KIGALI, Rwanda (July 27, 2009) – Government health officials from 13 African countries today launched the first-ever push for accreditation of the continent's medical laboratories, starting a process that the World Health Organization (WHO) and the U.S. Government believe will be an historic step to strengthen health systems and lead to better care for patients.
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MAYWOOD, Il. – In recent years, oncologists have debated whether patients with a certain type of advanced lung cancer would benefit from surgery.
Now a major study published in the journal The Lancet has found that surgery after standard chemotherapy and radiation can be an option for patients. Surgery significantly prolongs survival without progression of the lung cancer, but does not dramatically improve overall survival compared to a control group treated with conventional chemotherapy and radiation alone.
BOSTON, Mass. (July 26, 2009) — Crack open the latest medical textbook to the chapter on type 2, or adult-onset, diabetes, and you'll be hard pressed to find the term "immunology" anywhere. This is because metabolic conditions and immunologic conditions are, with a few exceptions, distant cousins.
However, a group of papers appearing in Nature Medicine, two of which are from Harvard Medical School researchers, have linked type 2 diabetes with immunology in a way that might persuade leading researchers to start viewing them as siblings.
BOSTON, Mass. (July 26, 2009) — High-throughput sequencing has turned biologists into voracious genome readers, enabling them to scan millions of DNA letters, or bases, per hour. When revising a genome, however, they struggle, suffering from serious writer's block, exacerbated by outdated cell programming technology. Labs get bogged down with particular DNA sentences, tinkering at times with subsections of a single gene ad nauseam before moving along to the next one.
With the Nike Research Award, Nike wants to encourage research into the prevention of injuries in athletics. The prize, worth $25,000, is awarded for fundamental-biological research into the function of the human foot.
The same mechanism that helps you detect bad-tasting and potentially poisonous foods may also play a role in protecting your airway from harmful substances, according to a study by scientists at the University of Iowa Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine. The findings could help explain why injured lungs are susceptible to further damage.
In a study released online on July 22 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, researchers at Arizona State University and Princeton University show that ants can accomplish a task more rationally than our – multimodal, egg-headed, tool-using, bipedal, opposing-thumbed – selves.
This is not the case of humans being "stupider" than ants. Humans and animals simply often make irrational choices when faced with very challenging decisions, note the study's architects Stephen Pratt and Susan Edwards.
NEW YORK (July 24, 2009) -- A large attack on a major metropolitan area with airborne anthrax could affect more than a million people, necessitating their treatment with powerful antibiotics. A new study finds that in order for a response to be effective, quick detection and treatment are essential, and any delay beyond three days would overwhelm hospitals with critically ill people.
Researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston say one organism discovered during their study may unlock the key to what causes colic, inconsolable crying in an otherwise healthy baby.
LA JOLLA, Calif., July 24, 2009 – Scientists at Burnham Institute for Medical Research (Burnham) have found that the Caspase-8 protein, long known to play a major role in promoting programmed cell death (apoptosis), helps relay signals that can cause cancer cells to proliferate, migrate and invade surrounding tissues. The study was published in the journal Cancer Research on June 15.
KINGSTON, R.I. – July 23, 2009 – News reports last week about scuba divers off San Diego being menaced by large numbers of Humboldt's or jumbo squid have raised the ire of University of Rhode Island biologist Brad Seibel. As a leading expert on the species who has dived with them several times, he calls the reports "alarmist" and says the squid's man-eating reputation is seriously overblown.
For years Seibel has heard stories claiming that Humboldt squid will devour a dog in minutes and could kill or maim unsuspecting divers.
While repair of the central nervous system has long been considered impossible, French researchers from Inserm, the CNRS and the UPMC have just developed a strategy that could promote neuronal regeneration after injury. The in vitro studies have just been published in the journal PLoS ONE.
The progressive degradation of useful soils for agriculture and farm animal husbandry is a growing environmental and social problem, given that it endangers the food safety of an increasing world population. This fact prompted the Basque Institute for Agricultural Research and Development – Neiker-Tecnalia – to design a series of research projects in order to evaluate alternative agricultural practices, as a function of their capacity to combine the productivity of crops with the health of the soil.
The criteria of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)'s Red List are an essential tool for evaluating the conservation status of species around the planet, and according to these criteria all the species in the Canary Islands are endangered. However, research carried out recently by José Luis Martín Esquivel has highlighted some conflicting areas within the scientific protocol designed to identify threatened plants and animals.
A novel drug that targets a master disease-causing gene can dramatically reduce heart muscle damage after a heart attack and may lead to significantly improved patient outcomes, researchers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have shown.
The drug, known as Dz13, specifically targets and neutralises the master regulator c-Jun gene, which is responsible for inflammation and muscle death in the aftermath of a heart attack, trials in preclinical models have found.