Formaldehyde and Chicken Eggs: What’s Inside a Flu Shot

Wired - 

Flu virus

All flu vaccines start with flu viruses: genetic material packaged in an envelope of proteins and fats, studded with yet more proteins—antigens—that push the body’s immune system into action. With thousands of possible flu variants out there, the World Health Organization looks at info from 141 labs around the world to determine which variants are most likely to circulate each year. Since it can take more than six months to manufacture the shot, the WHO picks four strains about nine months before flu season: two A viruses (which can infect humans and animals, like swine flu) and two B viruses (which primarily affect humans).

Egg Protein

Manufacturers grow the flu viruses in fertilized chicken eggs—hundreds
of millions every year. Scientists inject the viruses into the allantoic fluid between the embryo and the shell, where the viruses replicate. Then the fluid goes for a spin in a centrifuge, along with layers of sucrose solutions of different concentrations to separate the denser virus from the rest of the egg proteins. Trace amounts of egg can remain in the final shot.   Read More

An Ultra-Simple Tourniquet That’s Saving Soldiers’ Lives

Wired - When you think of surgery, images of calm doctors working on anesthetized patients in pristine operating rooms come to mind. Combat medics face a different reality. They often ply their trade on dusty desert roads, and, when trying to save a soldier’s life, a charred Humvee door sometimes has to suffice for an operating table.

Medics across all branches of the armed services are prepared for situations like these. Dr. Sam Scheinberg is a veteran combat surgeon and saved his share of soldiers in Vietnam. As CEO of SAM Medical he commissioned Portland-based design firm Ziba to develop a tourniquet that can help save the lives of wounded soldiers. His only caveat was was that it had to be “brain dead and bomb proof.”

Ziba has won awards for its work for Adidas, Costco, and Logitech, but designing for users who are pinned down by sniper fire was a new experience. In response, they tossed their sketchpads and CAD workstations and opted to prototype solutions by crawling on the floor of their studio and dodging imaginary mortar shells. They whipped up prototypes made from duct tape and scrap materials.   Read More

Chick-fil-A Vows to Serve Chicken Raised Without Antibiotics

Mashable - Chick-fil-A's famous chicken sandwiches will still be breaded and fried, but soon they won't come with antibiotics.

On Tuesday, Chick-fil-A, the privately held food chain based in Atlanta,announced that it intends to serve chicken "raised without antibiotics" at all its restaurants within five years. It sounds like a clear-cut promise. The history of such vows, though, isn't so simple.

In 2007, Tyson Foods created a campaign to sell chicken that was "raised without antibiotics." Then it turned out Tyson was injecting the chicken eggs with a vaccine that included antibiotics.

Other fast-food chains have announced policies to curb antibiotic use in livestock, most notably McDonald's in 2003, but those polices have included loopholes that allowed livestock producers to continue giving antibiotics to healthy animals.   Read More

Health scan: How stubborn bacteria avoid antibiotics

Jerusalem Post - The mechanism used by some bacteria to survive antibacterial treatment has been revealed for the first time by Hebrew University of Jerusalem researchers.

The mechanism used by some bacteria to survive antibacterial treatment has been revealed for the first time by Hebrew University of Jerusalem researchers. They suggest that their work could pave the way for new ways to control such pathogens.

In addition to the known phenomenon in which some bacteria achieve resistance to antibiotics through mutation, there are other types, known as “persistent bacteria,” that are not resistant to the antibiotics but simply continue to exist in a dormant or inactive state when exposed to antibacterial treatment. These bacteria “awaken” when that treatment is over, resuming their detrimental tasks.

Until now, scientists have been aware of a connection between these kinds of bacteria and the pathogen’s naturally occurring toxin HipA, but they didn’t know the cellular target of this toxin and how its activity triggers dormancy of the bacteria.

Now, the Jerusalem researchers, led by Prof. Gadi Glaser of the faculty of medicine and Prof. Nathalie Balaban of the Racah Institute of Physics, have been able to show how this comes about. They demonstrated that when antibiotics attack these bacteria, the HipA toxin disrupts the chemical “messaging” process necessary for nutrients to build proteins. This is interpreted by the bacteria as a “hunger signal” and sends them into an inactive state (dormancy) in which they are able to survive until the antibacterial treatment is over.

The research on persistent bacteria has been conducted in Balaban’s lab for several years, focusing on the development of a biophysical understanding of the phenomenon.

It will be combined with other work being done in Glaser’s lab that focuses on fighting persistent bacteria in the hope of leading to more effective treatment for bacterial infections.   Read More

Israel Discovers New Therapy For Brain Cancer

Arutz Sheva - Israeli researchers at the Hebrew University Hadassah Medical School made a ground breaking discovery of a cancer-driving protein.

Regina Golan-Gerstl, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow at the Hebrew University Hadassah Medical School, has successfully identified a genetic protein which is involved in the development of the most common and aggressive type of brain cancer found in adults called glioblastoma.

For the 22,000 American citizens who are diagnosed each year with brain cancer, these never before known molecular aspects can provide new diagnosis and treatment options for patients.

Golan-Gerstl and her team of biochemists supported by the Israel Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) discovered a splicing factor hnRNP A2/B1, a protein gene found in humans, which was detected to have higher than normal levels found in glioblastoma samples.   More

Lamprey Micro-Robot Could Detect Disease

Discovery News - To locate disease in the human body, it would be great if a doctor could get inside and look around. Imaging technology helps, but the resolution of the image isn’t always good enough for analysis. On top of that shortcoming, a lot of imaging technologies, like MRIs, involve using large, expensive machines the size of a small room.

That’s where something called cyberplasm comes in. To learn more about this micro-robot, which fuses together microelectronics and biomimicry, Daniel Frankel of Newcastle University is leading a U.K.-based study with the support of a research team from the National Science Foundation in the United States.

BLOG: Flying Robot Swarm Performs James Bond Theme

DNEWS VIDEO: MODERN MEDICINE AND TECH

The idea is to have an electronic nervous system (which every robot ultimately has) with sight and smell sensors derived from animal cells. Cyberplasm’s artificial muscles would be powered by glucose, just as real muscles are. In addition, the robot would respond to light and chemical stimuli the same way a real creature does.                More

A Wirelessly Controlled Pharmacy Dispenses Drugs From Within Your Abdomen

Implantable Chip The chip is about the size of an average flash memory stick. Courtesy of MicroCHIPS Inc.

PopSci - In the future, implantable computerized dispensaries will replace trips to the pharmacy or doctor’s office, automatically leaching drugs into the blood from medical devices embedded in our bodies. These small wireless chips promise to reduce pain and inconvenience, and they’ll ensure that patients get exactly the amount of drugs they need, all at the push of a button.

In a new study involving women with osteoporosis, a wirelessly controlled implantable microchip successfully delivered a daily drug regimen, working just as well, if not better, than a daily injection. It could be an elegant solution for countless people on long-term prescription medicines, researchers say. Patients won’t have to remember to take their medicine, and doctors will be able to adjust doses with a simple phone call or computer command.

Pharmacies-on-a-chip could someday dispense a whole suite of drugs, at pre-programmed doses and at specific times, said Robert Langer, the Institute Professor at the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, who is a co-author on the study.          More

Emergency Rooms Go Wireless

Discovery News - The Mi-Tag, a wearable vital sign monitor, could bring emergency rooms into the wireless age. Jorge Ribas reports.

Rare Syndrome Mysteriously Spreading Among New York State’s Teens

Gizmodo - This is 16-year-old Lori Brownell. As you can see in the video, Lori is very sick. Her symptoms started last August. Nobody could diagnose her at the time, and since then 17 more kids have developed the same symptoms in the same geographical area.

On Christmas Eve, doctors told Lori she may have Tourette syndrome, a sickness that causes involuntary physical and vocal tics and, in a minority of cases, swearing. What nobody knows yet is why this syndrome is spreading so quickly, and in such a small community.

The rest of the kids are showing the same symptoms as Lori. 15 of the 17 teenagers affected by this syndrome—all girls except one boy—go to LeRoy High School, in Genesee County, New York. The other two girls are from Corinth, in Saratoga County, about 50 miles away. It’s unclear yet if there is any connection between these two groups.

Some doctors believe that all of the teens have conversion disorder, a neurosis that affects motor functions. People used to call this hysteria. Conversion disorder’s symptoms may include fits, numbness, blindness and paralysis. Psychiatrists believe this disorder happens because of difficulties in the patient’s life, not because of any external pathogen or chemical substance.

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When Stress Is Good for You

 

It’s Disparaged as Dangerous, but Healthy Levels of Stress Can Pump Up Both Mind and Body

WSJ - Stress: It can propel you into “the zone,” spurring peak performance and well-being. Too much of it, though, strains your heart, robs you of memory and mental clarity and raises your risk of chronic disease.

How do you get the benefits—and avoid the harmful effects?

By learning to identify and manage individual reactions to stress, people can develop healthier outlooks as well as improve performance on cognitive tests, at work and in athletics, researchers and psychologists say.

The body has a standard reaction when it faces a task where performance really matters to goals or well-being: The sympathetic nervous system and the hypothalamus, pituitary and adrenal glands pump stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, into the bloodstream. Heartbeat and breathing speed up, and muscles tense.

What happens next is what divides healthy stress from harmful stress. People experiencing beneficial or “adaptive” stress feel pumped. The blood vessels dilate, increasing blood flow to help the brain, muscles and limbs meet a challenge, similar to the effects of aerobic exercise, according to research by Wendy Mendes, an associate professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, and others.

The body tends to respond differently under harmful or threatening stress. The blood vessels constrict, and “you may feel a little dizzy as your blood pressure rises,” says Christopher Edwards, director of the behavioral chronic pain management program at Duke University Medical Center. Symptoms are often like those you feel in a fit of anger. You may speak more loudly or experience lapses in judgment or logic, he says. Hands and feet may grow cold as blood rushes to the body’s core. Research shows the heart often beats erratically, spiking again and again like a seismograph during an earthquake.                     More

Another Potential Risk Factor for Developing Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease in Women

ScienceDaily (Jan. 2, 2012) — A hormone derived from visceral fat called adiponectin may play a role as a risk factor for development of all-cause dementia and Alzheimer disease (AD) in women, according to a study published Online First by the Archives of Neurology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

The number of people affected by dementia worldwide is estimated to double over the next 20 years from the current number of about 36 million people, the authors provide as background information in the article. AD is the most common form of dementia. The authors write that data suggest an association between insulin resistance and inflammation, hallmarks for type 2 diabetes, and development of dementia. “An additional potential factor that may contribute to the onset of AD and all-cause dementia is adiponectin. Adiponectin is a hormone derived from visceral fat, which sensitizes the body to insulin, has anti-inflammatory properties, and plays a role in the metabolism of glucose and lipids.”        More

Video: Researchers Watch Type 1 Diabetes As It Unfolds, in Real Time

T Cells Attacking This image, captured from video, shows the T cells (purple dots) attacking the pancreatic islets (green images in center), which contain the insulin‑producing beta cells. Beta cell destruction leads to type 1 diabetes. The attack continues over several hours before a number of beta cells are destroyed. La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology

A new real-time view of immune cells attacking the pancreas sheds light on how type 1 diabetes unfolds, as white blood cells seek out and destroy insulin-producing beta cells. Researchers believe it could help point the way to new intervention methods to halt the destruction before the onset of type 1 diabetes, also known as juvenile diabetes.

Diabetes results from the body’s lack of ability to produce sufficient insulin, which keeps blood glucose levels in check. Type 1 is an autoimmune disorder in which the body’s T lymphocytes attack and kill the pancreas’ insulin-making beta cells; type 2 also involves pancreatic destruction and can result from several factors, though in this country it is often the result of poor diet and obesity. There is no cure, at least not yet. Watching exactly how the destructive process unfolds could be a major step in that direction, however.

Researchers at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology used two-photon excitation microscopy and a new imaging technique to access a live, functioning pancreas in a mouse. The pancreas is small, soft and tucked away beneath other organs in the abdominal area, so it’s difficult to see in action. This study marks the first time researchers have used two-photon microscopy to study the pancreas (it’s previously been used to image the liver, lymph nodes and some other organs).                   More