Health Meaning

If US Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) has its way, the Food and Drug Administration will soon acquire the ability to regulate cigarettes and other tobacco products, more drugs and foods that already oversees. As Reuters reports, the Waxman bill cleared a committee of the House of Representatives yesterday, 39-13, but it still needs approval by the House and the full Senate. Some cigarette manufacturers such as Philip Morris, are on board, while others oppose the legislation. It remains to be seen whether President Barack Obama, a former smoker himself, would support the bill.

The laboratory researcher in Germany who was accidentally exposed to the deadly Ebola virus two weeks ago remains good health, according to virologist Stephan Günther Bernhard Nocht Institute for tropical medicine in Hamburg, Germany, where the researcher pricked during an experiment. Günther coordinated an international effort to save the life of the researcher in case she was infected by giving it an experimental vaccine. In the last week, it has not developed a fever, and Ebola virus was not detected in his blood. . If it remains, it will be released on April 3, after the 21-day period for Ebola incubation purposes

said Günther Science Insider that there was a development minor week: the patient developed slightly elevated levels of D-dimer, which are fragments of proteins that are a possible indication of a coagulation disorder and could be a sign of infection with Ebola virus.

However, D-dimer may also indicate other conditions, such as a blood clot, or coronary artery disease, and showed no other signs of illness. Günther and briefly considered if advisers to give him an experimental drug called anticoagulant rNAPc2, but decided to hold off.

Because she remained in good health, "the reason for this laboratory discovery is most likely not Ebola," says Günther. She was moved to an isolation unit as a precaution last week, but as of yesterday, it is in a regular hospital room, according to Stefan Schmiedel, the clinician University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf oversee his care. But it may not be possible to determine whether the researcher has remained healthy because the vaccine worked or because it has never been infected with the virus.

More than a decade after Congress told the Environmental Protection Agency to start the test chemicals that can disrupt the balance of hormones in people, the agency finally gets time to do it. Yesterday, the EPA published a list of 67 first pesticides that will be tested this summer as part of its screening program of so-called endocrine disruptors.

The testing mandate has been folded into the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996, at a time of escalating public concerns about chemicals in the environment hormonelike. These endocrine disruptors can cause reproductive problems in wildlife, and scientists suspect that they contribute to cancer and infertility in men. Environmental groups have been frustrated by the delay in the test program. EPA says it has taken so long in part because scientists had to develop tests for endocrine disruption.

The outbreak of swine flu in the United States and Mexico is, as is typical in the early stages of the spread of a new virus leading to an outpouring of different data from different sources.

At a news conference today in Mexico City, the Mexican health secretary said they had confirmed 20 deaths from swine flu and had 40 other suspected cases. A Associated Press dispatch said that the Ministry of Health of Mexico has identified 943 suspected cases. The World Health Organization said the reports today, there have been 62 suspicious deaths and a total of 882 suspected cases. WHO said Canadian laboratory confirmed 18 cases of swine flu, of which 12 were "genetically identical" to those of the United States. At a press conference today in Atlanta, the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control, Richard Besser, makes no mention of the Canadian trials, but said CDC had confirmed 7 samples from Mexico as the same as the virus of the US swine flu in a region of its genome.

But, more importantly, stakeholders agreed with the WHO assessment that the epidemic is "very worrying".

Five people with swine flu in the US were hospitalized, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported today. So far, only one patient in the US was hospitalized, a 41 year old woman who recovered.

CDC and health agencies in other countries have been baffled by the absence of severe illness from swine flu outside Mexico, now suspect the infection led to hospitalization nearly 2,000 people and more than 150 deaths. "As we continue to look for cases," said CDC Director Richard Besser Acting at a press conference, "we will see a broader spectrum of disease. ... I think we will see deaths in this country. "

Besser said three hospitalized patients in California and two in Texas, but he had no details on individuals. CDC has confirmed 64 cases, with 45 of those in New York.

CDC has investigators in Mexico helping to sort why this epidemic has apparently caused many more cases of serious illness. "At this point, we have not been able to rule in or out assumptions," said Besser.

President Barack Obama today called for $ 1.5 billion from Congress to help fight the swine flu. This was news to Besser at the press conference. "I had not heard that," he said, adding that it was not uncommon to have additional funding requests during a public health emergency.

Plus The New Republic 'The health care blog, Jonathan Cohn wondered why a seemingly qualified expert on diseases infectious-member Institute of medicine, nonetheless has yet to get a vote Senate confirmation to become commissioner of the Food and Drug administration. Margaret Hamburg is the candidate of President Barack Obama to run the FDA, who worked in the preparation of vaccines and to develop diagnostic tools to understand swine flu.

Mexico confirmed that a person from Mexico infected with the swine flu virus developed symptoms on 11 March, six days earlier than the case that many in the media called "patient zero" science Insider has learned. The finding not only adds a new entry at the left end of the timeline of the epidemic, but it also calls into question the geographical link between the old Patient Zero and a large pig farm.

Epidemiologist Mauricio Hernández-Ávila Vice Minister of disease prevention and health promotion for the Ministry of Health of Mexico, stressed science Insider that Mexican labs still many former test samples. "I think we will have previous cases, and we are working on it," said Hernández-Ávila, noting that they have other samples not tested from early March and possibly in February.

The previous patient zero, a 4 year old boy from La Gloria in Veracruz, lived near a huge pig farm in Perote, Granjas Carroll, which some suspect may be housed a pig infected than kick the epidemic. But the trial did not find a pig infected by what is now called the 09 A (H1N1) influenza, or have farm workers tested positive.

Hernández-Ávila said he remains open minded about the origin and may eventually point to the Perote region when they do more tests. "It is remarkable that in such a small community, which is isolated, we have a swine flu positive person," he said.

* Note :. Subject to change

The virus isolated from the second patient of swine flu in the Netherlands has an interesting mutation in a gene called PB2 that could mean? the virus has become more to spread from person to person, a team of Dutch researchers reported Friday ProMED, a disease outbreak surveillance system. But they are the first to recognize that this could be a red herring.

The virus isolated from the patient, a 53 year old woman who developed the first symptoms of flying home from Cancun, Mexico, April 30, has a variation at position 677 of the PB2 gene, which encodes polymerase protein of the virus. Following the modification, an amino acid called glutamic acid in the protein chain is replaced by another called glycine.

scientific flu this particular region of the PB2 gene has long piqued, said Marcel Jonges, a researcher at the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) in Bilthoven. Dozens of studies have suggested that a transfer to a position near-627-can make the H5N1 bird flu virus more virulent and more transmissible between humans. And last year, a study PloS Pathogens suggested that a change at position 677 might do the same. Dutch patient, said Jonges, is the first swine flu cases in which the latter change was seen.

Oliver Pybus of Oxford University, one of the authors on PLoS Pathogens paper, called the findings "intriguing" but he warned that the mutation could be devoid of meaning. We need more laboratory studies, for example, in animals, to show that the mutation does make a difference, he said. Jonges agrees, and these studies are underway in the laboratory flu virologist Ron Fouchier at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, he said. "But we wanted to get this conclusion as soon as possible so that other people can look for it, too," he adds.

Very few PB2 sequence data was collected in the swine flu to date, Jonges said, because most scientists are focusing on genes hemagglutinin and neuraminidase, the famous H and N that sit outside of the virus. The PB2 gene has not yet been discussed on a new wiki page Pybus and other scientists analyze genetic information on the swine flu as it comes in. More researchers should begin sequencing the PB2 gene said Jonges, and especially the region between positions 0 and 700, which seems to play a role in adaptation to human hosts.

It is not surprising that a deadly disease like cancer can make you depressed. But if the tumors are the source of depression? That's what a new study in rats suggests. Animals with breast tumors showed depressivelike behavior and anxiety, although unlike humans, they do not know the psychological burden that comes with a serious illness.

Up to 60% of women with breast cancer also have depression, and this figure generally holds true for other cancers. In addition to anxiety and fear, some studies suggest that treatments like chemotherapy can trigger an inflammatory cascade that is linked to depression, social isolation, and related symptoms. But no one had focused on the impact of the tumors themselves for a very simple reason: It is difficult to disentangle the psychological burden of cancer, the effects of treatment, and biochemical effects of the disease

So Leah Pyter. , A behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, Illinois, turned to rats, which do not share our mental burden of being diagnosed with cancer. Working with his mentor, systems biologist Brian Prendergast, and their colleagues, Pyter induced mammary tumors in rats and then put 12 sick animals, with 12 healthy controls, through various tests that indicate depressive behaviors. In a standard test, the rats placed in a cylinder of water were considered more depressed if they spent more time sitting, as opposed to the paddling pool. In another, researchers counted how much sucrose consumed rats. (Eating less suggests that animals are down in the dumps.) The team also examined anxiety. Rats that buried more marbles were considered more obsessive-compulsive - and therefore more anxious

tumors affected rats were more likely to show depressive behaviors and anxiety, reports of team online this week in the Proceedings of the national Academy of sciences . For example, tumors with rats spent about 80% of their time floating in water, compared to 50% for healthy rats.

levels to determine what caused low animal spirits, the researchers measured cytokines, molecules that can be released by tumors or immune cells that fight against their signaling. Sick animals showed higher levels in the blood and in the hippocampus of the brain that controls emotional behavior. "Cytokines in the brain can induce depressivelike behavior," said Pyter. The levels of certain cytokines were more than double normal levels, the group reports. The rats with tumors also had an insufficient response to stress, producing fewer glucocorticoid hormones that dampen natural inflammation and may remove cytokines. Why the release of glucocorticoids is altered, she does not know, but there are reports of the same effect in people with a dispersed cancer.

"It was not really a research center in this field, [and] I think it is increasingly important," said Charles Cleeland, psychopharmacologist at MD Anderson Cancer center in Houston, Texas, which has examined the link between chemotherapy and depression. it also notes that "some patients come to the clinic treatment with behavioral changes," saving the results found here.

As swine flu cases continue to rise in many countries, the World Health Organization (WHO) maintains that the epidemic does not deserve the "pandemic" label. And the United States, representing just over half of the 12,954 confirmed cases of the disease reported to WHO by 46 countries, there are signs the epidemic may have peaked.

Number of cases in part reflect the intensity of a country surveillance efforts, but it is clear that the new H1N1 virus responsible for the disease has made solid progress in Japan, with 350 confirmed cases, most outside the Americas. The cases in recent days have also nearly doubled in Chile to 74, the highest number seen in the southern hemisphere. Yet WHO Keiji Fukuda, the Deputy Director General, explained at a press conference today that the spread does not deserve to spend a Phase 5 alert to phase 6, indicating a pandemic large scale. "It is quite possible that it will continue to spread and it will be implemented in many other countries in several regions, in which it would be fair to call it a pandemic," said Fukuda. " Right now, we're really still in the early parts of the evolution of the spread of this virus, and we'll see where it goes. "

WHO earlier had defined phase 6 that sustained spread of the virus community in two regions of the world, but last week put that definition on the ice, following pressure from member countries who criticized the phasing system does not take into account the severity of the disease. Fukuda said in the coming weeks that WHO hopes to hold a video conference with leading scientists and public health specialists who have "a wide range of views" on how to define the phases of influenza epidemics. "We're trying to see what kind of adjustments could be made to ensure that the definitions really meet the situation," said Fukuda.

At a press conference today by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the top scientific spokesman for the agency, Anne Schuchat, highlighted the indicators suggested the worst may be over in the United States-for now at least. "Our national statistics and most of our regional statistics suggests that we have passed the peak here for this time of year," said Schuchat.

CDC has no hard evidence that the spread of the new H1N1 virus has actually decreased. Rather, CDC divides the United States into nine regions, and seven saw a decline in influenza-like illness (ILI) in recent weeks. "We were on the baseline for this time of year, which is really extraordinary for several weeks, and now we are below the baseline again," said Schuchat. But she warned that the decline may be just a "breathing space" due to the arrival of summer and the virus can come back strong at the return of cold weather in the fall.