The Great Beyond

There’s no shortage of reading material on the genes behind schizophrenia this morning. In addition to three papers in Nature announcing the identification of key genetic glitches responsible for increasing the risk of the disease there are at least five different press releases and well over a hundred news articles at the time of writing.

This new research combines DNA data from tens of thousands of people to identify the genetic variations behind schizophrenia risk. It also shows some links between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

“Our findings are a real scientific breakthrough since they tell us a lot more about the nature of the genetic risk of schizophrenia than we knew as little as a year ago,” says a co-author of one of the studies, David St Clair, of the University of Aberdeen (press release).

Here comes the caveat: “However this is not a breakthrough that is going to change clinical practice any time soon,” he adds. “It will still be many years before our findings can be translated into new drug treatments.”

Continue reading "The genes behind schizophrenia" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 02, 2009
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US President Barack Obama controversially decided to spend a billion dollars on ‘comparative effectiveness’ research, as part of the huge stimulus package announced earlier this year. Now the Institute of Medicine has brought out the list he asked for suggesting where the money should go.

Comparing difference between different treatments is hugely controversial in the US, where some see it as an outrageous attempt to bring cost as a factor into the health system.

Others disagree. In a statement Harold Sox, co-chair of the committee behind the new IOM list, said, “Health care decisions too often are a matter of guesswork because we lack good evidence to inform them. For example, we spend a great deal on diagnostic tests for coronary heart disease in this country, but we lack sufficient evidence to determine which test is best.”

His committee whittled down 1,268 suggestions for comparative effectiveness research topics into a 100 item list. It will come as no surprise to find out that coronary heart disease is on it. The best suggestion though has to be this one:

Compare the effectiveness of dissemination and translation techniques to facilitate the use of CER [Comparative Effectiveness Research] by patients, clinicians, payers, and others.

So the committee carefully considering controversial comparisons concluded comparing clinician communication criteria could create crucial clarity? Crikey!

Stand by for more fighting. “Because the committee's work was requested by Congress and the resulting portfolio is so broad in scope, the recommendations may be more influential than they might otherwise have been, but the report is unlikely to quell the controversy surrounding CER,” opines the New England Journal of Medicine.

More coverage
Candidates Aplenty for Spending on Comparative Effectiveness – WSJ health blog
Panel Suggests U.S. Medical Priorities – NY Times

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 01, 2009
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The editor of a respected diabetes journal has admitted he rushed an article on a Sanofi-Aventis drug into print in response to the company’s plunging share price.

Rumours about the results of the study on Lantus (insulin glargine) are perceived to be behind a 14% tumble in Sanofi shares last week.

“The market was falling and there were rumours about papers that we assumed were ours,” says Edwin Gale, editor of the Diabetologia journal and a researcher at the University of Bristol (Bloomberg).

“Because we were aware there were leaks, we felt there would be an alarmist, uncontrolled statement coming out in the press, so we did a rush job on it, coming out a week earlier than expected. We’ve never had to do that before.”

Bloomberg notes that Ralph DeFronzo, a diabetes researcher at the University of Texas Health Science Center, warned in an 11 June conference call that an “earthquake” might put doctors off Lantus.

Continue reading " Share price tumble prompted ‘rushed publication’ of drug study " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 01, 2009
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The news that New York’s stem cell research initiative will be allowed to pay $10,000 to women who donate their eggs is enjoying another round of media coverage today.

As we noted last week:

[The New York Empire State Stem Cell Board] reached the decision on 11 June. Board members noted that taxpayer funds are already used to compensate some egg donors in state-subsidized in vitro fertilization programs. They also emphasized that researchers in other states that do not allow payment for eggs – including Massachusetts and California -- have largely failed to recruit donors.

The Washington Post published a sizeable piece on the decision today, noting that it makes NY state the first to allow taxpayer-funded researchers to pay women for eggs for stem cell research.

Researchers quoted in the Post story are divided over the move.

“In a field that’s already the object of a great deal of controversy, the question is, are we at the point where we really need to go that route in order to do the science?” says Jonathan Moreno, professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. “I’m not convinced.”

The NY Times notes that National Academy of Science guidelines prohibit paying women for eggs used in stem cell research.

Headline watch
$10,000 is an egg-cellent price, says stem cell panel – NY Daily News

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 26, 2009
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Posted for Erika Check Hayden

Some baboons are born with an in-built resistance to a malaria-like disease, scientists have found. It is the first known example of a genetic variant in a non-human primate species that is correlated with a complex trait — in this case, resistance to a parasitic disease.

Like ancestral humans, baboons are large-bodied primates that roam the grasslands of East Africa. The research reveals that both groups have evolved similar solutions to fighting off malaria parasites that are common in that region.

"Our study suggests that looking at genetic differences between non-human primates may help us learn more about the possible solutions that evolution has come up with for us to cope with these sorts of things," says Jenny Tung, a graduate student at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who conducted the research with Gregory Wray, also of Duke, and Susan Alberts of Duke and the Institute of Primate Research at the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi.

Continue reading "Baboon genes help fight parasites" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 25, 2009
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The British Chiropractic Association, which sued science writer Simon Singh over a column in which he wrote about the organisation's stance on certain childhood medical conditions, has now released a list of studies which it says "support the claims which Dr. Singh stated were bogus."

Singh and others had challenged the BCA to support their claims with scientific evidence instead of taking the case to the libel court.

Skeptics, such as Martin Robbins on Lay Scientist, have already begun to deconstruct the list, pointing out that few of the 29 listed studies dealt directly with the medical efficacy of chiropractic and that those which did failed to conform to the statistically powerful, randomised, placebo-controlled, double-blind standard to which many medical studies are subject. Robbins also identifies a case of what he calls "dishonest quote-mining." [The comment is here.]

Robbins provides a list of other examinations of the BCA evidence, included below.

Continue reading "Chiropractors reveal "plethora of medical evidence"" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen on June 22, 2009
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Global spending on health in developing nations has increased massively in recent years, but research published today in the Lancet questions how well spent it really is.

So called ‘development assistance for health’ went up from $5.6 billion in 1990 to $21.8 billion in 2007, according to a study funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But, while poor countries did generally receive a bigger share of this pot than richer nations, some are missing out.

Angola, Ukraine and Thailand are among the 30 poorer countries with the most illness and premature death. They are also among the twelve countries missing from the list of those nations receiving most health aid, says Christopher Murray, study author and researcher at the University of Washington.

“With no one tracking this massive growth in spending, it’s no wonder that some countries receive far more than their neighbours for no immediately apparent reason,” he says (press release). “We’re hoping that this attempt to count money that has never been counted before in a careful and consistent way will lead to greater transparency and better use of health resources.”

Continue reading "$20 billion, and for what?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 19, 2009
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This is a drill, actual inventory procedures may vary.

It's a fact of lab life that stuff gets lost in the shuffle. Digging up that old data spreadsheet or lab notebook is probably not too much more than an inconvenience for most researchers. But if you happen to work at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick in Fredrick, Maryland then it's a lot more serious than that.

At a press conference yesterday Col. Mark Kortepeter, USAMRIID's deputy commander told reporters that a recent inventory had turned up some 9,300 vials of previously uncatalogued pathogens, including serum samples from patients who had contracted hemorrhagic fever during the Korean War. The inventory also turned up Ebola, plague, anthrax, and botulism. Most of the samples were left by researchers who had since retired from the laboratory.

The report was bound to get tonnes of press, in part because USAMRIID is the former employer of Bruce Ivins, a researcher who the FBI named a "person of interest" in the 2001 anthrax attacks. Ivans died of a Tylenol overdose in July of 2008. This February, it emerged that Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus at the lab had gone unaccounted for, and all work was suspended until this inventory was completed.

Officials told reporters that numerous new security measures have been installed at the lab since 2001, and they've instituted an "aggressive" inventory system to ensure that future samples don't go unnoticed. It's clear that USAMRIID hopes to use this event to draw a line under its recently troubled past.

Image: US Army/ArraySarah

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on June 18, 2009
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The New York Empire State Stem Cell Board (ESSCB) has approved the use of state funds to compensate women who donate eggs for embryonic stem cell research.

The board, which implements New York’s $600 million stem cell research initiative, reached the decision on 11 June. Board members noted that taxpayer funds are already used to compensate some egg donors in state-subsidized in vitro fertilization programs. They also emphasized that researchers in other states that do not allow payment for eggs – including Massachusetts and California -- have largely failed to recruit donors.

Nevertheless, the decision sparked a predictable outcry from activists. The New York State Catholic Conference called it “a grossly unethical, dangerous and exploitative move that treats women’s body parts as commodities,” (Catholic Courier) and Thomas Berg, a Catholic priest and a member of the ESSCB’s ethics committee, criticized the board for not allowing public comment on the issue (Christian News Wire).

Posted by Heidi Ledford on June 17, 2009
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At least two bloggers have taken credit for independently making hundreds of formal complaints against British chiropractors for false advertising. British chiropractors have drawn extra attention in the wake of a libel case brought by the British Chiropractic Association against science writer Simon Singh (The Great Beyond, 10 June 2009), and a related campaign to keep libel laws out of science.

The head of the Leicester branch of Skeptics in the Pub explained on his blog Adventures in Nonsense on Saturday how he automated a search for false claims on chiropractic websites, and filed complaints with local Trading Standards offices and with the General Chiropractic Council (GCC). The activist has forced numerous companies to change the public claims they made about health remedies through similar steps in the past.

He told Nature that Saturday's post came in response to a blog post on Zeno's Blog, a blog about false medical claims, which announced an independent letter-writing campaign last week.

A self-identified ex-member of the GCC questions whether the council will take action on so many complaints at once, since members under investigation are exempt from paying the membership dues which fund the GCC's activities, and because a committee member is targeted by the complaint.

The author of Zeno's Blog told Nature: "I don't necessarily expect it to be a smooth process, but, as a statutory body, I fully expect the GCC to follow through on all valid complaints."

The author of Adventures in Nonsense said that he had already written the to GCC to ask how they would handle this and other potential conflicts and was awaiting a response. He added that while he has long had an interest in false claims made by many different businesses, the Simon Singh case had "focused [skeptics'] energy on chiropractic."

Posted by Lucas Laursen on June 15, 2009
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GlaxoSmithKline’s diabetes Avandia, previously plagued by problems associated with heart attacks, is in the news again. Late last week, GSK announced results of a large-scale clinical trial claiming that in the long term Avandia did not increase cardiovascular risk “compared to other commonly used diabetes medicines”.

The news means that GSK will hope that sales get a boost, but also that doctors will prescribe the drug more. “We believe that Avandia remains an important diabetes medicine for the appropriate patients,” said Ellen Strahlman, GSK’s Chief Medical Officer.

But there is still resistance. In the same issue of the Lancet (summary here) where the results of the trial, called Record, were published, Ravi Retnakaran and Bernard Zinman from Mount Sinai Hopsital, Toronto, Canada, offer caution. “definitive conclusions about the relation between rosiglitazone and cardiovascular disease remain elusive,” they say, and look at not just Avandia, or rosiglitazone but also a drug in the same thiazolidinedione family, pioglitazone.

“We believe that the evidence regarding the risk–benefit ratio for thiazolidinediones needs a prudent approach to the use of these medications in the management of type 2 diabetes.”

The whole thing is rounded up nicely over at FiercePharma, including links to other coverage and explanation of some of the controversies that have plagued the drug's history. The debate will rage for some time it seems.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on June 10, 2009
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The libel case between the British Chiropractic Association and science writer Simon Singh appears to be drawing unwelcome attention to chiropractic in the UK.

The BCA sued Singh last year over a column he wrote attacking the organisation's medical claims. Nature has covered the case and a related campaign to 'Keep Libel Laws Out Of Science' coordinated by the non-profit lobby group Sense About Science most recently in a blog post and in a pair of news stories here and here.

Yesterday, the chair of the McTimoney Chiropractic Association (MCA), a professional organisation of practitioners of a form of chiropractic, reportedly emailed the group's members advising that they remove their websites to avoid being targeted by a coordinated campaign of complaints to the General Chiropractic Council (GCC), the UK's chiropractic regulating body. A copy of the email is posted on Chiropracticlive.com.

The message notes that "complaints against more than 500 individual chiropractors have been sent to the GCC in the last 24 hours." A representative from Sense About Science told Nature that the organisation is not involved in the complaints to the GCC.

Numerous chiropractors have removed their websites, but bloggers have already pointed to publicly available archived copies of the old sites, which made claims that the MCA suggested its members should not be making.

The MCA did not answer the telephone or respond to an email from Nature today.

The letter from the MCA is reposted in full below:

Continue reading "Chiropractic group advises members to 'withdraw from the battleground'" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen on June 10, 2009
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Libel scorekeepers take note: campaigners have collected over 4000 signatures from the public, joining a core of 150 prominent figures in science, government and the media who signed a statement Wednesday to “Keep Libel Laws Out of Science.”

The spark for the campaign was the libel case brought by the British Chiropractic Association against science writer Simon Singh. Last month, a British judge decided that Singh’s words, published in The Guardian in 2008, made a factual allegation that the BCA dishonestly promoted medical treatments its members knew did not work. Singh maintains otherwise, and he announced last Wednesday that he is appealing the ruling.

The BCA released a statement Friday in response to the campaign, declaring that “The BCA sued Simon Singh only as an act of last resort.” The brief statement notes that “to stifle scientific debate would clearly be wrong,” but that “scientists must realise that they cannot simply publish with impunity what they know to be untrue and libellous.”

Fear of libel suits also means that web publishers must closely monitor--and sometimes remove--potentially libellous public comments from their sites, as happened with a statement by Stephen Curry last week on Nature Network. He has since commented on the removal, writing that, "This development seems to introduce a level of self-censorship that I had not been fully aware of before. If I can find a positive note, it will make us rely even more heavily that we already do on solid evidence."

The UK judge presiding over the case—who with a single previous ruling prompted legislation denying the jurisdiction of UK libel law in several US states—is unlikely to be overruled by the appeals court, Singh says. For now, then, the present ruling on meaning stands, and the score is BCA: one ruling; Simon Singh: thousands of supporters.

Previous coverage on Nature:
Science writer will appeal libel case ruling (Nature News, 3 June 2009)
Science writer waits on legal advice in libel case (The Great Beyond, 19 May 2009)
Court setback for science writer (Nature News, 13 May 2009)
Simon Singh loses first round in chiropractic fight (The Great Beyond, 8 May 2009)

Posted by Lucas Laursen on June 08, 2009
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The World Health Organization has recommended that health authorities in all nations being routinely vaccinating young children against rotavirus, which causes 500 000 diarrheal deaths and 2 million hospitalizations every year.

Continue reading "WHO recommends expanded use of diarrhea vaccine" »

Posted by Erika Check Hayden on June 06, 2009
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Think bankruptcy is just for folks with too many credit cards? Think again.

Major health costs (see table) contributed to over 60% of US bankruptcies in 2007, according to a study of over 2,000 individuals, although this is obviously before the credit crunch really started to bite. The study [pdf], published in The American Journal of Medicine (AJM) this week, is a follow-up to a study in 2001 which found that major health costs accounted for 46.2% of US bankruptcies in that year.

The surprise is that over three quarters of those bankrupted had medical insurance and middle-class incomes.

Continue reading "Health costs drive US bankruptcies even for the insured" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen on June 05, 2009
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Administration of a common diabetes medication to mice appears to “considerably improve” the performance of an experimental anti-cancer vaccine, according to newly published research.

Yongwon Choi, one of the team behind the new study and a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, says the discovery is “potentially extremely important and could revolutionize current strategies for both therapeutic and protective vaccines” (press release).

In their paper in this week’s Nature the researchers take a slightly more measured line, saying this “surprising finding” could “have important implications for therapeutic and prophylactic vaccine development”.

Continue reading "Does diabetes drug boost vaccines?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 04, 2009
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Posted on behalf of Jane Qiu

It was strange bedfellows indeed at a meeting on regenerative medicine in Beijing last month. At the opening ceremony Hu Xiang, chief executive officer of Beike Biotechnology in Shenzhen, gave a speech as a key sponsor, sharing the podium with government officials and influential public figures including China’s health minister Chen Zhu.

With multi-lingual websites and promoting agencies in the US, Europe, Thailand and India, Beike has earned international notoriety by recruiting patients around the world to receive untested stem-cell therapies in China. It supplies stem cells to a network of over two dozen hospitals in China and one in Thailand for treating a myriad of diseases. Hu told Nature that Beike has treated over 5,000 patients since 2005. The company claims to be conducting clinical research, but is yet to publish any data in major international peer-reviewed journals. (See related Nature story here.)

Ellis Rubinstein, president of the New York Academy of Sciences which cohosted the meeting, says that he did not know Beike’s track record, but was grateful that someone had put down “some serious money to support the event”; several major pharmaceutical companies had pulled out as sponsors. “We are having a financial crisis in a good part of the world. That’s the reality in which we are operating,” he says.

Some researchers, like Zhao Chunhua of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, were deeply concerned. “Having Beike sharing the podium with such a distinguished list of speakers has simply sent out a very wrong signal,” he says.

Posted by Alex Witze on June 02, 2009
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An as yet unpublished study reporting the emergence of artemisinin-resistant malaria in Cambodia is getting a fair share of attention. The study was first alluded to by a 20 May Bloomberg story, now unavailable on the Bloomberg site but still available here.

Roll forward 8 days and to a BBC reporter on the ground in Cambodia, reporting directly from the site of two clinical trials, where the news seems to be coming from. The BBC then ran another story that says: “International scientists say they have found the first evidence of resistance to the world's most effective drug for treating malaria. They say the trend in western Cambodia has to be urgently contained because full-blown resistance would be a global health catastrophe.”

In the UK, science reporters were then bombarded with offers of comments from expert malaria scientists, courtesy of the Science Media Centre, and the story took off. The Daily Mail has the considered "Killer new malaria bug discovered" headline for one, although other reports are somewhat more measured.

The studies are not yet complete, nor published or peer-reviewed. The WHO has no updates on its website about this work.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t important, but with stories mysteriously disappearing, and no signs of any reports, it is hard to form a firm opinion about the dangers. Of course, artemisinin should not be used on its own, but in combination with another anti-malarials, and in 2006 WHO recommendations were taken on board by 13 pharma companies to stop selling single-drug malaria medications.

The news from Cambodia doesn’t sound good, but the real extent of the situation will not be made clearer by a rash of media reports. We need to await the clinical trial data, and the peer-reviewed results of those trials.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on June 01, 2009
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Sure, Francis Collins is likely going to be the next head of the US National Institutes of Health. But is he famous? A new ad campaign called the Rock Stars of Science is trying to bring a little celebrity to the sciences by picturing famous researchers together with rock stars. (In case you can't recognize him behind those cool shades: that's Collins to the right of Joe Perry. And for those of you who have no idea who Joe Perry is: he's the guy with the striped hair to the left of Collins.)

The campaign launched with a 6-page photo portfolio in GQ magazine. “It’s like being in the middle of a genius sandwich”, the ad quotes Josh Groban, apparently a singer of some sort, who was pictured between UCLA neurologist Jeffrey Cummings and Elan Corp’s chief scientific officer, Dale Schenk.

Musical ability was not a prerequisite to participate in the campaign, at least not for the scientists. One scientific rock star – cardiologist Eric Topol of The Scripps Research Institute -- told theheart.org: “I was asked to leave the band in ninth grade and take a study hall because my clarinet playing was so pathetic.” And participants evidently weren’t given much choice about their wardrobe: “I was the only scientist that ended up in tennis shoes and barefoot, but what can you do?” lamented Schenk to The Scientist. (Personally, I think NIAID director Anthony Fauci looks quite dapper in his white “cool and dry” “cotton-rich” button-down shirt, available for $49.95 at Macy’s.)

It’s all for a good cause of course: the ad campaign aims to highlight the importance of biomedical research and the need for science funding. Medscape Medical News notes that the campaign hopes to fight the social forces behind a recent survey which found that only 4% of Americans could name a living scientist and – prepare to be shocked – that Britney Spears is more influential than Stephen Hawking. Yeah. Good luck with that.

Images: Geoffrey Beene/GQ

Posted by Heidi Ledford on May 29, 2009
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Journalists, scientists and even a Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament met in a pub last night in support of science writer Simon Singh, who is fighting a libel case brought by the British Chiropractic Association, which Nature covered two weeks ago and last week.

The 7 May ruling, in which Justice David Eady spelled out how he would interpret Singh's article if the case goes forward, will make it difficult for Singh to defend himself in a full trial.

The Skeptics Club, which meets at the Penderels Oak pub in London, invited speakers including comedian Dave Gorman, journalist Nick Cohen, and Lib Dem Dr. Evan Harris. The speakers decried English libel law, which is famously plaintiff-friendly, and warned of the dampening effect it is having on scientific discourse before welcoming Singh, who made jokes and thanked the crowd for its support.

Singh has until 28 May 2009 to decide whether to settle the case (for a cool £100,000+, he says), appeal the ruling, or fight the case under the current definition of his article. Lawyers from the Guardian, which was not sued, advised Singh that he was unlikely to win in an English court, but he and his personally retained counsel are still considering whether to appeal Eady's ruling and how their appeal might fare in a European court, he said.

Asked what impact a ruling against him would have on his science writing career, Singh joked, "I'll go back to writing cosmology and Fermat's last theorem. Everyone was very nice about it."

He added that he would not accept settlement terms that limited his ability to write about chiropractic in the future.

Posted by Lucas Laursen on May 19, 2009
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Posted on behalf of Meredith Wadman

Is it possible to catch a sexually transmitted disease from a transplant of reproductive-tract tissue? That gross-out possibility doesn't seem too likely, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was advised this week.

A panel of expert advisers to the US regulatory agency said on 14 May that, while rigorous data are lacking, epidemiologic and anecdotal evidence suggests that the transmission of Chlamydia trachomatis and Neisseria gonorrhoeae through products like amniotic membrane transplants used in eye surgery (pictured) are exceedingly slight.

“Any potential for transmission with these products would seem to be very low-- acceptably low,” said panel member Emily Erbelding, an infectious-disease specialist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.

Continue reading "One way you'll probably never catch an STD" »

Posted by Alex Witze on May 15, 2009
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The US Food and Drugs Administration is getting serious flack today from commentators (Eye on FDA, Testcountry) over a 5 May warning letter telling General Mills that the popular cereal's health claims are too drug-like.

A two-year-old marketing campaign claims that Cheerios can reduce cholesterol by 4% in 6 weeks. The FDA, which was responding to a complaint by the National Consumers League, had the option to send a less severe informal letter asking the company to change its labelling, according to the Eye on FDA posting.

Another federal body, the Federal Trade Commission told Kellogg's earlier this year to stop claims that Frosted Mini-Wheats improved children's attention spans, reports Bloomberg.

The FDA, which is reportedly trying to make its image more consumer-friendly under the new White House administration, may be suffering from internal growing pains. Officials at the agency's headquarters "did not know, they were upset and said this was a field office that was freelancing," a former FDA official told AdvertisingAge. A spokesperson for the agency who would not comment on the fracas directly told AdvertisingAge that "warning letters speak for themselves."

Image: screenshot of Cheerios website earlier today.

Posted by Lucas Laursen on May 14, 2009
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While Reporters Without Borders celebrates the release of Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi, Physicians for Human Rights are holding a virtual and live vigil today to draw attention to the continued imprisonment of Iranian doctors Kamiar and Arash Alaei.

The brothers’ HIV relief work landed them in an Iranian prison in June 2008. They were charged and later convicted of “communications with an enemy government” and “seeking to overthrow the Iranian government under article 508 of Iran’s Islamic Penal Code” this winter according to the vigil website.

The doctors, who studied and have attended conferences in the US, had distributed condoms and clean needles in Iranian prisons to curtail HIV transmission.

Saberi's conviction ("cooperating with a hostile state" ) was overthrown on the grounds that the United States is not hostile to Iran, according to an editorial in the Boston Globe. The reversal has diplomatic overtones, writes the Globe, which should also apply to the doctors.

Previous Nature coverage of this topic
An appeal to President Ahmadinejad - Nature Editorial, 29 January 2009
Iranian AIDS doctors' trial draws condemnation - Nature, 28 January 2009
Iran puts leading HIV scientists on trial - The Great Beyond, 07 January 2009
Iran holds AIDS doctors - Nature, 17 September 2008

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 12, 2009
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Clinical cancer research is often conducted by scientists with conflicts of interest, such as ties to the company making a drug tested in a study. And studies conducted by conflicted researchers are more likely to report positive findings, researchers reported yesterday.

The findings come from a study led by Reshma Jagsi of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who published her results in the journal Cancer.

Jagsi and her colleagues studied 1,534 cancer research reports published in eight top journals in 2006. Twenty-nine percent of the studies appeared to have a conflict of interest. However, only 17 percent disclosed a conflict of interest. And randomized clinical trials that measured a treatment's impact on patient survival were more likely to report positive results if a conflicted researcher was involved with the study, Jagsi's team found.

Continue reading "Cancer studies sometimes conceal conflicts" »

Posted by Erika Check Hayden on May 11, 2009
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Pharma companies Merck and GSK are squaring up for a fight, with rival products vying for a slice of the controversial cervical cancer vaccine market.

Merck’s Gardasil has already been on the market for a while, and the company last week unveiled results showing that it can protect for over eight years, extending the known protection time.

GSK meanwhile unveiled a study on its product Cervarix, which it claims shows it to be better than Gardasil. Cervarix has yet to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, although it is used in other countries.

The whole issue of vaccinating against cervical cancer has been controversial. Both Merck and GSK’s vaccines actually protect against Human papillomavirus (HPV) , which can cause the cancer. Some groups, mainly on the political right, fear that vaccinating young people against STDs may encourage promiscuity, although the US Centres for Disease Control recommends vaccination for all 11 and 12 year old girls.

According to the Wall Street Journal, $1.4 billion of Gardasil sold last year, while GSK moved about $231 million-worth of Cervarix. As Mike Huckman notes on MSNBC’s Pharma’s Market blog, which vaccine works best is only one part of the fight.

“Sales of Gardasil are going down,” he writes. “By its own admission, Merck is having a tough time getting females in their late teens and early- to mid-20s to get the set of three shots.

“It’s hoping to find a way to break through with that population and to win approval of the vaccine for older women and males to reignite sales growth. And Glaxo will be late getting into the game.”

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 11, 2009
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Count Lennart Bernadotte of didn’t quite make it to 100. He died in 2004 at the age of 95, but not before ensuring that his life’s great project had a future. Great grandson of King Oscar II who presented the first Nobel awards in Stockholm in 1901, Count Lennart launched, exactly sixty years ago, the Nobel Laureates Meeting in Lindau, a pretty but very provincial town on Lake Constance. The original aim of the weeklong meetings was to encourage isolated and struggling scientists and doctors in post-war Germany by bringing them into social contact with great living scientists from around the world.

Over the next 55 years or so, not a lot changed, even though Germany was no longer isolated or struggling. The meetings – morning lectures, afternoon discussions, evening dances - were popular but remained anachronistically provincial. By the turn of the millennium that had become unsustainable. Laureates were becoming less interested in a long trip to speak with locals at meetings primarily conducted in German, however charming the location.

In 2005, the meetings were internationalised and thrust into the modern world (Nature 436, 170-1). Now 600 hand-picked students from all around the world mingle, discuss and dance with 20 or more Nobel laureates during summer.

To commemorate the centenary of Count Lennart’s birth on 8 May, the Meetings organisers set up a science-history project to digitalise selected lectures from their archives and make them openly available on their webpage (www.lindau-nobel.de). The first eleven selected lectures are now live, more will follow in phases throughout the summer.

The cleaned up voice recordings, accompanied by an introduction and charming black-and-white photos taken in Lindau, bring legendary scientists to life – be it Rita Levi Montalcini (Physiology or Medicine, 1986) pushing her human-rights agenda, Rosalyn Yalow (Physiology or Medicine, 1977) appealing to women to help solve social problems or simply the extraordinary plumminess of the British tones of Lawrence Bragg (Physics 1915) and Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (Chemistry 1964). A particular treasure is the lecture on the gravitational constant by Paul Dirac (1933, Physics). Dirac was renowned for being almost pathologically socially withdrawn. Despite this, he showed up to the first ten meetings in Lindau, where, they say, he remained almost silent aside from his lectures.

Coming soon – Werner Heisenberg, Konrad Lorenz, James Watson and other stellar personalities.

Image: Nobel Laureate Dorothy Crowfoot-Hodgkin (Chemistry 1964) and young researchers at
the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting 1986.

Posted by Alison Abbott on May 11, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Chemistry, Health and medicine, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The libel case brought by the British Chiropractic Association against science writer Simon Singh arrived in court yesterday.

Singh is being sued by the association over an article he wrote for the Guardian which was less than complimentary about the BCA. (See Chiropractors get litigious, again - August 19, 2008, also the ‘For Simon Singh and Free Speech’ Facebook timeline.)

Yesterday, the judge in the case ruled that Singh’s assertion that the BCA “promotes bogus treatments” was a statement of fact, and not comment (Index on Censorship).

Continue reading "Simon Singh loses first round in chiropractic fight" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 08, 2009
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A string of e-mails posted on the non-for-profit news site ProPublica has reignited a long-running debate on the role of psychologists in interrogation.

The e-mails relate to a 2005 document from the American Psychological Association (APA) on psychological ethics and national security. The document lays out guidelines for psychologists working for the Pentagon and other security services. Among other things the document says that psychologists must report acts of cruel or degrading treatment, but that they may consult on interrogations.

The e-mails show that psychologists actively involved with the military had a disproportionate influence on the way the guidelines were written. "These guys were writing a get out of jail free card for themselves," says Nathaniel Raymond, senior investigator at the Cambridge-based Physicians for Human Rights, which has called on the APA to investigate.

The APA calls those accusations "ill-founded". The guidelines were meant to help psychologists working in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, to navigate the ethical minefield surrounding military intelligence gathering. In that context it only makes sense that the panel would consult with those who needed guidance the most. "To allege that the APA leadership engaged in unethical conduct in the development of this task force’s report is wholly without merit," the organization said in a statement.

The Boston Globe has done a really good story on the subject here.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on May 08, 2009
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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded 81 grants worth $100,000 (£65,000) each for research projects into unconventional approaches to tackle global health issues, such as HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, pneumonia and diarrheal diseases (Telegraph, AP, Baltimore Sun).

Among the grant recipients of five-year grants is Eric Lam at Rutgers University in New Jersey, who is exploring tomatoes as an antiviral drug delivery system.

Continue reading "Gates Foundation awards grants for unconventional projects " »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on May 06, 2009
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South Korea has re-entered stem cell science, with the national committee on bioethics approving the first research proposal since the national scandal over Woo Suk Hwang’s fraudulent stem cell claims.

A new study will be undertaken at Cha Hospital in Seoul.

“The decision will help reactivate stem cell research in South Korea,” says Chung Hyung-Min, the hospital’s lead researcher (AFP). “Stem cell research has been done by scientists in Britain and other countries. But there has been no successful case yet, using human eggs.”

Reuters says the research will involve “producing human stem cells through cloning” while AFP confusingly says the project will be “using aborted human eggs to develop cures for grave human diseases”. The Korea Times says the approval is for “somatic stem cell cloning”.

A number of conditions have been placed on the research team. The Korea Times explains:

In lifting the ban, the committee called on the hospital to minimize the use of human eggs by having the research conducted primarily on lab animals. The use of human eggs will be limited to 800 for the research, lower than the 1,000 originally requested by the centre.

The hospital was also required to remove all references about stem cell research leading to 'cures' for certain diseases and improve the quality of its consent process for egg donors.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 30, 2009
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Common genetic variations implicated in autism are reported in two papers published this week by Nature. The studies represent the first robust evidence of a link between such common variations and autistic spectrum disorders.

“The genes that were discovered appear to be involved in the development of the frontal lobe of the brain ... that is, involved in complex behaviour such as social behaviour and also abstract thought,” says study author Geri Dawson, chief officer of the Autism Speaks group (ABC News).

In one of the papers the research team uses a genome-wide association study with 780 families to pinpoint six single nucleotide polymorphisms linked to autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs). The second paper pin-points two major gene pathways as linked to ASDs

“It is very exciting,” says Hakon Hakonarson, who led both studies (LA Times). “It opens up the opportunity someday for new interventions to fix the bad consequences this variant has on brain function and development.”

Hakonarson is director of the Center for Applied Genomics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

More coverage
Autistic Kids Have Altered Genes Controlling Brain Development – Bloomberg
Biggest autism study identifies gene variations behind condition - Times

Papers
Common genetic variants on 5p14.1 associate with autism spectrum disorders
Autism genome-wide copy number variation reveals ubiquitin and neuronal genes

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 29, 2009
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“Mmm… chocolate”. Remember who said that? It was Homer Simpson. Why do you remember? Maybe it’s because that utterance inspired you to eat some lovely, unctuous, fatty chocolate, which boosted your memory.

For ‘tis written: scientists from the University of California, Irvine, have shown that the molecule oleoylethanolamide (OEA), which is released when fat gets to the gut, can help rats to retain memories after they’ve been through a training exercise. The study came out this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The experiments involved giving rats OEA, then checking their ability remember during two exercises – navigating a maze and avoiding something nasty.

Having lots of OEA normally quashes the appetite, tricking the brain into thinking its stomach is full. But this compound also seems to help consolidate memories, reporter John von Radowitz in The Scotsman. (Scotland of course famous for its high-fat cuisine in the guise of deep-fried battered chocolate bars.)

The process might have evolved many years back in our history, the authors suggest.

“Remembering the location and context of a fatty meal was probably an important survival mechanism for early humans,” author Daniele Piomelli told BBC News.

The Daily Telegraph tells us that a memory pill to help “students and Alzheimer’s patients” is on the cards. Whether that is the case or not right now, the work could lead to new therapeutics for people with memory or other cognitive problems, the authors suggest.

Image: By Chotda from Flickr under Creative Commons

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on April 28, 2009
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A genetically modified corn has been produced in an attempt to combat worldwide problem of vitamin deficiency.

Somewhere between 40 and 50% of the world’s population is suffering from diseases caused by a lack of minerals and vitamins, say Paul Christou, of the University of Lleida in Spain, and his colleagues. In response they have created a corn with enhanced levels of three compounds: the vitamin A precursor beta-carotene, vitamin C, and vitamin B9.

“In assessing strategies to deal with micronutrient deficiency, the provision of a varied diet with fresh fruit, vegetables, and fish would be ideal,” the researchers write in PNAS. “However, where this varied diet is impossible because of poverty and poor governance, super-enhanced, nutritionally complete cereals could provide a durable solution to improve the health and general well-being of impoverished populations.”

Previous vitamin enhanced plants have had increased levels of only one compound, meaning only one problem would be solved. The new Christou-corn potentially opens the door to magic-maize that could help improve health more generally.

“Our research is humanitarian in nature and targets impoverished people in developing countries. This specific project is targeted towards sub-Saharan Africa,” Christou told the BBC. “Our funding is exclusively from public sources so we are not encumbered by any commercial constraints.”

Gary Toenniessen, of the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, warns that many countries in Africa where the crop might be useful don’t have procedures in place to approve and evaluate GM crops and several countries have outright banned them (AP).

Another expert who spoke to AP was more positive. “I could see this transforming the field. It's just really cool stuff,” said Martina Newell-McGloughlin of UC Davis.

Image: National Academy of Sciences, PNAS

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 28, 2009
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An international team of researchers has successfully converted adult cells into embryonic-type stem cells without a potentially dangerous method previously used in this transformation.

In the brilliantly named journal Cell Stem Cell, the team reports that they successfully generated pluripotent stem cells from mouse cells that normally generate connective tissue. Crucially, their technique does not involve the use of genetic material or viruses.

“Scientists have been dreaming about this for years,” says paper author Sheng Ding, of the Scripps Research Institute in California (press release).

Continue reading "Induced stem cells advance" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 24, 2009
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An animal rights activist has been added to the FBI’s Most Wanted list, ranking him among terrorists such as Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri.

Daniel Andreas San Diego is wanted for allegedly bombing two biotechnology facilities near San Francisco, says the FBI. He is the first US ‘domestic terrorist’ to make the Most Wanted list.

Both of the buildings bombed were apparently targeted for doing business with Huntingdon Life Sciences, a company that has long been targeted by animal rights extremists.

“San Diego is a known San Francisco Bay-area animal rights extremist, involved with the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty campaign, commonly referred to as SHAC,” says Michael Heimbach, assistant director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division (statement). “We continue to make great strides in dismantling animal rights and environmental extremists, like Daniel Andreas San Diego.”

According to Heimback, animal rights and environmental extremists have committed over 1,800 criminal acts and caused over $110 million in damages. A reward of up to $250,000 is on offer for information leading to the location and arrest of San Diego, who is considered armed and dangerous.

Coverage
Animal rights activist on FBI terror list – SF Chronicle
In defense of people – Chronicle editorial
Vegan Daniel Andreas San Diego who tried to close British animal lab is put on FBI list – (London) Times
Wanted: FBI Adds Environmental Terrorist to Most-Wanted List – WSJ Environmental Capital blog

Image: detail from FBI wanted poster

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 22, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine, Policy | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Patients with diabetes given a stem cell transplantation were able to go without insulin for over three years in some cases, according to a new study in JAMA.

Researchers from American and Brazil treated 23 patients with type 1 diabetes and 20 used less insulin or none at all during the follow-up period, 12 continuously and 8 transiently. The idea is to stop the patients' own immune systems attacking insulin-producing cells.

“We were trying to preserve islet beta cell mass, that is, the cells that produce insulin, by stopping the immune system attack on these cells,” says study author Richard Burt, of Northwestern University (Forbes).

“Why new onset? Because we wanted to make sure there were still some islets there. We don't believe stem cells form islet cells, but if the islet cells are still there, there might be regeneration if we stop the attack soon enough.”

Continue reading "Diabetes breakthrough ‘is not a cure’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 15, 2009
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UPDATE – Current Nature editor Philip Campbell’s tribute, John Maddox 1925–2009, is now on our website:

It was with great sadness that I and my colleagues at Nature learned of the death on Sunday of Sir John Maddox — or 'JM', as his colleagues always referred to him.

There was puzzlement, too. Yes, John had been looking frail recently, but, well, this was JM — the perpetually restless, irresistible, unstoppable force. The editor who conducted some gatherings with 'shock and awe' as some recall. The 'man with a whim of iron' as others used to call him. And the man who survived countless cigarettes and glasses of red wine, many consumed late into the night as he wrote the week's Editorials at the last possible moment.

As Walter Gratzer, of King’s College, London, wrote recently, “John Maddox brought an old-fashioned Nature into the modern age from the mid-1960s.” (History of Nature feature.)

A full appreciation from Nature will follow shortly. Meanwhile, here is what the world is saying.

Without too much trouble I could probably fill blogs for a month with tales of John: of waiting at the typesetter while he finished an editorial way beyond deadline; of a plan to visit Mexico together when we wined and dined the very attractive press attache at the Mexican Consulate; of how he regularly set fire to his waste-paper basket. Of being sent to the wine bar with a fiver for a bottle of Chateau Thames. Of him disappearing on a Friday night and saying, as the door closed, that he wanted a thousand words from me by Monday for the following week’s issue – on anything I pleased. Of many cases of exasperation and irritation, and many more acts of kindness.

- Henry Gee, Nature editor

He was one of those fellows who shaped the direction of science for quite a long period of time with the power of one of the most influential science journals in the world. I suspect every scientist of my generation read his editorials in our weekly perusal of the journal.

- PZ Myers, Pharyngula

One of the toughest adversaries I’ve ever wrangled with is Sir John Maddox. He was hard-headed, scarily knowledgeable, hyper-articulate, unfailingly gracious even as he ripped you a new one.

- John Horgan, Director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology

As Editor of Nature, he restored the journal to an unchallenged position as the place to publish interesting research quickly, and did so at a time when Britain’s influence in world science was otherwise declining. His judgments, sometimes quirky but never dull, were always backed by persuasive argument and a sense of humour.

- The Times

It was a mark of his skilled editorship that Nature could publish a paper on, say, the Loch Ness monster without sacrificing its authority.

“He took command of Nature in a big way,” the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins said. “He had a tremendous grasp of science in the full range, from physics to biology to public affairs as they affected the world of science.”

Martin Rees, the president of the Royal Society and Britain’s astronomer royal, called Mr. Maddox “a dominant figure,” adding that “he helped establish Nature’s status internationally and built it up by developing supplements to increase its coverage.” After retiring as editor in 1995, he assumed an influential elder statesman role, acting, Mr. Rees said, “as a general guru of science and scientific policy.”

- NY Times

"He adored science and talked about it all the time," she [his daughter, Bronwen Maddox] says. "He was enormously enthused by it. He was a physicist, and took to the biological sciences with enthusiasm, but I think his heart stayed in physics."

- Scientific American

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 14, 2009
Categories: Chemistry, Earth, environment & ecology, Energy, Financial Crisis, Health and medicine, Neat technologies, On Nature News | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

A gene variant linked to late-onset Alzheimer's may affect the brain's workings early in life, decades before forgetfulness becomes apparent.

Publishing in PNAS (doi: 10.1073/pnas.0811879106), Clare Mackay from the University of Oxford, and colleagues at Imperial College London, scanned the brains of 36 healthy adults between 20 and 35 years old. Eighteen of the volunteers carried the ApoE4 allele of the APOE (apolipoprotein E) gene, which is associated with late-onset Alzheimer's. About a quarter of the population have one copy of ApoE4, which for reasons unknown increases their risk of developing Alzheimer's fourfold, says the Alzheimer's association.

The volunteers were asked to do memory tests, and to do nothing, while hooked up to fMRI machines. Though all performed equally well on the memory tests, the APOE4 carriers showed greater activity in the hippocampus, an area of the brain involved in long-term memory. Other distinctive differences in hippocampal brain activity were spotted even when the volunteers did nothing. (The images show increased brain network activity for the APOE4 carriers, relative to non-carriers, while resting and performing memory tasks).

Continue reading "Alzheimer's gene linked to overworked memory" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on April 07, 2009
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US scientists today report preliminary data on a brain imaging study they say may help lead to the identification of a ‘footprint’ of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the brain. Rajendra Morey, director of the neuroimaging lab at Durham Veterans Administrative Medical Centre, and his colleagues are presenting results of their study on 42 US soldiers who had recently served in Iraq or Afganistan at the World Psychiatric Association International Congress on Treatments in Psychiatry in Florence. Journalistically speaking, the group of probands is attractive, and so the study has been press-released in advance.

One group of 22 suffered from PTSD while a second group of 20 did not. Using an experimental paradigm designed to indicate how easily distracted the soldiers were, the neuroscientists showed that there were differences between the two groups of soldiers in activation of a brain area called the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, a region they say is associated with the ability to maintain vigilance. The scientists say this concords with established understanding of the underlying psychology of PTSD. Sufferers are hypervigilant, and fail to stay focussed because they are always on the look-out for unexpected threats.

They also saw also saw differences in activation in brain areas previously shown to be associated with PTSD - the medial prefrontal cortex, a large slab of tissue onto which scientists have tentatively projected many possible functions, and the amygdala, which reproducibly indicates the emotional saliency of a signal (ie ‘is what I am seeing or hearing truly appalling, or is it not quite so bad?’)

What do the results tell us? Primarily that it is possible to see group differences in brain activation patterns between people with PTSD and those without it. It is a solid piece of information, but the hope of eventually finding a useful and reliable way of predicting an individual’s susceptibility to PTSD, or to diagnosing it – as expressed in the meeting abstract – is still just a hope. This is part of a body of work which is very much in progress. Seeing group differences is a long way from being able to predict syndromes from an individual’s brain scan. For many reasons, individual brain scans are still highly variable.

Posted by Alison Abbott on April 03, 2009
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Video games might improve your eyesight, according to a paper published by Nature Neuroscience.

Daphne Bavelier, of the University of Rochester in New York, and colleagues found that study subjects who played action video games (either Unreal Tournament 2004 or Call of Duty 2) had improved ability to detect small changes in shades of gray on a uniform background, so-called ‘contrast sensitivity’. Those who played a more sedate game (The Sims 2) showed no improvement.

“Unfortunately, contrast sensitivity is one of the aspects of vision that is most easily compromised,” says Bavelier (Independent). “This problem affects thousands of people worldwide, including those with professional activities requiring excellent eyesight, and ageing populations, along with individuals who are clinically evaluated for vision problems such as amblyopia.”

The new study suggests playing certain video games might help with contrast problems. After 50 hours of playing the action-game group had improved their ability to see shades of gray by 43%.

“[Contrast sensitivity function] improvements are typically brought about by correction of the optics of the eye with eyeglasses, contact lenses or surgery,” the researchers write. “We found that the very act of action video game playing also enhanced contrast sensitivity, providing a complementary route to eyesight improvement.”

Gary Rubin, of the University College London Institute of Ophthalmology, told the BBC, “Contrast sensitivity is a very basic visual function, and usually they are more difficult to alter in adulthood. This is a small study, showing a small effect, but it was carefully done, and merits further investigation.”

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 30, 2009
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A British team will announce a multimillion-pound research project this week to develop blood from embryonic stem cells, the Independent reports.

The team is made up of a consortium involving NHS Blood and Transplant, a section of the National Health Service responsible for providing organ transplantation and blood for England and Wales, the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service and the Wellcome Trust, a medical research charity.

The Wellcome Trust is believed to have promised £3m towards the cost of the project, with further funding coming from the other consortium partners, the Independent writes.

Continue reading "Britain joins race to make blood from stem cells" »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on March 25, 2009
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Posted for Declan Butler

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), the world's second-largest pharmaceutical company by sales, has put a bit more flesh on proposals outlined last month by Andrew Witty, its chief executive to share some of its patents to boost research into neglected diseases, and to making its drugs available more cheaply in the very poorest countries.

The company's 2008 Corporate Responsibility Report, released on Tuesday, says it will put some 500 granted patents and 300 pending applications into the pool (press release, report).

The report also confirms the company will also introduce differential pricing: “Secondly, on 1 April 2009 we will reduce our prices for patented medicines in the 50 poorest countries in the world, the LDCs [least developed countries], so they are no higher than 25 per cent of the developed world price. Where possible we will reduce our prices further while ensuring we cover our manufacturing costs so this offer is sustainable.”

Continue reading "GSK’s pledge to the developing world, Part 2" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 25, 2009
Categories: Chemistry, Health and medicine, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

UK scientists are about to embark on a project to scale up the production of synthetic blood from stem cells.

A team led by the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service will try to use stem cells from human embryos not needed in IVF treatment to produce type-O negative blood. This blood would then be free of any risk from viruses.

“In principle, we could provide an unlimited supply of blood in this way,” says Marc Turner, director of the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service and a researcher at the University of Edinburgh (BBC).

“We should have proof of principle in the next few years, but a realistic treatment is probably five to 10 years away.”

The Independent notes:

Scientists in other countries, notably Sweden, France and Australia, are also known to be working on the development of synthetic blood from embryonic stem cells. And last year, a team from a US biotechnology company, Advanced Cell Technology, announced that it has been able to produce billions of functioning red blood cells from embryonic stem cells.

In a separate article the paper points out that ACT managed to make up to 100 billion red blood cells, but that a litre of donated blood contains around 5 trillion cells.

Site: Alamy

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 23, 2009
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The rush to manufacture drugs in living organisms continues. Hot on the heals of the drug-goat, a team of European researchers have created transgenic tobacco plants that produce a potential treatment for diseases such as diabetes.

Mario Pezzotti, of the University of Verona, and colleagues successfully engineered the plant to produce anti-inflammatory compound interleukin-10, they report in BMC Biotechnology. Now they are going to feed these tobacco leaves to mice with autoimmune diseases to see if they are an effective treatment.

“Transgenic plants are attractive systems for the production of therapeutic proteins because they offer the possibility of large scale production at low cost, and they have low maintenance requirements,” says Pezzotti (press release). “The fact that they can be eaten, which delivers the drug where it is needed, thus avoiding lengthy purification procedures, is another plus compared with traditional drug synthesis.”

The press release, with considerable understatement, notes that tobacco “isn’t famous for its health benefits”. However, Pezzotti says it has many advantages for genetic modifiers such as himself.

“Tobacco is a fantastic plant because it is easy to transform genetically and you can easily regenerate an entire plant from a single cell,” he told Reuters.

Surely though it’s time to start considering the end user of any of these products.

The drug-laced milk from GM goats didn’t make it past the regulators in the US, but would consumers rather drink milk or eat tobacco leaves? The scientist who can make a GM chocolate that contains drugs is going to make a killing…

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 19, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The pope came under fierce attack this week after he suggested that condom use might hamper the fight against AIDS in Africa.

The pontiff, who is currently visiting Africa, reportedly told journalists that AIDS is “a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which can even increase the problem” (BBC).

That drew angry criticism from health experts. The French foreign ministry said his statements pose “a threat to public health policies and the duty to protect human life” (Bloomberg).

Continue reading "Pope under fire over condom comments" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 18, 2009
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Posted on behalf of Roberta Kwok

A drug company executive has admitted to faking cancer to avoid a trial over a synthetic blood product.

Howard Richman, former vice-president at Biopure Corp. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, pretended to be his doctor on the phone to convince his lawyer he had colon cancer that was spreading. He also forged a doctor's note saying he was undergoing surgery and chemotherapy, leading a judge to cancel the trial (AP).

The US Securities and Exchange Commission had filed a lawsuit against Richman, the company, and three other Biopure executives alleging that the company had misled investors about the progress of a synthetic blood substitute called Hemopure. The Food and Drug Administration had rejected clinical trials, but the company left investors in the dark (Boston Globe).

Richman pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in a US District Court in Boston this week. He could face up to 10 years in prison.

Biopure has had its share of challenges recently; last November, it sued an NIH scientist over a meta-analysis that linked a class of blood subsitutes, including Hemopure, to increased risk of heart attack and death (Nature).

Posted by Alex Witze on March 13, 2009
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A study by Swiss researchers published this week [Br. J. Sports Med doi:10.1136/bjsm.2008.056242 (2009)], is focusing media attention on the inflexibility of a test that screens for testosterone abuse, but fails to flag up some cheats. The problem was not unknown: drug testers are already taking steps to counter it. As a commentary and editorial [subscription required] in Nature pointed out last August, there may also be flaws with more stringent steroid analyses – the ones that are actually used in court to charge athletes with doping.

The screen in question measures the ratio of testosterone to its close relative, epitestosterone, in urine. Too much testosterone and your sample is flagged up for further, more sophisticated, isotope analyses. The problem is that due to genetic variation, some athletes can use testosterone without ever breaching a fixed alert threshold ratio set in 2004 by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).

To drive this home, Christophe Saudan and his colleagues tested 171 football players from various nations, and found that Asians in their sample – most of whom had a crucial genetic deletion – naturally secreted lower levels of testosterone in their urine, so were more likely to slip under the radar screen than African, European or Hispanic individuals. A unique and non-specific threshold is ‘not fit for purpose,’ the researchers say.

Fortunately, drug testers are aware of this problem.

Continue reading "Drug testing: one size doesn't fit all" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on March 13, 2009
Categories: Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Tthe California Institute for Regenerative Medicine has sharpened the agency’s focus on translating stem cell-based treatments into treatments, in the wake of President Barack Obama’s decision to loosen restrictions on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research.

Continue reading "CIRM carves out translational role after Obama stem cell shift" »

Posted by Erika Check Hayden on March 13, 2009
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It’s been a busy week for massive pharma deals. After a nine-month corporate struggle, Roche has finally clinched a complete merger with Genentech, offering $46.8 billion – or $95 a share – for the 44% of the biotechnology firm that it doesn’t already own.

The offer, described as a ‘friendly agreement’ [press release], comes days after Merck and Schering-Plough shook hands on a $41 million merger, and six weeks after Pfizer snapped up Wyeth for $68 billion.

Analysts think Roche has done well to get Genentech’s board onside for under $100 a share – some were predicting much higher sums. The board had earlier rejected sub-$90 a share offers. And Roche also managed to push through an agreement before clinical trial results due in April, which are expected to drive up Genentech’s value by expanding the use of its blockbuster anticancer drug Avastin.

Details of the combined company’s operations have also been released – but there is no clear picture yet on how many jobs might go.

Continue reading "Roche and Genentech seal the deal" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on March 12, 2009
Categories: Chemistry, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

New discoveries in genetics always seem to work their way into fertility clinics before they are used in any other area of medicine. An announcement from a team in the Netherlands today is a case in point.

The team has developed a test that can identify embryos with genetic abnormalities that predispose them to developing two incurable cancer syndromes called neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) and Von Hippel-Lindau disease (VHL). Families with these diseases can use the test during assisted reproduction in a procedure called preimplantation genetic diagnosis to discover which of their embryos are free of the genetic mutations that cause them. These embryos can then be implanted in the mother’s womb. Indeed, the team reports that one set of healthy twins was born to a couple who used the test to screen for VHL-causing mutations.

Continue reading "Healthy babies born after use of new gene screening technique" »

Posted by Erika Check Hayden on March 11, 2009
Categories: Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Celebrities in China are grumpy about the country’s new food safety law, which was approved by Parliament on 28 February.

One of the regulations says individuals who recommend food in advertisements are legally liable for damages if the product is later found to be unsafe. Celebrities are widely believed to be directly targeted by the provision, Xinhua reports.

Feng Xiaogang, the movie director famed for hit films such as “The Banquet” (2006), tells Xinhua he thinks the rule is “unfair”, and that many celebrities are concerned about it.

“I won’t advertise for any food product any more,” Ni Ping, a well-known television presenter, told press at a session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an advisory body with many celebrity members (SciDev.net). Ni has taken flak for advertising chestnut juice made by Sanlu, the now-bankrupt state-owned company at the heart of last year’s scandal involving melamine-tainted milk.

Continue reading "Chinese celebs unhappy with food safety law" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on March 10, 2009
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Holes in brain tissue caused by stroke may be fixable using a ‘scaffold’ for stem cells, say researchers from the UK.

Previous attempts to seed such holes in rat brains with stem cells found that the stem cells tended to migrate into surrounding healthy tissue, rather than plugging the gap. Now Mike Modo, of King’s College London, and colleagues have found that a scaffold of biodegradable polylactic-co-glycolic acid polymer laced with stem cells can plug holes in just seven days.

“We would expect to see a much better improvement in the outcome after a stroke if we can fully replace the lost brain tissue, and that is what we have been able to do with our technique,” says Modo (press release). “This works really well because the stem cell-loaded PLGA particles can be injected through a very fine needle and then adopt the precise shape of the cavity. In this process the cells fill the cavity and can make connections with other cells, which helps to establish the tissue.”

Their work is due to be published in Biomaterials. This image shows the brain before and after the stem cells were introduced:

Anthony Hollander, a stem cell expert at the University of Bristol, told the Daily Mail, “It is too early to say if it will be clinically effective in patients but the more we explore these possibilities the more likely it is that we will develop successful therapies.”

More
Stem cells could help treat strokes – PA
Stem-Cell Repair Kit for Stroke – Technology Review

Image: modified from figure in Bible E et al., The support of neural stem cells transplanted into stroke-induced brain cavities by PGLA particles, Biomaterials (2009), doi:10.1016/j.biomaterials.2009.02.012.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 09, 2009
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The viruses that normally give you a sniffle or a poorly tum might be responsible for causing diabetes. This may sound unusual – a virus being responsible for a non-infectious disease – but it has been debated for many years among diabetes experts.

The research, carried out at the Peninsula medical school in Plymouth, UK, involved looking for enteroviruses in the pancreases of young people who had died soon after contracting type 1 diabetes. The suspicion was that the viruses were attacking beta cells – insulin factories. And that suspicion has now been shown to be right – 60% of the pancreases had evidence of viral infection of beta cells. And it could be more common than 60%: "The protein isn't completely stable, so 60% is a conservative estimate," researcher Adrian Bone of the University of Brighton, UK told New Scientist.

Continue reading "The diabetes virus?" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on March 06, 2009
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Americans are being exposed to vastly more radiation from medical tests than they were twenty years ago, according to the US National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements.

The council says Americans living in 2006 were exposed to over seven times more radiation from such scans than those living in 1980, mainly due to computed tomography and nuclear medicine. The council’s executive vice president Kenneth Kase says the increase was “not a big surprise to anybody” and doctors are emphasising that such tests are vital in modern medicine (ABC News).

“The medical information derived from CT scans literally saves thousands of American lives on a daily basis,” says John Boone, a radiologist at the University of California, Davis Medical Center.

This is not to say that there is no fallout from this report.

Continue reading "Huge rise in US medical radiation doses" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 04, 2009
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The US Food and Drug Administration has accused India-based drug manufacturer Ranbaxy of falsifying data in both approved and pending drug applications.

All drug applications from Ranbaxy’s Paonta Sahib facility have been halted as a result, using what is known as the Application Integrity Policy. The company was warned by the FDA last year about “deviations from US current Good Manufacturing Practice”.

“The FDA’s investigations revealed a pattern of questionable data raising significant questions regarding the reliability of certain applications, and this warrants applying the Application Integrity Policy,” says Deborah Autor, director of the Office of Compliance at the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, in a statement released yesterday. “Today’s action reflects the FDA’s continued vigilance and its steadfast commitment to safeguarding the public’s health.”

Ranbaxy says it is analysing the FDA’s letter and adds, “The FDA has said it has no evidence the drugs on the market are substandard and also that they comply with specifications upon testing. No products from Ranbaxy’s other manufacturing facilities are included in the AIP.”

Comment on the situation below the fold.

Continue reading "Ranbaxy ‘falsified drug approval data’, says FDA" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 26, 2009
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Posted on behalf of Roberta Kwok

The US National Academies is hosting a meeting on "integrative medicine" this week, and some scientists are not happy about it.

The meeting, a "Summit on Integrative Medicine and the Health of the Public" held in Washington DC, bills itself as a discussion of "health care that addresses together the mental, emotional, and physical aspects of the healing process". The academies' Institute of Medicine organized the summit in partnership with the Bravewell Collaborative, a private philanthropic organization based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

On the agenda are topics such as social determinants of health, mind-body medicine, and continuous care for chronic disease. "The purpose of the meeting is to discuss alternatives to the current health care system, which anybody would agree is facing a tremendous crisis," says Ralph Snyderman, a rheumatologist and chancellor emeritus of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who chaired the summit planning committee.

Continue reading "Integrative medicine: What's that?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 26, 2009
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Posted for Roberta Kwok

Researchers have linked a genetic variation to a tendency to avoid gloom. As described in a study published today, people who carry longer versions of a serotonin-related gene are drawn to pleasing images, while paying less attention to negative ones.

The gene affects levels of the mood-altering neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain, and its promoter region, called 5-HTTLPR, comes in short or long forms. Researchers took DNA samples from 97 people to determine which combination of alleles they had. They then showed pairs of pictures, one positive or negative and the other neutral, and gauged the participants' reactions.

The 16 people with two long forms of 5-HTTLPR preferred the happy images and avoided the depressing ones, the study found. Those with at least one short allele did not show the same pattern and seemed to favour the negative images, though that effect was not statistically significant.

"We have shown for the first time that a genetic variation is linked with the tendency to look on the bright side of life," says lead researcher Elaine Fox of the University of Essex, UK (press release). The findings appear in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Scientists have previously found that people with short alleles of the gene are more likely to be depressed or attempt suicide (AFP). They may also have more intense neurochemical reactions to stress.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 26, 2009
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Soccer fans take note: if your anger over a lost game affects your heartbeat, you could be at greater risk of developing a dangerous heart arrhythmia in the future.

The concept that rage can be risky is not entirely new. Reuters cites previous research showing that “earthquakes, war or even the loss of a World Cup Soccer match” can increase death from heart attacks.

Rachel Lampert of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut and her colleagues report in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology that they monitored the heart rate of 62 patients with a history of heart disease. The patients were subjected to “a mental stress protocol” in which they recounted a recent event that made them angry. Those patients who experienced an anger-induced change in their heartbeats were more likely to later develop serious irregularities in their heart rate over the next year.

Before you rush out to enroll in anger management classes, there are a few points to keep in mind. The researchers began with a pool of patients who were already vulnerable to heart arrhythmia. And what they’ve found is a correlation, but doesn’t establish causation. So whether those anger-induced affects on the heart actually contributed to future arrhythmia remains unclear.

That said, a little anger management never hurts. CNN offers a few tips from the Mayo Clinic in its story.

Posted by Heidi Ledford on February 24, 2009
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Both the Guardian and Australia’s ABC news have picked up on last week’s Nature story by K. S. Jayaraman about India’s moves to protect traditional knowledge by allowing European patent officers to check new patents against a database of historical remedies.

The database details ancient treatments from systems such as Ayurveda and Yoga and it is hoped it will ensure companies cannot patent things which have been used in India for generations. “We are trying to establish the claim on traditional cures,” Vinod Kumar Gupta, of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, told Jayaraman.

Continue reading "India moves to protect traditional medicine" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 23, 2009
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China has banned actors from mimicking doctors or disease-sufferers in television adverts.

According to state media, the ban follows a story in the Beijing Times which exposed one actor who pretended to be four different experts on television in order to promote various drugs (Xinhua). In another case, 12 ‘experts’ selling medicine on TV shows were exposed as fakes on the internet (Shanghai Daily).

China has experienced numerous problems with fake drugs. In the most recent example a counterfeit diabetes product caused at least two deaths (Reuters, AFP).

Truth in advertising though? It’ll never catch on in the west.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 18, 2009
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Yoghurt bacteria could be used to deliver an anthrax vaccine, if Todd Klaenhammer gets his way.

The North Carolina State University researcher has just published a paper in PNAS describing how swallowing a vaccine based on the lactic acid bacteria protected mice against exposure to anthrax. As he notes in his paper the Lactobacillus bacteria can pass through the stomach and are safe in large amounts, making them potentially useful as a vaccine delivery mechanism.

“Normally, you can’t eat vaccines because the digestive process in the stomach destroys them, so vaccines are traditionally administered by needle,” says Klaenhammer (press release). “But using ‘food grade’ lactic acid bacteria as a vehicle provides a safe way of getting the vaccine into the small intestine without losing any of the drug’s efficacy in binding to the dendritic [immune] cells, which can then trigger an immune response.”

Klaenhammer is not the only person working on oral vaccines, and there are a large number currently in development. Way back in 2003, a review article in the American Journal of Drug Delivery noted other people were trying live vectors, transgenic plants, and even “virus-like particles”. An oral polio vaccine is already in use.

Still, anything that avoids needles is great progress. Now all we need to do is convince a vocal minority that vaccines are actually a force for good, any maybe produce this vaccine in a low-fat, raspberry flavour…

"This is eating the good guys," says Klaenhammer (News and Observer).

The research should be live here soon.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 17, 2009
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Ever since Barack Obama was made the 44th president of the United States, stem cell researchers have been poised over their lab benches, waiting for the moment he would lift the ban on federally funded embryonic stem cell research.

Their wait may nearly be over.

“We’re going to be doing something on that soon, I think. The president is considering that right now,” David Axelrod, a senior advisor to Obama, told ‘Fox News Sunday’ at the weekend.

This is probably not a moment too soon. Stem cell research advocates have been making unhappy noises of late about how long it seemed to be taking the new administration to get round to lifting the ban, as the LA Times has pointed out:

Wary of a delay, one prominent advocacy group sent Obama a letter recently saying that he had pledged to revoke the Bush order. “We wanted him to know that we were still counting on the campaign commitment,” said Amy Comstock Rick, president of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research.

Writing for the Encyclopaedia Britannica blog, Jonathan Slack, director of the Stem Cell Institute at the University of Minnesota says:

Lifting the ban also will be welcome because it will eliminate the red tape that is required to separate the financial accounting of federally fundable and non-fundable work. This can be quite complex; for example, a shared piece of equipment may have been partially paid for with federal funds. Fine judgement may be required to determine whether, say, 50 percent funding represents a problem if the machine is only 30 percent used for federally non-permitted purposes.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 16, 2009
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Sanofi-Aventis’s new CEO, Christopher Viehbacher, made his debut today to present the company’s 2008 earnings, and speculation yesterday was that the executive – fresh from his former position at GlaxoSmithKline – would come in thundering for renewed cost cutting efforts and an overhaul of the company’s R&D system.

Both topics came up during his presentation this morning, but Viehbacher, who took the helm in December, declined to give details. He spent much of the presentation on the defensive: Sanofi’s stock fell 28% last year, making it the worst performer among Europe’s top pharma companies. Meanwhile, Sanofi employees have largely been spared from the painful cuts undertaken by other pharma companies to reduce costs.

Viehbacher acknowledged criticisms that Sanofi has an overstuffed, unfocused drug pipeline, and said the company would be taking a hard look at its research programs with the aid of its new science adviser, former NIH chief Elias Zerhouni. Viehbacher predicted cuts to internal R&D and increased acquisitions of small- to mid-sized biotech companies. And he said he’s shying away from megamergers with other large firms, which could put to rest periodic rumours that Sanofi may purchase fellow pharmaceutical company, Bristol-Meyers-Squibb. (For an example, check out this BNET Pharma article.)

When pushed to give numbers and dates for the company’s cost cutting plans, Viehbacher shot back, “Hey, look guys I’ve been at this job for 10 weeks. Give me a little room here.” He went on to elaborate that R&D cuts are not undertaken lightly. Sacrificing an internal R&D program to make room for acquisition of a new biotechnology company feels like turning against his own children, he said. “I love my children better than my nieces and nephews. It’s a fact of life,” he said. “You can never get far from human emotion, and that’s what makes R&D a tricky exercise.”

Posted by Heidi Ledford on February 11, 2009
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The controversial doctor whose research led to the MMR safety scare has been accused of manipulating his research data. According to an investigation by the Sunday Times, Andrew Wakefield “changed and misreported results” in a Lancet paper which has been used as support by those who believe the now conclusively debunked claim that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine causes autism.

The Times says:

In most of the 12 cases [in the paper], the children’s ailments as described in The Lancet were different from their hospital and GP records. Although the research paper claimed that problems came on within days of the jab, in only one case did medical records suggest this was true, and in many of the cases medical concerns had been raised before the children were vaccinated. Hospital pathologists, looking for inflammatory bowel disease, reported in the majority of cases that the gut was normal. This was then reviewed and the Lancet paper showed them as abnormal.

Wakefield is currently being investigated by the UK’s regulatory body for doctors, the General Medical Council.

“You also know that, at this juncture in the GMC process, it would be inappropriate for Dr Wakefield to give a detailed response to you,” his lawyers told the Times. “He has denied the allegations and gave a detailed response over many days to the GMC panel.”

However, a response – apparently from Wakefield – has been posted on anti-MMR websites.

Continue reading "Fakefield? MMR-autism link doctor stands accused" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 09, 2009
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Posted for Heidi Ledford

A local entrepreneur has donated $100 million over the course of 10 years towards the establishment of a new immunology research institute. The new ‘Ragon Institute’ plans to focus initially on development of an HIV vaccine, but eventually aims to tackle broader issues in immunology and infectious diseases.

In a time of shrinking endowments and overstretched budgets, it is refreshing to hear that some philanthropists still have their wallets open. At the announcement of the institute yesterday morning, Harvard University President Drew Faust called the donation “particularly extraordinary at this time.”

The heroes of this story are Phillip “Terry” Ragon – an MIT grad who made his fortune by founding a software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts – and his wife, Susan Ragon. For more about their motivation to invest, check out the Boston Globe story.

Continue reading "$100 million stimulus package for Boston-area HIV research" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 05, 2009
Categories: Financial Crisis, Health and medicine, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Bill Gates had a good idea yesterday, but failed to take it to its logical conclusion.

To make a point about malaria the billionaire software mogul punctuated a talk by releasing mosquitoes into the concerned audience.

“Malaria is spread by mosquitoes. I brought some,” Gates told the invitation-only Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference in California (Fox News, AFP). “Here I’ll let them roam around. There is no reason only poor people should be infected.”

As the New York Daily News and other papers noticed, at a conference like TED this was always going to end up on twitter.

“Bill Gates just released mosquitos into the audience at TED and said: "Not only poor people should experience this." :)” wrote Facebook manager Dave Morin. eBay founder Pierre Omidyar added, “That's it, I'm not sitting up front anymore.”.

Later the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – which has combating malaria as one of its aims – said the insects were not carrying the disease. Now if Bill Gates really wanted to solve the malaria problem, what he should have done is get all the world’s important people in a room and actually infect them with malaria. I think we’d see interest in malaria research rise pretty sharply after that.

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 05, 2009
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Another victim of the credit crunch: the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Last week Rajat Gupta, the chairman of the fund’s board, warned the international meeting in Davos, Switzerland, that “the global fund is not immune to the environment today of the global financial crisis” (AFP).

Currently the gap between the cost of programmes eligible for funding and the funds pledged by nations is about $5 billion for the months up to 2011 (Christian Science Monitor, NY Times).

Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, can see where some of the money can come from. He thinks the US government should take back the alleged $18 billion in bonuses Wall Street bankers are getting (NY Times).

“Those bonuses are being paid out of our bailout funds,” he says (LA Times). “I suggest the U.S. government reclaim that funding and put the money into the Global Fund immediately.”

And Eve Odete, Oxfam’s Pan-Africa Policy Officer, is warning of a “possible reduction in social spending as the global financial crisis is likely to hit Africa hardest this year” (Reuters). Given that we’re just printing money at the moment, it shouldn’t be too hard for the world’s treasuries to run off a few extra notes should it?

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 03, 2009
Categories: Financial Crisis, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the researchers behind last year’s pioneering stem cell windpipe transplant has revealed an early interest in medicine.

Anthony Hollander, of the University of Bristol, has revealed that as a child in 1973 he wrote to British children’s TV programme – and national institution – Blue Peter to request help, with better spelling than mine at age nine:

This may seem very strange, but I think I no how to make people or animals alive. Why Im teling you is because I cant get the things I need.

A list of what I need.
1. Diagram of how evreything works (inside youre body)
2. Model of a heart split in half, (both halvs)
3. The sort of sering [syringe] they yous for cleaning ears (Tsering must be very very clean)
4. Tools for cutting people open
5. Tools for stiches
6. Fiberglass box, 8 foot tall, 3 foot width.
7. Picture of a man showing all the arteries.

Continue reading "‘This may seem very strange, but I think I no [sic] how to make people or animals alive.’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 30, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs) are back in the news again: a study published in Human Reproduction [pdf] has linked two of them to human fertility problems.

Researchers from UCLA measured levels of perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoate (PFOA) in blood samples taken from 1,240 pregnant Danish women from 1996-2002. Those with higher levels of the PFCs in their blood had taken longer to become pregnant than those with the lowest levels.

The link is ‘tenuous but interesting,’ according to Tony Rutherford, chairman of the British Fertility Society. As The Times reminds us, correlation does not prove causation.

"There are probably things in the environment that are affecting us in ways we don't know about, but you have to get to the basic biology of what's the mechanism of action - that's the missing link," Jamie Grifo, director of reproductive endocrinology at New York University Medical Center, tells the Washington Post. "The problem with the study is, it creates more anxiety and fear, but it doesn't answer [that] question."

Continue reading "Perfluorinated chemicals linked to pregnancy delays" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on January 29, 2009
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Posted for Erika Check

Is gene therapy inching its way towards a comeback? Today, doctors report that they have used the technique to cure 8 children with one form of the rare illness called severe combined immunodeficiency, or SCID. And the achievement is so far free from the complications that accompany gene therapy to treat a form of SCID caused by a different genetic glitch.

The result is welcome positive news for gene therapy, which has been struggling to rehabilitate its image after some stunningly bad news rocked the field 6 years ago. At that time, doctors treating SCID patients were cautiously optimistic that they were writing gene therapy’s first success story by infused corrective genes into patients with so-called “X-linked SCID.” But the success stories were marred in 2002 when one of the X-linked SCID patients developed cancer. The trials were later allowed to restart, but five of 20 patients treated with gene therapy have since developed cancer, and one has died.

Today, doctors led by Maria-Grazia Roncarolo of the San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy in Milan publish the results of gene therapy trials in children with a different form of SCID that is caused by a deficiency of an enzyme called adenosine deaminase. Children with this version of SCID can be treated with bone marrow transplants and enzyme replacement. But in 8 of 10 children who lacked a matching donor, doctors report, treatment with a corrected adenosine deaminase gene allowed them to survive without enzyme injections.

“The prospects for continuing advancement of gene therapy to wider applications remain strong,” write two scientists who were not involved in the study in a commentary accompanying the report.

Coverage
Gene therapy cures form of 'bubble boy disease' – AP

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 29, 2009
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The medical condition ‘cello-scrotum’ has been unveiled as a hoax by its perpetrators.

Back in 1974 Elaine Murphy and John M Murphy read a letter to medical journal the BMJ detailing the music-related chafing condition ‘guitar nipple’. Deciding that this was probably a spoof they submitted a letter noting a similar phenomenon in cellists.

“Anyone who has ever watched a cello being played would realise the physical impossibility of our claim,” they write in a new letter to the BMJ. “Somewhat to our astonishment, the letter was published.”

Not only was the 1974 letter published, it was later cited and – despite doubters – seemed about to become medical cannon canon before the Murphy’s new intervention.

Noel Bradshaw, a cellist with the London Symphony Orchestra, told the Times, “You would have to be doing something fairly extreme to get that by playing the cello. Otherwise, given the angle of the cello, you would have to have pretty enormous bollocks.”

Can you spot which of the following musical medical conditions is fictional?

Fiddler’s Fingers – skin inflammation from allergy to ‘exotic woods’ used in fiddle construction. True?
Violin Face – elongated faces from playing the violin. True?
Horn heart – arrhythmia caused by playing the French horn. True?
Punk piercing – unintentional stabbing associated with punk-music fashion. True?
Baton bulge – swelling in conductors’ thumbs from vigorous waving of their batons. True?

Answer below the fold.

Best headline - Medical hoax: 'Cello scrotum' was just a test tickle, AFP.

Elaine Murphy is now a Baroness and is on the oversight board of the National Health Service. John Murphy is chairman of St Peter’s Brewery.

Continue reading "‘Scrotum-gate’ hits the headlines" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 28, 2009
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Posted on behalf of Heidi Ledford
A controversial lawsuit got the green light to move forward yesterday when the California Supreme Court rejected Wyeth’s protests against a previous ruling that Wyeth could be held liable for side effects caused by a drug it did not make.

Plaintiff Elizabeth Conte says that she developed a neurological condition (called tardive dyskinesia) after taking a drug called metoclopramide. Metoclopramide is sold under the brand name Reglan by Wyeth, but Conte took a generic version of the drug manufactured and sold by other companies.

Nevertheless, Conte alleges that her doctor relied on drug labelling and a write-up in the Physician’s Desk Reference that were supplied by Wyeth. That labelling, she says, underplayed the risks of the drug. She tried to sue the generics manufacturers as well, but was unable to satisfactorily show that her doctor paid any attention to their labelling. The doctor did recall reading Wyeth’s labels, and so a California Appellate Court decided last November that her case against Wyeth could proceed.

Continue reading "Bewildering pharmaceutical case free to proceed" »

Posted by Asher Mullard on January 22, 2009
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A Chinese court has sentenced two men to death for their roles in producing and selling melamine-tainted milk, which killed at least 6 children and made around 300,000 ill.

Babies began suffering from kidney problems caused by the melamine in late 2007 and doctors were blaming the powdered milk by July 2008.

Sanlu, the now-bankrupt state-owned company at the heart of the scandal, allegedly failed to recall products despite knowing that they were contaminated because Party officials wanted them to keep quiet about the scandal.

The two men who were sentenced were Zhang Yujun and Geng Jinping, the BBC reports. Zhang Yujun was convicted for producing 600 tonnes of fake fatal protein powder, from which he earned £715,000. Geng Jinping was sentenced for producing and selling the toxic products to milk companies.

Continue reading "Two sentenced to death in China over tainted milk" »

Posted by Asher Mullard on January 22, 2009
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Posted for Erika Check

John Reed will resume his work on the board of the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine after a state commission found that a letter he wrote in 2007 “raises ethical concerns”, but does not violate state ethics laws.

In August 2007, Reed, president of the Burnham Institute for Medical Research in La Jolla, California, asked CIRM staff to appeal its decision that a Burnham-affiliated scientist was ineligible for a grant. The Santa Monica-based group Consumer Watchdog asked the state Fair Political Practices Commission to investigate the move and Reed recused himself from the CIRM board that December.

On 7 January, Kourtney Vaccaro, chief of the commission’s enforcement division, sent a warning letter to Reed via his attorney. “In our view, by submitting a “letter of appeal” to CIRM staff, Dr Reed intended to influence a decision that had the potential to affect his economic interests,” Vaccaro wrote. However, because the decision had already been made, Vaccaro said, it could no longer be influenced, so the commission will close the complaint without further action.

CIRM modified its appeal process last year in the wake of the controversy.

“We are delighted that with the completion of the review by the Fair Political Practices Commission Dr John Reed will reengage in his role as an ICOC [board] member,” CIRM board chairman Robert Klein said in a statement. “As CIRM matures, we continue to review and enhance our policies and procedures to avoid potential problems in the future.”

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 13, 2009
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The controversy over whether Robert Gallo was robbed of a Nobel Prize in Medicine may end up lasting as long as the drawn-out battle over the discovery honoured by that prize.

A letter published in Science last week is the latest salvo in the flap over the Nobel, half of which was awarded last October to Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for the discovery of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Both scientists were at the Pasteur Institute in Paris in the 1980s; Gallo, at the time, was at the US National Cancer Institute. The French and US scientists fought for years over who actually deserved credit for the discovery, and finally agreed to share credit in 1987. But the Nobel committee seems to have broken the truce by shunning Gallo and instead giving half the prize to German Harald zur Hausen for his work on the human papilloma virus.

The Science letter calls Gallo “an unsung hero” and argues, “Without Gallo's contributions, the relevance of this virus to AIDS might not have been recognized for years… Gallo's contributions should not go unrecognized.”

Continue reading "Nobel Prize row rumbles on" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 12, 2009
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Posted on behalf of Roberta Kwok

Scientists have found the first late-onset Alzheimer’s genetic risk factor specifically linked to women, but it doesn’t necessarily explain why more women get the disease.

The gene is PCDH11X, and it’s found on the X chromosome. That’s bad news for women, who carry two X chromosomes while men only have one. According to the study, published in Nature Genetics, the high risk only kicks in if the patient has two copies of a particular PCDH11X variant.

“What you have in a nutshell is the first study showing a gene on the X chromosome and the first sex-specific effect [for Alzheimer’s],” senior investigator Steven Younkin, a consultant-researcher at the Mayo Clinic’s Florida campus, told HealthDay. “It does not mean women are at increased risk for Alzheimer’s.”

Continue reading "Clue to Alzheimer’s on X chromosome" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 12, 2009
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It turns out that grumpy people who say cellphones are destroying life as we know it may be on to something. According to the Washington Post, “Cellular telephones are perhaps the biggest threat to survey data that epidemiologists have confronted in years.”

The problem is that it is much easier to do surveys with landlines than it is with cellphones (or mobile phones, as the British are wont to call them). Given 16% of adults in the US live in houses that only have cellphones that could be a problem.

According to the Post it takes nine calls to cellphones to get one completed entry in the Federal Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey, which tracks health and behavior. As it only takes five calls to landlines it costs a lot more if you want to include cellphones in your survey, which you have to if you want accurate data. An additional complication, says the newspaper, is that “people answer the same question differently depending on how you reach them”.

Read the full article here.

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 12, 2009
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Drug regimes that increase the production of stem cells may circumvent some present limitations to a stem cell therapy, a new study suggests.

Stem cells have been hailed of late as the cures of disease and the saviours of patients. Yet researchers still face many obstacles before these new therapeutic tools can be put to work. For instance, what is the best way to generate stem cells, and how do you get them into the patients who need them? A study in Cell Stem Cell now shows that we may be able to side-step both of these issues by spurring bone marrow to boost stem cell production.

Previous studies have shown that treatment with granulocyte colony stimulating factor followed by recently approved Genzyme Corporation drug Mozobil can increase blood stem cell production. Sara Rankin, of Imperial College London, and her colleagues now show in mice that a different regime — endothelial growth factor followed by Mozobil — induces bone marrow to pump out two other types of stem cell.

Continue reading "Drug combo boosts stem-cell production" »

Posted by Asher Mullard on January 09, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

An expert advisory committee of the Food and Drug Administration will today consider anti-clotting treatment ATryn, which is already approved for use in Europe.

“On the basis of the development activities and data generated over the last 16 years, the Applicant maintains that ATryn has been shown to be safe and efficacious,” says an FDA advisory committee in a report released on Wednesday (pdf). “As such, ATryn should be recommended for licensure for the treatment of a rare plasma protein disorder to prevent serious and potentially life-threatening venous thromboembolic events.”

The GM goats produce human antithrombin in their milk, which can then be used to treat patients with hereditary antithrombin deficiency, a genetic condition that can lead to life-threatening blood clots.

Continue reading "Nurse! Get me 5 cc of Goat, stat!" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 09, 2009
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A new study performed atop Mount Everest shows that humans can survive with far lower blood oxygen levels than expected. These findings, hope the doctors who made them, may have important implications for treating critical care patients.

Setting out on an extreme scientific mission, Mike Grocott, a UCL Senior Lecturer in Critical Care Medicine, and his colleagues scaled the Himalayan summit to examine how altitude affects the body. Metres from the apex, at temperatures around -25°C, the climbing doctors unzipped their down suits are collected blood from the femoral artery in the groin. Back at base camp, they found that the average blood oxygen level at 8,400 metres was 3.28 kilopascals (kPa), and the lowest value was 2.55 kPa. These findings are reported in The New England Journal of Medicine.

"This is far below what was previously thought possible,” Grocott told The Telegraph. “Previous speculation had been that humans could not function if the levels dropped below 3.9 kPa.”

Continue reading "Doctors drop trousers on top of the world — for science" »

Posted by Asher Mullard on January 08, 2009
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Posted on behalf of Declan Butler

Iran has summarily tried two of the nation's HIV researchers with communicating with an “enemy government,” in a half-day trial that started and ended on 31 December in Tehran’s Revolutionary Court. There will be no further court hearings, and a verdict is expected within days.

The brothers, Arash and Kamiar Alaei, who have achieved international acclaim for their progressive HIV-prevention programme, have been held in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison since their arrest last June (see Nature story, subscription required). Kamiar, the younger of the brothers, holds a master's degree from the Harvard School of Public Health and was to have resumed doctoral studies at the University of Albany's School of Public Health in New York. Arash, former head of international education and research cooperation at the Iranian National Research Institute of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, runs a clinic in Tehran. The brothers are not thought to have been politically active.

Jonathan Hutson, a spokesman for the Washington-based Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), points out that the six-month detention itself breached human rights, as it was “largely incommunicado.” Moreover, whereas Iranian law forbids anyone to be held in detention for longer than four months without charges being brought, it only filed the charge of communicating with an “enemy government” in early December.

At the trial, the prosecution also indicted the men on new secret charges. The trial denied the men the right to defend themselves against the new accusations and the right to due process, says Hutson. “The trial was unfair even by the draconian standards of Iran's penal code," he says.

In August, the prosecutor publicly accused the men of fomenting a velvet revolution, arguing that they had collaborated with other scientists around the world, including some in the United States, attended international AIDS conferences, and met frequently with AIDS NGOs. “Those are not crimes, that's good medicine,” says Hutson, adding that it has casts a chilling effect on academic collaboration between Iran and the rest of the world. IIn December, the US National Academies suspended visits to Iran after the temporary detention of one of its officials in Tehran (Nature).

Several human-rights organizations, including PHR and Amnesty International, have called on Iran to allow the men access to lawyers and the right to contest their detention before a judge. The call has been taken up by several scientific bodies, including the International AIDS Society, the Foundation for AIDS Research and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and thousands of scientists and physicians have signed an online petition.

Posted by Alex Witze on January 07, 2009
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Posted on behalf of Roberta Kwok

“Obesity wonder drug Leptin revived,” crows the Telegraph, and that’s the gist of most headlines about a new study out of Children’s Hospital Boston that could bring an appetite-suppressing hormone back from the dead.

What’s leptin? Circa 1995, it was thought to be a possible treatment for obesity. The hormone dials down people’s longing for food, and in short-term trials, it appeared to help patients shed weight. The catch: Their brains soon became resistant to leptin, and the pounds came right back.

Continue reading "Hope flares anew for chubby mice (and humans?)" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 07, 2009
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Like the cast of a cheap zombie movie, British scientists want your braaaaaaains.

At a press conference in London, researchers said a lack of healthy and diseased brains was holding back work on Alzheimer's, autism and other conditions.

“There’s a great opportunity to facilitate important research to discover cures and treatments which would go unfulfilled if we don't increase the number of brains available for research,” Paul Francis, from King’s College London (Daily Telegraph).

Payam Rezaie, of the Neuropathology Research Laboratory at the Open University, says the situation is dire (BBC):

For autism, we only have maybe 15 or 20 brains that have been donated that we can do our research on. That is drastically awful. We would need at least 100 cases to get meaningful data. But that is just one example. A lot of research is being hindered by this restriction.

Only the Guardian seems to have noticed that a special “telephone helpline” will be set up to help people donate their brains to science. Always willing to lead by example, I will be offering up my brain to journalism researchers, provided that the helpline doesn’t have one of those awful systems which asks you to, “Press one to donate your brain to a chemist, press two to donate your brain to a biologist, press three to donate your brain to a medical researcher.”

More
Nature's Kerri Smith visited a brain bank at UCL for last month’s NeuroPod.

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 07, 2009
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Posted on behalf of Anna Petherick

Cambridge University opened a big black Physics of Medicine centre this week, inviting Nobel Prize winner Sir Aaron Klug along for the plaque-revealing ceremony.

The swish new centre is in the rapidly developing West Cambridge site, which also houses the William Gates Building computing laboratory. The Physics of Medicine building makes the next door Cavendish laboratory—where most of the university’s physics research happens—look rather short and 1970s-shabby.

Athene Donald, deputy head of physics, will run the new center. She was recently profiled in The Observer and on BBC Radio 4 after being made a laureate of the UNESCO/L’Oreal-sponsored Women in Science awards.

The centre aims to become the place to go if you want to research anything biophysical, from tissue scaffolds to the properties of the eye’s optical fibres.

Top image: The new centre, with Sir Aaron Klug in the far left. University of Cambridge/Philip Mynott.

Posted by Asher Mullard on December 19, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The UK is being warned that a second wave of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease deaths could be on the way, after the nasty condition was found in a man with genes thought to make people less susceptible.

Until now all cases of variant CJD in the UK have been in people with an ‘MM’ genetic makeup. But the new case is in an ‘MV’ person. MVs make up 47% of the population (Daily Telegraph).

“Given that 160-170 MM individuals were infected we would estimate that the number of MV victims would be a maximum of 300 to 350, probably between 50 and 350,” says Chris Higgins, chair of the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (BBC).

This follows a paper published in Lancet Neurology on genetic risk factors in CJD, generally contracted from eating infected beef. An op-ed piece published with that paper noted that “To put it prudently, a second wave of CJD with a longer incubation time might hit these shores, but we do not know whether this will be a tidal wave or just an imperceptible ripple.”

Hugh Pennington, of Aberdeen University, told the BBC that the MV-gene cases “have a longer incubation period, because they’re more resistant... a longer period goes by between [the patient] being infected... and falling ill.”

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 18, 2008
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Every year the BMJ - the new hip and trendy title of the venerable British Medical Journal – gets into the Christmas spirit with some slightly frivolous research.

This year has some truly choice picks.

Continue reading "Head banging, frankincense and papal rugby" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 18, 2008
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Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager

The virologist and anthropologist D. Carleton Gajdusek, who won the 1976 Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on infectious brain agents now known as prion diseases, died last week in Norway.

He was found in his Tromso hotel room on Friday morning. Currently the cause of death is unknown, but his biographer, Robert Klitzman, told the New York Times that the Nobel laureate’s death was likely due to congestive heart failure. Gajdusek was 85.

The former NIH researcher and NINDS director is most noted, and won the Nobel, for his work in the fifties and sixties on kuru, a disease that led patients into trembling and madness before death. After an autopsy, the victims were found to have spongy holes in their brains. Gajdusek also worked in isolated communities around the world to investigate the genetics of pseudo-hermaphroditism, Huntington's disease and other conditions.

Most recently, Gajdusek was charged with molesting several of the young boys that he adopted while on expeditions to the Pacific. He pleaded guilty to one charge, served one year in prison and then spent the remainder of his life living in Europe.

Continue reading "Gajdusek passes on" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 16, 2008
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After years of being lambasted as “the lowest form of wit”, sarcasm has fallen into the good graces of doctors as a tool for diagnosing dementia.

John Hodges, a neurologist at Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute in Australia, and his colleagues designed two sets of short plays that were identical except for the tone of voice: words were said either seriously, or sarcastically.

Continue reading "Diagnosing dementia with sarcasm?" »

Posted by Asher Mullard on December 16, 2008
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The World Health Organisation has announced that the death of a two-year old in Indonesia is linked to bird flu. In another case in the country a nine-year old also contracted the virus, although she survived. Both had the nasty H5N1 strain.

To date 139 cases of bird flu have been confirmed in Indonesia since 2003, with 113 of them being fatal (press release, news coverage).

Meanwhile, Hong Kong's Health secretary warned of a “new alert” and said the government will consider using a new vaccine on chickens after an outbreak on a poultry farm (AP).

Continue reading "Bird flu round up" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 10, 2008
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If you believed some of the more sensationalist headlines, you might think that a commentary paper published in Nature yesterday was urging everyone to go out and source illegal drugs to boost their brain function.

Sample headlines include ‘Let all pop pills for brain, experts urge’ and ‘Uppers for everyone, scientists say’. Admittedly, that is catchier than the title of the article in question: ‘Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy’.

“The article, while libertarian in spirit, is absolutely not saying: ‘use these drugs, everybody’,” says Philip Campbell, one of the paper’s authors and editor of Nature.

“My advice is to avoid taking such drugs unless you have been prescribed them. It is a serious felony to sell such drugs off-prescription in the US; in the UK, Ritalin, for example, is a class B drug, so that un-prescribed possession is punishable by prison and a fine. Furthermore, these drugs have undergone no clinical trials for use by healthy people. And they do have side-effects.”

Continue reading "The ethics of brain boosting" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 08, 2008
Categories: Health and medicine, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

It sounds like the plot of a preposterous B-movie: former US president Jimmy Carter is going to single-handedly slay a dragon that has been terrorising the world since biblical times.

For accuracy’s sake we may have to replace ‘single-handedly’ with ‘backed by a huge amount of money from Bill Gates and the British government’. And we’ll have to change ‘dragon’ to ‘affliction with little dragons’.

What we’re actually talking about here is the nasty parasitic Guinea worm (dracunculiasis: "affliction with little dragons") that is found in Sudan, Ghana, Mali, Niger, and Nigeria. This, says the New England Journal of Medicine, is “a plague so ancient that it has been found in Egyptian mummies and has been proposed by some to have been the ‘fiery serpent’ described in the Old Testament as torturing the Israelites in the desert”.

Carter announced last week that there were fewer than 5,000 cases remaining worldwide, and he unveiled a collaboration between his Carter Center, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK’s Department for International Development to finally slay the dragon.

“Guinea worm is poised to be the second disease eradicated from Earth, ending needless suffering for millions of people from one of the world's oldest and most horrific afflictions,” says Carter (press release). “The reduction of Guinea worm cases by more than 99 percent proves that when people work together, great positive change is possible.”

Continue reading "Jimmy Carter vs the dragon" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 08, 2008
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Unsurprising science news strikes again — your happiness depends on the happiness of the people who surround you, especially your friends, family, neighbours and colleagues. But is that the whole story?

Political scientist James Fowler and sociology professor Nicholas Christakis, of UCSD and Harvard, analyzed a social network of 4,739 people whose happiness, along with other factors, had been tracked for 20 years. The report their findings in the British Medical Journal:

While there are many determinants of happiness, whether an individual is happy also depends on whether others in the individual’s social network are happy. Happy people tend to be located in the centre of their local social networks and in large clusters of other happy people. The happiness of an individual is associated with the happiness of people up to three degrees removed in the social network.

So even the happiness of a friend of a friend's friend can make you happier, they say.

Although Fowler and Christakis are getting a lot of media attention with this story (over 490 online news stories at last check), a related BMJ article is getting less coverage. Reporting in the same issue, economist Ethan Cohen-Cole and assistant professor of public health Jason Fletcher, of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and Yale University, assessed the value of a different social network and concluded that “Researchers should be cautious in attributing correlations in health outcomes of close friends to social network effects, especially when environmental confounders are not adequately controlled for in the analysis.”

Props go to Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The New York Times and TopNews for at least mentioning both stories.

Also, no need to despair if you are unhappy — happy people shouldn’t ditch their unhappy friends just yet, writes population health scientist Peter Sainsbury in an associated commentary in the BMJ. “…Happiness is not everything; unhappy acquaintances may contribute something other than happiness to our lives,” he writes.

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Asher Mullard on December 05, 2008
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Only last week, according to the BBC, the Zimbabwean government said that the cholera epidemic rampaging through the country since August and making news since late October was not an emergency. Now a national emergency has officially been declared, reports the local state-controlled Herald. Economic ruin under Mugabe’s regime has closed hospitals and apparently left the country helpless in the face of a treatable disease.

Continue reading "Zimbabwe admits cholera epidemic is an emergency" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on December 05, 2008
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One of America’s most important medical research centres has begun disclosing all employees’ industry links on its website.

The Cleveland Clinic is making public “payments to its physicians and scientists for speaking and consulting of $5,000 or more per year, and any equity, royalties, and fiduciary relationships in companies with which they collaborate”. Anyone searching the staff directory on the centre’s website can now find out this information just by scrolling to the bottom of an individual doctor’s page.

This move follows conflict of interest allegations concerning clinic employees, see the Cleveland Plain Dealer for more on this.

David Rothman, president of the Institute on Medicine as a Profession, told the New York Times that the clinic was “breaking a new path here”.

Praise has also come from senator Charles Grassley, who has been running a high profile campaign against conflicts of interest in the medical research sphere (see links below). “Patients deserve easy access to information about their doctors’ relationships with drug companies and the Cleveland Clinic is making that possible,” says Grassley in the Times.

See also
This programme was brought to you in association with... - November 21
Department of beams in the eye - October 23
Conflict of interest inquiry claims psychiatrist scalp - October 06

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 03, 2008
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Last month the University of Texas Medical Branch announced that 3,000 of its 12,000 employees would lose their jobs after Hurricane Ike devastated its facilities.

Now the Galveston Daily News is reporting that 127 faculty members will be among the casualties.

The Chronicle of Higher Education notes that the Texas Faculty Association is not happy. A post on the association’s blog says, “Of the 127 names listed, a mere 44 were non-tenure track. That means, gentle readers, that UTMB used Ike to further weaken tenure by running off tenured and tenure track faculty at a rate of almost twice that of non-tenure track faculty.”

Continue reading "Faculty cut at hurricane-hit Texas university" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 02, 2008
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The US Food and Drug Administration is seeking legislative changes so it can better protect the American food supply chain.

“Rising food imports, increasing consumption of convenience foods, and new foodborne pathogens are among the challenges we face. To address these challenges, we must move toward a food safety and defense system that is more proactive and strategic” FDA wrote one year ago in its Food Protection Plan.

Now, in their 2008 progress report, the FDA is restating its requests for legislative changes, which include the power to hire private-sector inspectors, issue mandatory recalls and force food facilities to register biennially. "These authorities are critical to future food protection implementation efforts" the report's authors write.

Continue reading "FDA wants more power" »

Posted by Asher Mullard on December 02, 2008
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It’s World AIDS day. Amidst government pledges and calls for more HIV testing, there’s 15 minutes of silence, an HIV+ marathon, a new Queen concert movie and much, much more.

Continue reading "Everyone marks World AIDS day" »

Posted by Asher Mullard on December 01, 2008
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Posted for Asher Mullard

Ahead of World AIDS Day on December 1st the papers are abuzz with AIDS news.

A paper in the Lancet says universal testing could reduce the number of people developing AIDS by 95%. An Indonesian state is pushing for micro-chipping of HIV positive people. Infections are up in the UK. And researchers have estimated that over 300,000 lives could have been saved if South Africa had started distributing antiretroviral drugs sooner.

Full details below the fold.