Not only healthy , sex is also made ​​more beautiful

Do you spend so much money to do beauty treatments ? It turns out that you do sexual intercourse with your partner will naturally enhance your beauty .

Here are 5 reasons why sex will make you look more beautiful than ever before .

Illustration of a beautiful woman.

Sex makes you radiant and youthful

Sex will make your hair shine and your skin glow. This is caused when you have sex , the hormone estrogen is good for hair and skin removed . You will also produce more collagen which will make your skin more supple and toned .

Orgasm is the best anti- depressant

During orgasm the body releases the hormone serotonin and DHEA . Serotonin is a neurotransmitter responsible for regulating mood and make you feel happy while DHEA will boost your immunity . Therefore, when you are free from stress , you will look more beautiful .

Sex makes you more sexy

As reported by mindbodygreen.com , when you are aroused during sex , your breasts will be enlarged by 25 % and your nipples will be increased by 1.5 inches . This is what will make you look more sexy .

Sex makes your stomach more flat

The hormone oxytocin is released when you orgasm , will make your cortisol decreased . This is what will flatten your belly as you lose fat in the belly .

Sex will make you more confident

Happy and stress-free feeling you feel after sex helps you to mennyelesaikan you with simpler problems . As a result, your confidence level has increased and you are more excited . Once again , you look more radiant .

It turns out sex is not only beneficial for your love life and sex partner but can also make you look more beautiful . So do not hesitate to do it with your partner tonight ladies .

Sources : Merdeka

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Why BMI Isn’t The Best Measure for Weight (or Health)

Body Mass Index (BMI) provides an easy way to measure obesity, but more doctors are questioning its accuracy and usefulness.

BMI is supposed to estimate the amount of body fat a person carries based on height and weight, and categorizes people based on what is appropriate for their size. BMI readings under 18.5 mean you are underweight, and could put on a few pounds. If you fall between 18.5 and 24.9, you’re considered normal, while a BMI of 30 or higher qualifies as overweight.

But in recent years, more researchers argue that it’s not the most accurate way to measure body weight. For years, scientists have said that BMI can’t distinguish between fat and muscle, which tends to be heavier and can tip more toned individuals into overweight status, even if their fat levels are low. In the journal Science, the latest data from University of Pennsylvania shows that BMI also doesn’t tease apart different types of fat, each of which can have different metabolic effects on health. BMI cannot take into consideration, for example, where the body holds fat. Belly fat, which is known as visceral fat, is more harmful than fat that simply sitting under the skin. 

Visceral fat develops deep among muscles and around organs like the liver and by releasing certain hormones and other agents, it disrupts the body’s ability to balance its energy needs. Even relatively thin people can have high levels of visceral fat, which means they might be considered healthy by BMI standards, but internally they may actually be at higher risk of developing health problems related to weigh gain.

In April of last year, a study published in the journal PLoS One documented such inconsistencies and questioned the accuracy of using BMI to classify weight status of 1,400 men and women. As TIME reported:

Among the study participants, about half of women who were not classified as obese according to their BMI actually were obese when their body fat percentage was taken into account. Among the men, in contrast, about a quarter of obese men had been missed by BMI. Further, a quarter who were categorized as obese by BMI were not considered obese based on their body fat percentage. Overall, about 39% of participants who were classified as overweight by their BMI were actually obese, according to their percent body fat.

So why is BMI still the preferred way to measure weight and evaluate obesity? For one, it’s a relatively easy measurement for doctors to take during an office visit. Taking a person’s height and weight and plugging it into an equation produces a number that informs doctors about whether their patients are at high, low or no risk when it comes to weight-related health problems.

But there may be better ways to measure body fat that provide more useful readings on how likely a person’s weight will contribute to chronic health problems. CT scans and MRIs can provide a clearer glimpse at the body’s make-up by separating out fat from muscle, for example. But these are expensive and involved compared to stepping on a scale. Other types of scans, including dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) images, which are normally used to measure bone density, can also distinguish between fat from bone and muscle mass, but are also costly.

On the more practical level, some researchers have been pushing for using waist circumference or even wrist circumference to gauge potentially harmful weight gain and fat depots, but the evidence supporting this measurement and its ability to predict future health problems isn’t definitive enough yet.

So without a viable way to change how we measure body fat, for now, BMI is the best option. The study authors argue that perhaps doctors should rely on not just assessing body composition but measuring hormones and biomarkers in the blood or urine, for example, to get a better handle on abnormal processes that may contribute to obesity and chronic disease. And until such tests become available, BMI may still prove useful yet — if doctors combine BMI with a comprehensive evaluation of their patients’ medical history and lifestyle habits to get a meaningful, if not yet perfectly precise picture of their weight-related health.

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Warmer Temps Trigger More Disease

Undated file photo provided by the U.S. Forest Service shows egg masses of the hemlock woolly adelgid. Scientists say climate change is a contributing factor.

Climate change is often associated with extreme weather events, melting glaciers and rising sea levels. But it could also have a major impact on human, animal and plant health by making it easier for diseases to spread.

Various germs and parasites may find the coming years a time to live longer and prosper. Rising temperatures are changing environments and removing some of their natural impediments.
Sonia Altizer is an associate professor at the University of Georgia’s Odum School of Ecology and lead author of the study. She said it’s a review of research done over the past 10 years to see what trends and new information on climate change have emerged.
“One of the big themes that has emerged is that there’s a lot of diseases, especially in natural systems, where there as a pretty clear signal that either the prevalence or severity of those diseases has increased in response to climate change.”
She said some of those natural systems where the signal is strongest are in the arctic and in warmer oceans.
“So in the arctic there are parasitic worms that affect muskox and reindeer, for example, that are developing faster and becoming more prevalent and expanding their ranges. And then in tropical oceans, like Caribbean coral reefs, there’s a large amount of evidence that has mounted that shows that warming interferes with the symbiosis of corals – makes them more vulnerable to disease and at the same time increases the growth rate of some lethal bacteria,” she said.
But a second theme emerged indicating that sometimes climate change may have no effect at all.
“The other main point that we focused on is that knowing why different pathogens respond differently to climate change is what’s needed to help us predict and ultimately manage disease outbreaks in people and animals and plants,” she said.
Some countries will be much better prepared to handle the disease threat than others, like those in Europe and North America.
.
“Surveillance, vector control, modern sanitation, drugs, vaccines can be deployed to prevent outbreaks of a lot of diseases, especially vector borne disease or diarrheal disease that are much more problematic in the developing world. And so these can counter the effects of climate change and make it hard to detect increases in those pathogens,” said Altizer.
Controlling vectors means controlling such things as mosquitos and ticks, which can carry malaria or dengue fever.
In developing countries, pathogens affecting agriculture and wildlife could adversely affect food security and the livelihoods of indigenous peoples.
So how concerned should health officials be? Altizer said there’s no simple answer.
“I think that the answer to it really depends on the location. So where, when and what pathogen? So I think we’re at a stage now where in the next five to ten years scientists will be able to move towards a predictive framework that will be able to answer questions about where in the world and what pathogens are responding and will continue to respond most strongly to climate change.”
Altizer says the effects of climate change will unfold over decades. So it’s vital to follow long-term standardized data for many diseases and pathogens. She said crop management may be a good example to follow. It has a long history of tracking disease outbreaks, forecasting potential threats and responding to those threats early. 

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Stem Cells From Urine May Treat Human Diseases

Chinese scientists have grown teeth from stem cells cultured from human urine.

Researchers have isolated stem cells from urine as the latest potential source of treatment for human diseases. Investigators say using urine to collect and cultivate these master cells is easy and involves minimal processing.

Using proteins known as growth factors, researchers can manipulate stem cells - or master cells - to grow into any tissue in the body. Therapy using stem cells from a patient’s own body is desirable because it does not cause immune rejection, as can happen with tissues and organs from donors.  

Currently, most scientists use a complicated process to engineer regular skin and blood cells into specific cell types. That's because there are few pure sources of master cells - apart from human embryos, whose use is quite controversial.

Researchers are now finding small numbers of stem cells in urine. Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, said, “The advantage with urine is that you are getting approximately 2 liters of urine out every day. So you don’t have to keep going back and sticking the patient [with a needle] or doing biopsies on the patient.”

Reporting in the journal Stem Cells, a team from Wake Forest described how urine samples from 17 healthy individuals ranging in age from 5 to 75 contained stem cells that could be isolated, then coaxed to become smooth muscle-type cells like those that line the inside of the urethra and bladder.

Potential shown

Next, they placed the differentiated cells onto biologically-active support structures called scaffolds, made from pig intestine, then implanted the engineered tissue into mice.

After one month, the urine-derived stem cells developed biological markers of connective tissue and blood vessels, suggesting that they also had the potential to become bone, muscle, nerve or fat cells.

While urine may be a plentiful and less invasive way to obtain stem cells, some experts are skeptical about its value as a source of stem cells. Chris Mason, a regenerative medicine researcher at University College London, said there are very few usable stem cells in the liquid waste.

But he said in a Skype interview that the unusual research into urine-derived stem cells needs further scientific exploration.   

“It looks like it’s an area where we are looking at very, very early data from a few groups. And I think that before we can say for certain there are [usable stem cells in urine], one would have to have it reproduced by a number of different laboratories. So I think it’s more of a question mark and a maybe, rather than a certainty and a definitely not,” said Mason.

Researchers in China, meanwhile, report having grown tiny tooth buds from master cells found in urine. Researchers caution it is not yet clear, however, whether those buds can take root and grow into replacement teeth.


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WHO: Breast-Feeding Can Save Infants' Lives

Hundreds of women promote public breastfeeding outside City Hall Square, Copenhagen, June 17, 2013.

The World Health Organization reports that exclusive breast-feeding until six months of age could prevent the deaths of more than 200,000 infants each year.

In order to mark World Breast-Feeding Week, August 1-7, a new WHO study finds few countries are implementing the International Code of Marketing of Breast-Milk Substitutes, 32 years after it was adopted.

The WHO considers breast-feeding the best source of nourishment for infants and young children, describing it as a practice with lifelong health benefits. The agency says people who were breast-fed as babies are, for example, less likely to be overweight or obese later in life, and may be less prone to diabetes and more likely to perform better in intelligence tests.

According to Dr. Carmen Casanovas, a breast-feeding expert with WHO’s Department of Nutrition for Health and Development, nearly all mothers are physically able to breast-feed and will do so if they have accurate information and support.

However, she says, while data show fewer than four out of 10 children in the world are currently exclusively breast-fed, the practice could save an estimated 220,000 infant lives annually.

"What is appropriate breast-feeding? It means starting breast-feeding within the first hour of life with skin-to-skin contact between mother and infant," she said. "Exclusive breast-feeding — that is, that the baby is not receiving anything but breast milk during the first six months of life — and continued breast-feeding with appropriate foods until two years of age or beyond."

Casanovas says many women are discouraged from breast-feeding, or have been led to believe their children will get a better start in life if they are fed infant formula and other commercial substitutes for breast milk.

The World Health Assembly adopted the International Code of Marketing of Breast-Milk Substitutes in 1981 to counter the aggressive marketing of these products to mothers by the industry.

WHO says infant formula does not contain the antibodies found in breast milk. It says infants in developing countries are at particular risk from the use of unsafe water and unsterilized equipment in making formula. It says babies can become malnourished because mothers may try to stretch supplies by over-diluting formula with water.

While the code was created to protect mothers from dishonest promotional campaigns, Casanovas acknowledges it has not been markedly successful. She says the WHO study shows only one out of five countries in the world are fully implementing the code. She says it is essential countries adopt and adapt the code to meet their own situation.

"They have to have a prohibition of advertisement of breast-milk substitutes; a prohibition of giving samples of breast-milk substitutes today in the health centers; a prohibition of giving gifts to the health workers, because sometimes it is not a sample, but it could be a trip to some place or any other type of gift," she said. "And a prohibition of advertising of giving samples to the mothers."

WHO says full implementation of the code is vital for reducing or eliminating all forms of promotion of breast-milk substitutes. The code is voluntary. It aims to control, not ban the marketing of these products.

WHO says it is very important for countries to monitor the implementation of the code. It notes this document allows member states to sanction those who do not comply with the regulations. It says those found in breach of the code can be fined or punished in other ways. 

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Tips to maintain metabolic rate during fasting

Stir fried vegetables, one of Indonesian recipes

Fasting can lower our metabolic rate, so it needs effective way to prevent weight gain that is often occured during fasting month of Ramadan. 

"With slow metabolism, we gain weight easily. One way to prevent weight gain during fasting is by keeping the body active," Chairman of Gema Foundation for Nutrition awareness, Tirta Prawita Sari said on Wednesday.

Basically, the body has adequate food from pre-dawn meal (sahur in Islam) to produce energy during the day. But keeping yourself active will keep your metabolism at high rate.

If you have pre-dawn meal and then spend most of the fasting time for sleep, the food will be stored as fat in your body and not burnt into energy. Sari added, the impacts of fasting might vary to each person, but the success in maintaining body's weigh while fasting can be measured by weight and abdominal circumference.

"Someone might look fat, but he has small stomach circumference. It is successful and looks healthier than a skinny person with big belly and it tends to bulge," Sari said.

Therefore, during fasting month you must consume high fiber food with enough protein and fat, and slightly salt. You must also avoid overcooked food and increases you water intake. It can help maintain the balance of energy and body weight during fasting month.

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Swiss Device Calibrates Antibiotics Dosage

Laboratory technicians may now have a new instrument to help them calibrate the dosage of antibiotics.

Scientists in Switzerland say they have developed a matchbox-sized device that can test for the presence of harmful bacterial activity in an infected patient in a few minutes instead of the days or even weeks current medical technology requires.

With antibiotic resistant bacterial infections on the rise, doctors say they need to be sure they are administering just the right antibiotic at the exact dosage needed to effectively and quickly treat a specific infection.

Sometimes an infection is so severe that a patient may be within hours of death unless proper treatment is given immediately. 

Today, though, it takes a long time to determine that specific and crucial mix of what antibiotic to use and how much of it should be administered to a patient who may be infected with any of a countless variety of contagions.

Medical professionals must first culture the bacteria, observe its growth, and then measure the bacterial infection's response to any of a number of antibiotic treatments.  

But, in cases when time is a major factor, doctors often just don’t have that luxury of using the lengthy lab work needed to help determine such specific treatment.
  Past experience used to make judgment

Instead, many simply rely on their past experience and use their best judgment to select what they consider to be the most effective medication to treat their patient.

While in many cases this approach works just fine and the patient fully recuperates, doctors also run the risk that their selected medication is not only ineffective, but could expose the patient to possibly dangerous side effects and cause the infectious bacteria to become antibiotic resistant.

The e-coli bacteria could be identified and treated more quickly with new device.

The researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) say they found their solution at the Nano, or atomic, level.

Their newly developed device is centered on a microscopically small lever that vibrates in the presence of bacterial activity. A laser focused on the lever reads the vibration and then translates it into electrical signals that can be easily read.  If there’s no signal, according to the researchers, that means there’s no bacteria.  The entire test only takes minutes.

"This method is fast and accurate. And it can be a precious tool for both doctors looking for the right dosage of antibiotics and for researchers to determine which treatments are the most effective," explains Giovanni Dietler, a professor at EPFL and one of the researchers involved in developing the device.

The vibrations that their Nano-levers detect are actually caused by the microscopic movements of a bacterium's metabolism.

According to the researchers these metabolic movements are almost imperceptible. So in order to measure and test for this activity, the researchers first put bacteria on an extremely sensitive measuring device which in turn would vibrate a tiny lever that is only just a little bit thicker than a strand of hair if it detects metabolic activity from the microbes.

The vibrations the tiny lever produces are also incredibly small, oscillating at approximately one millionth of a millimeter.  So to measure these microscopic vibrations, a laser is projected onto the lever and the light that’s reflected back is converted into an electrical signal that is then interpreted by a clinician.
  Signals easy to read
The researchers say that these electrical signals are as easy to read as an electrocardiogram.  If the signals produce a flat line then that means all of the bacteria are all dead. So within minutes a doctor can sample the harmful bacteria and determine whether certain antibiotic treatments would be successful or not.

A technician displays MRSA bacteria strain - a drug-resistant "superbug" at a laboratory in Berlin.

While their device is already very small the researchers are hoping to shrink their device to an even smaller size. 
"By joining our tool with a piezoelectric device instead of a laser, we could further reduce its size to the size of a microchip," says Dietler. “They could then be combined together to test a series of antibiotics on one strain in only a couple of minutes.”

The research team is now working to see if their tool could be used in other areas of medical treatment, especially oncology, the study of tumors and cancers.  Using a technique similar to the one they use on bacteria, they’re trying to find out if they could measure the metabolism of tumor cells that have been exposed to cancer treatment to evaluate the efficiency of the treatment.

"If our method also works in this field, we really have a precious tool on our hands that can allow us to develop new treatments and also test both quickly and simply how the patient is reacting to the cancer treatment," says Sandor Kasas, another member of the team that developed the new device.

The study outlining the research and development of the device has been published in the latest issue of the journal, Nature Nanotechnology.  

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Researchers Say Hearing Loss from IEDs May Be Treatable

Victims of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, in war zones often suffer hearing loss, but a new study suggests that the deafness may not be permanent.  The findings suggest that the inner ear structures that are damaged in such roadside bomb blasts may recover with the proper treatment.  
Soldiers who survive the explosion of a roadside bomb, are usually deafened in addition to sustaining other physical injuries, according to John Oghalai, a specialist in diseases of the ear at Stanford University in California.  
He says that’s because the blast caused by IEDs produces an airwave of extreme force, and the inner ear structures cannot withstand the massive air pressure. He says hearing aids do not help in cases of explosion-related deafness, and being deaf can have a devastating impact on peoples’ lives.
“It takes you away from communication.  It takes you away from society.  When you can’t communicate with people, even if you could see them and whatever, it’s not the same as being an active participant in communication.  So people become isolated and they become depressed," said Oghalai.
There is currently no cure for blast-related deafness.  But Oghalai says researchers now know what causes it, so they can begin to develop biological cures.
He says earlier research indicated that the intense pressure wave obliterates the cochlea - the snail-shaped structure deep inside the inner ear that converts sound vibrations into the electrical impulses that the brain interprets as hearing.

But researchers led by Oghalai studied the effect of loud blasts in a mouse model, and they discovered that was not the case.  
When the anesthetized rodents were exposed to noise of the same intensity produced by an IED, tiny hair and nerve cells inside the cochlea became severely damaged and died, but not the critical cochlea itself.
“The cochlea looks almost like it’s just been subjected to a lot of repetitive noise trauma, rather than any type severe trauma.  So that’s good [because] as we develop treatments for one, it will work for the other," he said.
Oghalai theorizes that treating the ear immediately after the damage could limit the extent of hearing loss.  He hopes researchers will have therapies available for clinical human trials in 10 years.
A study by John Oghalai and colleagues identifying the cause of IED-related deafness is published in the journal PLoS ONE.

 

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Restoring Sight to the Cataract-Blinded Poor

In China or Ethiopia, Rwanda or Nepal, the scenes are the same: crowds of patients waiting in the open air, bandages over their eyes. Each has been blind for months, years, decades, because of cataracts, the hardened, clouded lens tissue that causes most of the world’s blindness. Each underwent a ten-minute microsurgery barely 24 hours earlier, in temporary field hospitals where medical teams worked with assembly-line efficiency: making tiny slits in eyeballs, delicately removing cataracts, and inserting artificial lenses.

As the bandages come off, some people exclaim in joy, or do a little dance. Others have a wondering look, as they see the landscape, or the faces of family members again.

The two surgeons responsible for these scenes met in the Himalayas. Geoffrey Tabin, an American doctor educated at Yale and Harvard, was a passionate mountain climber when he met Sanduk Ruit, who had grown up in a poor Nepalese village, a ten-day walk from the nearest school. Ruit had studied medicine in India before returning to Nepal and embarking on a one-man effort to restore sight to Nepalese suffering from cataracts. In the developed world, cataracts are usually removed before they cause serious visual impairment. But in poorer nations, people often lose all sight, as the cataract hardens and covers the eyeball with a white veil. Even children may be afflicted, especially high in the Himalayas, where UV radiation from the sun damages the eye.

“Worldwide, there are 18 million people who can’t see the shadow of a hand move across their face because they’re blind from cataracts,” Tabin says. In places where the margins of survival are thin, the blind are often plunged into greater poverty and even early death. Poor families cannot afford to lose a worker, or to feed and care for someone helpless. “They call it a ‘mouth without hands,’” Tabin says.

Ruit realized that modern surgery with artificial lens implantation could be done quickly, outside hospitals, at a cost of only about $25 per patient. The technique he refined allows cataracts to be removed in one motion, through a sutureless incision. Almost all have perfect vision the next day.

“He really is the genius behind our whole system of developing really top-quality cataract surgery for the poorest of the poor at very high volume,” says Tabin. Together, the two men founded the Himalayan Cataract Project in 1995. Its work has spread from Nepal to Bhutan, northern China, and northern India, in addition to about ten African countries, including Ethiopia, Rwanda, Ghana and South Sudan.

At the project’s “eye camps,” groups of visiting eye surgeons perform hundreds of the surgeries over a period of weeks in remote areas far from hospitals. Tabin says the technique is almost the same as in advanced Western hospitals, but the pace is much faster. “We have almost like an assembly-line production, where a doctor is just moving from patient to patient.” Over eleven days in February-March 2013, in Ethiopia, for example, teams performed more than 1300 surgeries.

Perhaps even more important, Tabin says, is that the camps train local doctors and medical workers in the technique, who then go on to train others. And it helps set up local, self-sustaining surgical operations.

 

All together, he estimates, two million people have had their vision restored through the project's efforts. He says the project’s goal, of wiping out preventable blindness through the developing world, seems increasingly attainable.

“When we started, there was a backlog of cataract blindness in Nepal. We thought it’s going to be a lifetime before we get a handle on this. But now doctors in Nepal are doing over 250,000 cataract surgeries every year, and people are coming in to have their cataracts done earlier and earlier,” Tabin says. “And Nepal, which is really the poorest country in South Asia, is now the only major developing country that’s reducing its rate of blindness now.”

Over the two decades of its existence, the project has been the subject of several documentaries. It is also the subject of a new book, “Second Suns: Two Doctors and Their Amazing Quest to Restore Sight and Save Lives,” by the late writer David Oliver Relin. In 2006, Ruit received the Ramon Magsaysay prize, often referred to as the Asian Nobel Prize, and Tabin was awarded an Unsung Hero award by the Dalai Lama.

It is the moment when the bandages come off, however, that Tabin says have been most gratifying. “When the patch comes off, there’s first this look of bewilderment, or ‘what am I seeing,’ and then recognition, and then this absolutely pure unadulterated joy,” he says. “I never get tired of seeing that.

 

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Vaccinating Dogs Against Rabies in East Africa

Tanzanians and their dogs wait in line for free rabies vaccinations.

Rabies is a global health issue, claiming fifty to sixty thousand lives every year. Most of these deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The rabies virus is usually transmitted to humans through the bite of an infected dog. Because children are the most susceptible to attacks by rabid dogs, they account for the vast majority of deaths.
 
Veterinarian Guy Palmer is conducting research in Tanzania on a sustainable rabies vaccination program.
 
Palmer explained, “If we can get around 60% we can actually control a disease outbreak. We don’t need to vaccinate every dog. We need to vaccinate somewhere around 60%. So, the question becomes, can you actually achieve that level of vaccination in a low resource setting?”
 
Palmer has a PhD in infectious diseases and is an adviser to the Global Development Program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
 
He and his colleagues work with community leaders to arrange dog vaccination clinics.  Word spreads quickly and people gather with their animals. But Dr. Palmer was surprised when he saw the dog owners.
 
“Children own these dogs,” he said. “They bring with them their vaccination cards and it’s amazing the percentage that we have that have the vaccination card from a previous trip.  We come every year to each village. In general, these families don’t have a lot of papers and certificates. They tend to put a value on those they have.”
 
While the vaccination effort has been successful, Palmer says there’s more to do to make it sustainable over the long-term.
 
“We now have about 15 years of experience with this. And if you continue these vaccination campaigns, you completely suppress rabies. The challenge is how do you get away from this model we have now, which is donor driven. It costs us about three dollars to vaccinate a dog in those regions and that’s not something that’s, at the moment, sustainable by either the individuals nor by the government. Using country-wide approaches, it’s possible to actually move rabies out of a region and then vaccinate only around the periphery to control the disease.  To do that what we’ve really got to do is reduce costs,” he said.
 
About one dollar of the vaccine cost is keeping it cold. Fortunately, silk polymers have the potential to revolutionize the storage of vaccines. Strands of silk proteins are purified from silkworm cocoons and are incorporated into the vaccine serum. The silk polymers don’t affect the vaccine’s effectiveness, but they stabilize the serum so that it doesn’t degrade under high temperatures. These polymers can protect vaccines at up to 45 degrees Celsius for more than six months. The vaccines remain more than eighty percent potent despite storage at these temperatures.
 
Dr. Palmer says there’s another way to reduce costs, as well.
 
“Working with the communities to get them to vaccinate is one of the major goals we have because that will reduce one of our other major costs, which is transport. If we can actually get the vaccines there, then they can maintain them locally and do the local vaccinations,” he said.
 
Dr. Palmer’s rabies vaccination studies may present other healthcare opportunities. The vaccination clinics could also be used to provide care and treatment for children when they bring their dogs to be vaccinated. 
    
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Early Treatment for HIV Can Save Millions of Lives

Anti-retroviral drug Tenofovir could cut the risk of HIV in half among injected drug users, (File photo).

The World Health Organization says early treatment for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, can save millions of lives.

WHO is issuing new treatment guidelines for people infected with HIV as a major international AIDS Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia gets under way.

The World Health Organization reports earlier antiretroviral therapy - ART - could avert an additional 3 million deaths and prevent 3.5 million more new HIV infections between now and 2025.

WHO says recent evidence indicates that treating people with HIV earlier, with safe, affordable and easier-to-manage medicines will help them live longer, healthier lives. Because the medication lowers the amount of virus in the blood, WHO says this will greatly reduce the risk of transmitting the HIV infection to others.

Use of lifesaving drugs on the rise

Coordinator of WHO’s HIV-AIDS Department, Gundo Weiler, says 9.7 million people were taking lifesaving antiretroviral drugs at the end of 2012, an amazing increase from the figure of 300,000 10 years ago.  He says the increase in the use of ART drugs is making a huge impact on the lives of individuals and on the AIDS epidemic.

Weiler says, “Over the last decade, the scale-up of antiretroviral treatment in low and middle income countries has averted more than four million deaths-4.2 million deaths exactly-and also, it has averted more than 800,000 infections among children due to the prevention of mother and child transmission…Antiretroviral treatment is not only good for the health of the person who is taking the treatment, but it also reduces the likelihood of transmission.  So, the scale-up of ART has an effect on the HIV epidemic together with all the other prevention efforts.”

WHO reports 32 million people are living with HIV and 1.7 million people died of AIDS-related causes in 2011.  Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest burden of HIV.  WHO notes treatment coverage has increased in every region of the world, with Africa leading the way.  It says four of five people in sub-Saharan Africa started treatment in 2012.

While progress is being made, United Nations health officials are concerned that some groups of people who need treatment are not getting it.  It notes fewer children than adults are receiving ART, with only one in three children receiving them.

They say other groups susceptible to getting the disease, including injecting drug users, men who have sex with men, and sex workers have less access to antiretroviral therapy.  They say it is important to reach these people who are stigmatized and excluded from services.

WHO steps up recommendations

The new WHO recommendations call for antiretroviral therapy to be provided to all children with HIV under five years of age, to pregnant and breastfeeding women with HIV, as well as to all HIV-positive partners where one partner in the relationship is uninfected.

Director of WHO's HIV-AIDS Department, Gottfried Hirnschall, says people starting treatment today have a much easier regimen to follow than in the past.

“Ten years ago, there were many tablets several times a day," says Hirnschall.  "People started late when they got sick when they started.  We are now at a single tablet, once a day, early in the infection.  That is the new paradigm shift.  It will keep people alive, healthy, for long periods of time and it will also prevent that people can transmit the infection to their partners, to whoever they engage sexually or through other means.”

Hirnschall says the price of HIV drugs for developing countries has been drastically reduced to an average of $140 per person per year.  The same drug in wealthy countries, he says can run to $10,000 or more a year.

The U.N. health agency recommends a more integrated approach in the treatment of HIV.  It says HIV services should be more closely linked with other health services, such as those for tuberculosis, maternal and child health, sexual and reproductive health, and treatment for drug dependence.

 

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Hormone Estrogen Reduces Urinary Tract Infections in Older Women

Researchers conduct experiment with estrogen, (File photo).

Post-menopausal women are at higher risk than younger women of developing bacterial infections of the urinary tract, called UTI’s.  Researchers have found that taking estrogen may help prevent the infections in women who are plagued by them.  
Experts say up to 60 percent of all women will develop a urinary tract infection at some point in their lives, with 20 percent experiencing recurrent episodes.  Most repeat infections are in women beyond their childbearing years, according to Annalie Brauner, a researcher and consultant at the Karoliska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.

Brauner said post-menopausal women are more susceptible to recurrent UTI’s because the mucosal tissue lining the bladder becomes very fragile, developing gaps which invite harmful bacteria to invade the tissue.  
That’s something researchers, including Brauner, saw in their studies of women with UTI’s. “There was an extensive [and] massive [amount] of bacteria multiplying, and they could also hide away from the body’s own host defense mechanisms,” she said.
Brauner said the body naturally secretes those defensive antimicrobial peptides when it detects invading microorganisms. “And that is the reason why they cannot fend off the invading bacteria as quick as younger women can,” she explained.
Brauner said the bacteria’s ability to burrow deeply into the mucosal tissue lining the bladder also often renders antibiotics ineffective.
But when women with repeated UTI’s were given supplemental estrogen through the vaginal canal, Brauner said the hormone restored the integrity of the bladder's cellular lining to that of healthier tissue seen in younger, premenopausal women.
Researchers repeated their experiments in a mouse model of menopause and got the same results.  
“So, we believe that by treating post-menopausal women with recurrent infections of UTI with local estrogen we could prevent these recurrences,” Brauner explained.
A study on the effectiveness of the female hormone estrogen in preventing urinary tract infections is published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

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Malaria-Infected Mosquitoes More Attracted to Humans

Mosquitoes infected with the malaria parasite are significantly more attracted to human odors than uninfected mosquitoes.
Researchers already knew that the microscopic parasite - Plasmodium falciparum - can alter the behavior of the mosquitoes it infects, causing them to consume larger and more frequent blood meals. That increases the rate of malaria transmission.
But now James Logan and colleagues at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine have identified another behavioral change. Using fabric permeated with human odor, they found that "malaria-infectious females are more attracted to human odors than uninfected mosquitoes." They landed on and probed the fabric about three times more frequently than the females that did not carry the parasite. Only female mosquitoes bite.
That finding, reported in the journal PLOS-One, casts doubt on the reliability of earlier malaria transmission studies which typically have used uninfected mosquitoes.
The new study suggests those earlier results may not always be representative of the behavior of infected insects. Logan and his colleagues conclude that understanding the olfactory changes behind the enhanced attraction to humans may help identify new weapons in the fight against this dangerous disease.
Each year, malaria infects more than 200 million people worldwide, and claims an estimated 660,000 lives.  

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Scientists Developing New Weapon Against Malaria

FILE - In this June 4, 2012 file photo, vehicles move past Pakistani day laborers sleeping under a mosquito net. A new insecticide could be sprayed on nets to kill mosquitoes.(AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen, File)

Scientists are making progress in developing a new species-specific insecticide that would be lethal only to insects that carry malaria.
According to scientists at Virginia Tech and the University of Florida the insecticide would be far less toxic to beneficial insects such as bees. They say the insecticide is formulated to interfere with an enzyme found in the nervous system of mosquitoes and other organisms called acetylcholinesterase. If the effectiveness of the enzyme is disrupted, it causes an organism to convulse and die.
“A simple analogy would be that we’re trying to make a key that fits perfectly into a lock,” said entomologist Jeff Bloomquist, a professor at the University of Florida's Emerging Pathogens Institute and its Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. “We want to shut down the enzyme, but only in target species.”
Scientists are trying to perfect the mosquito-specific compounds and manufacture them on a large scale so that they can be applied to netting where mosquitoes might land. They say it will take at least four to five years before a compound is ready to be submitted for federal approval.
The team recently published a study in the journal Pesticide Biochemistry and Physiology comparing eight experimental compounds with commercially available insecticides that target the enzyme.
Though they were less toxic to mosquitoes than commercial products, the experimental compounds were far more selective, indicating researchers are on the right track, Bloomquist said.
“The compounds we’re using are not very toxic to honeybees, fish and mammals, but we need to refine them further, make them more toxic to mosquitoes and safer for non-target organisms,” he said.
Malaria is caused by microscopic organisms called protists, which are present in the saliva of infected female mosquitoes and transmitted when the mosquitoes bite. Initial symptoms of the disease can include fever, chills, convulsions, headaches and nausea. In severe cases, malaria can cause kidney failure, coma and death.
Worldwide, malaria infected about 219 million people in 2010 and killed about 660,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 90 percent of those infected lived in Africa.  

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Malaria Risk Spikes for World's Poorest Children

Children living along the Thai-Burma border come to a malaria clinic in Sai Yoke district, Kanchanaburi Province, to get tested, October 26,2012.

The poorest children in the world's most impoverished communities are twice as likely to contract malaria as the least poor, according to a new study published in the Lancet medical journal Wednesday.

Researchers say the study, led by Britain’s Durham University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, suggests that alleviating poverty could protect children from malaria.

Durham University Professor Steve Lindsay, who led the research, says the study highlights a possible new approach to tackling the often fatal mosquito-borne disease.

“What is novel about this is thinking about malaria not just through getting bed nets out or better medicines," Lindsay said. "But we can actually improve or reduce malaria by assisting development in these communities.”

Young girl with malaria rests in a clinic in South Sudanese state of Nothern Bahr el Ghazal.

The research published on Wednesday is based on an analysis of nearly 5,000 English-language studies published over the past three decades. Those studies were conducted in poor communities in Africa and Asia, focusing on children up to the age of 15.

The youngsters were ranked by several factors including family assets, such as whether they have access to a bicycle or radio, levels of education, and skill sets.

By linking levels of malaria to socio-economic status, the research finds that the poorest people are hit the hardest. As an example, Lindsay explains how  inadequate housing impacts the spread of malaria.

“80 percent of malaria transmission occurs indoors at night," he said. "So if you have a nice house where it is not so leaky, you have got screening on the doors, and you may have a ceiling, then you will get fewer mosquitos coming indoors.”

Other development factors also play a role, like eating a nutritious diet or having an education, which helps people make informed decisions about malaria prevention, said Lindsay.

The study is an attempt to unite the scientific and development communities, so that the two can work together to tackle malaria.

“We are being a wee bit provocative here with our hypothesis," said Lindsay. "First of all, scientists need to look at what are the mechanisms for where development, in its broad sense, is protective. And then look at ways of intervening -- better housing, better education, helping to improve the general welfare of communities and how that might impact and reduce malaria.”

More than 2.5 billion people are at risk of malaria. The disease is endemic in more than 100 countries around the world. 

  

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American Medical Association: Obesity is a Disease

A competitor prepares to audition for thereality television programme "Dance Your Ass Off", during which overweight or obese contestants hope to lose weight by dancing, in New York, December 18, 2009.

The largest U.S. doctors' group said obesity is a disease. The decision, announced this week by the American Medical Association at its annual meeting, could lead to increased funding for obesity research and help people obtain insurance coverage for treatment for obesity.
The AMA said obesity requires a range of medical interventions for treatment and prevention. Most insurance companies do not cover visits to a nutritionist or doctor to treat obesity. 
The U.S. obesity rate increased nearly 50 percent between 1997 and 2012, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC also said nearly 30 percent of American adults are obese and that childhood obesity has more than doubled in the past 30 years.
The World Health Organization estimates that globally, at least 2.8 million people die each year as a result of being overweight or obese.
Dr. Patrice Harris from the AMA said, “Recognizing obesity as a disease will help change the way the medical community tackles this complex issue that affects approximately one in three Americans.”
Obesity is linked to cardiovascular disease, including heart attack and stroke, high blood pressure and Type 2 diabetes. It also increases the risk for cancer.

 

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US: Cervical Cancer Vaccines Cut Rates of HPV Infections

Gardasil, a Human Papillomavirus vaccine, is displayed at a clinic in Dallas, Texas March 6, 2007.

The U.S. introduction of a vaccine to prevent cervical cancer in 2006 has reduced infections with the human papillomavirus or HPV - the sexually-transmitted virus that causes the disease - by more than half among girls and young women, U.S. health officials said on Wednesday.

The results were better than expected and may even suggest that unvaccinated individuals are benefiting because of a drop in the number of infections circulating, the team reported in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

“This report shows that HPV works well, and the report should be a wake-up call to our nation to protect the next generation by increasing HPV vaccination rates,” Dr Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a statement.

Frieden said only a third of U.S. girls aged 13-17 have been fully vaccinated with HPV vaccines, which include Merck's Gardasil and GlaxoSmithKline's Cervarix.

That compares with far higher vaccination rates in other countries such as Rwanda, where more than 80 percent of teenage girls have been vaccinated.

“Our low vaccination rates represent 50,000 preventable tragedies - 50,000 girls alive today will develop cervical cancer over their lifetime that would have been prevented if we reach 80 percent vaccination rates,” Frieden said.

In the study, a team led by the CDC's Dr. Lauri Markowitz used data from a large health survey to compare rates of infection with certain strains of the HPV virus among girls and women aged 14-19 in the four-year period before the introduction of the vaccine (2003-2006) and after its introduction (2007-2010).

The study largely reflects the impact of Merck's Gardasil. In 2006 it became the first HPV vaccine to win U.S. approval.

Gardasil protects against four HPV strains known to cause cervical cancer and genital warts. Glaxo's Cervarix won U.S. approval in 2009 and protects against two of the most common cancer-causing strains of HPV.

The researchers found the vaccine worked even better than expected, reducing by 56 percent the number of infections caused by strains of HPV covered by the vaccine among women and girls aged 14-19.

Markowitz said the higher than expected response rate could be the result of so-called “herd immunity,” in which the vaccine is also reducing infections among those who are not vaccinated. Or it could mean that the vaccine was working even among women who had not received the full three doses, which included about 49 percent of women in the study.

The CDC recommends routine HPV vaccination for boys and girls at age 11-12. But only about half of all U.S. girls have gotten at least one of the three recommended shots, and far fewer boys have gotten the first dose of the vaccine.

According to the CDC, HPV infections cause about 19,000 cancers each year among women in the United States, of which cervical cancer is the most common. HPV infections also cause about 8,000 cancers a year in U.S. men, of which throat cancers are the most common.  

 

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