March 18, 2010, Washington, DC—A new study linking funding increases in the global fight against malaria to a drop in deaths from the disease also shows that resources from donor governments still fall short of those needed for maximum impact against the world's fourth-biggest killer of children, according to a global health policy analyst at international aid agency World Vision.
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BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Cancer death rates for African-Americans far exceed non-Hispanic Caucasians in the United States, and only community-driven approaches to reducing health disparities will lessen the gap, says Edward Partridge, M.D., president-elect of the American Cancer Society (ACS) National Board of Directors and director of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Baltimore, MD, 19 March 2010. – New research has revealed a major breakthrough in the use of cough medicine ingredient noscapine as a prophylactic treatment for prostate cancer.
The study shows that noscapine inhibited tumor growth in mice and also limited the spread of tumors without causing any side effects.
A new species of dinosaur, a relative of the famous Velociraptor, has been discovered in Inner Mongolia by two PhD students.
The exceptionally well preserved dinosaur, named Linheraptor exquisitus, is the first near complete skeleton of its kind to be found in the Gobi desert since 1972, and will help scientists work out the appearance of other closely related dinosaur species.
Patient referrals between hospitals influence the rates of hospital-acquired infections such as MRSA, according to a study by researchers based in the Netherlands. The findings, published March 19 in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology, explain that referred patients, who have the potential to carry a hospital-acquired infection with them, are more likely to be admitted to University Medical Centers than to teaching or general hospitals.
Pregnant women in Australia and New Zealand who had swine flu were 13 times more likely to be admitted to hospital with a critical illness, according to research published on bmj.com today.
The authors conclude that 11% of mothers and 12% of babies died as a result of being admitted to intensive care with swine flu. However they emphasise that given the small numbers included in their research, there are limits to the conclusions that can be drawn from the results.
Mosquitoes transmit infectious diseases to millions of people every year, including malaria for which there is no effective vaccine. New research published in Insect Molecular Biology reveals that mosquito genetic engineering may turn the transmitter into a natural 'flying vaccinator', providing a new strategy for biological control over the disease.
The research, led by Associate Professor Shigeto Yoshida from the Jichi Medical University in Japan, targets the saliva gland of the Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes, the main vectors of human malaria.
March 18, 2010 (Pasadena, Calif.) – Extreme obesity is affecting more children at younger ages, with 12 percent of black teenage girls, 11.2 percent of Hispanic teenage boys, 7.3 percent of boys and 5.5 percent of girls now classified as extremely obese, according to a Kaiser Permanente study of 710,949 children and teens that appears online in the Journal of Pediatrics.
Most kidney donors and recipients are in favor of exchanging personal health information that may influence success before scheduling a living organ donor transplant, while healthcare professionals are more reluctant, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society Nephrology (CJASN). The results suggest that clinicians should consider supporting and facilitating more information sharing before transplantation.
In physical, as in financial growth, it's not what you make but what you keep that counts, USC marine biologists believe.
Their study of genes associated with growth in oysters suggests that slow-growing animals waste energy in two ways: by making too much of some protein building blocks and then by having to dispose of the excess.
Donal Manahan, director of the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies and the study's senior author, calls the inefficient process "metabolic taxation."
WASHINGTON, DC (March 18, 2010) – Although Asian Americans have long been portrayed as a "model minority" with few major problems, data released online today in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) reveal that distinct groups of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (AA and NHPI) differ widely in death and disease rates, including from breast cancer and other conditions such as heart disease, and stand to benefit strongly from culturally appropriate care.
Researchers are only beginning to understand how individual variation in gene regulation can have a lasting impact on one's health and susceptibility to certain diseases. Now, an ambitious survey of the human genome has identified differences in the binding of master regulators called transcription factors to DNA that affect how genes are expressed in different people.
STANFORD, Calif. — The key to human individuality may lie not in our genes, but in the sequences that surround and control them, according to new research by scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Yale University. The interaction of those sequences with a class of key proteins, called transcription factors, can vary significantly between two people and are likely to affect our appearance, our development and even our predisposition to certain diseases, the study found.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A team of researchers at MIT and the University of California at San Diego has shown how cell division in a type of bacteria known as cyanobacteria is controlled by the same kind of circadian rhythms that govern human sleep patterns.
Previous studies have shown that even though cyanobacteria do not "sleep" in the same way that humans do, they cycle through active and resting periods on a 24-hour schedule. Cyanobacteria depend on sunlight for photosynthesis, so they are most active during the day.
Previously unobservable events occurring between insemination and fertilization are the subject of a groundbreaking new article in Science magazine (March 18) by Mollie Manier, John Belote and Scott Pitnick, professors of biology in Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences. By genetically altering fruit flies so that the heads of their sperm were fluorescent green or red, Belote and his colleagues were able to observe in striking detail what happens to live sperm inside the female.