Archive by date | November 2010

Stem cell plaintiff’s institute takes sides against him in court battle

The research institute that is home to the controversial adult stem cell researcher James Sherley was granted permission today to officially join those opposing Sherley’s courtroom-based attempt to quash US government funding for human embryonic stem cell research. The decision comes one week before key court arguments.  Read more

Research trip to the Antarctic: A rough passage

Research trip to the Antarctic: A rough passage

Science journalist Jane Qiu is travelling to the Palmer ecological research station on the Antarctic Peninsula, joining researchers investigating how climate change has affected the region in recent decades. Please check back for her dispatches from the bottom of the world. We have sailed well into the Drake Passage, a thousand kilometers of open water between Cape Horn in Chile and northern Antarctic. Gigantic waves pound the hull and flood the lower deck. A few giant petrels and albatrosses circle around us, gliding effortlessly and elegantly in the southern wind. The Drake’s notorious gales are formed because of the perennial  … Read more

No letup for bluefin tuna

No letup for bluefin tuna

Fisheries regulators have elected to show little mercy to the Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus), whose population is in danger of being wiped out by commercial fishing.

On 27 November at a meeting in Paris, members of the Madrid-based International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), which manages tuna fishing, voted for 2011 catch quotas in the Mediterranean to be set at 12,900 tonnes, just slightly lower than this year’s 13,500 tonnes.

US polar bears mark their territory

US polar bears mark their territory

More than two years after Alaskan polar bears were given a protection status of “threatened species” by the US Endangered Species Act, the Obama administration set aside on Wednesday 24 November 484,330 sq kilometres — twice the size of the UK — in Alaska as “critical habitat”.

Europe bans bisphenol-A from baby bottles

The European Commission on Thursday agreed to ban the common chemical bisphenol-A (BPA) from baby bottles across the European Union (EU) by mid-2011.

The decision follows a ‘better safe than sorry’ approach taken by many countries, manufacturers and consumers in the past few years, as a steady stream of research (most of it in animals) suggests that exposure to BPA may affect development and poses cancer risks. At the same time, it’s not clear whether our everyday exposure merits restricting the chemical – though with young infants, few want to take any chances.

Research trip to the Antarctic: Boarding ship

Research trip to the Antarctic: Boarding ship

Science journalist Jane Qiu is travelling to the Palmer ecological research station on the Antarctic Peninsula, joining researchers investigating how climate change has affected the region in recent decades. Please check back for her dispatches from the bottom of the world.  Read more

Obama orders review of Guatemala syphilis experiments

Obama orders review of Guatemala syphilis experiments

President Barack Obama today asked his bioethics commission to dig into the recent discovery that US government-funded scientists intentionally infected subjects with syphilis in a study in Guatemala in the 1940s. “The research was clearly unethical,” Obama wrote in a memorandum to Amy Gutmann, the chair of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. “In light of this revelation, I want to be assured that current rules for research participants protect people from harm or unethical treatment, domestically as well as internationally.” While the Guatemala experiment is six decades old, the shift of many pharamceutical companies’ clinical trials  … Read more

Would cholera vaccines have helped in Haiti?

Would cholera vaccines have helped in Haiti?

Three leading researchers today called for the United States to create a national stockpile of cholera vaccines that could be quickly deployed to outbreaks worldwide, In an opinion article published online by the New England Journal of Medicine the researchers – Matthew Waldor, a cholera researcher at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Peter Hotez president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute in Washington DC, and John Clemens, head of the International Vaccine Institute in Seoul – argue that this could have an enormous impact in controlling cholera outbreaks, such as the current one raging in Haiti, and also serve US foreign policy interests, through “vaccine diplomacy.”

The question of whether vaccine could have helped in Haiti — or help in future outbreaks — is one that I’ve addressed as part of a long analysis on the Haiti outbreak published in this week’s issue of Nature. I’ve excerpted the relevant part in full below, which describes how those working in the field remain highly sceptical of the utility of cholera vaccine in an outbreak situation.

See below the fold for the full excerpt: