Jack's Newswatch

SEATTLE, Washington (CNN) — A wiry, slightly hunched man presses in a few numbers, the electronic lock gives way with a beep and the group presses into the crowded laboratory, plastered with ominous warnings about toxins and biohazards.

Guiding the visitors at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center is Mark Roth, a 50-year-old biologist with a tall forehead, thinning red hair and a perpetual wry smile. He asks his assistant, Jennifer Blackwood, if the rat is ready. It is. She turns a dial, and the sealed enclosure starts to fill with poison gas — hydrogen sulfide. An ounce could kill dozens of people.

The rat sniffs the air a few times, and within a minute, his naturally twitchy movements are almost still. On a monitor that shows his rate of breathing, the lines look like a steep mountain slope, going down.

At first glance, that looks bad. We need oxygen to live. If you don’t get it for several minutes — for example, if you suffer cardiac arrest or a bad gunshot wound — you die. But something else is going on inside this rat. He isn’t dead, isn’t dying. The reason why, some people think, is the future of emergency medicine.

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Popularity: 19% [?]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States and Europe face a new health threat from a mosquito-borne disease far more unpleasant than the West Nile virus that swept into North America a decade ago, a U.S. expert said on Friday.

Chikungunya virus has spread beyond Africa since 2005, causing outbreaks and scores of fatalities in India and the French island of Reunion. It also has been detected in Italy, where it has begun to spread locally, as well as France.

“We’re very worried,” Dr. James Diaz of the Louisiana University Health Sciences Center told a meeting on airlines, airports and disease transmission sponsored by the independent U.S. National Research Council.

“Unlike West Nile virus, where nine out of 10 people are going to be totally asymptomatic, or may have a mild headache or a stiff neck, if you get Chikungunya you’re going to be sick,” he said.

“The disease can be fatal. It’s a serious disease,” Diaz added. “There is no vaccine.”

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Scientists have cured colour blindness in monkeys in a world first that offers hope for millions.

The innovative technique could not only allow colour-blind people tell red from green for the first time – it could restore sight to the blind.

Sufferers of age-related macular degeneration – the most common cause of blindness in the elderly – are among those who could benefit.

Researcher Jay Neitz said: ‘If we could find a way to do this with complete safety in human eyes, as we did with monkeys, I think there would be a lot of people who would want it.

‘We hope the technology will be useful in correcting a lot of different vision disorders.’

Professor Neitz used gene therapy – injections of genes – to allow two male spider monkeys called Sam and Dalton to see in full colour for the first time.

Like some people with red-green colour blindness, the monkeys lacked a pigment that the cones, the colour-detector cells at the back of the eye, need to see red and green.

As a result, they animals, who had been colour blind since birth, saw both red and green as shades of grey. 

Other colours, such as orange, blue and brown appeared washed-out.

To fix their vision, the US scientists injected the creatures’ eyes with the gene needed to make the missing pigment.

Each jab contained millions of copies of the gene, the journal Nature reports.

Four months later, the monkeys’ vision suddenly improved.

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Living too close to wind turbines can cause heart disease, tinnitus, vertigo, panic attacks, migraines and sleep deprivation, according to groundbreaking research to be published later this year by an American doctor.

Dr Nina Pierpont, a leading New York paediatrician, has been studying the symptoms displayed by people living near wind turbines in the US, the UK, Italy, Ireland and Canada for more than five years. Her findings have led her to confirm what she has identified as a new health risk, wind turbine syndrome (WTS). This is the disruption or abnormal stimulation of the inner ear’s vestibular system by turbine infrasound and low-frequency noise, the most distinctive feature of which is a group of symptoms which she calls visceral vibratory vestibular disturbance, or VVVD. They cause problems ranging from internal pulsation, quivering, nervousness, fear, a compulsion to flee, chest tightness and tachycardia – increased heart rate. Turbine noise can also trigger nightmares and other disorders in children as well as harm cognitive development in the young, she claims. However, Dr Pierpont also makes it clear that not all people living close to turbines are susceptible.

Until now, the Government and the wind companies have denied any health risks associated with the powerful noises and vibrations emitted by wind turbines. Acoustic engineers working for the wind energy companies and the Government say that aerodynamic noise produced by turbines pose no risk to health, a view endorsed recently by acousticians at Salford University. They have argued that earlier claims by Dr Pierpont are “imaginary” and are likely to argue that her latest findings are based on a sample too small to be authoritative.

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Popularity: 44% [?]

A groundbreaking advance in medicine announced this week promises to dramatically reduce the number of people who would be killed in a nuclear war due to radiation poisoning with simple injections administered within three days of exposure.

Funded by the Pentagon, Professor Andrei Gudkov, chief scientific officer at Cleveland BioLabs, developed the preventative drug – it’s not a vaccine – based on research he began in 2003 using protein produced in bacteria found in the intestine to protect cells from radiation, reported Israel’s YnetNews.

Cells exposed to large doses of radiation die, scientists have found, when the cell’s “suicide mechanism” is activated. The new medication based on intestinal bacteria works by suppressing the mechanism that causes cells to die and allows them to recover.

Gudkov’s hunch paid off in early mice studies.

“We exposed both groups to lethal radioactive radiation,” he told YNetNews. “All the mice in the control group died within a short period of time. A few days later, when I approached the cage with the mice that received the protein, I could see that they’re OK, that they’re alive. They survived. It’s hard to describe the joy all of us felt. We realized that finally, after so many years and so many experiments and frustrations, we made a breakthrough that may save the lives of millions.”

Those results were published in the journal Science, but the discovery of the injectable medicine is only now being revealed following two tests that showed the drug’s effectiveness in protecting monkeys and its safety for humans.

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Newt comments on Obama’s new healthcare initiative.

Updates:

6:19 pm EDT, July 13th, 2009 — The lady is “nuts”…

Popularity: 46% [?]

ST. CATHARINES — The clinical setting inside Biolyse Pharma Corp. resembles the space-plague movie The Andromeda Strain.

Except this St. Catharines firm is developing what could be a real miracle drug for a horrible earthly disease.

In lab tests, the as-yet-unnamed drug so far seems to kill all cancer cells; if it continues to perform as well in human trials, it could revolutionize cancer treatment, generate billions of dollars for Biolyse and create hundreds of new jobs in St. Catharines.

Biolyse executive vice-president John Fulton is more blunt: “I’ve heard talk in the labs referring to this as the Holy Grail of cancer drugs.”

Inside the complex, glassed-in rooms are staffed by white-gowned researchers.

Strange machines whiz and rotate as raw materials are refined into life-saving potions.

On a tour yesterday, company production manager Claude Mercure spoke about the new injectible medicine in development that is made from a common flower.

Most aspects of its source and production are being kept confidential by the company.

But in tests so far, the drug is a dynamo.

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Popularity: 61% [?]

Two patients with inoperable prostate cancer have made dramatic recoveries after receiving one dose of an experimental drug that is creating excitement among cancer specialists.

The results were so startling that researchers decided to release details of the two cases before the drug trial – in which the patients took part – was complete. Doctors said their progress had exceeded all expectations. The men were treated at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota in the US, one of the top medical centres in the world.

Dr Eugene Kwon, the urologist who was in charge of their treatment, compared the results to the first pilot breaking the sound barrier.

“This is one of the Holy Grails of prostate cancer research. We have been looking for this for years,” he said.

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men – 34,000 new cases and more than 10,000 deaths are reported each year in Britain, where rates of its occurrence have tripled in the past 30 years, mainly due to improved detection. The US has the highest incidence of the disease.

Rodger Nelson and Fructuoso Solano-Revuelta were diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer and sought treatment at the Mayo Clinic.

They were told the disease had spread beyond the prostate. Mr Nelson’s cancer was encroaching on the abdomen and Mr Solano-Revuelta’s tumour was the size of a golf ball. Patients in such condition are told they may have only months to live, and are normally only offered palliative care. But after one infusion of the drug ipilimumab, a monoclonal antibody that stimulates the immune system, given with conventional hormone therapy, their tumours shrank enough to be surgically removed. Both men have since made a full recovery and returned to their businesses.

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Popularity: 62% [?]

BALTIMORE – At one of the nation’s top trauma hospitals, a nurse circles a patient’s bed, humming and waving her arms as if shooing evil spirits. Another woman rubs a quartz bowl with a wand, making tunes that mix with the beeping monitors and hissing respirator keeping the man alive.

They are doing Reiki therapy, which claims to heal through invisible energy fields. The anesthesia chief, Dr. Richard Dutton, calls it “mystical mumbo jumbo.” Still, he’s a fan.

“It’s self-hypnosis” that can help patients relax, he said. “If you tell yourself you have less pain, you actually do have less pain.”

Alternative medicine has become mainstream. It is finding wider acceptance by doctors, insurers and hospitals like the shock trauma center at the University of Maryland Medical Center. Consumer spending on it in some cases rivals that of traditional health care.

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Popularity: 57% [?]

NEW YORK — Scientists know caloric restriction can delay aging and prolong life, but a Harvard researcher is working to develop a drug that could have the same effect without the extreme deprivation for which most people lack the desire and willpower.

“We are closer, it seems, than we’ve ever been — but it’s a big promise and I don’t want to over-promise,” says David Sinclair, a professor of pathology at the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging at the Harvard Medical School. “There have been way too many promises about anti-aging for millennia.”

The scientific view of aging has changed drastically since the 1990s, he says. Before then, researchers believed the body simply wore down over time like an old car, and no serious thought was given to developing a medication that could slow that process.

Sinclair says researchers have now pinned down certain “longevity genes” that can be activated to deploy the body’s repair mechanisms and potentially prolong people’s lifespans.

Sinclair presented his work Wednesday at the 10th annual Age Boom Academy workshop run by the International Longevity Center, a non-profit think-tank.

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Popularity: 60% [?]

Scientists say a natural supplement made from tomatoes, taken daily, can stave off heart disease and strokes.

The tomato pill contains an active ingredient from the Mediterranean diet – lycopene – that blocks “bad” LDL cholesterol that can clog the arteries.

Ateronon, made by a biotechnology spin-out company of Cambridge University, is being launched as a dietary supplement and will be sold on the high street.

Experts said more trials were needed to see how effective the treatment is.

Preliminary trials involving around 150 people with heart disease indicate that Ateronon can reduce the oxidation of harmful fats in the blood to almost zero within eight weeks, a meeting of the British Cardiovascular Society will be told at Ateronon’s launch on Monday.

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OTTAWA – Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz pressed forward with a controversial new “Product of Canada” food labelling rule after the top official in his department warned it might not help local producers and could cause consumer confusion, internal records show.

The purpose of the memorandum to the minister, released under Access to Information and dated five weeks before the July 2008 announcement, was to “inform [Ritz] of potential food processing industry implications from proposed changes to ‘Product of Canada’ labelling guidelines” requiring 98% of all ingredients to be Canadian to use the term.

“Given that fewer food products will qualify to use the ‘Product of Canada’ label, it is unclear to what extent the new guidelines will encourage companies to strive to have more of their inputs sourced from Canada in order to meet this claim in response to increased consumer demand,” states the memo, dated June 10, 2008.

“It is also unclear whether the new guidelines will provide increased transparency [and as a result, presumably, increased demand] or simply add to consumer confusion.”

The memo was prepared by senior officials in the ministry’s food value chain bureau and presented to Ritz by the deputy minister.

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