“When we first started having a pertussis outbreak, we assumed that this would be primarily in the unvaccinated population,” Dr David Witt, of Kaiser Permanente Medical Centre in San Rafael, California, told
a conference in Chicago, using the scientific name for the once-common childhood disease.

“What we pretty quickly identify is that the bulk of the outbreak was in fully-vaccinated children in the 8 to 12 age group,” he said. “Older kids and younger kids seemed to be pretty well protected but the age of 8 to 12 was the vast bulk of the cases.

“And when we examined that, it was correlated to being more than three years from the last vaccine booster dose,” he said, adding that many of the children did not seek care because the vaccine mitigated the symptoms. He cautioned that more research was necessary as he presented the preliminary results at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy organised by the American Society of Microbiology.

In the group of 15,000 children surveyed, doctors found 171 confirmed cases of whooping cough across all age groups, including 103 in the group of eight to 12-year-olds. These children were up to 20 times more likely to become infected than those whose last booster injection was more recent, Witt said.

He insisted, however, that parents should get their children vaccinated, saying the vaccine provided good protection for the first two to three years and appeared to mitigate the symptoms of those who became infected. The infection causes coughing fits lasting up to 10 weeks and can be fatal, especially in infants. It is commonly treated with antibiotics, which are used to reduce symptoms and prevent the spread of the disease.

The disease infects 30-to-50 million people worldwide each year and kills some 300,000, according to the US-based Centre for Disease Control (CDC). – AFP-Relaxnews

The omega-3 fatty acids in fish may lower stroke risk through their positive effects on blood pressure and cholesterol, wrote Susanna Larsson and Nicola Orsini of Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet in the journal Stroke.

Their analysis was based on 15 studies conducted in the United States, Europe, Japan and China, each of which asked people how frequently they ate fish, then followed them for between four and 30 years to see who suffered a stroke.

“I think overall, fish does provide a beneficial package of nutrients, in particular the omega-3s, that could explain this lower risk,” said Dariush Mozaffarian, a Harvard School of Public Health epidemiologist whose research was included in the analysis.

“A lot of the evidence comes together suggesting that about two to three servings per week is enough to get the benefit.”

Vitamin D, selenium, and certain types of proteins in fish may also have stroke-related benefits, he added. Data for the analysis came from close to 400,000 people aged 30 to 103. Over anywhere from a few years to a few decades, about 9,400 people had a stroke. Eating three extra servings of fish each week was linked to a 6% drop in stroke risk, which translates to one fewer stroke among a hundred people eating extra fish over a lifetime. The people in each study who ate the most fish were 12% less likely to have a stroke than those that ate the least.

Mozaffarian’s report separated the effects of different kinds of fish and found that people who ate more fried fish and fish sandwiches, not surprisingly, didn’t get any stroke benefit. But the research can’t prove that adding more non-fried fish to your diet will keep you from having a stroke, Mozaffarian told Reuters Health. People “could have healthier diets in other ways, people could exercise more, people could have better education that could lead them to see their doctors more,” he added, all of which could decrease their risk of strokes.

Still, most studies have tried to take those other health and nutrition factors into account to isolate the effects of fish as much as possible – and they suggest a cause-and-effect relationship, he said. It’s likely that people who start out eating no fish or very little probably have the most to gain by putting it on their plate more often.

“You get a lot of bang for your buck when you go from low intake to moderate, a few servings per week,” Mozaffarian said. After that, the benefit from each extra serving probably goes down. Fatty fish such as salmon and herring are especially high in omega-3s, The American Heart Association recommends at least two servings of fatty fish in particular each week. – Reuters

Another chemical used as an industrial metal degreasing agent, trichloroethylene (TCE) also boosted heart risks, said the research to be presented at the Paediatric Academic Societies annual meeting in Denver Colorado.

“Congenital heart disease (which occurs when the heart is malformed before birth) is a major cause of childhood death and life-long health problems,” said D. Gail McCarver, lead author of the study and pediatrics professor at Wisconsin’s Medical College.

Previous studies suggested it could be caused by chemicals in the environment. Researches collected stool samples from 135 newborn babies with the heart condition and 432 infants without it.

A full 82% of all the infants showed exposure to at lesat one of the 17 solvents measured in the study. While infants who showed exposure to ethyl benzene had four times the risk of CHD. Black infants exposed to TCE showed an eight-fold risk for the heart condition, and white infants with the traces in their stool had a two-fold higher risk, said the finding.

“This is the first report that exposure to ethyl benzene was associated with CHD,” McCarver said. Some residents of the US Gulf Coast have expressed concern about their health in the aftermath of the BP oil spill last year, though no studies have been completed yet to determine the effects of exposure to the spilled oil.

Other sources of ethyl benzene include vehicle exhaust, petrol pump vapours and cigratte smoke.
Source: AFP

Liver cancer is the third most deadly cancer in the world. University vice-chancellor Professor Joseph Sung Jao-yiu said: “Every one of us has this gene called cell cycle-related kinase. The key is whether it’ll be activated and how much of it is in your body.

“During liver cancer development, the gene is abnormally activated, which in turn allows cells to grow at an abnormally high rate. It’s like awakening a long-dormant gene.” During an ongoing three-year research project scientists at the university’s Institute of Digestive

Disease found that about 70% of the 50 liver cancer patients involved in the study produced high levels of the gene. They were also more likely to die sooner than those with low levels of the gene. The scientists found that proteins uniquely present in men directly controlled the gene, which was critical for inducing processes that led to abnormal cell growth and tumor formation. This was why globally the disease was seven times more frequent in men than women in 2007, they said.

Hongkong men were three times more likely to be prone to the killer cancer than women. In 2008, out of 1,745 new cases of liver cancer, men accounted for more than 1,200. Sung said now that the gene has been proven to promote liver cancer, targeted therapy can be developed to treat it. He said he expected medication to be ready in five to 10 years.

Builders have been ordered to cover their bums and bodies – to guard against rising rates of skin cancer.
Leading medics warned that cases of the disease among Britain’s 2.4 million construction workers are now on a level with asbestos-related disease.

It follows research by a University of Manchester team which found builders – who often go topless and wear jeans which slip down – were nine times more likely to get skin cancer than other workers, with 1,000 tumours reported every year.

Construction workers are at higher risk due to long spells working in direct sunlight and ultraviolet rays reflected from surfaces. Writing in the Journal of Occupational Medicine, the experts want foremen to encourage staff to wear long-sleeved, loose-fitting shirts and suncream for protection.

Dr Henry Goodall, president of the Society of Occupational Medicine, warned: “Skin cancer can takes years to develop. Neglecting to cover up in the sun can be as dangerous as forgetting to wear a hard hat. “We need to send a clear message that the days of the topless builder are over.”

But it could have been much worse. The new strain of H1N1 flu could have been much more virulent, and it could even have been bird flu, which, because of the way the United States produces flu vaccine, could wreak havoc.

Months back, when a swine flu vaccine was still just a glimmer in scientists’ eyes, US health officials were driving home the message that children, and especially those with underlying health conditions like asthma and pregnant women were at great risk of dying from H1N1 influenza and should be first in line for innoculation.

But after rolling out the vaccine last month, the authorities ran into a problem: There wasn’t enough to go around. “The National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have done a very good job of emphasizing the importance of getting vaccinated. But then there’s no vaccine,” said Steven Salzberg, director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Maryland.

Salzberg’s wife and younger daughters were among thousands who queued last week in Rockville, a suburb of Washington, for swine flu vaccinations. “They left when they saw the line was about 1km long before the place was even open. There were many, many hundreds arriving by the second,” Salzberg said.

Last week, as child deaths spiked well above the annual toll for kids from seasonal flu, vaccination clinics in the county that includes Rockville were abruptly cancelled. The county’s supply of vaccine had run dry. So what if this had been the next “big one”, a flu on the scale of the pandemic that killed tens of millions around the globe in 1918? After all, the strain of flu that caused the 1918 pandemic was also H1N1, the grandfather of today’s swine flu pandemic.

“If we had a really virulent highly infectious influenza strain today, it could easily be as bad as 1918,” said Salzberg. But David Beshai, associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said progress in health care and nutrition mean “a replica of 1918 is not in the cards.

“When you really need vaccine quickly, we just can’t do it, and this has now been demonstrated,” Salzberg said. He said changing the way the United States makes flu vaccine was too costly for companies to put in place and would have to come from the highest political levels.

They said tests of Sanofi -Pasteur’s A(H1N1) flu vaccine showed children respond to it just as they do to seasonal flu vaccine, with children over 10 needing only a single dose but children under 9 needing two. Separately, Sanofi said it had won a US government order for 27.3 million more doses of its vaccine and AstraZeneca’s MedImmune unit said the US government has ordered 29 million more doses of its needle-free vaccine.

Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said young children will likely need to have their doses 21 days apart. But he said they could receive seasonal flu shots and A(H1N1) shots on the same day – something that could ease the logistics of vaccinating children multiple times. “As we had hoped, in children the 2009 A(H1N1) vaccine is acting just like the seasonal flu vaccine,” Fauci told reporters in a telephone briefing.

Children aged 10 to 17 mounted an immune response that should protect them from A(H1N1) within 8 to 10 days, Fauci said. The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said 46 US children have died from A(H1N1), which appears to have first emerged in Mexico in March and which spread around the world to cause a pandemic in only six weeks.

A(H1N1) is now the dominant strain of influenza circulating globally and Fauci said it is possible it may replace the seasonal form of A(H1N1) also circulating. “If you look at the history of where new viruses come in, frequently what they do is come back the next year and displace one or even more than one of the circulating strains,” he said. “It is a distinct possibility that this might ultimately be incorporated into a seasonal flu vaccine.” – Reuters

The study, conducted among 20,000 people by the universities of Bonn and Maastricht, also revealed that people who like to pay back perceived injustices also have fewer friends and are less satisfied with life.

The study also revealed that positively inclined people were more willing to work longer hours but only if they perceived their wages as being fair.

Researchers led by Professor Karim Nayernia at Newcastle University and the NorthEast England Stem Cell Institute (NESCI) developed a new technique that allows the creation of human sperm in the laboratory.

They stressed that the sperm, developed from stem cells with XY chromosomes (male), will not be used for fertility treatment, as this is prohibited by British law and in any case is not their main interest. “This is an important development as it will allow researchers to study in detail how sperm forms and lead to a better understanding of infertility in men,” said
Nayernia.

“It could help us develop new ways to help couples suffering infertility so they can have a child which is genetically their own.” He said more investigation was needed to decide whether the in-vitro derived (IVD) sperm, could be used as a fertility treatment. – AFP