Of Ferrets, Men And Bird Flu

Scientists have completed the first assessments of how readily the H7N9 flu virus in China can pass among ferrets and pigs. The mammals provide the best inkling of how dangerous these bugs may become for humans.

The news is both bad and good. They’ve found the new bird virus is easily passed between ferrets sharing the same cage.

“This is a more infectious virus — it has a higher intrinsic transmissibility [among mammals] — than most of the avian viruses we’ve seen in the past,” Dr. Richard Webby, a study co-author, tells Shots.

But the saving grace, so far, is that H7N9 doesn’t travel very well through airborne secretions from sneezing and coughing. It requires direct, intimate contact for infection.

What about pigs — which often serve as incubators of flu strains that go on to cause big outbreaks in people?

Researchers have found that pigs can catch H7N9. But infected pigs don’t pass it on very well, either through direct contact with other pigs or through airborne secretions.

Continue reading.

How One Fraudulent Medical Study Fueled A UK Measles Epidemic

Great Britain is in the midst of a measles epidemic, one that public health officials say is the result of parents refusing to vaccinate their children after a safety scare that was later proved to be fraudulent.

More than 1,200 people have come down with measles so far this year, following nearly 2,000 cases in 2012. Many of the cases have been in Wales.

Childhood vaccination rates plummeted in Great Britain after a 1998 paper by Dr. Andrew Wakefield claimed that the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella had caused autism in a dozen children. That study has since been proven fraudulent, but it fueled fears about vaccine safety in Great Britain and the United States.

“This is the legacy of the Wakefield scare,” Dr. David Elliman, spokesman for the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, told The Associated Press.

Continue reading.

Illustration of the measles virus, Morbillivirus, by Mehdi jmiai/Wikimedia.org (F: Fusion Glycoprotein; H: Hemagglutinine; V: V Protein; L: Polymerase)

pulitzercenter:

Millions of cancer patients around the world have no access to pain medication. Read the latest piece from PRI’s The World and the Pulitzer Center’s series on #globalcancer. Graphic by Kim Ducharme, Zia Sobhani.

determined4medschool:

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The radically simple Uniject™ injection system

Rethinking the needle to extend the reach of lifesaving vaccines and medications

What if syringes were so easy to use that even untrained health workers could give injections without the risk of error?

What if vaccines for developing countries could be prepackaged in low-cost prefilled syringes, vastly reducing the amount of vaccine wasted?

What if syringes could not be reused—and we knew for certain that gateway to HIV transmission was closed?

The Uniject™ autodisable injection system (Uniject), born in PATH’s Seattle shop, is little more than a small bubble of plastic attached to a needle, but it answers all these needs. It is so simple that health workers can learn to use it after less than two hours of training. It cannot be reused, which eliminates one route of disease transmission. And it is precisely prefilled by the pharmaceutical producers with a single dose, which ensures that the correct amount of drug is delivered and that none is discarded unnecessarily.

PATH developed Uniject with funding from the US Agency for International Development and then licensed the system to BD, the largest syringe manufacturer in the world. As part of the licensing agreement, BD supplies the Uniject system to pharmaceutical producers at preferential prices for use in developing-country programs. Developing Uniject and bringing it to market has been a 20-year endeavor.

Originally developed for use with vaccines, Uniject now promises to extend the reach of other lifesaving drugs as well as contraception.

Uniject is a trademark of BD.

(From PATH)

http://www.path.org/our-work/uniject.php

That’s cool

npr:

Perhaps you’ve noticed a toddler’s sagging swim diaper and wondered if it’s really keeping the poop out of your neighborhood pool.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has the answer for you: no.

Last summer, researchers at the federal public health agency collected 161 filter samples from public swimming pools in the Atlanta area. More than half of those samples, 58 percent, were contaminated with E. coli.

That, the CDC reported today, “signifies that swimmers introduced fecal matter into pool water.”

— Everybody In The Pool! But Please Leave The Poop Behind : Shots - Health News 

Photo: iStockphoto.com

Humans Scent Is Even Sweeter For Malaria Mosquitoes

People smell yummy to mosquitoes.

So yummy, in fact, that our scent is a big way the pesky insects track us down.

But just how much mosquitoes like Eau de Human may not be entirely up to the bugs.

Mosquitoes are more attracted to human odors when they’re infected with the malaria parasite, scientists reported Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE.

Entomologists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine gave malaria-transmitting mosquitoes two places to land: a clean, nylon stocking and one worn for 20 hours on the foot of young Dutch volunteer.

All the mosquitoes gravitated more toward the dirty sock than the fresh one. But the bugs infected with malaria landed on the smelly nylon more frequently. And while they were there, the parasite-possessed bugs were more likely to try and bite the stocking than the malaria-free insects.

It’s almost like mind control. The parasite changes the behavior of the insects for its own benefit. The more biting the bugs do, the more they spread the protists.

Malaria isn’t the only parasite known for such manipulation.

Continue reading.

Photo of a beheaded Anopheles gambaie mosquito, showing its odor-detecting antennae, by the Zwiebel lab/Vanderbilt University. 

Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs Tackle Global Health

When the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs launched their recent album, “Mosquito,” the cover art was a little too much for even the punk world.

“Fans of Yeah Yeah Yeahs are questioning the band’s taste, and even their sanity, following the unveiling of their new album cover,” The Guardian wrote. 

But Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman, Karen O, wasn’t phased by the criticism. “We don’t have fans because we do what they want us to do, we have fans because we do whatever we want and that’s really what they want the most,” she told Rolling Stone.

The 3D mosquito is pretty cool. But the full album cover is a bit disturbing. And so is the video for their for the title song, “Mosquito.” Ew, look how full that mosquitoes gets!

The cover was designed by the designed by South Korean–born animator Beomsik Shimbe Shim, who now resides in Los Angeles.

Scientists Clone Human Embryos To Make Stem Cells

created personalized embryonic stem cells from a patient’s skin.

The findings, published Wednesday in the journal Cell, mark a long-sought step that many think is crucial for using stem cells to treat diseases.

“It’s been a holy grail that we’ve been after for years,” the University of Pennsylvania’s John Gearhart, who wasn’t involved in the study, tells Shots. “It is something investigators have been trying to do for over a decade.”

But the advance is already re-igniting an intense ethical debate. If the discovery holds up, it brings us one step closer to cloning humans.

Embryonic stem cells have almost magical powers. When given the right food and environment, they can transform into any cell type in the body — bones, muscles, blood, nerves — you name it.

Many scientists think these cells could eventually treat a slew of illnesses. “Diabetes, various types of neurological diseases, heart disease. It’s across the board, ” Gearhart says.

For such treatments to work, though, the stem cells need to be personalized. Their genetic code must perfectly match that of the patient’s, else the immune system will reject them.

One way to get personalized stem cells is by cloning.

Specifically, the method is called somatic cell nuclear transfer, and it’s deceitfully simple. Take an egg and remove it’s DNA. Then insert the DNA from a patient’s skin cell into the empty egg. As the embryo develops, it makes stem cells that scientists can harvest and grow in the lab.

Continue reading.

The image shows a scientist removing the nucleus from a human egg. This is the first step in embryonic cloning. Image courtesy of OHSU Photos.

Learning How to Cough Around Drug-Resistant TB

Medecins Sans Frontiers counselor, Rano Safarova, tries to teach a group of children near Vose, Tajikistan, how to stop the spread of tuberculosis in their homes. Several members of this extended family have active TB including the 66-year-old grandmother, who’s the matriarch of the clan.  The youngest victim in the family is a 4-year-old boy, who’s been left partially paralyzed and unable to speak from TB meningitis.

The grandmother refuses to accept that TB spreads through the air. She insists that the 4-year-old got it from swimming in a cold river.

“I have several concerns with this family,” says MSF nurse Tina Martin during a visit to the family’s cluster of mud-walled houses in southern Tajikistan. “Mostly I’m concerned with the level of education, the lack of understanding of what TB is and how it’s transmitted. This is highly concerning. This is a very close family. They live together, eat together, sleep together. And as TB is airborne transmission the family is reinfecting each other over and over.” 

MSF is working to try to improve TB treatment for children in the Central Asian nation, particularly children infected with drug-resistant strains of the bacteria.

Photos:  Jason Beaubien, NPR

Using Bacteria To Swat Malaria Inside Mosquitoes

It’s a bit like probiotics for mosquitoes.

When scientists infect mosquitoes with a specific bacterium, the insects become resistant to the malaria parasite.

Sounds like an easy way to stamp out malaria, right? Just introduce the infected mosquitoes into an area and let the bugs take over the natural population.

But there’s been one big hitch: The bacterium — called Wolbachia — doesn’t stick around inside mosquitoes that carry malaria. So scientists would have to continually release flocks of treated mosquitoes to keep malaria down.

Now entomologists have overcome this obstacle, at least partially.

They’ve created a malaria-transmitting mosquito that maintains theWolbachia infection for its entire lifetime and even passes it onto its offspring.

“Groups have been trying to do this for more than 10 years,” microbiologist George Dimopoulos, from the Johns Hopkins Malaria Institute, tells Shots. “So it’s a landmark achievement.”

The findings, reported Thursday in the journal Science, raise the possibility of one day controlling malaria with the bacteria.

“You could just release large number of infected females and establishWolbachia in a mosquito population” Dimopoulos, who co-authored the study with a team at Michigan State University, says. “Gradually it would convert a malaria-spreading population to a non-spreading one.”

Continue reading.

Image of Wolbachia bacteria, green, infecting the ovaries of the malaria-transmitting mosquito Anopheles stephensi. Courtesy of Zhiyong Xi/Michigan State University