Researchers hope to make mosquito 'flying vaccinator': AFP

TOKYO — Japanese researchers hope one day to turn blood-sucking mosquitoes into deliverers of vaccines that could instead inoculate millions for free.
A new study shows real promise for turning the reviled insects into heroes by genetically modifying them to make them "flying vaccinators", according to scientists at Jichi Medical University north of Tokyo.
The researchers have already genetically modified a mosquito species so that its saliva contains a protein that acts as a vaccine against leishmaniasis, a sandfly-borne disease that triggers terrible skin sores and can be fatal.
The team confirmed that mice bitten by the transgenic mosquito developed an antibody to the disease, meaning they had built up immunity, said Shigeto Yoshida, the associate professor who has led the research.
Similarly the mosquitoes could be used to help combat malaria, perhaps a decade from now, said the malaria expert.
"What's good is that they don't charge you for vaccinations," Yoshida told AFP by telephone on Wednesday.
"You would be vaccinated without even noticing. You wouldn't need any drug and you wouldn't need to show up at a designated place for mass vaccinations."
Repeat bites would only strengthen the immunity, he said.
For now a problem is that no effective vaccine exists, because malaria's antigen, which triggers immune reactions, changes frequently.
However, Yoshida expects science will come up with a solution, and that the transgenic mosquito will ultimately help rid the developing world of a deadly scourge.
Nearly one million people die each year from malaria -- most of them children -- predominantly in Africa and Asia, according to the World Health Organization.
There are several anti-malarial drugs, none of them universally effective, and a treatment, called artemisinin.
"The treatment works but it is beyond the reach of people who need to worry about food for tomorrow. They just can't afford it," Yoshida said. "Malaria is a disease closely linked to poverty. A flying vaccinator matters a lot."
Yoshida conceded the new approach could raise ethical questions about carrying out vaccinations without informed consent.
"Technically speaking I believe it's a matter of 10 years or so, but it's a different issue whether society would accept it," he said.
Another problem is that the vaccinator mosquito may still pick up and spread the infected blood of a malaria-positive person.
Yoshida's team is hoping it can tackle this problem, by also developing a mosquito that kills malaria parasites inside its own body. AFP

Chemical in Bananas Identified as Potent Inhibitor of HIV Infection

ScienceDaily (Mar. 16, 2010) — A potent new inhibitor of HIV, derived from bananas, may open the door to new treatments to prevent sexual transmission of HIV, according to a newly published University of Michigan Medical School study.

Scientists have an emerging interest in lectins, naturally occurring chemicals in plants, because of their ability to halt the chain of reaction that leads to a variety of infections.
In laboratory tests, BanLec, the lectin found in bananas, was as potent as two current anti-HIV drugs. Based on the findings published March 19 in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, BanLec may become a less expensive new component of applied vaginal microbicides, researchers say.
New ways of stopping the spread of the HIV are vitally needed. The rate of new infections of HIV is outpacing the rate of new individuals getting anti-retroviral drugs by 2.5 to1, and at present it appears an effective vaccine is years away.

"HIV is still rampant in the U.S. and the explosion in poorer countries continues to be a bad problem because of tremendous human suffering and the cost of treating it," says study senior author David Marvovitz, M.D., professor of internal medicine at the U-M Medical School.
Although condom use is quite effective, condoms are most successful in preventing infection if used consistently and correctly, which is often not the case.
"That's particularly true in developing countries where women have little control over sexual encounters so development of a long-lasting, self-applied microbicide is very attractive," Markovitz says.
Some of the most promising compounds for inhibiting vaginal and rectal HIV transmission are agents that block HIV prior to integration into its target cell.
The new research describes the complex actions of lectins and their ability to outsmart HIV. Lectins are sugar-binding proteins. They can identify foreign invaders, like a virus, and attach themselves to the pathogen.
The U-M team discovered BanLec, the lectin in bananas, can inhibit HIV infection by binding to the sugar-rich HIV-1 envelope protein, gp120, and blocking its entry to the body.
Co-authors Erwin J. Goldstein, Ph.D., professor emeritus of biological chemistry at U-M and Harry C. Winter, Ph.D., research assistant professor in biological chemistry at U-M, developed the biopurification method to isolate BanLec from bananas. Following their work, the U-M team discovered BanLec is an effective anti-HIV lectin and is similar in potency to T-20 and maraviroc, two anti-HIV drugs currently in clinical use.
Yet therapies using BanLec could be cheaper to create than current anti-retroviral medications which use synthetically produced components, plus BanLec may provide a wider range of protection, researchers say.
"The problem with some HIV drugs is that the virus can mutate and become resistant, but that's much harder to do in the presence of lectins," says lead author Michael D. Swanson, a doctoral student in the graduate program in immunology at the University of Michigan Medical School.
"Lectins can bind to the sugars found on different spots of the HIV-1 envelope, and presumably it will take multiple mutations for the virus to get around them," he says.
Swanson is developing a process to molecularly alter BanLec to enhance its potential clinical utility. Clinical use is considered years away but researchers believe it could be used alone or with other anti-HIV drugs as a vaginal microbicide that prevents HIV infection.
Authors say even modest success could save millions of lives. Other investigators have estimated that 20 percent coverage with a microbicide that is only 60 percent effective against HIV may prevent up to 2.5 million HIV infections in three years.

Good Friends, Rather Than Close Family Ties, Help You Live Longer In Older Age

ScienceDaily (June 16, 2005) — A network of good friends, rather than close family ties, helps you live longer in older age, suggests research in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

The research team drew on data from the Australian Longitudinal Study of Aging (ALSA), which began in 1992 in Adelaide, South Australia. The study aimed to assess how economic, social, behavioural and environmental factors affected the health and wellbeing of people aged 70 and upwards.
In total, almost 1500 people were asked how much personal and phone contact they had with their various social networks, including children, relatives, friends, and confidants.
Survival was monitored over 10 years. The group was monitored annually for the first four years of the study and then at approximately three yearly intervals.
The research team also considered the impact of factors likely to influence survival rates, such as socioeconomic status, health, and lifestyle.
Close contact with children and relatives had little impact on survival rates over the 10 years. But a strong network of friends and confidants significantly improved the chances of survival over that period.
Those with the strongest network of friends and confidants lived longer than those with the fewest friends/confidants.
The beneficial effects on survival persisted across the decade, irrespective of other profound changes in individuals' lives, including the death of a spouse or close family members, and the relocation of friends to other parts of the country.
The authors speculate that friends may influence health behaviours, such as smoking and drinking, or seeking medical help for troubling symptoms. Friends may also have important effects on mood, self esteem, and coping mechanisms in times of difficulty.
An accompanying editorial suggests that feeling connected to others may provide meaning and purpose that is not only essential to the human condition, but also to longevity, conferring a positive physiological effect on the body in the same way that stress confers a negative effect.

Genetics Of Popularity: Genetic Influence In Social Networks Identified

ScienceDaily (Jan. 27, 2009) — Can't help being the life of the party? Maybe you were just born that way. Researchers from Harvard University and the University of California, San Diego have found that our place in a social network is influenced in part by our genes, according to new findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This is the first study to examine the inherited characteristics of social networks and to establish a genetic role in the formation and configuration of these networks.
The research was conducted by Nicholas Christakis of Harvard, who is professor of sociology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School, Christopher Dawes and James Fowler, both of UC San Diego.
"We were able to show that our particular location in vast social networks has a genetic basis," says Christakis. "In fact, the beautiful and complicated pattern of human connection depends on our genes to a significant measure."
While it might be expected that genes affect personality, these findings go further, and illustrate a genetic influence on the structure and formation of an individual's social group.
The researchers found that popularity, or the number of times an individual was named as a friend, and the likelihood that those friends know one another, were both strongly heritable. Additionally, location within the network, or the tendency to be at the center or on the edges of the group, was also genetically linked. However, the researchers were surprised to learn that the number of people named as a friend by an individual did not appear to be inherited.
The study included national data (from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health) for the social networks of 1,110 adolescent twins, both fraternal and identical. The researchers compared the social networks of the identical twins to those of the fraternal twins, and found greater similarity between the identical twins' social network structure than the fraternal twins' networks.
There may be an evolutionary explanation for this genetic influence and the tendency for some people to be at the center while others are at the edges of the group, according to the researchers. If a deadly germ is spreading through a community, individuals at the edges are least likely to be exposed. However, to gain access to important information about a food source, being in the center of the group has a distinct benefit.
"One of the things that the study tells us is that social networks are likely to be a fundamental part of our genetic heritage," says Fowler, associate professor of political science at UC San Diego. "It may be that natural selection is acting on not just things like whether or not we can resist the common cold, but also who it is that we are going to come into contact with."
The findings also illuminate a previously unknown limitation of existing social network models, which had assumed that all members behave as interchangeable cogs. To address these intrinsic differences in human beings that contribute to the formation of social networks, the researchers have created a new mathematical model, called the "attract and introduce" model, which is also explained in this paper and supports the genetic variation of members.
This model creates networks that very closely simulate actual human social networks, and using this model, they found that when someone was placed in any virtual network, they gravitated towards the same place within the network.
Because both health behaviors and germs spread through social networks, understanding how contagions flow through social networks has the potential to improve strategies for addressing public health concerns such as obesity or the flu.
"I think that going forward, we are going to find that social networks are a critical conduit between our genes and important health outcomes," says Fowler.
Fowler and Christakis have also published on other aspects of social networks, such as the spread of obesity, smoking, and happiness.
The research was funded by the National Institute on Aging and the National Science Foundation.

Sleep Deprivation Influences Drug Use in Teens' Social Networks, Study Finds

ScienceDaily (Mar. 20, 2010) — Recent studies have shown that behaviors such as happiness, obesity, smoking and altruism are "contagious" within adult social networks. In other words, your behavior not only influences your friends, but also their friends and so on. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego and Harvard University have taken this a step farther and found that the spread of one behavior in social networks -- in this case, poor sleep patterns -- influences the spread of another behavior, adolescent drug use.


The study, led by Sara C. Mednick, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and the VA San Diego Healthcare System, will be published March 19 in PLoS ONE.
"This is our first investigation of the spread of illegal drug use in social networks," said Mednick. "We believe it is also the first study in any age population on the spread of sleep behaviors through social networks."
Using social network data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, Mednick and her colleagues James H. Fowler, UCSD Department of Political Science and Nicholas A. Christakis, Harvard Medical School, mapped the social networks of 8,349 adolescents in grades 7 through 12. They found clusters of poor sleep behavior and marijuana use that extended up to four degrees of separation (to one's friends' friends' friends' friends) in the social network.

Another novel network effect that they discovered was that teens who are at the center of the network are at greater risk of poor sleep, which in turn means they are more likely to use marijuana -- putting them at the crossroads of two behaviors increases a teenager's vulnerability.
Contrary to the general assumption that drug use has a negative effect on sleep, the researchers also found that sleep loss is likely to drive adolescents to use drugs -- the less they sleep the more likely their friends are to sleep poorly and use marijuana.
"Our behaviors are connected to each other and we need to start thinking about how one behavior affects our lives on many levels," said Mednick. "Therefore, when parents, schools and law enforcement want to look for ways to influence one outcome, such as drug use, our research suggests that targeting another behavior, like sleep, may have a positive influence. They should be promoting healthy sleep habits that eliminate behaviors which interfere with sleep: take the TV out of the child's bedroom, limit computer and phone usage to daytime and early evening hours, and promote napping."
The research was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute on Aging and National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Sciencedaily.com

Meal Planning a Key to Weight Loss

By Susan Brady

While there are many good weight loss programs out there, the biggest problem people encounter is actually staying on their diet of choice. Support groups, community forums, online weight trackers, trainers at your gym are but a few of the factors that have an effect on how well you do on a diet, but the food and nutrition aspect is foremost and requires a bit of planning. Without it, you are destined to fail. So get off the procrastination wagon, start planning your meals, and give yourself a head start with your weight loss.
The best diet in the world won’t work for you if it involves eating foods you dislike. With a food plan, you are in control. The details of the plan itself are entirely up to you. It’s possible to construct a diet that consists of foods you enjoy, cooked in a manner acceptable to you, with preparation time that fits your lifestyle, at a cost that fits your budget. Your plan may involve eating the same menu everyday. This method eliminates stress because it eliminates the need to constantly count calories. You can spend an hour or two finding recipes that work for you and stay within your allotted calorie (or point or carb) count and devie a shopping list. You might plan two or three different options for each meal so that you will have, for example, one of three breakfast menus you can choose from on any given day. It can be both fun and challenging to plan well-balanced, nutritious meals that fit your lifestyle and please your palate. You can also get help from the hundreds of cookbooks that are published each year. (The library is also a good source for finding cookbooks that match your dietary restrictions.)If eating the same menus day after day is unappealing, you can try one of the numerous successful diet plans; or you may want to join a diet club such as Weight Watchers or TOPS (Take off Pounds Sensibly). Or you may want to participate in a weight control class sponsored by your health plan. Going with a nationally published diet offers the benefit of a diet that is already balanced, calorie controlled, and in place. The same is true with the diet clubs; additionally some people benefit from the group sessions that provide nutritional education and motivational support. Many people find the weekly weigh-ins, at the diet clubs, help them stay on track.
healthnews.com

Morning Sickness, symptoms, Treatment and Prevention

Definition of Morning Sickness

Pregnancy sickness or "morning sickness" is nausea, with or without vomiting, during pregnancy.

Description of Morning Sickness

Morning sickness may occur at any time of the day, especially when the stomach is empty. It affects about one-third to one-half of all expectant women and is most common during the first three months of pregnancy. Some expectant mothers will not experience it until well into the second trimester and a few may never experience morning sickness throughout the pregnancy.
If the nausea and vomiting persist or worsen the woman may have a rare condition called hyperemesis gravidarum. This exaggerated form of morning sickness occurs in fewer than 1 in 250 pregnancies. The symptoms of this condition are frequent and severe nausea and vomiting, inability to “keep anything down," weight loss, signs of dehydration (severe thirst, dry lips and tongue, confusion, rapid breathing and an increased heart rate) and starvation. This condition is treated by immediate hospitalization with intravenous hydration until the woman can tolerate foods and liquids by mouth.

Causes and Risk Factors of Morning Sickness

No one knows for sure the causes of morning sickness. It is known that the neurologic “control” for nausea and vomiting is located in the brain stem. A myriad of physical reasons why this area may be overstimulated during pregnancy have been suggested, including the high level of the pregnancy hormone HCG in the blood in the first trimester, the rapid stretching of the uterine muscles, the relative relaxation of the muscle tissue in the digestive tract (which makes digestion less efficient) and the excess acid in the stomach caused by not eating or by eating the wrong foods.
Emotional factors also influence morning sickness. Morning sickness is unknown in some more primitive societies where lifestyles are simpler, more relaxed and less demanding.
There is evidence that shows that some women with unwanted, unplanned pregnancies suffer debilitating nausea and vomiting, yet experience no morning sickness at all in pregnancies they are happy about. The fact that morning sickness is more common and tends to be more severe in first pregnancies supports the concept that both physical and emotional factors are involved. Physically, the novice pregnant individual is less prepared for the onslaught of hormones and other changes than one who has been through it before.

Treatment of Morning Sickness

There is no currently approved medication available for morning sickness, but the doctor may suggest trying these medication-based treatments if the methods mentioned are not helping:
antacids that are low in sodium and available over-the-counter
vitamin B6
sugar solution that is available over-the-counter
acupressure wristbands (used for seasickness)
antihistamine (prescribed by a doctor) only if the following concerns are evident: persistent vomiting, insufficient weight gain and signs of dehydration
Please talk to your doctor before taking any medication.

Self CareThere are many self care methods of alleviating the symptoms and minimizing the effects of morning sickness. These include:
Eat four to six small meals per day, instead of three heavy meals. An empty stomach and low blood sugar, resulting from long stretches between meals, can trigger nausea, as can eating too much at one meal.
Eat crackers or dry toast 20 to 30 minutes before getting up in the morning, while slightly propped up in bed. Bland foods such as crackers or pretzels may help at any time of day when you feel nauseated.
Minimize the intake of fluids with meals. Instead drink small amounts of fluids frequently between meals.
Eat a diet high in protein and complex carbohydrates, both of which fight nausea.
Drink plenty of fluids, especially if you are losing them through vomiting. If they are easier to get down than solids when your stomach is upset, use them to get your nutrients.
Herbal teas, fruit juices and popsicles are helpful in combating the nauseated feeling.
Take a prenatal vitamin supplement to compensate for nutrients missed through not eating.
Avoid the sight, smell, and taste of foods that make you queasy.
Eat before nausea strikes. Food will be easier to get down and may prevent an attack.
Eat in bed to avoid an empty stomach and to keep the blood sugar on an even keel.
Before you go to bed at night, have a snack that is high in protein and complex carbohydrates.
Get extra sleep and relaxation. Both emotional and physical fatigue can exacerbate morning sickness.
Greet the morning in slow motion – rushing tends to aggravate nausea.
Brush teeth with a toothpaste that does not increase the queasiness and rinse the mouth with a good rinser after each bout of vomiting, as well as after each meal. Not only will this keep the mouth fresh and reduce nausea, it will also decrease the risk of damage to teeth and gums that can occur when bacteria starts working on the regurgitated material in the mouth.
Minimize stress. Morning sickness is more common among women who are under a great deal of stress, either at work or home.