny hospital in Paris removed a patient’s cancerous growth, and then gave him an artificial airway, or bronchus.
The bronchus was made from reconstituted aorta, the body’s largest artery.
The pioneering treatment in October 2009 avoided the complete removal of the patient’s lung.
In the later stages of lung cancer, only a third of patients survive a year.
The Paris patient, 78, is said be fit and well, some 16 months after surgery.
[Continues at BBC]
Clinic Mistake Exposes Patients To HIV and Hepatitis
Photo: Andrew Magill (CC)
It’s difficult to hear your doctor say you have cancer. It’s even more difficult to hear how his nurse used the same needle for 2 months before using it to take your blood. Sky News reports:
More than 50 cancer patients will have to wait an agonising three months to find out whether they have been infected with HIV, after a NSW clinic used one needle on patients for two months.
The bungle occurred when a newly employed nurse mistakenly believed the Accu-Chek Multiclix, a device used to check blood sugar levels, automatically changed needles.
Dr. Michael Jones, chairman of the private radiology company PRP Diagnostic Imaging which runs the Gosford clinic, said the nurse didn’t realise she had to change the needle manually for each new patient.
Instead, the needle was left unchanged between November 28 and January 28, and used on 53 patients and two staff members.
The patients had visited…
Japanese Dog Sniffs Out Early Bowel Cancer
Labrador retrievers are known to be trained for many things. They can work as seeing-eye dogs, therapy dogs, sniff for drugs, sniff for bombs, and now, sniff bowel cancer? BBC News reports:
A Labrador retriever has sniffed out bowel cancer in breath and stool samples during a study in Japan.
The research, in the journal Gut, showed the dog was able to identify early stages of the disease.
It has already been suggested that dogs can use their noses to detect skin, bladder, lung, ovarian and breast cancers.
Cancer Research UK said it would be extremely difficult to use dogs for routine cancer testing.
The biology of a tumour is thought to include a distinct smell and a series of studies have used dogs to try to detect it.
[Continues at BBC News]
Oral Sex Causes Cancer
Two views of Clara Jacobi, a Dutch woman who had a tumor removed from her neck in 1689.
No doubt conservative Christians are going to make hay with this, claiming they knew it was a sin all along… Amanda Gardner reports on a new study showing that oral sex may be a principal cause of head and neck cancers, in USA Today:
There’s a worrisome uptick in the incidence of certain head and neck cancers among middle-aged and even younger Americans, and some experts link the trend to a rise in the popularity of oral sex over the past few decades.
That’s because the human papillomavirus (HPV) is a major trigger for these cancers, and HPV can be transmitted through this type of sexual activity.
“It seems like a pretty good link that more sexual activity, particularly oral sex, is associated with increased HPV infection,” said Dr. Greg Hartig, professor of otolaryngology — head…
U.S. Balks At International Effort To Destroy Smallpox Virus
Bangladeshi child with smallpox.
Citing the “war” on terror is a useful catchall for the U.S. government to do anything distasteful that it desires, even in defiance of the rest of the world, it seems. Betsy McKay reports for the Wall Street Journal:
The U.S. and Russia will fight international efforts this week to set a deadline to destroy the last known stocks of smallpox, saying the deadly virus is needed for research to combat bioterrorism.
Members of the World Health Organization meet on Wednesday to begin debating the future of what is left of what was one of the world’s most lethal viruses before it was eradicated more than 30 years ago: samples kept in tightly guarded freezers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and a Russian government lab near Novosibirsk.
The U.S. says it needs to maintain the virus samples to develop new drugs and vaccines to counter…
Is Schizophrenia Caused By An ‘Insanity Virus’?
It’s a novel and chilling theory: we are all born with a brain-ravaging virus that invaded the human DNA millions of years ago. Our bodies work to contain it, but childhood infections such as the flu can allow HERV-W to become temporarily unleashed — the cause of schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis. Discovery reports:
Schizophrenia has long been blamed on bad genes or even bad parents. Wrong, says a growing group of psychiatrists. The real culprit, they claim, is a virus that lives entwined in every person’s DNA.
Schizophrenia is usually diagnosed between the ages of 15 and 25, but the person who becomes schizophrenic is sometimes recalled to have been different as a child or a toddler—more forgetful or shy or clumsy. Even more puzzling is the so-called birth-month effect: People born in winter or early spring are more likely than others to become schizophrenic later in life. It is a small increase,…
What’s That Itch?!? Go Ahead And Pee On Your Phone to See If You Have an STD
Welcome to our brave new world. (I’d like some soma, please if I ever have to do this…) Denis Campbell writes in the Guardian:
Mobile phones and computers will soon be able to diagnose sexually transmitted diseases under innovative plans to cut the UK’s rising rate of herpes, chlamydia and gonorrhoea among young people.
Doctors and technology experts are developing small devices, similar to pregnancy testing kits, that will tell someone quickly and privately if they have caught an infection through sexual contact.
People who suspect they have been infected will be able to put urine or saliva on to a computer chip about the size of a USB chip, plug it into their phone or computer and receive a diagnosis within minutes, telling them which, if any, sexually transmitted infection (STI) they have. Seven funders, including the Medical Research Council, have put £4m into developing the technology via a forum called the…
Disease Kills 20 Ugandans And Infects Over 20,000 Within Two Months
Director George Romero can scare us with zombies and crazies, but this disease which causes the body to rot away is all too real. The disease is caused by insects that enter the body, suck the blood and breed rapidly. Associated Press writer Godfrey Olukya reports:
A disease whose progression and symptoms seem straight out of a horror movie but which can be treated has killed at least 20 Ugandans and sickened more than 20,000 in just two months.
Jiggers, small insects which look like fleas, are the culprits in the epidemic which causes parts of the body to rot. They often enter through the feet. Once inside a person’s body, they suck the blood, grow and breed, multiplying by the hundreds. Affected body parts — buttocks, lips, even eyelids — rot away.
James Kakooza, Uganda’s minister of state for primary health care, said jiggers can easily kill young children by sucking their…
