First H1N1 vaccines to arrive Tuesday

The first doses of approved vaccines for the H1N1 "swine" flu will start trickling in across the U.S. on Tuesday. The first to arrive, 600,000 doses of MedImmune's FluMist nasal spray, will be for healthy people ages 2 to 49, the Associated Press reported . [More]


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Readers Respond on "Knowing Your Chances"--And More...

Unintentional Comedy I have been really enjoying your magazine since I started reading it last year.

Ig Nobel Prizes Awarded

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When there are Nobel prizes there are Ig Nobel prizes, which were handed out at Harvard on October 1st. The awards honor research that “makes people laugh and then makes them think.” [More]


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Breast cancer deaths drop over past two decades

The number of women who die from breast cancer has decreased slowly (about 2 percent per year) but steadily since 1990, according to a new report by the American Cancer Society (ACS), released to mark the start of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. [More]


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You Snooze, You Lose -- Weight

Lose weight while you sleep? It sounds too good to be true--but recent research indicates that there is a connection between how much you weigh and the amount of shut-eye you get per night.

Two hormones, ghrelin and leptin, help to control appetite. When you do not get enough rest, levels of ghrelin, which increases hunger, rise; levels of leptin, which promotes feelings of fullness, sink. A study in the May issue of Psychoneuroendocrinology found a significant disruption in nighttime ghrelin levels in chronic insomniacs. According to the study, this hormone imbalance leads insomniacs to experience an increase in appetite during the day, leading to weight gain over time.

Odds Favor Drunk Trauma Victims

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Being drunk might make you more accident prone, but it also increases your chance of survival. Research published in the journal American Surgeon reveals that trauma patients are more likely to survive if they were intoxicated at the time of their injury.

EPA Announces Plan to Review Six Controversial Chemicals

Saying that the public is "understandably anxious and confused" about chemicals in their bodies and in their environment, President Obama’s top environmental official announced on Tuesday a new push to transform the way the nation regulates industrial compounds. [More]


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The Effect of Our Surroundings on Body Weight

Obesity is a “global epidemic,” according to the World Health Organization. Two thirds of American adults and one third of school-age children are either overweight or obese (defined as extremely overweight). These proportions have been rising steeply, report the latest surveys. From 1960 to 2002 the population of overweight and obese adults increased by roughly 50 percent, and the corresponding increase for children was 300 percent. Compounding the problem, obesity rates in other countries are rapidly approaching those in the U.S.

What is causing this pandemic, and what can we do about it? Researchers have provided some tentative answers that fly in the face of commonly held beliefs. They suggest that the increase in obesity may be a result of environmental changes that tempt us into unhealthy habits and tend to overwhelm our psychological defenses against consuming too much and succumbing to fattening fare. In fact, environmental cues can exacerbate any innate tendency to use food as a balm for jittery nerves or sadness. Thus, many health experts advocate legislation--for instance, a tax on junk food--that promotes healthy eating. Others are trying to help individuals change their immediate eating milieu in ways that discourage overeating.

Great Depression Increased Life Expectancy

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Believe it or not, depression can be good for your health. Ok, not that kind of depression. An economic depression. According to work published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , people actually got healthier during the Great Depression. [More]


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Wild Meat Raises Lead Exposure

To Dr. William Cornatzer, it was an unforgettable image, one that troubled him deeply. [More]


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Could a microchip help to diagnose cancer in minutes?

Current cancer screening often requires painful procedures and weeks of waiting to obtain results. But what if doctors could read a biological sample with a small hand-held device and come back with an answer in less than an hour? [More]


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Uganda embarks on bubonic plague-prevention program

As reports of bubonic plague in the Democratic Republic of Congo have filtered into neighboring Uganda, the Ugandan government is taking preemptive action, according to Uganda's Daily Monitor and reported by ProMED-mail . [More]


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Teen Inventors Fight Tinnitus

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Ever get a ringing in your ears after a loud blast of music on your iPod? That’s one example of the usually temporary condition called tinnitus, the sensation of sound even when no sound is being produced. But a new invention--created by high school students--may help.

50 Years Ago: Kidney Transplantation

OCTOBER 1959 FOUNDER OF KIDNEY TRANSPLANTS -- “Identical-twin grafts have demonstrated that where an immunological barrier does not exist kidneys can be successfully transplanted to cure otherwise incurable kid­-ney and vascular disease. We transplanted a kidney from a healthy man to his criti­cally uremic brother. Though the men were probably not identical twins, we hoped that their relationship might make for some immunologic compatibility. The recipient was given a total dose of X-rays large enough to depress his reticuloendothelial tissues severely. As the patient’s reticuloendothelial system recovers from the radiation, it may be forced to become familiarized with the antigens and the transplanted kidney. It is as yet too early to evaluate the results of this transplant, but initially it appears to be successful. -- John P. Merrill ”

AIDS vaccine surprises scientists, proves partially successful

In an early-morning announcement today, researchers reported that an experimental HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) vaccine effectively reduced the number of people who contracted the virus by nearly a third. [More]


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Stem cells bring new insights to future treatment of vision--and neural--disorders

BALTIMORE--Deep in the brain, buried in the hippocampus and subventricular zone, reside adult neural stem cells , cells that retain the ability to become other types of neural cells and could serve as possible treatments for ailments ranging from vision impairment to Parkinson's to spinal cord injuries. Doctors, scientists and patients, however, are understandably hesitant to go digging around for them, their location being "a great deterrent," Sally Temple , founder of the New York Neural Stem Cell Institute, said at the 2009 World Stem Cell Summit here on Wednesday. [More]


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Inflammation Brings on the Blues

As if being stuck sick in bed wasn’t bad enough, several studies conducted during the past few years have found that the immune response to illness can cause depression. Recently scientists have pinpointed an enzyme that could be the culprit, as it is linked to both chronic inflammation--such as that found in patients with coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis--and depressive symptoms in mice.

In the new study, immuno­physiologist Keith Kelley and his colleagues at the University of Illinois exposed mice to a tuberculosis vaccine that produces a low-grade, chronic inflammation. After inocu­lation, production in the mice brains of an enzyme called IDO, which breaks down tryptophan, spiked. The animals exhibited normal symptoms of illness such as moving around and eating less. Yet even after recovering from the physical illness induced by the vaccine, they showed signs of depression--for example, struggling less than control mice to escape from a bucket of water. Surprisingly, their listlessness was solved relatively simply. “If you block IDO, genetically or pharmaceutically, depression goes away” without interfering with the immune response, Kelley explains.

LSD Returns--For Psychotherapeutics

Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, lambasted the countercultural movement for marginalizing a chemical that he asserted had potential benefits as an invaluable supplement to psychotherapy and spiritual practices such as meditation. “This joy at having fathered LSD was tarnished after more than ten years of uninterrupted scientific research and medicinal use when LSD was swept up in the huge wave of an inebriant mania that began to spread over the Western world, above all the United States, at the end of the 1950s,” Hofmann groused in his 1979 memoir LSD: My Problem Child.

For just that reason, Hofmann was jubilant in the months before his death last year, at the age of 102, when he learned that the first scientific research on LSD in decades was just beginning in his native Switzerland. “He was very happy that, as he said, ‘a long wish finally became true,’ ” remarks Peter Gasser, the physician leading the clinical trial. “He said that the substance must be in the hands of medical doctors again.”

Inhale or Don't?: Marijuana Hurts Some, Helps Others

Clinton didn’t inhale, Obama did--and maybe Reagan should have. New research suggests that THC, the chemical that gives marijuana its mind-bending properties, kills developing neurons, yet oddly, the same chemical saves neurons in adults with Alzheimer’s disease.

“Marijuana is not the ‘soft drug’ people like to think it is,” says neuro­pharmacologist Veronica Campbell of Trinity College in Dublin, whose latest study uncovered the harmful effects of THC on young neurons. When Campbell and her co-workers treated brain cells from newborn or adolescent rats with THC, the neurons died, but THC did not have such deadly effects on neurons taken from adult rats. In fact, work from other labs shows that THC benefits adult neurons. “We don’t know why,” Campbell says. Several possi­bilities are being investigated for this “Jekyll and Hyde” effect.

Boosting Vaccines: The Power of Adjuvants (preview)

The thought of birth defects caused by rubella, rows of iron lungs housing children crippled by polio, or the horrific sound of a baby struggling with whooping cough can still evoke dread among people who have seen firsthand the damage inflicted by these and other vaccine-preventable diseases. Fortunately, those scourges are virtually unknown to modern generations that have had access to vaccines all their lives.

For more than 200 years vaccines have proved to be one of the most successful, lifesaving and economical methods of preventing infectious disease, second only to the sanitization of water. Vaccines have spared millions of people from early death or crippling illnesses and made the global eradication of smallpox in 1979 possible. Health experts now pledge to eliminate polio, measles and perhaps one day even malaria--although, as we shall see, a malaria vaccine will require novel approaches to immunization to be successful.