Malaria vaccine

The route all strains of the most deadly malaria parasite use to enter red blood cells has been identified by researchers at the Sanger Institute in Cambridge.

The scientists involved said the finding offered “great hope” for the development of a vaccine, which had the potential to be hugely effective.

Other experts said they were surprised and impressed.

Malaria affects 300 million people each year.

One million die, mostly children in sub-Saharan Africa.

There are many malaria parasites. Plasmodium falciparum is the most deadly and researchers at the Sanger Institute acknowledge it as a “very complex and cunning foe”.

It is exceptionally good at evading and bamboozling the immune system. Within five minutes of being bitten by a malaria-carrying mosquito, the parasite is already hiding inside the liver.

It then emerges from the liver at a different stage in its life cycle and infects red blood cells, where it starts reproducing.

Difficulty

The human immune system struggles to build up resistance to malaria and researchers have struggled in the laboratory.

There is still no approved vaccine against malaria. Large scale trials of the most advanced prototype – RTS,S – showed it halved the risk of getting malaria.

This study, published in Nature, looked at the moment the parasite infected a red blood cell.

They were looking for proteins on the surface of Plasmodium and red blood cells which were necessary for the parasite to identify its target and invade.

Others had been found before, but none were universally used.

The team at the Sanger Institute discovered that “basigin”, a receptor on the surface on red blood cells, and “PfRh5″, a protein on the parasite, were crucial.

In all strains of Plasmodium falciparum tested so far, interrupting the link protected the blood cells from attack.

One of the researchers, Dr Julian Rayner, said: “We were able to completely block invasion using multiple different methods, using antibodies targeting this interaction we could stop all invasion of red blood cells.

“It seems to be essential for invasion.”

The plan is to develop a vaccine which will prime the immune system to attack PfRh5 on the parasite

Fellow researcher Dr Gavin Wright said a vaccine would have great potential as the target was so essential.

“As a starting point for developing a vaccine you couldn’t hope for better,” he said.

Prof Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute at Oxford University, said that after 25 years studying malaria he was “surprised” and “intrigued” by the findings.

He said textbooks and academic research suggested that if you blocked one pathway into the red blood cells, the parasite would choose another.

He added: “It remains to be seen how easy it will be to translate into a vaccine, but [for blood stage vaccines] PfRh5 is now at the top of the list.

“Vaccine candidates will come. If I had to bet, I’d say you’d get some partial efficacy from it.”

Head injury

A method of communicating with brain damaged patients who appear to be in a vegetative state has been discovered by scientists in the UK and Belgium.

Writing in The Lancet  medical journal they describe how they measured electrical activity in the brain to detect consciousness.

The technique, known as EEG, is painless and involves attaching electrodes to the head.

Doctors hope it can be used as a diagnostic tool in homes and hospitals.

The trial involved 16 patients at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge and the University Hospital of Liege in Belgium.

All had been diagnosed as being in a vegetative state – a condition where a person is awake, but has no sense of awareness of themselves or their surroundings.

The patients were asked to imagine wiggling their toes or squeezing their right hand. The brain activity of three of the 16 patients showed they were repeatedly able to follow commands.

The report author, Professor Adrian Owen, from the Centre for Brain and Mind, University of Western Ontario, Canada said: “Many areas of the brain that activate when you perform a movement also activate when you imagine doing it.

“We know these three patients were conscious as they were able to respond repeatedly to the instructions we had given them. One of the patients was able to do it more than 100 times.”

‘Wrong’ diagnosis

Professor Owen’s team at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge previously showed that it was possible to communicate with some vegetative patients using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

But many brain injured patients cannot be assessed in these scanners because they have metal plates or pins, or they are unable to remain still.

The EEG device is comparatively cheap and portable. Professor Owen said: “This is exciting because it means we can get out into the community, take it to patients in nursing and care homes, and assess many more patients at the bedside to see if we can detect covert awareness.”

Helen Gill-Thwaites, a consultant in the diagnosis of low awareness states at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability (RHN) in Putney said: “For a small proportion of patients EEG could be a very useful tool in the diagnostic process.

“It would however be a useful addition and not a replacement, to current methods of assessing severely brain-injured patients.

“Sadly, in my work outside of the RHN I meet many patients who have never had a proper assessment and have been wrongly diagnosed as being in a vegetative state.”

Paul Matthews, Professor of Clinical Neurosciences, Department of Medicine, Imperial College, London said: “The approach suggests a simple, practical way in which some of these patients might be helped to communicate.

“This innovative work has taken fundamental brain science right to the bedside. Efforts to further evaluate this and related approach in the clinic should be prioritised.”

fast food outlet

Most people who live near fast-food restaurants aren’t at increased risk for weight gain, but women may put on a few extra pounds, according to a new study.

The findings challenge the widely held belief that living near fast-food restaurants and other unhealthy food outlets has contributed to the rapid rise in Americans’ weight over the past few decades.

Researchers analyzed 30 years of data collected from participants in the Framingham Heart Study Offspring Cohort, which followed heart health and weight among people in and around Framingham, Mass., from 1971 to 2001.

No consistent relationship existed between access to fast-food restaurants and individual body mass index (BMI), a measurement of body fat determined by height and weight.

“We found that living near a fast-food restaurant had no effect on weight overall, with a minimal effect for women,” study author Dr. Jason Block, who conducted the research as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at Harvard University, said in a foundation news release.

“Our study shows that it’s likely not where you live that matters, but what you eat,” he added.

Block and colleagues found that predictors of higher BMI in both women and men included not smoking, older age, being married and consuming two or more alcoholic drinks per day. Among women, having a high school education or less was also associated with higher BMI.

“As we grapple with our obesity epidemic, this study shows that living next to a fast-food restaurant may not be a significant driver of weight gain over time,” Block said. “There are clearly other factors that affect BMI more.”

]]> http://infoloft.com/2012/02/fast-food-outletsrestaurants-nearby-might-not-cause-weight-gain/feed/ 0 http://infoloft.com/2012/02/fast-food-outletsrestaurants-nearby-might-not-cause-weight-gain/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/infoloft/~3/eyZ1-MrVefk/ http://infoloft.com/2012/02/commercial-diet-schemes-weight-loss-programs-better-than-doctors-help/#comments Wed, 22 Feb 2012 03:38:01 +0000 Ali http://infoloft.com/?p=3295

commercial diet

LONDON  – Commercial weight-loss programs such as Weight Watchers and Slimming World are more effective and cheaper than family doctor-based services led by specially trained staff, according to the findings of a study published on Friday.

With a global epidemic of obesity putting huge pressure on health budgets, researchers at Britain’s Birmingham University wanted to compare the effectiveness of doctor-led weight loss programs against several well-known commercial schemes.

The results suggest that while commercial schemes generally help people to lose weight, doctor-led programs do not.

After 12 weeks, people in all the schemes studied had achieved significant weight loss, but the average loss ranged from the highest at 4.4 kg (9.7 lb) with Weight Watchers down to 1.4 kg on a program led by primary care staff.

A control group who were not put on any specific diet program but were given vouchers for free access to a gym for 12 weeks lost just as much weight on average as those using health clinic-based based weight-loss programs.

After a year, statistically significant weight loss was recorded in all groups apart from the primary care programs, but Weight Watchers was the only program to achieve significantly greater weight loss than the control group.

Kate Jolly, a clinical senior lecturer in public health and epidemiology at Birmingham who led the research, said primary care-based weight loss services led by specially trained staff are “ineffective” while commercially provided services “are more effective and cheaper.”

Worldwide, around 1.5 billion adults are overweight and another 0.5 billion are obese, with 170 million children classified as overweight or obese. Obesity takes up between 2 to 6 percent of healthcare costs in many countries.

This latest research, published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), comes in the wake of the first gold-standard randomized controlled trial of Weight Watchers last month which showed that the program works far better than getting doctors to tell patients to lose weight.

Another study in the United States published in 2003 found that one year’s free access to Weight Watchers resulted in an average weight reduction of 3.5 kg after one year.

In the BMJ study, which involved 740 obese and overweight men and women in Britain, several other commercial weight loss programs were also studied including Slimming World, Rosemary Conley and a group-based dietetics program as well as general practice one to one counseling and pharmacy-led one to one counseling.

Weight Watchers and Slimming World are both group-based weight-loss schemes where people trying to shed pounds are given dieting tips and encouraged to go to weekly meetings to be weighed and discuss their progress with other members.

At a cost of roughly 40 pounds ($64) for 12 weeks, they are also relatively inexpensive, particularly when compared to the billions of dollars spent on healthcare for overweight and obese people worldwide every year.

In a commentary on the BMJ study, nutrition experts Helen Truby and Maxine Bonham from Monash University in Australia said it showed there is “no simple solution” to the obesity epidemic.

They said the UK’s state-funded National Health Service (NHS) should be aware of the level of investment needed to develop an expert workforce to manage the problem of obesity, and said it could learn a great deal from commercial companies about how to deliver what consumers want.

creator Bil Keane

PHOENIX — Bil Keane’s “Family Circus” comics entertained readers with a simple but sublime mix of humor and traditional family values for more than a half century. The appeal endured, the author thought, because the American public needed the consistency.

Keane, who started drawing the one-panel cartoon featuring Billy, Jeffy, Dolly, P.J. and their parents in February 1960, died Tuesday at age 89 at his longtime home in Paradise Valley, near Phoenix. His comic strip is featured in nearly 1,500 newspapers across the country.

Jeff Keane, Keane’s son who lives in Laguna Hills, Calif., said that his father died of congestive heart failure with one of his other sons by his side after his conditioned worsened during the last month. All of Keane’s five children, nine grandchildren and great-granddaughter were able to visit him last week, Jeff Keane said.

“He said, ‘I love you’ and that’s what I said to him, which is a great way to go out,” Jeff Keane said of the last conversation he had with his father. “The great thing is Dad loved the family so much, so the fact that we all saw him, I think that gave him great comfort and made his passing easy. Luckily he didn’t suffer through a lot of things.”

Jeff Keane has been drawing “Family Circus” in the last few years as his father enjoyed retirement.

Keane said in a 1995 interview with The Associated Press that the cartoon had staying power because of its consistency and simplicity.

“It’s reassuring, I think, to the American public to see the same family,” he said.

Although Keane kept the strip current with references to pop culture movies and songs, the context of his comic was timeless. The ghost-like “Ida Know” and “Not Me” who deferred blame for household accidents were staples of the strip. The family’s pets were dogs Barfy and Sam, and the cat, Kittycat.

“We are, in the comics, the last frontier of good, wholesome family humor and entertainment,” Keane said. “On radio and television, magazines and the movies, you can’t tell what you’re going to get. When you look at the comic page, you can usually depend on something acceptable by the entire family.”

Jeff Keane shared the sentiment, saying “Family Circus” had flourished through the decades because readers continue to relate to its values of family moments.

“It was a different type of comic, and I think that was my dad’s genius — creating something that people could really relate to and wasn’t necessarily meant to get a laugh,” he said. “It was more of a warm feeling or a lump in the throat.”

Keane’s friend Charles M. Schulz, the late creator of “Peanuts,” once said the most important thing about “Family Circus” is that it is funny.

“I think we share a care for the same type of humor,” Schulz told The Associated Press in 1995. “We’re both family men with children and look with great fondness at our families.”

Keane said the strip hit its stride with a cartoon he did in the mid-1960s.

“It showed Jeffy coming out of the living room late at night in pajamas and Mommy and Daddy watching television and Jeffy says, ‘I don’t feel so good, I think I need a hug.’ And suddenly I got a lot mail from people about this dear little fella needing a hug, and I realized that there was something more than just getting a belly laugh every day.”

Even with his traditional motif, Keane appreciated younger cartoonists’ efforts. He listed Gary Larson’s “The Far Side” among his favorites, and he loved it when Bill Griffith had his offbeat “Zippy the Pinhead” character wake up from a bump on the head thinking he was Keane’s Jeffy.

Keane responded by giving Zippy an appearance in “Family Circus.”

Born in 1922, Keane taught himself to draw in high school in his native Philadelphia. Around this time, young Bill dropped the second “L” off his name “just to be different.”

He worked as a messenger for the Philadelphia Bulletin before serving three years in the Army, where he drew for “Yank” and “Pacific Stars and Stripes.” He met his wife, Thelma (“Thel”), while serving at a desk job in Australia.

He started a one-panel comic in 1953 called “Channel Chuckles” that lampooned the up-and-coming medium of television. (In one, a mom in front of a television, crying baby on her lap, tells her husband: “She slept through two gun fights and a barroom brawl — then the commercial woke her up.”)

He moved to Arizona in 1958 and two years later started a comic about a family much like his own. Keane and his wife had a daughter, Gayle, and sons Glen, Jeff, Chris and Neal — one more son than in his cartoon family.

“I never thought about a philosophy for the strip — it developed gradually,” Keane told the East Valley Tribune in 1998. “I was portraying the family through my eyes. Everything that’s happened in the strip has happened to me.

“That’s why I have all this white hair at 39 years old.”

Thelma Keane died of Alzheimer’s disease in 2008 and was the inspiration for the Mommy character in the comic strip.

When his wife died, Keane called her “the inspiration for all of my success. …When the cartoon first appeared, she looked so much like Mommy that if she was in the supermarket pushing her cart around, people would come up to her and say, ‘Aren’t you the mommy in ‘Family Circus?’”

She also served as his business and financial manager.

Arizona and Keane had a mutual influence on each other. Keane’s work can be found all around — from children’s centers to ice cream shops.

Likewise, Arizona could also be found in Keane’s work.

A 2004 comic saw the family on a scenic lookout over the Grand Canyon with the children asking “Why are the rocks painted different colors” and “What time does it close?”

Jeff Keane said those memories endure.

“He was just our dad. The great thing about him is he worked at home, we got to see him all the time, and we would all sit down and have dinner together. What you see in the ‘Family Circus’ is what we were and what we still are, just different generations.”

London Students Strike

The police were out in force as thousands of students marched through central London.

Some 4,000 officers were on duty, as demonstrators marched peacefully in a protest against higher tuition fees and “privatisation” in universities.

After the violence of last year’s major fees protest, the police had warned they might use plastic bullets in “extreme circumstances”.

Police said 24 people were arrested, mostly for breaches of the peace.

Police estimate there were about 2,000 protesters, but organisers put the number attending at 15,000.

Scotland Yard said three arrests were for public order offences, one was for possession of an offensive weapon, three were for going equipped and 12 breaches of the peace.

At lunchtime, some protesters broke away from the march and set up tents in Trafalgar Square, but were eventually moved on.

The crowd marched to the City of London, where a protest against corporate greed has been taking place outside St Paul’s Cathedral.

Financial district

BBC correspondent Mike Sergeant was with the protesters as they neared St Paul’s and the City.

“The march is moving slowly, sedately even. It is quite extraordinary the way it’s being policed,” he said.

“It’s the most tightly controlled march through London that I have ever seen. Very little opportunity for protesters to break away – an enormous contrast to last year.”

The student protest, organised by the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, is against the government’s plans for a market-driven higher education system and the rising tuition fees.

“We are being told by a cabinet of millionaires that we will have to pay triple tuition fees,” said campaign leader Michael Chessum.

Student protest organiser Michael Chessum: “Police intimidation is unacceptable and irresponsible”

As a warning against any outbreaks of violence, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Police had said that one of the tactics available was “the authority to deploy baton rounds [plastic bullets] in extreme circumstances”.

As police and news helicopters hovered overhead, thousands of protesters set off from Malet Street in London’s university district.

Protesters carried placards which read “Scrap Tuition Fees” and “Free Education” and chanted “No ifs, no buts, no education cuts” and slogans criticising the police over rubber bullets.

They then marched through the capital.

BBC Education Correspondent Sean Coughlan is at the demonstration. At 1325, he said: “Chanting student protesters are going through London’s Theatreland, lots of noise, lots of cameras and lots of police. It feels less predictable than last year’s protests, but so far no trouble.”

As the demonstration moved through Trafalgar Square, some protesters broke away from the march.

They set up about 20 pop-up tents at the base of Nelson’s column, but were later moved on by the police.

The police had said they would arrest those who refused to move, on the grounds that they had broken away from the authorised route of the march.

Earlier, one of the campaigners, Glynn, told BBC News he had come from another camp in London’s Finsbury Park, to protest against a “corrupt government” which was fuelled by “corrupt money and bankers”.

As dusk fell, a few hundred protesters continued their demonstration at the end point of the march, London Wall.

The rally is being supported by the National Union of Students, but it is not being organised by them.

Much of the anger is over tuition fees, which are set to rise to a maximum of £9,000 a year at England’s universities next year.

Universities in Wales are also raising their fees up to to that maximum level from autumn 2012 – but only for students from outside Wales.

In Scotland, Scottish students will continue to pay no fees, but fees of up to £9,000 a year will be charged to students from other parts of the UK.

Daisy Robinson, a London student, is among the marchers.

“It is just not fair, education should be available to everyone,” she said.

Annette Webb, studying at Portsmouth University, said: “I was against it when they raised fees from £1,000 to £3,000, but to go up to £9,000 will price out most students.

“It will mean that education is only for the rich and I believe it should be for everyone.”

James Dodge, 22, from Ashford, Kent, said: “I like to exercise my free right to protest, even when it is being curtailed by the Metropolitan Police.”

Universities Minister David Willetts said: “We are putting students at the heart of the system, with a diverse range of providers offering high-quality teaching. Going to university depends on ability not the ability to pay.

Student Protest Map/Route

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Internet Explorer

It’s been a long and winding road for Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s venerable web browser, and for over a decade it’s been the browser of choice for most netizens. According to Net Marketshare’s latest numbers, however, IE now enables just under half of the world‘s total — meaning mobile and desktop combined — web traffic after owning 95 percent of the browsing market seven years ago. The decline is at least partially due to a rise in mobile web browsing and an increasing Chrome user base. Of course, Microsoft’s finest still has a healthy 52.63 percent desktop market share, which gives it a sizable lead over the competition from Firefox (23 percent), Chrome (18 percent), and Safari (five percent). There’s plenty more graphs and charts to show you exactly how the browser war is going, so hit the links below for the full pie-chart treatment.