Category Archives: Health Care

Searching for More Effective Tuberculosis Drugs

In India: A Search for More Effective Tuberculosis Drugs

The multi-drug regimen is a major problem for several reasons. It requires TB patients to manage taking four drugs exactly as prescribed over six to nine months. If patients don’t take the full course of the medicines, the TB bacteria may develop resistance to the drugs and become even more difficult to treat. To reduce that risk, many countries require that patients go to a clinic so a healthcare professional can watch them take the medication and ensure they are complying with their drug-treatment regimen. This is both expensive and time consuming. Gokhale said that a single drug that targets multiple pathways could save time and money by eliminating the need to take so many drugs over such a long period of time.

To create their new compound, Gokhale and his colleagues exploited an evolutionary quirk in the way Mycobacterium tuberculosis builds the lipid layer that coats its surface. Unlike other organisms, M. tuberculosis displays a suite of complex lipids on its outer membrane. Some scientists have suggested that these long lipid molecules contribute to the bacteria’s ability to maintain long-term infections by confusing the host’s immune system.

MRI That Can See Bacteria, Virus and Proteins

IBM team boosts MRI resolution

The researchers demonstrated this imaging at a resolution 100 million times finer than current MRI. The advance could lead to important medical applications and is powerful enough to see bacteria, viruses and proteins, say the researchers.

The researchers said it offered the ability to study complex 3D structures at the “nano” scale. The step forward was made possible by a technique called magnetic resonance force microscopy (MRFM), which relies on detecting very small magnetic forces.

In addition to its high resolution, MRFM has the further advantage that it is chemically specific, can “see” below surfaces and, unlike electron microscopy, does not destroy delicate biological materials.

Now, the IBM-led team has dramatically boosted the sensitivity of MRFM and combined it with an advanced 3D image reconstruction technique. This allowed them to demonstrate, for the first time, MRI on biological objects at the nanometre scale.

That is very cool.

Fast Fitness Forecast is False, it Takes Time

Fitness Isn’t an Overnight Sensation

“To make a change in how you look, you are talking about a significant period of training,” Dr. Kraemer said. “In our studies it takes six months to a year.” And, he added, that is with regular strength-training workouts, using the appropriate weights and with a carefully designed individualized program. “That is what the reality is,” he said.

And genetic differences among individuals mean some people respond much better to exercise than others
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Now, said Mr. Antane, who runs with a group in Princeton on Thursday nights, “everything changed — my outlook on life, who I hung out with, how I felt about myself.”

Our bodies evolved under conditions with much more exercise than we currently get if we sit in an office all day. And we had less food. It is no surprise with more food and less exercise that we gain weight. And given that the benefit of fat was to help us survive when we had little food out bodies don’t change overnight. If they did then our ancestors would have had much more difficulty surviving – the whole point was to provide a resource to tap in bad times. If that resource dissipated quickly it would not have helped much.

Moving Closer to Robots Swimming Through Bloodsteam

Pretty cool. Tiny motor allows robots to swim through human body

James Friend, of Monash University, said that such devices could enter previously unreachable brain areas, unblocking blood clots, cleaning vessels or sending back images to surgeons. “The first complete device we want to build would have a camera,” Professor Friend said.
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Professor Friend said they had shown the motor, which is a quarter of a millimetre wide, had enough power to navigate this type of nanorobot through the bloodstream of a human artery. Tests of their prototype device in a liquid as viscous as blood were also promising. “It swam.”
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The team plans to conduct animal tests of a nanorobot driven by their motor later this year or early next year. But Professor Friend cautioned that many technical hurdles needed to be overcome.

Their miniature motor was connected to an electricity supply and a way would need to be found to power it remotely. The construction of the flagella also needed refinement.

Rethinking the Food Production System

photo by John Hunter of wine-berries from his Garden.

Food needs ‘fundamental rethink’

The new approach needed to address key fundamentals like biodiversity, energy, water and urbanisation, he added.
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Water scarcity: “One of the key things that I have been pushing is to get the UK government to start auditing food by water,” Professor Lang said, adding that 50% of the UK’s vegetables are imported, many from water-stressed nations.
Biodiversity: “Biodiversity must not just be protected, it must be replaced and enhanced; but that is going to require a very different way growing food and using the land.”
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“In Europe, 30% of the food grown did not appear on the shelves of the retailers because it was a funny shape or odd colour.
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“The way that seeds are selected is about immunity to any known disease; they have also got to grow big and fast, and have a fantastic shelf life. “Never mind taste, texture or nutrition, it is all about how it looks.

I agree. The food system is broken. We have moved to mono-culture food production. We have changed our diets to eat food like concoctions. We need to return to healthier and sustainable food production.

Appropriate Technology: Self Adjusting Glasses

Self Adjusting Glasses for 1 billion of the world’s poorest see better

What if it were possible, he thought, to make a pair of glasses which, instead of requiring an optician, could be “tuned” by the wearer to correct his or her own vision? Might it be possible to bring affordable spectacles to millions who would never otherwise have them?

More than two decades after posing that question, Josh Silver [a physics professor at Oxford] now feels he has the answer. The British inventor has embarked on a quest that is breathtakingly ambitious, but which he insists is achievable – to offer glasses to a billion of the world’s poorest people by 2020.

Some 30,000 pairs of his spectacles have already been distributed in 15 countries, but to Silver that is very small beer. Within the next year the now-retired professor and his team plan to launch a trial in India which will, they hope, distribute 1 million pairs of glasses. The target, within a few years, is 100 million pairs annually.
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Silver has devised a pair of glasses which rely on the principle that the fatter a lens the more powerful it becomes. Inside the device’s tough plastic lenses are two clear circular sacs filled with fluid, each of which is connected to a small syringe attached to either arm of the spectacles.

The wearer adjusts a dial on the syringe to add or reduce amount of fluid in the membrane, thus changing the power of the lens. When the wearer is happy with the strength of each lens the membrane is sealed by twisting a small screw, and the syringes removed. The principle is so simple, the team has discovered, that with very little guidance people are perfectly capable of creating glasses to their own prescription.
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Oxford University, at his instigation, has agreed to host a Centre for Vision in the Developing World, which is about to begin working on a World Bank-funded project with scientists from the US, China, Hong Kong and South Africa. “Things are never simple. But I will solve this problem if I can. And I won’t really let people stand in my way.”

Cool. A couple points I would like to make:

1) this professor is making a much bigger difference in the “real world” than most people ever will. The idea that professors are all lost in insignificant “ivory towers” is a very inaccurate view of what really happens.
2) Spending money on this kind of thing seems much more important for the human race than spending trillions to bail out poor moves by bankers, financiers… It sure seems odd that we can’t find a few billion to help out people across the globe that are without basic necessities yet we can find trillions to bail out the actions of few thousand bad actors.

Bacteria Offer Line of Attack on Cystic Fibrosis

MIT researchers have found that the pigments responsible for the blue-green stain of the mucus that clogs the lungs of cystic fibrosis (CF) patients are primarily signaling molecules that allow large clusters of the opportunistic infection agent, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, to organize themselves into structured communities.
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P. aeruginosa appears as a classic opportunistic infection, easily shrugged off by healthy people but a grave threat to those with CF, which chokes the lungs of its victims with sticky mucus.

“We have a long way to go before being able to test this idea, but the hope is that if survival in the lung is influenced by phenazine — or some other electron-shuttling molecule or molecules — tampering with phenazine trafficking might be a potential way to make antibiotics more effective,” said Newman, whose lab investigates how ancestral bacteria on the early Earth evolved the ability to metabolize minerals.

How Aerobic Exercise Suppresses Appetite

How aerobic exercise suppresses appetite

Those of you who run, bike, swim, or otherwise engage in aerobic exercise have probably noticed that in spite of burning scads of calories during your chosen activity, the last thing you feel when you’re finished is hungry.
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The researchers discovered that aerobic exercise produces increased peptide YY levels while lowering ghrelin, leading to decreased appetite. Weight training was associated with a decrease in ghrelin, but no change in peptide YY, meaning that there was a net suppression of appetite, but not to the same degree as observed with treadmill training. In both cases, changes in appetite lasted for about two hours.

I know I find this to be true for me.

Global Cancer Deaths to Double by 2030

Global Cancer Deaths to Double by 2030 by Salynn Boyles

Cancer deaths are projected to more than double worldwide over the next two decades, largely from a dramatic increase in cancer incidence in low- and middle-income countries driven by tobacco use and increasingly Westernized lifestyles.

A new report from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) explores the global burden of cancer, which is poised to become the leading cause of death worldwide by 2010. The report predicts that by 2030, 27 million new cancer cases and 17 million cancer deaths will occur each year worldwide. That compares to 12 million new cancers and slightly less than 8 million cancer deaths in 2007.

People really need to stop smoking. And we are pretty lame a society when we inflict such needless disease and death on our fellow humans. Curing millions of cancer patients 20 years from now will be very hard. but it isn’t hard to “cure” millions of them today. We just need people not to pay a lot of money to give themselves cancer by smoking.

Poor Reporting and Unfounded Implications

Correlation is not causation. And reporting of the form, “1 time this happened” and so I report it as though it is some relevant fact, is sad. Take any incident that happened and then state random traits you want to imply there is some relevant link to (blue eyes, red hair, people that watch IT Crowd, people that bought a banana yesterday, tall, overweight, did poorly in math…) and most people will know you are ignorant.

Looking at random data people will find patterns. Sound scientific experimentation is how we learn, not trying to find anything that support our opinions. Statistics don’t lie but ignorant people draw faulty conclusions from data (when they are innumerate – illiteracy with mathematical concepts).

It’s not what the papers say, it’s what they don’t by Ben Goldacre

On Tuesday the Telegraph, the Independent, the Mirror, the Express, the Mail, and the Metro all reported that a coroner was hearing the case of a toddler who died after receiving the MMR vaccine, which the parents blamed for their loss. Toddler ‘died after MMR jab’ (Metro), ‘Healthy’ baby died after MMR jab (Independent), you know the headlines by now.

On Thursday the coroner announced his verdict: the vaccine played no part in this child’s death. So far, of the papers above, only the Telegraph has had the decency to cover the outcome.
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Measles cases are rising. Middle class parents are not to blame, even if they do lack rhetorical panache when you try to have a discussion with them about it.

They have been systematically and vigorously misled by the media, the people with access to all the information, who still choose, collectively, between themselves, so robustly that it might almost be a conspiracy, to give you only half the facts.

Science education is important. Even if people do not become scientists, ignorance of scientific thinking is dangerous. The lack of scientific literacy allows scientifically illiterate leaders to make claims that are lacking scientific merit. And results in people making poor choices themselves, due to their ignorance.