news health update

Kamis, 08 Agustus 2013

Experts: MERS virus may be infecting camels

Experts: MERS virus may be infecting camels

LONDON â€" Scientists have found an intriguing clue that suggests camels might somehow be involved in infecting people in the Middle East with the mysterious MERS virus.

Since the virus was first identified last September, there have been 94 illnesses, including 46 deaths, from MERS, or Middle East respiratory syndrome, mostly in Saudi Arabia. Aside from several clusters where the virus has likely spread between people, experts have largely been stumped as to how patients got infected.

In a preliminary study published on Friday, European scientists found traces of antibodies against the MERS virus in dromedary, or one-humped, camels, but not the virus itself. Finding antibodies means the camels were at one point infected with MERS or a similar virus before fighting off the infection.

The antibodies were found in all 50 camel blood samples from Oman, compared to 15 of 105 samples from Sp anish camels. Animals from Spain, the Netherlands and Chile were tested for comparison to those from Oman. No MERS antibodies were found in tests done in cows, sheep or goats.

"Finding the (MERS) virus is like finding a needle in a haystack, but finding the antibodies at least gives you an indication of where to look," said Marion Koopmans, chief of virology at the Netherlands' National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, the study's senior author. "What this tells us is that there's something circulating in camels that looks darned similar to MERS."

The study was published in the Lancet Infectious Diseases.

Koopmans expected results would be similar for other camel populations across the Middle East.

"We can't say this proves camels are a reservoir for MERS but it does show there is something going on with camels that may be relevant for people," Koopmans said.

Across the Middle East, camel products including milk are popular and the animals are often kept for racing and other purposes.

MERS is part of a family of coronaviruses that can cause the common cold as well as SARS, which sparked a global outbreak in 2003. Health officials in Saudi Arabia, in a letter this week to the New England Journal of Medicine, documented seven new infections of MERS in health workers, including some mild cases.

MERS is most closely related to a bat virus, leading some scientists to think bats are the natural source. Some experts think bats might be infecting other animals like camels with MERS before passing it to humans. MERS can cause symptoms including fever, cough, breathing problems, pneumonia and kidney failure. There is no known treatment or cure.

Some experts said more testing of other animals in the Middle East was needed.

"Camels may be involved in (MERS) transmission but there could also be cows, goats, or somet hing else involved," said Vincent Munster, a virologist at the National Institutes of Health, who co-wrote an accompanying commentary.

There are ongoing tests on camel samples from elsewhere in the Middle East, as well as tests on dates â€" which some scientists think may be infected by bat excrement before being eaten by people.

The World Health Organization called the camel findings "an important development" but pointed out that many MERS patients had no known contact with animals.

"There must be some other step somewhere that results in human infections," WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said.

He said it was still unclear what kind of animal contact might be needed for MERS to spread.

"Even if we know where the virus is, we don't know exactly how it's jumping into humans," Hartl said. "This is another piece of the puzzle, but there are still a lot of holes that need to be filled in."

Senin, 05 Agustus 2013

First taste of test-tube burger declared 'close to meat'

First taste of test-tube burger declared 'close to meat'

By Kate Kelland, Health and Science Correspondent

LONDON | Mon Aug 5, 2013 1:46pm EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - The world's first laboratory-grown beef burger was flipped out of a petri dish and into a frying pan on Monday, with food tasters declaring it tasted "close to meat".

Grown in-vitro from cattle stem cells at a cost of 250,000 euros ($332,000), the burger was cooked and eaten in front of television cameras to gain the greatest media coverage for the culmination of a five-year science experiment.

Resembling a standard circular-shaped red meat patty, it was created by knitting together 20,000 strands of laboratory-grown protein, combined with other ingredients normally used in burgers, such as salt, breadcrumbs and egg powder. Red beet juice and saffron were added to give it colour.

The two food tasters were reserved in their judgement, perhaps keen not to offend their host at the London event, noting the burger's "absence of fat".

Pressed for a more detailed description of the flavour, food writer Josh Schonwald said the cultured beef had an "animal protein cake" like quality to it, adding that he would like to try it with some of the extras often served with tra ditional burgers - salt, pepper, ketchup and jalepenos.

Even the scientist behind the burger's creation, vascular biologist Mark Post of Maastricht University in the Netherlands, was relatively muted in his praise of its flavour.

"It's a very good start," he told the hundreds of reporters who had gathered to watch the meat being cooked and served.

The Dutch scientist's aim was to show the world that in the future meat will not necessarily have to come from the environmentally and economically costly rearing and slaughtering of millions of animals.

"Current meat production is at its maximum - we need to come up with an alternative," he said.

MASSIVE SCALE

The World Health Organization (WHO) says meat production is projected to rise to 376 million tonnes by 2030 from 218 million tonnes annually in 1997-1999, and demand from a growing world population is expected to rise beyond that.

According to a 2006 report by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), industrialised agriculture contributes on a "massive scale" to climate change, air pollution, land degradation, energy use, deforestation and biodiversity decline.

The meat industry contributes about 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, a proportion expected to grow as consumers in fast-developing countries such as China and India eat more meat, the report said.

Chris Mason, a professor of regenerative medicine at University College London, who was not involved in the research, said it was "great pioneering science" with the potential to ease environmental, health and animal welfare problems.

But, he added: "whilst the science looks achievable, the scalable manufacturing will require new game-changing innovation".

Post said he was confident his concept can be scaled up to of fer a viable alternative to animal meat production, but said it may be another 20 years before lab-grown meat appears on supermarket shelves.

He also conceded that the flavour of his meat must be improved if it is to become a popular choice.

Post resisted requests from journalists from all over the world eager to try a morsel of the world's first cultured beef burger, saying there was not enough to go around.

Instead, he said, his children would be offered the leftovers.

($1 = 0.7528 euros)

(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

Sugary drinks tied to obesity among preschoolers

Sugary drinks tied to obesity among preschoolers

By Genevra Pittman

NEW YORK | Mon Aug 5, 2013 12:16am EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Five-year-olds who drink sugar-sweetened sodas, sports drinks or juices every day are more likely to be obese than those who have sugar-sweetened beverages less often, according to a new study.

Although the link between sugary drinks and extra weight has been well documented among teens and adults, researchers said that up until now, the evidence was less clear for young children.

"Even though sugar-sweetened beverages are relatively a small percentage of the calories that children take in, that additional amount of calories did contribute to more weight gain over time," said Dr. Mark DeBoer, who led the study at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

He and his colleagues surveyed the parents of a nationally-representative group of 9,600 children when the kids were two, four and five years old. The children were all born in 2001. Parents reported on their income and education, as well as how often children drank sugary beverages and watched TV.

The children and their mothers were weighed at each survey visit.

The proportion of kids who had at least one soda, s ports drink or sugar-sweetened juice drink each day ranged from 9 to 13 percent, depending on their age.

Those children were more likely to have an overweight mother and to watch at least two hours of TV each day at age four and five.

After accounting for those influences as well as families' socioeconomic status, the researchers found five-year-olds who had at least one sugary drink each day were 43 percent more likely to be obese than those who drank the beverages less frequently or not at all.

Kids were considered obese if they had a body mass index - a measure of weight in relation to height - above the 95th percentile for their age and gender, as calculated by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

About 15 percent of five-year-olds in the study were obese.

Four-year-old sugary beverage drinkers also tended to have a higher rate of obesity than non-drinkers - but that finding could have been due to chance, the researchers reported Monday in Pediatrics. Among two-year-olds, there was no link between sugar-sweetened beverages and obesity.

In a statement sent to Reuters Health, the American Beverage Association trade group wrote, "Overweight and obesity are caused by an imbalance between calories consumed from all foods and beverages (total diet) and calories burned (physical activity). Therefore, it is misleading to suggest that beverage consumption is uniquely responsible for weight gain among this group of children, especially at a time in their lives when they would normally gain weight and grow."

The researchers said kids who drink sports drinks and other beverages with added sugar may not make up for the extra calories by eating or drinking less of something else. That could be in part because sugar wouldn't satisfy children's appetite as well as something with protein and fat.

Drinking milk, on the other hand, "will contribute to satiety and not as big of an increase in total intake as something that is pure sugar," DeBoer told Reuters Health.

His study did not take into account kids' other eating habits and physical activity.

Dr. Y. Claire Wang, who studies childhood nutrition and obesity at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York, said she wasn't surprised by the findings.

"This is really just adding to the evidence we already know that (drinking) sugar-sweetened beverages in childhood is associated with weight gain. It's definitely one of the major, if not the main, driver in childhood obesity," Wang, who wasn't involved in the new research, told Reuters Health.

One of the study's co-authors, Ryan Demmer, is also a researcher at Columbia.

DeBoer said parents should be aware of where young kids are getting extra unhealt hy calories and stick with water and milk for beverage options.

Wang recommended whole fruits over fruit drinks and juices.

"It's not to say that you're going to ban all these sugary things â€¦ from people's childhoods," she said. "It's just they're supposed to be very rare treats."

SOURCE: bit.ly/cxXOG Pediatrics, online August 5, 2013.

Sabtu, 03 Agustus 2013

Hundreds fall sick in US from stomach bug

Hundreds fall sick in US from stomach bug

Donna Heller thought she had cancer. But multiple visits to the doctor after a month with debilitating nausea and diarrhea didn't yield any answers. Convinced she was dying, she met with her lawyer to get her will in order.

Then she saw a television report about an outbreak of cyclospora possibly linked to bagged salad mix. The stomach illness matched all her symptoms and is easily treatable with antibiotics. She told her doctor she suspected that could be the cause, and tests showed she was right.

Donna Heller from Burleson, Tex., suffered debilitating nausea and diarrhea lasting a month until she was diagnosed with cyclospora by the CDC last week and began taking the antibiotics. (LM Otero/Associated Press)

"It went so long and nobody was able to give me answers," said Heller, a 54-year-old teacher in Crowley, Texas. "It didn't seem like anybody wanted to take you serious because there are so many stomach problems that resemble each other."

A mysterious outbreak of the parasitic illness usually found abroad is growing, with more than 400 confirmed cases in 16 states. FDA officials said Friday they had discovered the source of some of the illnesses, but not all of them. The agency said that the illnesses from Iowa and Nebraska are linked to salad mix from a Mexican farm that was served at Olive Garden and Red Lobster restaurants. Those make up around half of the cases.

The rest of the illnesses â€" many of them in Texas â€" are still a mystery, state and federal officials say.

The source of this outbreak has proved particularly hard to trace. Doctors have to test specifically for cyclospora and many don't because it is relatively rare. So they may not order the correct tests, at least not at first. The parasite is so tiny that it's often difficult to confirm that a person has the illness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Tests often have to be repeated with fresh samples.

Heller said initial tests from her doctor showed up as inconclusive, but she later received a call from the CDC telling her she definitely had the illness.

Many have the disease and don't know it

Doctors or labs may not notify state health departments as quickly as they would for a more common foodborne illness like salmonella. And there are different rules in different states about whether cyclospora has to be reported to federal health authorities.

All those obstacles are making it harder for state and federal officials. It also means there are probably many people who have the disease and don't know it.

There are usually only 150 cases a year in the U.S. of cyclospora poisoning. (Centers for Disease Control/Associated Press)

The illness is rare â€" roughly 150 cases are reported in the United States annually. Scientists only identified it in the early 1990s.

In comparison, there are tens of thousands of lab-confirmed cases of salmonella food poisoning in this country each year, and officials believe there are hundreds of thousands more that are not confirmed.

The cyclospora parasite is native to the tropics and tends to come into the United States on imported produce. For example, Guatemalan raspberries were the source of five outbreaks in Canada and the United States in the late 1990s. Two of those outbreaks involved more than 1,000 illnesses each, said Ynes Ortega, a cyclospora expert at the University of Georgia.

Takes a week to show up

Officials say part of the problem is that the disease takes a week on average to show up, and diagnosis has often been delayed, making it hard for victims to remember what they ate.

CDC spokeswoman MarDia-Belen Moran says the agency also is interviewing people who aren't sick as controls to get more information on eating patterns, as well as lab testing foods that they suspect.

For its part, the FDA says it has a 21-person team in its Maryland headquarters and specialists in 10 field offices across the country working to identify the source of the outbreak.

Food often goes through several stops â€" potentially in several countries â€" before it reaches a grocery cart, and trying to race it is "labour-intensive and painstaking work, requiring the collection, review and analysis of hundreds and at times thousands of invoices and shipping documents," the FDA said.

Heller says she doesn't know what food might have caused her illness, but she said she was eating out a lot near her home south of Fort Worth around the time she fell ill in late June.

She said she finally went on the correct antibiotics this week and is starting to feel better, though her symptoms aren't gone completely. She said the illness has taken an emotional toll.

"I literally, through the course of all this, have been brought to tears probably 10 different times, just so defeated," she said.

Â© The Associated Press, 2013

Jumat, 02 Agustus 2013

FDA links stomach illnesses in IA, NE to 2 restaurant chains with salad mix from ...

FDA links stomach illnesses in IA, NE to 2 restaurant chains with salad mix from ...

â€œIt is not yet clear whether the cases reported from other states are all part of the same outbreak,â€ the agency said in a statement. â€œThe investigation of increased cases of cyclosporiasis in other states continues.â€

Both Olive Garden and Red Lobster are owned by Orlando-based Darden Restaurants. In a statement, Darden spokesman Mike Bernstein said the FDAâ€™s announcement is â€œnew information.â€

â€œNothing we have seen prior to this announcement gave us any reason to be concerned about the products weâ€™ve received from this supplier,â€ Bernstein said.

The FDA said it traced illnesses from the restaurants in Nebraska and Iowa to Taylor Farms de Mexico, the Mexican branch of Salinas, Calif.-based Taylor Farms. The company, which provides produce to the food service industry, said its facility located about 180 miles north o f Mexico City in San Miguel de Allende is the only one of its 12 sites to be connected to the cases.

In an email, the chairman and CEO of Taylor Farms, Bruce Taylor, said the Mexican plant produced 48 million servings of salads for thousands of restaurants in the Midwest and eastern U.S. in June, the month the outbreak started. He said the facility has an extensive water testing program.

â€œAll our tests have been negative and we have no evidence of cyclospora in our product,â€ Taylor said. â€œWe are working closely with the FDA to continue this investigation.â€

Taylor said Taylor Farms de Mexico does not supply Olive Garden and Red Lobster restaurants in Texas, the state with the second most illnesses in the outbreak. According to CDC, 113 of the illnesses reported so far were in Texas. Iowa has had 146 illnesses and Nebraska 81.

In an additional statement on the companyâ€™s website, Taylor Farms says the Mexican facility is â€œstate of the art an d has an exceptional food safety record.â€ The statement said the product is out of the food supply.

The FDA said it had audited the Mexican processing facility in 2011 and found â€œno notable issues,â€ according to the agency. The agency said it would increase surveillance efforts for green leafy products imported from Mexico.

The most recent known illness in the two states linked to the infected salad was in Nebraska a month ago. The typical shelf life for a salad mix is up to 14 days.

There have been more recent illnesses in other states. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the most recent illness was July 23 but centers did not specify a location.

The agency said its investigation has not implicated any packaged salad sold in grocery stores.

Follow Mary Clare Jalonick on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mcjalonick

FDA issues new rules on gluten labeling

FDA issues new rules on gluten labeling

After years of waiting, the Food and Drug Administration released new rules Friday defining exactly what "gluten-free" on a food label means. The standardized definition will help the 3 million American who have celiac disease, along with millions more who follow a gluten-free diet for other reasons.

Under the federal definition, which FDA has been working on since 2007, food that carries a "gluten-free" label must contain fewer than 20 parts per million of gluten.

With the new rule, when consumers see "gluten-free" on a food label," they can be assured that those claims have meaning," said Michael Taylor, the FDA's deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine.

Gluten is a protein that occurs naturally in wheat, rye and barley. Celiac disease is an inherited auto-immune condition that makes it impossible for those who have it to digest gluten. If they eat gluten, their bodies pro duce antibodies that attack and damage the lining of the small intestine. This can cause severe health problems including nutritional deficiencies, osteoporosis, growth retardation, infertility, miscarriages, short stature and intestinal cancers.

The new label rules will be "fantastic," said Andrea Levario, whose son has celiac disease. Right now when she shops, "if I pick up a product and it says 'gluten-free' I don't know what that means because there's no federal standard." Levario is the executive director of the American Celiac Disease Alliance in Alexandria, Va.

Food packages will be required to conform to the new rules within one year, Taylor said.

Labeling is crucial because for people with celiac disease, following a gluten-free diet is the only treatment available. "While a diabetic needs insulin to survive, a celiac must have gluten-free food," Levario said. "Without clear ingredient information and a definitive labeling standard, celiac consu mers are playing Russian roulette when it comes to making safe food choices."

Congresswoman Nita Lowey (D-Westchester), who first began arguing for labeling standards in 1999, hailed the new rules.

"I am pleased that our federal government has finally set clear, uniform standards that will rein in a fast-growing, unregulated market," Lowey said.

The Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act of 2004 required that the FDA issue standards for the term "gluten-free." It also required food packaging to clearly list whether they contained any of the top eight ingredients that cause allergic reactions. Those are milk, egg, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, Crustacean shellfish, soy, and wheat. That portion of the act went into effect in 2006.

Gluten-free foods have become very popular over the past five years. The market was estimated to be $4.2 billion in 2012, according to Packaged Facts. The market research firm estimates sales will reach $6.6 billion by 2017.

Companies that market gluten-free products were pleased with the new rules. "We are thrilled by the FDA's decision to regulate gluten-free labeling," said T.J. McIntyre, vice president of Boulder Brands, which makes Glutino gluten-free products. "This is bigger than products or brands, this is a consumer safety issue."

Both the European Union and Canada have set the same level of fewer than 20 parts per million for their gluten-free labels, Taylor said.

Kamis, 01 Agustus 2013

How facelifts make us look younger by just 3 years

How facelifts make us look younger by just 3 years

New study into the effects of facelifts finds people look no more attractive
Roughly Â£10,000 would be needed to look 10 years younger
Fifty raters were shown before and after pictures of patients

By Daily Mail Reporter

PUBLISHED: 19:14 EST, 1 August 2013 | UPDATED: 20:22 EST, 1 August 2013

Negligible: A study has found on average people look just three years younger

Slim pickings: A study has found on average people look just three years younger

Having a facelift makes you look just three years younger - and doesnâ€™t improve your attractiveness, claim doctors.

A unique study found plastic surgery results in a more youthful appearance, but the improvements are remarkably small.

Overall, the number of years â€˜savedâ€™ by having a full facelift or other procedures such as eyelid surgery is around three.

The more work thatâ€™s done, the younger the look, according to US and Canadian specialists.
But they failed to find any significant change in attractiveness ratings afterwards - and in Britain the cost of a clutch of cosmetic surgery procedures could top Â£10,000.

Dr Joshua Zimm, of the Lenox Hill Hospital and Manhattan Eye, Ear Throat Institute of North Shore-LIJ Health System, New York, who led the latest study, said plastic surgeons often donâ€™t tell prospective patients they will look younger or more attractive because of the lack of objective research.

Instead patients are told they will look â€˜more refreshedâ€™ and â€˜less tiredâ€™.

But, he said, there is no doubt the explosion in facial surgery has been driven by expectations that patients will look younger, better and even have a competitive edge in the rat race at work.

However, the new study shows â€˜limitationsâ€™ in what patients should expect.

â€˜Our data demonstrate that ageing face surgery is effective in reducing the apparent age of patients but doesnâ€™t consistently improve a patientâ€™s attractivenessâ€™ he said.

The latest study, published in the journal JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery (must credit), is the first to investigate ratings of attractiveness post-surgery as well as enhanced youthfulness.

Expectations: One doctor claims the explosion in people having plastic surgery was driven by a belief they would look younger, but it comes at a huge financial cost

The study involved an assessment by 50 independent raters who examined preoperative and postoperative photographs of 49 patients, including 12 men, who underwent plastic surgery.

The patients had surgery between July 2006 and July 2010 at a private practice in Toronto, Canada, run by surgeon Peter Adamson, who took part in the study.

Patients in the study ranged in age from 42 to 73 years at the time of surgery with an average age of 57 years.

On average, the raters estimated their patientsâ€™ ages to be about 2.1 years younger than their chronological age before surgery and 5.2 years younger than their chronological age after surgery.

The average overall years saved (true age minus guessed age) following surgery was 3.1 years, with more years saved as more procedures were carried out.

To minimise bias by the raters, none was shown before and after pictures of the same patient.
Raters were also asked to rate the patientâ€™s attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the most unattractive and 10 being the most attractive.

There was a small, but statistically insignificant increase in attractiveness scores in post-op photographs.

Three-quarters of patients scored within the range 4-7, and the scores did not change with surgery even after allowing for patient age and procedure.

Dr Zimm said the study found a personâ€™s perceived age conferred a certain level of attractiveness - with younger people generally gauged as being more attractive.

â€˜From this study, it seems the attractiveness level will remain the same, regardless of ageâ€™ he said.
â€˜The age reduction is more substantial when the number of surgical procedures is increased, but this did not significantly improve overall attractivenessâ€™ he added.

Rajiv Grover, president of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons who practises at the King Edward VII Hospital in London, said the attractiveness ratings fell short using strict statistical criteria, but market research techniques would probably have found a substantial change.

He said most UK plastic surgeons would believe the study underestimated the amount of benefit gained by many patients.

He said â€˜The key here is good selection. I turn away 40 to 45 per cent of potential patients because I tell them honestly I donâ€™t think theyâ€™re going to get the results theyâ€™re after and theyâ€™ll be wasting their money.

â€˜If you select patients well, and theyâ€™re in the hands of a competent, experienced surgeon I would expect them to look seven, eight, even nine years younger af terwardsâ€™ he added.