Friday, December 13, 2013

F.D.A. Restricts Antibiotics Use for Livestock



WASHINGTON — The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday put in place a major new policy to phase out the indiscriminate use of antibiotics in cows, pigs and chickens raised for meat, a practice that experts say has endangered human health by fueling the growing epidemic of antibiotic resistance.
Enlarge This Image
Brian C. Frank for The New York Times
Pigs on a farm near Ralston, Iowa, where animals received antibiotics in their feed. Dark spots on their backs mean they are ready for market.

Readers’ Comments

Share your thoughts.
This is the agency’s first serious attempt in decades to curb what experts have long regarded as the systematic overuse of antibiotics in healthy farm animals, with the drugs typically added directly into their feed and water. The waning effectiveness of antibiotics — wonder drugs of the 20th century — has become a looming threat to public health. At least two million Americans fall sick every year and about 23,000 die from antibiotic-resistant infections.
“This is the first significant step in dealing with this important public health concern in 20 years,” said David Kessler, a former F.D.A. commissioner who has been critical of the agency’s track record on antibiotics. “No one should underestimate how big a lift this has been in changing widespread and long entrenched industry practices.”
The change, which is to take effect over the next three years, will effectively make it illegal for farmers and ranchers to use antibiotics to make animals grow bigger. The producers had found that feeding low doses of antibiotics to animals throughout their lives led them to grow plumper and larger. Scientists still debate why. Food producers will also have to get a prescription from a veterinarian to use the drugs to prevent disease in their animals.
Federal officials said the new policy would improve health in the United States by tightening the use of classes of antibiotics that save human lives, including penicillin, azithromycin and tetracycline. Food producers said they would abide by the new rules, but some public health advocates voiced concerns that loopholes could render the new policy toothless.
Health officials have warned since the 1970s that overuse of antibiotics in animals was leading to the development of infections resistant to treatment in humans. For years, modest efforts by federal officials to reduce the use of antibiotics in animals were thwarted by the powerful food industry and its substantial lobbying power in Congress. Pressure for federal action has mounted as the effectiveness of drugs important for human health has declined, and deaths from bugs resistant to antibiotics have soared.
Under the new policy, the agency is asking drug makers to change the labels that detail how a drug can be used so they would bar farmers from using the medicines to promote growth.
. . .
“It’s a big shift from the current situation, in which animal producers can go to a local feed store and buy these medicines over the counter and there is no oversight at all,” said Michael Taylor, the F.D.A.’s deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine.
Some consumer health advocates were skeptical that the new rules would reduce the amount of antibiotics consumed by animals. They say that a loophole will allow animal producers to keep using the same low doses of antibiotics by contending they are needed to keep animals from getting sick, and evading the new ban on use for growth promotion.
Posted by at No comments:

Tobacco Firms’ Strategy Limits Poorer Nations’ Smoking Laws



Conor Ashleigh for The New York Times
A cigarette display in Australia, where the tobacco industry lost a case last year. Philip Morris International has filed suit under an investment treaty.
By 
Published: December 13, 2013 243 Comments
Tobacco companies are pushing back against a worldwide rise in antismoking laws, using a little-noticed legal strategy to delay or block regulation. The industry is warning countries that their tobacco laws violate an expanding web of trade and investment treaties, raising the prospect of costly, prolonged legal battles, health advocates and officials said.
Conor Ashleigh for The New York Times
A cigarette display and antismoking messages in Australia, where the tobacco industry lost a case last year. Philip Morris International has filed suit under an investment treaty.

The strategy has gained momentum in recent years as smoking rates in rich countries have fallen and tobacco companies have sought to maintain access to fast-growing markets in developing countries. Industry officials say that there are only a few cases of active litigation, and that giving a legal opinion to governments is routine for major players whose interests will be affected.
But tobacco opponents say the strategy is intimidating low- and middle-income countries from tackling one of the gravest health threats facing them: smoking. They also say the legal tactics are undermining the world’s largest global public health treaty, the W.H.O. Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which aims to reduce smoking by encouraging limits on advertising, packaging and sale of tobacco products. More than 170 countries have signed it since it took effect in 2005.
More than five million people die annually of smoking-related causes, more than from AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined, according to the World Health Organization.
Alarmed about rising smoking rates among young women, Namibia, in southern Africa, passed a tobacco control law in 2010 but quickly found itself bombarded with stern warnings from the tobacco industry that the new statute violated the country’s obligations under trade treaties.
“We have bundles and bundles of letters from them,” said Namibia’s health minister, Dr. Richard Kamwi.
Three years later, the government, fearful of a punishingly expensive legal battle, has yet to carry out a single major provision of the law, like limiting advertising or placing large health warnings on cigarette packaging
Posted by at No comments:

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

My Medical Choice

By ANGELINA JOLIE
Published: May 14, 2013 1603 Comments
MY MOTHER fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56. She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms. But my other children will never have the chance to know her and experience how loving and gracious she was.
We often speak of “Mommy’s mommy,” and I find myself trying to explain the illness that took her away from us. They have asked if the same could happen to me. I have always told them not to worry, but the truth is I carry a “faulty” gene, BRCA1, which sharply increases my risk of developing breast cancer andovarian cancer.
My doctors estimated that I had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer, although the risk is different in the case of each woman.
Only a fraction of breast cancers result from an inherited gene mutation. Those with a defect in BRCA1 have a 65 percent risk of getting it, on average.
Once I knew that this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much I could. I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy. I started with the breasts, as my risk of breast cancer is higher than my risk of ovarian cancer, and the surgery is more complex.
On April 27, I finished the three months of medical procedures that the mastectomies involved. During that time I have been able to keep this private and to carry on with my work.
But I am writing about it now because I hope that other women can benefit from my experience. Cancer is still a word that strikes fear into people’s hearts, producing a deep sense of powerlessness. But today it is possible to find out through a blood test whether you are highly susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer, and then take action.
My own process began on Feb. 2 with a procedure known as a “nipple delay,” which rules out disease in the breast ducts behind the nipple and draws extra blood flow to the area. This causes some pain and a lot of bruising, but it increases the chance of saving the nipple.
Two weeks later I had the major surgery, where the breast tissue is removed and temporary fillers are put in place. The operation can take eight hours. You wake up with drain tubes and expanders in your breasts. It does feel like a scene out of a science-fiction film. But days after surgery you can be back to a normal life.
Nine weeks later, the final surgery is completed with the reconstruction of the breasts with an implant. There have been many advances in this procedure in the last few years, and the results can be beautiful.
I wanted to write this to tell other women that the decision to have a mastectomy was not easy. But it is one I am very happy that I made. My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87 percent to under 5 percent. I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer.
It is reassuring that they see nothing that makes them uncomfortable. They can see my small scars and that’s it. Everything else is just Mommy, the same as she always was. And they know that I love them and will do anything to be with them as long as I can. On a personal note, I do not feel any less of a woman. I feel empowered that I made a strong choice that in no way diminishes my femininity.
I am fortunate to have a partner, Brad Pitt, who is so loving and supportive. So to anyone who has a wife or girlfriend going through this, know that you are a very important part of the transition. Brad was at the Pink Lotus Breast Center, where I was treated, for every minute of the surgeries. We managed to find moments to laugh together. We knew this was the right thing to do for our family and that it would bring us closer. And it has.
For any woman reading this, I hope it helps you to know you have options. I want to encourage every woman, especially if you have a family history of breast or ovarian cancer, to seek out the information and medical experts who can help you through this aspect of your life, and to make your own informed choices.
I acknowledge that there are many wonderful holistic doctors working on alternatives to surgery. My own regimen will be posted in due course on the Web site of the Pink Lotus Breast Center. I hope that this will be helpful to other women.
Breast cancer alone kills some 458,000 people each year, according to the World Health Organization, mainly in low- and middle-income countries. It has got to be a priority to ensure that more women can access gene testing and lifesaving preventive treatment, whatever their means and background, wherever they live. The cost of testing for BRCA1 and BRCA2, at more than $3,000 in the United States, remains an obstacle for many women.
I choose not to keep my story private because there are many women who do not know that they might be living under the shadow of cancer. It is my hope that they, too, will be able to get gene tested, and that if they have a high risk they, too, will know that they have strong options.
Life comes with many challenges. The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of.
Angelina Jolie is an actress and director.
Posted by at No comments:

Friday, May 10, 2013





The Next Pandemic: Not if, but When

By DAVID QUAMMEN
Published: May 9, 2013 41 Comments
BOZEMAN, Mont.
Ben Jones


Readers’ Comments

Share your thoughts.
TERRIBLE new forms of infectious disease make headlines, but not at the start. Every pandemic begins small. Early indicators can be subtle and ambiguous. When the Next Big One arrives, spreading across oceans and continents like the sweep of nightfall, causing illness and fear, killing thousands or maybe millions of people, it will be signaled first by quiet, puzzling reports from faraway places — reports to which disease scientists and public health officials, but few of the rest of us, pay close attention. Such reports have been coming in recent months from two countries, China and Saudi Arabia.
You may have seen the news about H7N9, a new strain of avian flu claiming victims in Shanghai and other Chinese locales. Influenzas always draw notice, and always deserve it, because of their great potential to catch hold, spread fast, circle the world and kill lots of people. But even if you’ve been tracking that bird-flu story, you may not have noticed the little items about a “novel coronavirus” on the Arabian Peninsula.
This came into view last September, when the Saudi Ministry of Health announced that such a virus — new to science and medicine — had been detected in three patients, two of whom had already died. By the end of the year, a total of nine cases had been confirmed, with five fatalities. As of Thursday, there have been 18 deaths, 33 cases total, including one patient now hospitalized inFrance after a trip to the United Arab Emirates. Those numbers are tiny by the standards of global pandemics, but here’s one that’s huge: the case fatality rate is 55 percent. The thing seems to be almost as lethal as Ebola.
Coronaviruses are a genus of bugs that cause respiratory and gastrointestinal infections, sometimes mild and sometimes fierce, in humans, other mammals and birds. They became infamous by association in 2003 because the agent for severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, is a coronavirus. That one emerged suddenly in southern China, passed from person to person and from Guangzhou to Hong Kong, then went swiftly onward by airplane to Toronto, Singapore and elsewhere. Eventually it sickened about 8,000 people, of whom nearly 10 percent died. If not for fast scientific work to identify the virus and rigorous public health measures to contain it, the total case count and death toll could have been much higher.
One authority at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an expert on nasty viruses, told me that the SARS outbreak was the scariest such episode he’d ever seen. That cautionary experience is one reason this novel coronavirus in the Middle East has attracted such concern.
Another reason is that coronaviruses as a group are very changeable, very protean, because of their high rates of mutation and their proclivity for recombination: when the viruses replicate, their genetic material is continually being inaccurately copied — and when two virus strains infect a single host cell, it is often intermixed. Such rich genetic variation gives them what one expert has called an “intrinsic evolvability,” a capacity to adapt quickly to new circumstances within new hosts.
But hold on. I said that the SARS virus “emerged” in southern China, and that raises the question: emerged from where? Every new disease outbreak starts as a mystery, and among the first things to be solved is the question of source.
In most cases, the answer is wildlife. Sixty percent of our infectious diseases fall within this category, caused by viruses or other microbes known as zoonoses. A zoonosis is an animal infection transmissible to humans. Another bit of special lingo: reservoir host. That’s the animal species in which the zoonotic bug resides endemically, inconspicuously, over time. Some unsuspecting person comes in contact with an infected monkey, ape, rodent or wild goose — or maybe just with a domestic duck that has fed around the same pond as the wild goose — and a virus achieves transcendence, passing from one species of host into another. The disease experts call that event a spillover.
Researchers have established that the SARS virus emerged from a bat. The virus may have passed through an intermediate species — another animal, perhaps infected by cage-to-cage contact in one of the crowded live-animal markets of the region — before getting into a person. And while SARS hasn’t recurred, we can assume that the virus still abides in southern China within its reservoir hosts: one or more kinds of bat.
Bats, though wondrous and necessary animals, do seem to be disproportionately implicated as reservoir hosts of new zoonotic viruses: Marburg, Hendra, Nipah,Menangle and others. Bats gather in huge, sociable aggregations and have long life spans, circumstances that may be especially hospitable to viruses. And they fly. Traveling nightly to feed, shifting occasionally from one communal roost to another, they carry their infections widely and spread them to one another.
As for the novel coronavirus in Saudi Arabia, its reservoir host is still undiscovered. But you can be confident that scientific sleuths are on the case and that they will look closely at Arabian bats, including those that visit the productive date-palm groves at the oases of Al Ahsa, near the Persian Gulf.
What can we do? The first obligation is informed awareness. Early reports arrive from afar, seeming exotic and peripheral, but don’t be fooled. One emergent virus, sooner or later, will be the Next Big One. It may show up first in China, in Congo or Bangladesh, or maybe on the Arabian Peninsula; but it will globalize. Most people on earth nowadays live within 24 hours’ travel time of Saudi Arabia. And in October, when millions of people journey to Mecca for the hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage, the lines of connections among humans everywhere will be that much shorter.
We can’t detach ourselves from emerging pathogens either by distance or lack of interest. The planet is too small. We’re like the light heavyweight boxer Billy Conn, stepping into the ring with Joe Louis in 1946: we can run, but we can’t hide.
David Quammen, a contributing writer for National Geographic, is the author, most recently, of “Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.”

Posted by at No comments:

Sunday, May 5, 2013

Miracle Noodle News Report


http://www.miraclenoodle.com/
Posted by at No comments:

Friday, May 3, 2013

WHO | World Health Organization

Novel coronavirus infection - update

2 May 2013 - The Ministry of Health in Saudi Arabia has informed WHO of seven new laboratory confirmed cases of infection with the novel coronavirus (nCoV), including five deaths.
Two patients are currently in critical condition.
The government is conducting ongoing investigation into this outbreak.
Preliminary investigation show no indication of recent travel or animal contact of any of the confirmed cases. The confirmed cases are not from the same family.
From September 2012 to date, WHO has been informed of a global total of 24 laboratory confirmed cases of human infection with nCoV, including 16 deaths.



Posted by at No comments:

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Minocycline, a microglial inhibitor, reduces ‘honey trap’ risk in human economic exchange



Minocycline, a microglial inhibitor, reduces ‘honey trap’ risk in human economic exchange

Scientific Reports
 
3,
 
Article number:
 
1685
 
doi:10.1038/srep01685
Received
 
Accepted
 
Published
 
Recently, minocycline, a tetracycline antibiotic, has been reported to improve symptoms of psychiatric disorders and to facilitate sober decision-making in healthy human subjects. Here we show that minocycline also reduces the risk of the ‘honey trap’ during an economic exchange. Males tend to cooperate with physically attractive females without careful evaluation of their trustworthiness, resulting in betrayal by the female. In this experiment, healthy male participants made risky choices (whether or not to trust female partners, identified only by photograph, who had decided in advance to exploit the male participants). The results show that trusting behaviour in male participants significantly increased in relation to the perceived attractiveness of the female partner, but that attractiveness did not impact trusting behaviour in the minocycline group. Animal studies have shown that minocycline inhibits microglial activities. Therefore, this minocycline effect may shed new light on the unknown roles microglia play in human mental activities.

Subject terms:

At a glance

Figures

First | 1-2 of 2 | Last
view all figures
left
  1. Mean Offering Rate (percentage of money offered) by the Male Participants to Less- and More-Attractive Female Partners.
    Figure 1
  2. Trust Game Structure with the Most Extreme Cases.
    Figure 2
right

Introduction

In movies, a female spy often wins the trust of her male target using her physical attractiveness. The male target usually suspects that she is a spy, but because of her attractiveness, he becomes amorously entangled with the female spy despite concerns regarding her trustworthiness. For males, allocating valuable resources to physically attractive females may be evolutionarily adaptive, in that it may increase the probability of producing attractive offspring under natural selection. However, this tendency toward resource allocation to attractive females creates ‘noise’ that complicates decisions in short-term economic exchanges, leading to the tendency to ‘honey trap’ males with this behaviour.
In an economic exchange, attractiveness in a female increases sexual arousal in a male that automatically (without careful evaluation of her trustworthiness) facilitates trusting behaviour. While these traits should be adaptive in terms of mate-choice1, experimental studies have shown that they also affect decisions in social and economic exchange2, 3. These traits lead to the question of how males can avoid the honey trap.
Recent studies with human subjects show that minocycline, a commonly used tetracycline antibiotic, may facilitate focus on appropriate environmental cues for social decision-making, possibly by reducing noise and other factors (e.g. personality and arousal) that can obstruct decisions. In an economic exchange, one study showed that subjects treated with minocycline make more sober decisions compared to participants treated with placebo4. In another study, participants were given dextroamphetamine and those treated with minocycline report less of a ‘high’ feeling compared to those who did not receive minocycline4. Minocycline is also known to improve symptoms associated with psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and depression5, 6,7. There are past studies examining the effects of physical attractiveness on cooperation in social/economic exchange in different sex pairs, but no study has examined the effects of minocycline on such behaviour in different sex pairs. The hypothesis of this study was that minocycline reduces the risk of the honey trap effect and leads to more appropriate decisions in a short-term economic exchange, through a reduction in the noise triggered by physical attractiveness.
In this experiment, 98 healthy males played a trust game with 8 photographed young females after a 4-day oral treatment course of either minocycline or placebo. Looking at a picture showing a female's face, male players decided how much out of 1300 yen (approximately 13 USD) they would give to each female. Males then evaluated how trustworthy each female was and how physically attractive she was using a 11-point Likert Scale (0: Not at all – 10: Perfectly so). Of note, all of the photographed females had actually decided, in advance, to choose ‘betray’ against the male players. Therefore, male participants played with untrustworthy female partners, but were unaware of the deception. The impact of attractiveness and trustworthiness on the amount of money given to female partners was analysed. The independent variables were the evaluations/scores of physical attractiveness and trustworthiness given by the male participants.

Results

Table 1 summarizes the mean scores for the major variables and results of a t-test used to compare the placebo and minocycline conditions. Consistent with previous reports in which trust games were conducted between healthy male participants8, 9, the offering rate differed marginally between conditions. The State and Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI)10 was measured and no significant differences were found for either State or Trait Anxiety scores between conditions.
Table 1: Mean scores and results of t-tests comparing major variables
Full table
The primary hypothesis of this study was that the minocycline group would be less affected by the attractiveness of pictured females than the placebo group. To test this hypothesis, an ANOVA was performed with condition (minocycline vs. placebo) and attractiveness (high vs. low) as independent variables and the offering rate of money by participants as the dependent variable. The attractiveness score was not normally distributed (P = 0.0004), therefore the score was sub-divided into 2 categories (high vs. low). Figure 1 shows the mean offer rate by condition and the level of attractiveness. There is a significant interaction effect between condition and attractiveness (F (1,776) = 7.78, P = 0.005). Consistent with the primary hypothesis, participants in the placebo group gave larger amounts of money when the partner was more attractive, while participants in the minocycline group did not. According to a simple main effect test, a main effect of attractiveness was detected in the placebo group (P = 0.0004), but not in the minocycline group (P= 0.223). In addition, Figure 1 shows that, for partners with high attractiveness, the offering rate in the placebo group was significantly higher than in the minocycline group (P = 0.0004), but not for less attractive partners (P = 0.590).
Figure 1: Mean Offering Rate (percentage of money offered) by the Male Participants to Less- and More-Attractive Female Partners.
Mean Offering Rate (percentage of money offered) by the Male Participants to Less- and More-Attractive Female Partners.
Error bars represent the standard deviation for each condition. *** For the placebo group, the offering rate to highly attractive female partners is higher than that to partners with low attractiveness (P = 0.0004). ### The offering rate to highly attractive partners in the placebo group is higher than that in the minocycline group (P = 0.0004).


    Posted by at No comments:
    Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)