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Bird flu strain infects human for 1st time

A strain of bird flu that scientists thought could not infect people has shown up in a Taiwanese woman, a nasty surprise that shows scientists must do more to spot worrisome flu strains before they ignite a global outbreak, doctors say.

On a more hopeful front, two pharmaceuticals separately reported encouraging results from human tests of a possible vaccine against a different type of bird flu that has been spreading in China since first being identified last spring, which is feared to have pandemic potential.

The woman, 20, was hospitalized in May with a lung infection. After being treated with Tamiflu and antibiotics, she was released. One of her throat swabs was sent to the Taiwan Centres for Disease Control. Experts there identified it as the H6N1 bird flu, widely circulating in chickens on the island.

The patient, who was not identified, worked in a deli and had no known connection to live birds. Investigators couldn’t figure out how she was infected. But they noted several of her close family and friends also developed flu-like symptoms after spending time with her, though none tested positive for H6N1. The research was published online Thursday in the journal Lancet Respiratory Medicine.

Since the H5N1 bird flu strain first broke out in southern China in 1996, public health officials have been nervously monitoring its progress — it has so far killed more than 600 people, mostly in Asia. Several other bird flu strains, including H7N9, which was first identified in China in April, have also caused concern but none has so far mutated into a form able to spread easily among people.

“The question again is what would it take for these viruses to evolve into a pandemic strain?” wrote Marion Koopmans, a virologist at the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands, in a commentary accompanying the new report.

She said it was worrying that scientists had no early warning signals that such new bird flus could be a problem until humans fell ill. Scientists often monitor birds to see which viruses are killing them, in an attempt to guess which flu strains might be troublesome for humans — but neither H6N1 nor H7N9 make birds very sick.

Koopmans called for increased surveillance of animal flu viruses and more research into predicting which viruses might cause a global crisis.

“We can surely do better than to have human beings as sentinels,” she wrote.

The vaccine news is on the H7N9 bird flu that has infected at least 137 people and killed at least 45 since last spring. Scientists from Novavax Inc., a Gaithersburg, Maryland, company, say tests on 284 people suggest that after two shots of the vaccine, most made antibodies at a level that usually confers protection.

“They gave a third of the usual dose and yet had antibodies in over 80 percent,” said an expert not connected with the work, Dr. Greg Poland of the Mayo Clinic. “This is encouraging news. We’ve struggled to make vaccines quickly enough against novel viruses,” he said.

Results were published online Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine.

In a separate announcement on Thursday, Switzerland-based Novartis announced early tests on its H7N9 vaccine in 400 people showed 85 percent of them got a protective immune response after two doses. The data has not yet been published

Source: Yahoo news

Recluse-Spider Bite Eats Hole in Young Woman’s Ear

The ear of a woman bitten by a Mediterranean recluse. The black tissue is dead, or necrotic.

The ear of a woman bitten by a Mediterranean recluse. The black tissue is dead, or necrotic.

One woman’s Italian vacation took a turn for the worse when she woke up with pain in her ear one night. She had no way of knowing then that she’d just been bitten by a Mediterranean recluse spider, and that a chunk of her ear would soon be liquefied by the spider’s venom. But that’s exactly what happened, according to a recent report of her case.

The 22-year-old woman soon sought treatment for her pain in an Italian hospital, where doctors prescribed an antihistamine. But the swelling in her face and pain in her ear didn’t get any better. Once she was back home in the Netherlands, the ear got worse, and portions of it turned black — a clear sign that the skin and cartilage cells were dead.

The dead tissue made it clear to doctors that the woman had been bitten by a Mediterranean recluse, a spider whose bite is known to destroy skin and underlying fat, causing “sunken-in” scars or “a disfigured ear, if you are very unlucky,” said Dr. Marieke van Wijk, a plastic surgeon in the Netherlands involved in the woman’s treatment.

Source: escience news

IBM opens global research lab in Africa IBM’s

12th global research lab was opened here last week. It is designed to conduct applied and far-reaching exploratory research into the big challenges of the African continent and deliver commercially viable innovations that impact people’s lives.

 The facility features one of Africa’s most powerful computer hubs, giving IBM researchers the ability to analyse and draw insight from vast amounts of data in search for solutions to Africa’s challenges such as energy, water, transportation, agriculture, healthcare, financial inclusion, human mobility and public safety.

“The establishment of this research laboratory underpins the government’s commitment to innovation ecosystems that are already available in Kenya,” said the president of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta. The lab is supported by the Kenyan ICT Authority.

The lab’s research agenda will include the development of cognitive computing technologies that integrate learning and reasoning capabilities, enabling experts to make better decisions in areas such as healthcare delivery and financial services.

“We are currently experiencing the emergence of a new Africa – one where science and technology are enabling a pivotal ‘leap frog’ moment allowing governments and businesses to drive economic growth, raise the standard of living and compete with their global counterparts,” said Kamal Bhattacharya, director, IBM Research-Africa.

“The launch of Africa’s first full-scale, technology research facility will help lay the foundation for the continent’s future scientific and economic independence,” he added. Nicholas Nesbitt, country general manager, East Africa, said it was not just about science and technology, “but also about innovating new business models and partnering with local enterprises to ensure that our new solutions have the maximum impact on business and society.”

Source: The Times of India

 

Cancer Survivor to Return to Golf After 20 Months

When Jarrod Lyle returns to golf after a 20-month layoff at the Australian Masters, he expects some teary eyes on the tee.

Lyle is 32 years old and will be playing his first tournament since his second fight with myeloid leukemia — his first came at 17. This time, he’ll have his wife and young daughter with him Thursday when he starts a tournament that he’s not sure he’s physically ready to finish should he make the 36-hole cut.

“Just walking to that first tee and teeing the ball up and trying to hit it — that’s probably going to be the hardest thing,” Lyle said Tuesday at Royal Melbourne.

“It’s just going to let a whole lot of stuff out. Hopefully when that ball flies I can just get on to playing golf and put everything behind me and just get back to the golfer that I am.”

Lyle, then a regular on the U.S. PGA Tour, was diagnosed with his second bout of leukemia in March 2012 just before the birth of his daughter, Lusi. Lyle’s wife, Briony, became pregnant despite medical advice that Lyle’s first bout of cancer and the resulting chemotherapy would leave him sterile.

With a medical exemption to return to the PGA Tour whenever he feels he’s ready — and it might not be until late in 2014 — Lyle has found his second bout of cancer illuminating.

On the positive side, he knew what to expect, and anti-nausea drugs to counteract the chemotherapy had improved in the 15 years between his illnesses.

On the downside, because he had the disease once, it was harder to overcome twice. The first time, he spent two to three weeks at a stretch in the hospital. The second time, it often was four or five weeks or more. He’s lost weight, and his strength.

And he’s still not out of the usual five-year cancer-free time frame, as he thought he had done as a teenager.

Briony and Lusi, nearly 2, will be among a big group of friends and family supporting him at Royal Melbourne on Thursday on Friday. And against all odds, maybe the weekend.

Lyle will tee off just after midday on the first hole Thursday with two veterans to help him along — fellow Australian and 2006 U.S. Open champion Geoff Ogilvy, and Brendon de Jonge, the Zimbabwean who represented the International team at the recent Presidents Cup.

Many of Lyle’s fans will be wearing specially designed yellow shirts and hats to support his involvement in the children’s cancer charity Challenge.

When Tiger Woods won the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill in 2012, he was wearing a “Leuk the Duck” pin on his cap. The cartoon duck is a mascot for kids who come through the Challenge charity, and Woods wore it out of respect for Lyle, as did many players in the field not long after Lyle’s second cancer fight was known.

“To have the support of all those guys, guys that I am not really close with as well, it is nice,” Lyle said at the time. “It is nice to know they still care and want to know how you are going.”

On Thursday, Lyle won’t forget that support and knows where his heart will be.

“I’m going to dedicate this first tee shot to everybody that’s done that over the years or over the last 20 months,” he said. “Everyone who has got in contact with us and given us support.”

Source: abc news

 

 

Deadly MERS virus found in Saudi Arabian camel

The Saudi Health Ministry says it has discovered a deadly virus in a camel in Jiddah province, on the western coast of Saudi Arabia.

The ministry’s statement released Monday is considered an important development in the search for the origin the deadly illness. There have been more than 60 deaths from the virus known as Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, with all but a handful of the fatalities in Saudi Arabia.

The ministry said a sample from the camel was tested near the home of a patient infected with the virus.

An international research team in August found the mysterious virus that is related to SARS in a bat in Saudi Arabia. They suspected it was perhaps another animal that was spreading the virus directly to humans.

Source: The New Zealand Herald

HIV/AIDS experts awarded $5 million training grants for India, Africa

John hopkinsHIV/AIDS at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine and the university’s Bloomberg School of Public Health have been awarded more than $5 million by the Fogarty International Centre’s HIV Research Training Program to foster health and medical research skills in India, Uganda, Ethiopia and Malawi.

The training funds, to be spread over five years, focus on places hard hit by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, currently estimated to infect some 33.4 million people worldwide.

Four Johns Hopkins awards were among 22 grants announced in October 2013 by Fogarty, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The new funding will be used to train more than 50 undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral research scientists, as well as lab technologists, as part of a broader effort to develop and upgrade the health and medical research infrastructure in these countries, according to Fogarty officials.

Such added local skills, researchers say, are essential to the success of many other US government-funded HIV/AIDS initiatives aimed at preventing and treating people with the disease.

Among the Johns Hopkins faculty serving as principal investigators of the awards are Dr Robert Bollinger (HIV-TB Fogarty Research Training Program in India), Dr Ronald Gray (Male Circumcision and Use of Foreskin Tissues for HIV Prevention in Uganda), Dr Andrea Ruff (Optimizing HIV Prevention in Ethiopia through Implementation Science) and Dr Taha Taha (Training in HIV-related Non-communicable Disease Complications in Malawi).

“These training grants are desperately needed to assemble the critical mass of medical research personnel necessary to plan, organize, implement and monitor how we battle HIV disease in the countries most heavily burdened by the pandemic,” said Fogarty grant recipient Dr Robert Bollinger, a professor at Johns Hopkins and director of its Centre for Clinical Global Health Education.

Source: India Medical Times

China Reports Two New Cases Of H7N9 Bird Flu

Earlier this week, Chinese health officials notified the World Health Organization (WHO) of two new infections of H7N9 – a strain of the virus responsible for causing the bird flu. The Asian nation’s Xinhua news agency reported on one of the cases Tuesday – that of a three-year-old boy living in south China’s Guangdong Province. The boy tested positive for the virus by the provincial disease prevention and control center and is in stable condition at the People’s Hospital of Dongguan City, according to the news agency.

Hong Kong’s Centre for Health Protection (CHP) said the boy’s seven close contacts had tested negative for the virus, but three of them had flu-like symptoms.

According to the WHO, the second patient is a 64-year-old woman from Zhejiang Province in eastern China, who is a farmer and had regular contact with live poultry. She fell ill on October 30 and was admitted to a local hospital the next day. She is currently in a critical condition, the international health organization said.

Officials from Zhejiang province, which sits about 800 miles northeast of Guangdong, reported two infections in October, a 35-year-old man and in a 67-year-old farmer, who also worked with live poultry. The Chinese province has reported the most H7N9 cases, with 49 infections and 11 deaths so far.

When Chinese officials identified the bird flu strain back in March, the number of cases jumped before falling off into May. Only two cases were reported over the summer. Experts have warned that flu viruses are erratic and there is a chance that the number of cases could start rising as the Northern Hemisphere moves into winter, a pattern followed by other avian influenza viruses.

The four Chinese infections reported this autumn are fueling worries of another wave of H7N9 infections, but some public health experts say it’s too early to tell. Richard Webby, director of the WHO collaborating center for influenza studies at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, told CIDRAP News that it’s too early to tell if the recent infections are due to cooling temperatures, “or if we are seeing an increase at all.”Webby also pointed out, “chicken production is also likely getting ramped up soon for Chinese New Year.”

Marion Koopmans, a virologist at the National Institute of Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands, said the timing of the cases hints at seasonal factors, but there are too few of them to call it a trend just yet. She added that market surveys could be used to determine any trends.

“Whether or not we expect seasonality is related to the question where these viruses come from,” Koopmans told CIDRAP, a health news service of the University of Minnesota. She also noted seasonality reports seem to focus on virality of the flu virus in wild birds. “If H7N9 is circulating in backyard farms, the picture may be quite different,” Koopmans said.

The WHO has said that since H7N9 causes only a mild infection in the birds, it could still be in the avian population of China. It has called for China and bordering countries to continue monitoring public health markers for the virus.

Source; Red Orbit

 

Neurosurgeon bases surgery simulator on daughter’s head

Neurosurgery is deemed one of the most complicated surgical techniques, and any tools that help train new neurosurgical apprentices are largely welcomed in the medical world. Now, a neurosurgeon has created a surgery simulator designed to teach basic surgery skills, and it is modeled on his daughter’s head.

The simulator, created by Richard Ashpole of the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham, UK, is called the Realistic Operative Workstation for Educating Neurosurgical Apprentices, otherwise known as Rowena.

Rowena is coincidentally his 14-year-old daughter’s name, who Ashpole says was more than happy to help with his new creation – sitting still for 90 minutes while a mould was taken of her head.

Ashpole says he wanted the Rowena model to be as close to a real skull as possible, so it seemed logical to base the model on the head of a real person.

Rowena is made up of internal skull anatomy on a molded plastic base. The model consists of a fixed replaceable upper cranium with scalp, bone and Dural (a type of aluminum) layers. A realistic plastic brain is inside the skull.

How can Rowena be used?

Ashpole explains that a three-point headrest (skull clamp) can be used with Rowena in order to teach neurosurgeons anatomical positioning and landmarks. Raney scalp clips can also be used with the model, alongside burr hole and ICP (intracranial pressure monitoring) devices.

The model is able to withstand a variety of high-speed drills, as well as a hudson brace and a gigli saw and guide.

The dural layers – also complete with vascular markings – can be opened in different ways to expose the underlying brain. The model also allows bone flaps to be replaced and fixed with sutures (stitches) or a variety of screws and plates.

For a closure procedure, the dural layers can be sutured and the bone flaps can be replaced and fixed using any marketed fixation system. The scalp can also be stapled.

Source: Bartle Doo Articles

10-year-old boy cured of serious peanut allergy

On occasion, a medical transplant will confer more than the intended primary benefit from donor to recipient. That’s what happened when a 10-year-old boy lost his peanut allergy after receiving bone marrow to treat his acute lymphocytic leukemia.

“It has been reported that bone marrow and liver transplants can transfer peanut allergy from donor to recipient,” allergist Yong Luo, told reporters. “But our research found a rare case in which a transplant seems to have cured the recipient of their allergy.”

Luo presented his findings on Friday in Baltimore to the American College of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology’s annual meeting, sharing the boy’s history as a case study. The research team noted the boy had been diagnosed at 15 months of age with a peanut allergy after vomiting and erupting in whole-body hives after eating peanuts.

 

 

 

 

Later, the boy received a diagnosis for leukemia and, at age 10, underwent the transplant from a donor with no known allergies. Intrigued, allergists confirmed the loss of the peanut allergy by conducting an “oral food challenge,” which should not be undertaken at home doctors warn. Under close watch, the boy ingested a small amount of peanut and showed no reaction.

Medical researcher Steven Weiss, a co-author of the study, told attendees at the meeting that food allergy is associated with the body’s abnormal production of high specific IgE levels. This case adds to previous reports indicating that “genetic modification during the early stages of immune cell development in bone marrow may play a large role in causing allergy.”

One of the most common food allergies in the United States, peanut allergy affects some 400,000 Americans. Among schoolchildren, peanut allergy is the leading type of food allergy. But unlike other types of allergies, such as reactions to milk or soy, peanut allergy lasts a lifetime. Should any parent insist their child has “outgrown” his or her peanut allergy, experts advise a visit to a board-certified allergist for proper testing for allergens.

Any child with a peanut allergy should carry a prescribed epinephrine pen, at all times. “Food allergies are serious and can cause a severe, life-threatening reaction known as anaphylaxis,” Weiss said. “It’s important to be under the regular care of an allergist who can perform proper tests and administer treatment.”

Although minor reactions to peanut allergens are common, the more severe anaphylaxis causes a rush of symptoms including an itchy rash, throat swelling, and lowered blood pressure, which could progress to fatal shock.

There is no known cure for peanut allergy.

Source: Medical Daily

 

At 107, nation’s oldest veteran enjoys limelight

Richard Overton, believed to be the oldest living United States veteran at 107, accepted a box of cigars and a standing ovation Thursday with a humble demeanor and a beaming smile.

More than 100 people packed a conference room at the Stephen F. Austin building in downtown Austin to attend a pre-Veterans Day ceremony in Austin honoring Overton and Ken Wallingford, who spent 10 months in a tiger cage as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

“I’ve gotten so many letters and so many thank yous and I enjoy every bit of it, but I’m still going to enjoy some more,” said Overton, who is planning a visit with President Barack Obama next week in Washington, D.C.

Ex-state employee

Overton, identified by the General Land Office as the nation’s oldest veteran, was born in Bastrop County. He served in the Army during World War II in the South Pacific and now lives in Austin. He sold furniture in Austin after the war and later worked for the state Treasurer’s Office.

He drives and walks without a cane. During a television interview in March, he told a reporter that he doesn’t take medicine, smokes cigars every day and takes whiskey in his morning coffee. The key to living to his age, he said, is simply “staying out of trouble.”

The day’s ceremony, sponsored by the General Land Office, also recognized Wallingford, who shared his experience in captivity in the Cambodian jungle as the audience listened in amazement.

The former Army sniper, now 65, alternately laughed and became emotional as he told the story of his imprisonment and triumphant return home.

“As we look forward to Veterans Day I hope each and every one of us can remember those who have served, and importantly, those who serve today,” said Wallingford, who is veterans liaison for the Veterans Land Board.

Emotional memories

Wallingford brought a food and water bowl, sandals, pajamas and photos from his imprisonment in April 1972 to being set free in February 1973. His voiced cracked as he described his return to the United States.

“We weren’t going to leave without you guys,” Wallingford remembered hearing in the Army helicopter on his way out.

President Lyndon B. Johnson offered Wallingford and the other POWs who returned with him the presidential suite and staff of the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, he said.

Bill McLemore, deputy commissioner for the Veterans Land Board and a retired Army colonel, served with Wallingford. “Most veterans are just looking to have someone reaffirm that what they’ve done was an honorable thing to do,” McLemore said.

Source: Houston Chronicle