Eideard

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India has “never been closer” to wiping out polio, India’s health minister has declared as he marked World Polio Day.

There have been no new cases for more than nine months, making it the longest polio-free period since the global eradication campaign was launched. The only case reported this year was in the state of West Bengal in January. There were 39 cases reported over a similar period in 2010.

India is one of only four countries in the world where polio is still endemic. The virus is also prevalent in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria.

The overall trend in India is so positive that its vaccination programme is being discussed as one other countries might learn from.

Pakistan is a particular concern. It has seen 118 new cases so far this year concentrated in poor, insecure areas: Karachi, Baluchistan and the tribal areas close to the border with Afghanistan.

The two countries routinely re-infect each other. Afghanistan has seen 40 new cases this year. The continuing violence there also makes it hard to reach vulnerable children. Nigeria too has seen a surge in cases this year which have undermined recent gains…

Some communities simply do not trust the people who administer the vaccine and fear it could hurt their children… But they trust their priests.

The health ministry reported that no cases were reported from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh for 18 months…

Uttar Pradesh has been one of the worst-affected regions in the world’s fight against polio with hundreds of cases reported until a few years ago. Of the 549 polio cases in India in 2008, 297 were in Uttar Pradesh.

It is especially heartwarming for a grayhead like me to witness this victory. I grew up in a time when polio threatened all societies. Beaches and pools were often closed in summer because of the threat of contagion. All of us knew someone in every neighborhood who died or was left paralyzed by the disease.

I experienced each stage of vaccine development from early days of the first vaccinations, needle sticks and terrified children as kids always are over needles – on through to oral vaccines. The relief experienced by my parents, all parents in the factory town I grew up in. The minority of superstitious nutballs who kept their kids from safety were looked at as fools who fortunately only constituted a danger to themselves – and unfortunately to their own children.

Skeletons of the plague dead in London’s East Smithfield Cemetery
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Scientists have mapped out the entire genetic map of the Black Death, a 14th century bubonic plague that killed 50 million Europeans in one of the most devastating epidemics in history.

The work, which involved extracting and purifying DNA from the remains of Black death victims buried in London’s “plague pits,” is the first time scientists have been able to draft a reconstructed genome of any ancient pathogen.

Their result — a full draft of the entire Black Death genome — should allow researchers to track changes in the disease’s evolution and virulence, and lead to better understanding of modern-day infectious diseases.

Building on previous research which showed that a specific variant of the Yersinia pestis bacterium was responsible for the plague that ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351, a team of German, Canadian and American scientists went on to “capture” and sequence the entire genome of the disease.

“The genomic data show that this bacterial strain, or variant, is the ancestor of all modern plagues we have today worldwide. Every outbreak across the globe today stems from a descendant of the medieval plague,” said Hendrik Poinar, of Canada’s McMaster University, who worked with the team…

For this study Poinar’s team analysed skeletal remains from Black Death victims buried in London’s East Smithfield “plague pits,” which are located under what is now the Royal Mint…

Poinar, whose work was published in the journal Nature, said the team found that in 660 years of evolution, the genetic map of the ancient organism had only barely changed. “The next step is to determine why this was so deadly,” he said.

Pathogens and pandemics aren’t about to disappear. Levels of preparedness afforded by modern medicine, vaccination and hygiene are constantly challenged by ignorance and superstition. Indeed, in the United States significant resistance to well-proven methods flows like a river of political pus from the combination of religious nutballs and opportunist populists.

Living in a state that confronts deaths from plague every year, there is currency to the contemplation of historic tragedy. Living in a state where parents can refuse a vaccine for their children on religious grounds thereby endangering other children by the hundreds – research that supports greater depth of response to the dangers of pandemic is a necessity.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is a big, serious government agency with a big, serious job: protecting public health from threats ranging from hurricanes to bird flu.

So when the good doctors of Atlanta warned people this week about how to prepare for a zombie apocalypse, the world took notice.

“That’s right, I said z-o-m-b-i-e a-p-o-c-a-l-y-p-s-e,” Dr. Ali S. Khan wrote on the CDC website this week, adding casually that “Resident Evil” is his “personal favorite” zombie movie.

As it happens, Khan, one of the nation’s top-ranking public health professionals (he’s a rear admiral and an assistant surgeon general), doesn’t actually believe the living dead are about to claw their way out of graves and start chewing on your brain.

But, he and his communications team recently noticed, what they’d want you to do if the world really did suddenly go “Night of the Living Dead” is pretty much the same thing they’d want you to do in case of a hurricane or a major pandemic…

The CDC got a question about zombies during an online chat about radiation leaks related to the meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in March, and they saw traffic spike.

Khan and his communications team knew they’d found a way to get the public interested in disaster preparedness, he said.

So they posted the advice on Monday. Their website crashed on Wednesday.

The advice is mostly stuff you should already know: Make an emergency plan. Stockpile food, water and medicine. Have a utility knife, duct tape and battery-powered radio handy, along with some changes of clothes and bedding…Have basic first aid supplies handy for a hurricane or a pandemic — although, Khan says, “you’re a goner if a zombie bites you.

Airborne prions are also infectious and can induce mad cow disease or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disorder, new findings suggest. This is the surprising conclusion of researchers at the University of Zurich, the University Hospital Zurich and the University of Tübingen. They recommend precautionary measures for scientific labs, slaughterhouses and animal feed plants.

The prion is the infectious agent that caused the epidemic of mad cow disease, also termed bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), and claimed the life of over 280,000 cows in the past decades. Transmission of BSE to humans, e.g. by ingesting food derived from BSE-infected cows, causes variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease which is characterized by a progressive and invariably lethal break-down of brain cells.

It is known that prions can be transmitted through contaminated surgical instruments and, more rarely, through blood transfusions. The consumption of food products made from BSE-infected cows can also induce the disease that is responsible for the death of almost 300 people. However, prions are not generally considered to be airborne — in contrast to many viruses including influenza and chicken pox.

Prof. Adriano Aguzzi’s team of scientists at the universities of Zurich and Tübingen and the University Hospital Zurich have now challenged the notion that airborne prions are innocuous. In a study, mice were housed in special inhalation chambers and exposed to aerosols containing prions. Unexpectedly, it was found that inhalation of prion-tainted aerosols induced disease with frightening efficiency. Just a single minute of exposure to the aerosols was sufficient to infect 100% of the mice, according to Prof. Aguzzi who published the findings in the Open-Access-Journal “PLoS Pathogens.” The longer exposure lasted, the shorter the time of incubation in the recipient mice and the sooner clinical signs of a prion disease occurred. Prof. Aguzzi says the findings are entirely unexpected and appear to contradict the widely held view that prions are not airborne…

Precautionary measures against prion infections in scientific laboratories, slaughterhouses and animal feed plants do not typically include stringent protection against aerosols. The new findings suggest that it may be advisable to reconsider existing regulations.

I would say – “Right away!”

If you’re in a working environment where airborne contact now appears possible – or likely – you’re dumber than a hoe handle if you don’t proceed with preventive measures on your own.

UPDATE: While I don’t completely agree with his conclusions, Jim – who commented below – has a more detailed exposition of his analysis at his own blog. And a link to the original research which you may find useful.

Tomato plants use similar biochemical mechanisms to reject pollen from their own flowers as well as pollen from foreign but related plant species, thus guarding against both inbreeding and cross-species hybridization, report plant scientists at the University of California, Davis.

The researchers identified a tomato pollen gene that encodes a protein that is very similar to a protein thought to function in preventing self-pollination in petunias. The tomato gene also was shown to play a role in blocking cross-species fertilization, suggesting that similar biochemical mechanisms underlie the rejection of a plant’s own pollen as well as foreign pollen from another species…

“Flowering plants have several types of reproductive barriers to prevent accidental hybridization between species in nature,” Roger Chetelat said. “We have identified one piece of this puzzle, a gene that helps control whether or not tomato pollen is recognized and rejected by flowers of related wild species…

In plants, as well as animals, breeding between closely related individuals is generally considered detrimental because it leads to the expression of harmful mutations and leaves subsequent generations genetically ill equipped to deal with environmental changes or diseases.

And crossbreeding with individuals from different species can be equally detrimental because it frequently results in hybrid offspring that cannot reproduce…

Their findings suggest that the Cullin1 protein is part of a biochemical gatekeeper: An active form of the protein is required for pollen to fertilize plants of another species, if that species is capable of rejecting its own pollen.

Since this research opens another door to preventing some of the events feared by opponents of genetically modified plants, no doubt this and following research will be denied and ignored by purists that fear – even more – success that might offer access to sound nutrition at lower costs.

Chetelat and Wentao Li are members of the multicenter Interspecific Reproductive Barriers in Tomato research group…More information about the research group is available here. Their haiku is a kick, too.

If you want to understand the way prescription drugs are marketed today, have a look at the 1928 book, “Propaganda,” by Edward Bernays, the father of public relations in America.

For Bernays, the public relations business was less about selling things than about creating the conditions for things to sell themselves. When Bernays was working as a salesman for Mozart pianos, for example, he did not simply place advertisements for pianos in newspapers. That would have been too obvious.

Instead, Bernays persuaded reporters to write about a new trend: Sophisticated people were putting aside a special room in the home for playing music. Once a person had a music room, Bernays believed, he would naturally think of buying a piano. As Bernays wrote, “It will come to him as his own idea.”

Just as Bernays sold pianos by selling the music room, pharmaceutical marketers now sell drugs by selling the diseases that they treat. The buzzword is “disease branding.”

To brand a disease is to shape its public perception in order to make it more palatable to potential patients. Panic disorder, reflux disease, erectile dysfunction, restless legs syndrome, bipolar disorder, overactive bladder, ADHD, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, even clinical depression: All these conditions were once regarded as rare until a marketing campaign transformed the brand.

Once a branded disease has achieved a degree of cultural legitimacy, there is no need to convince anyone that a drug to treat it is necessary. It will come to him as his own idea…

It is hard to brand a disease without the help of physicians, of course. So drug companies typically recruit academic “thought leaders” to write and speak about any new conditions they are trying to introduce. It also helps if the physicians believe the branded condition is dangerous.

Interesting article. There is an obvious parallel in American politics. The Madison Avenue thugs who worked for the Bush, Cheney and Rove troika being the leading example.

RTFA and reflect upon cultural advances like “I’m always peeing in my pants” becoming “overactive bladder” – or how shyness was transformed into social anxiety disorder.

The 10-year-old Human Genome Project has only just begun to bring to fruition its promise to transform medicine…

Francis Collins, who led the U.S. component of the project and is now director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, said that although it may seem that the revolution promised with the publication of the first draft in 2000 is slow in coming, many early predictions had been prematurely hyped.

Isn’t that a pundit-based specialty?

Scientists have barely scratched below the surface of the possibilities opened up by having access to the whole human gene map, he said, and when they do, their results will determine the way all people are diagnosed and treated for diseases.

“It’s fair to say that most people have not yet had the experience of having their personal medical care directly affected by the sequencing of the human genome,” Francis told a briefing in London marking the project’s 10-year anniversary.

“So while one might argue that the consequences have not come across in the first 10 years in the most dramatic form that some predictors put forward in the year 2000, I think the predictions … were probably a bit overblown.”

Mike Stratton, another of the project’s founders and now director of Britain’s influential Sanger Institute, pointed to several areas of disease where big medical advances had already come about thanks to the ability to read the map of human life.

Cancer drugs, like so-called BRAF inhibitors for malignant melanoma skin cancers — versions of which are being developed by drugmakers including Switzerland’s Roche and Britain’s GlaxoSmithKline — were examples how quickly gene sequencing had given birth to targeted treatments, he said…

The genome founders also noted that scientists had already found more than 800 genetic variants that play a role in risks of common illnesses like heart disease, cancers and diabetes…

“When a truly transformative advance occurs in science, inevitably there will be in the short term an overly optimistic set of predictions,” he said. “But in the long term…the consequences will turn out to have been underestimated. I think that will…be true of the Human Genome Project.

Couldn’t agree more. We always hope for more than just plain good news. In part, let’s face it, because of our mortality.

But, real science requires proofs and testing, peer review and more testing. There is no easy way around sound methods. And, of course, if results aren’t forthcoming quickly enough to satisfy Reality TV and beancounters – whining is the result.

Preventable infectious diseases cause two-thirds of child deaths, according to a new study published by The Lancet. Experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF’s Child Health Epidemiology Reference Group (CHERG) assessed data from 193 countries to produce estimates by country, region and the world. While the number of deaths has declined globally over the last decade, the analysis reveals how millions of children under five die every year from preventable causes….

“These findings have important implications for national programs,” said UNICEF Chief of Health, Dr. Mickey Chopra. “The persistence of diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria, all of which are easily preventable and curable but which nonetheless remain the leading single causes of death worldwide, should spur us to do more to control these diseases.”

The study’s country and regional estimates, however, underscore how global efforts must be targeted to have maximum impact. Malaria, for instance, is responsible for approximately 16 percent of deaths in Africa, but is a comparatively minor disease in the rest of the world. The study did reveal successes in fighting some infectious diseases, such as measles and tetanus—each now only accounts for 1 percent of child deaths worldwide.

Newborn deaths—those within the first month of life—increased as a proportion of all child deaths globally from 37 percent in 2000 to 41 percent in 2008. The two greatest single causes of death among neonates are pre-term birth complications and birth-related asphyxia. “These new data make the compelling case that for countries to get on track for Millennium Development Goal 4, they need to scale up low-cost, effective newborn health interventions,” said co-author Dr. Joy Lawn, director of Global Policy and Evidence for Save the Children’s Saving Newborn Lives program.

Overdue – as we all know.

Those who manage to ignore children, their health as well as education and opportunities – deserve nothing but contempt.

Frequent exposure to environmental tobacco smoke among 13-year-olds is associated with an increased risk of future blood vessel hardening and greater risks of other heart disease factors, according to new research published in…a journal of the American Heart Association.

The study of 494 children showed that those with higher levels of exposure to secondhand smoke from ages 8 to 13 had, by age 13, significantly increased blood vessel wall thickness and functioning problems, both of which are precursors to arterial structural changes and hardening…

“Although previous research has found that passive smoke may be harmful for blood vessels among adults, we did not know until this study that these specific effects also happen among children and adolescents,” said Katariina Kallio, M.D., Ph.D., lead author of the study…

The research adds to a growing body of evidence indicating that secondhand smoke has objectively measurable effects on children’s heart health…

“These findings suggest that children should not face exposure to tobacco smoke at all,” Kallio said. “Even a little exposure to tobacco smoke may be harmful for blood vessels. We need to provide children a smoke-free environment.”

Smokers are among the most egregious of selfish human beings. They will squash their butts on the parlor floor or in the bowl of a spoon remaining at the dinner table. If no one is keeping an eye on them.

If their friends and family must also die – so be it.

When Annie Brown’s daughter, Isabel, was a month old, her pediatrician asked Brown and her husband to sit down because he had some bad news to tell them: Isabel carried a gene that put her at risk for cystic fibrosis.

While grateful to have the information — Isabel received further testing and she doesn’t have the disease — the Mankato, Minnesota, couple wondered how the doctor knew about Isabel’s genes in the first place. After all, they’d never consented to genetic testing.

It’s simple, the pediatrician answered: Newborn babies in the United States are routinely screened for a panel of genetic diseases. Since the testing is mandated by the government, it’s often done without the parents’ consent, according to Brad Therrell, director of the National Newborn Screening & Genetics Resource Center.

In many states, such as Florida, where Isabel was born, babies’ DNA is stored indefinitely, according to the resource center.

Many parents don’t realize their baby’s DNA is being stored in a government lab, but sometimes when they find out, as the Browns did, they take action. Parents in Texas, and Minnesota have filed lawsuits, and these parents’ concerns are sparking a new debate about whether it’s appropriate for a baby’s genetic blueprint to be in the government’s possession.

RTFA. Not too long; but, detailed. Gives you a chance to consider the viewpoint of these parents – and others. I beg to differ.

Thanks, Cinaedh