US pharma firm says COVID-19 vaccine produces antibodies in mice, guinea pigs

US immunotherapy company Inovio Pharmaceuticals Inc on Wednesday said its experimental vaccine to prevent coronavirus infection was shown to produce protective antibodies and immune system responses in mice and guinea pigs.

"We saw antibody responses that do many of the things we would want to see in an eventual vaccine," said Dr. David Weiner, director of the vaccine and immunotherapy center at the Wistar Institute, which has collaborated with Inovio. 

"We are able to target things that would prevent the virus from having a safe harbor in the body."

Inovio, which began human testing of its vaccine in April, said preliminary results from that trial are expected in June. 

The 40 healthy participants in the Phase 1 trial are given 2 shots, 4 weeks apart, of the vaccine, called INO-4800, and then followed for 2 weeks.

"We are already seeing safety data and it has been benign," Dr. Katherine Broderick, head of research and development at Inovio, told Reuters. "Some people have slight redness of the arm."

Once the preliminary data are in, she said Inovio expects to approach the US Food and Drug Administration for authorization to move into a Phase 2/3 trial, which could happen in July or August.

Inovio said the latest animal study results, published in the journal Nature Communications, validate its DNA medicines platform and build on previous positive clinical trial data for its experimental vaccine against a different, but related, coronavirus that causes Middle East Respiratory Syndrome.

That vaccine and INO-4800 are made using newer technology that focuses on specific genes on the outer "spike" portion of the virus.

Inovio said the newly published data demonstrate virus neutralizing activity using 3 separate testing procedures. Study authors also said they detected the antibodies in the lungs of the vaccinated animals.

Inovio next plans to test the vaccine in larger animals including rabbits and monkeys, and to undertake "challenge" studies in mice, ferrets and monkeys, Broderick said. 

Challenge studies involve intentionally giving the virus to an animal and then seeing if the vaccine prevents infection.

There are currently no approved treatments or vaccines for COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. Experts predict a safe and effective vaccine could take 12 to 18 months to develop.

-reuters-

Bill Gates, other charities pledge $125 million towards COVID 19 treatments

CHICAGO - The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and 2 other large charities on Tuesday pledged up to $125 million to help speed the development of treatments for the fast-spreading coronavirus, which the World Health Organization said on Monday was nearing pandemic proportions.

The effort, known as the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, will focus on new and re-purposed drugs that can be used right away to treat patients infected with the novel coronavirus and possibly other viruses in the future.

The money is intended to ensure that treatments for the virus will be available in poor countries and affordable for individuals.

Currently, no antiviral drugs or other immune system treatments have been approved to treat COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.

The Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust medical charity are each contributing up to $50 million, and the Mastercard Impact Fund has committed up to $25 million for initial projects.

The Gates Foundation’s funding is part of its $100 million commitment to the COVID-19 response announced last month.

"Viruses like COVID-19 spread rapidly, but the development of vaccines and treatments to stop them moves slowly," Mark Suzman, chief executive officer of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said in a statement.

"If we want to make the world safe from outbreaks like COVID-19, particularly for those most vulnerable, then we need to find a way to make research and development move faster. That requires governments, private enterprise, and philanthropic organizations to act quickly to fund research and development."

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Latest coronavirus study implicates fecal transmission

WASHINGTON, United States - Diarrhea may be a secondary path of transmission for the novel coronavirus, scientists said Friday following the publication of the latest study reporting patients with abdominal symptoms and loose stool.

The primary path is believed to be virus-laden droplets from an infected person's cough, though researchers in early cases have said they focused heavily on patients with respiratory symptoms and may have overlooked those linked to the digestive tract.

A total of 14 out of 138 patients (10 percent) in a Wuhan hospital who were studied in the new paper by Chinese authors in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) initially presented with diarrhea and nausea one or two days prior to development of fever and labored breathing.

The first US patient diagnosed with 2019-nCoV also experienced loose bowel movements for two days and the virus was subsequently detected in his stool. There have been other such cases in China documented in the Lancet, albeit infrequently.

"Importantly, 2019-nCoV has been reported elsewhere in the feces of patients with atypical abdominal symptoms, similar to SARS which was also shed in urine, suggesting a fecal transmission route which is highly transmissible," William Keevil, a professor of environmental healthcare at the University of Southampton said in a comment to the UK's Science Media Centre.

The possibility is not totally surprising to scientists, given that the new virus belongs to the same family as SARS.

Fecal transmission of SARS was implicated in sickening hundreds in Hong Kong's Amoy Gardens housing estate in 2003. A rising plume of warm air originating in bathrooms contaminated several apartments and was transported by wind to adjacent buildings in the complex.

Based on the literature, "the 2019-nCoV virus found in stool may be transmitted through fecal spread," added Jiayu Liao, a bioengineer at the University of California, Riverside.

But, he added: "We still do not know how long this virus can survive outside the body -- HIV can only survive roughly 30 minutes outside the body -- and what temperature range the 2019-nCoV is sensitive to."

Fecal spread could present new challenges to the virus's containment, but is more likely to be a problem inside hospitals, which can become "amplifiers" of epidemics, said David Fisman, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto.

Benjamin Neuman, a virology expert at Texas A&M University-Texarkana, cautioned that while fecal transmission was "certainly worth considering," "droplets and touching contaminated surfaces then rubbing eyes, nose or mouth" were likely the main way the virus was transmitted based on current data.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

How iPhone, Apple Watch can help reshape health research

In 1976, the Harvard School of Public Health and two other major medical institutions started a study on nurses that has become one of the largest and longest research efforts ever conducted on women’s health. They have so far enrolled more than 275,000 participants.

On Thursday, the Harvard school announced an even more ambitious women’s health study, one that aims to enroll 1 million women over a decade.

The new ingredients allowing the huge scale: Apple’s iPhones, apps and money.

Harvard’s new study is just one of three new large research efforts that Apple is working on with leading academic research centers and health organizations. Together, the studies, which Apple is paying for, show how the Silicon Valley giant and its popular products are reshaping medical research.

To enroll in clinical trials, patients have often had to travel to medical centers to be briefed by researchers and fill out the study paperwork in person. Many studies also follow patients only intermittently, in periodic surveys and visits to hospitals.

But Apple tools are enabling large-scale virtual studies that can follow people as they go about their daily lives. The company has developed a research app for iPhones — which participants can download from its app store — that is helping researchers quickly and easily recruit hundreds of thousands of study volunteers.

Researchers at Stanford Medicine, who studied whether an app on the Apple Watch could detect an irregular heartbeat condition, were able to enroll more than 400,000 participants in just 8 months. Apple helped recruit volunteers by promoting the study, which was published Wednesday, in its app store and emailing customers who had bought Apple Watches.

Dr. Ethan Weiss, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said he thought there would be many more of these so-called virtual studies, partly because they reduce the burden and costs compared with in-person studies.

He noted, however, that doctors did not yet know whether monitoring people en masse through smartphones and consumer-wearable devices would significantly improve health outcomes. “This is the big question. Is this ‘so what’? Or are we going to learn something meaningful we don’t know yet?”

Michelle A. Williams, dean of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said she hoped the new study of women, called the Apple Women’s Health Study, would enable researchers to learn much more about how women’s bodies and reproductive health change over time.

Through surveys, she said, women participating in the study may choose to provide qualitative information about their menstrual cycles, pregnancies, menopause and other health issues. Through the study’s app, they may also choose to automatically share fitness, heart rate and other quantitative data gathered by their iPhones or Apple Watches.

“I’m most excited about the fact that we’ll be able to collect women’s menstrual cycle information in ways that we’ve not really done before,” Williams said. “Having this data on a large modern cohort is so relevant to clinical women’s health today because a lot of the decision-making and diagnostic protocols that we’re currently using are from data from 50 years ago, when the social environment was different.”

Apple’s involvement in the research studies is the latest example of how the biggest tech companies are edging their way into the country’s $3.5 trillion health care market. The companies are making inroads in medicine in part by exploiting their scale, along with the technologies that have helped them dominate markets like cloud computing, search, productivity tools and consumer apps.

Microsoft recently began testing an artificial intelligence system for hospitals that records, transcribes and analyzes doctor-patient conversations. Google is working with hospitals to analyze millions of patients’ medical records in the hopes of identifying patterns to improve diagnosis and treatment.

Apple is striking out in a different direction. The company has acquired health and wellness startups and hired prominent medical researchers. It has made health a marketing point of its devices. Last year, it introduced an electrocardiogram app on the Apple Watch Series 4. This year it introduced menstrual cycle tracking and hearing health services for the iPhone and the watch.

In addition to the women’s health study, Apple is sponsoring a study, led by researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, that will examine physical activity and heart data from the Apple Watch to try to identify early warning signs of declining heart health. Another study, by researchers at the University of Michigan, will collect noise level data from headphones and an iPhone app to examine how long-term sound exposure can affect hearing.

The names of the studies also provide a marketing opportunity: They’re called the Apple Hearing Study, the Apple Women’s Health Study, and the Apple Heart and Movement Study.

Jeff Williams, chief operating officer of Apple, said the company hoped the studies would bolster the understanding of women’s, heart and hearing health. Apple also hopes to use the study data to improve its products or create new ones.

“We have a noise meter on people’s Apple Watches,” Williams said. “If we can help them understand the sound exposure in their environment and help them avoid the problem, or at least mitigate the problem, with hearing loss, that’s a huge contribution to society.”

The Apple studies could also influence how research studies treat health privacy. Apple’s research app allows study participants to granularly choose which types of information — such as heart or physical activity data — they share with researchers. Participants also have the ability to stop sharing their data or change their data-sharing category selections at any time. They can also choose to delete the current day’s data before it is shared with the study.

Apple has long marketed privacy as a feature that distinguishes its products from those of its rivals like Google. Apple has said that it does not have access to consumer data collected by the iPhone Health app, for instance, because the information is stored locally on users’ devices.

For the research studies, Apple said the technology was designed to meet federal standards for safeguarding health information. The company also said its researchers would have access to study participants’ data under pseudonymous ID codes — not their names.

But the studies reliant on Apple devices have inherent limitations because owners of the company’s products are not representative of the general US population. People who use iPhones have a median income of about $89,000 compared with $64,510 for Android users, according to recent data from Comscore. Among the Apple Watch users in the Apple Heart Study, there was a lower percentage of women, African Americans, Latinos and people ages 65 or older than in census data for the general population.

Michelle Williams of Harvard said that the women’s health study would ask participants for demographic information and adapt its methodology to account for any underrepresented groups.

There are also some concerns that Apple, which has already reshaped how people live, communicate and entertain themselves, is pursuing yet another way to influence society, this time through health.

“The broader point here is the fact that Apple has control over the app store, that Apple has connections with all of the people that have Apple iPhones, and that Apple gets to make a lot of decisions about how you collect the data, about how to notify people to be a part of the study,” said Matt Stoller, author of a new book, “Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.”

Whatever the potential health benefits, he said, “it’s still an extraordinary concentration of power in Apple’s hands.”


2019 The New York Times Company

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Childhood smoking exposure tied to irregular heartbeat in adulthood

Children who grow up breathing their parents’ secondhand smoke are more likely to develop a heart rhythm disorder known as atrial fibrillation than the kids of nonsmokers, a recent study suggests.

Based on families in the decades-long Framingham study, researchers found that half of the children of smokers included in the analysis were exposed to at least a half pack, or 10 cigarettes, a day - and for every pack-a-day increase in smoke exposure, kids’ risk of developing atrial fibrillation in adulthood climbed by 18 percent.

A small part of the risk for adult atrial fibrillation was associated with the tendency of smokers’ children to become smokers themselves as adults, the study team notes in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

“Smoking may have unintended and unanticipated downstream harms that have not previously been considered as part of the actual total negative consequences of smoking,” said Dr. Gregory Marcus, senior author of the study and an atrial fibrillation researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.

“These findings demonstrate how parental behaviors and exposures can meaningfully influence their children in ways that may not become apparent until late in adulthood,” Marcus said by email.

For the study, researchers examined data on 2,816 children and at least one of their parents. Overall, 82 percent of the kids were exposed to secondhand smoke by a parent at some point during childhood.

A total of 404 kids or 14.3 percent developed atrial fibrillation after researchers followed half of the children for at least 4 decades.

Exposure to secondhand smoke from parents was also associated with a 34 percent higher risk that children would become smokers, researchers report in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

And, becoming a smoker explained about 17 percent of the increased atrial fibrillation risk tied to parental smoking.

In atrial fibrillation, electrical impulses in the upper chambers of the heart are chaotic, causing that part of the heart muscle to quiver rather than contracting normally. 

As a result, blood doesn’t move as well to the heart’s lower chambers. This can lead to the formation of clots that can travel through the arteries to the brain and cause a stroke.

The study wasn’t designed to prove whether or how secondhand smoke exposure during childhood might cause atrial fibrillation.

“Early exposure to tobacco smoke may result in damage to the pulmonary veins, the heart, or the interface between the two, which may increase the propensity to atrial fibrillation,” Marcus said.

One limitation of the study is that researchers lacked smoking data for a large proportion of parents, which may have resulted from limited awareness of the health risks of smoking when some of the families started being followed in the 1950s, researchers note. It’s also unclear how much exposure to smoke kids had in the womb, which might also impact atrial fibrillation risk.

Even so, the results should offer parents who smoke yet another reason to quit, Marcus said.

“Smoking unfortunately remains common, especially among young individuals of child-bearing age,” Marcus added. “Complete smoking avoidance or cessation is the most healthy strategy for parents that want their kids to experience long-term health.”

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Many sexually active Pinoys don't use condoms, survey says

MANILA—Most sexually active Filipinos don't always use condoms, a survey this year has found, which puts them at risk of sexually transmitted infections and unwanted pregnancy.

A study by PhilCare, a leading health maintenance organization (HMO), showed that only 1 out of 10 Filipinos always use protection.

Of the 820 sexually active Filipinos polled nationwide, at least 30 percent said they used condoms very frequently to prevent pregnancy and at least 40 percent to avoid sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).

Condom use for the prevention of STDs was also higher among women with 48 percent than men with 36 percent. 

Some 36 percent of women and some 30 percent of men reported using condoms for pregnancy prevention.

The study also found out that Mindanaoans used protection more compared to the national average. 

Some 26 percent of respondents from Mindanao used condoms against unplanned pregnancy, more than twice the national average of 12 percent.

Meanwhile, at least 18 percent of respondents from Mindanao used condoms against STDs, way higher than the national average of 13 percent.

The survey also revealed that only 2 out of 10 young adults, aged 18 to 30, always used protection.

Over half of young adults used protection very frequently against STDs while almost 40 percent did to avoid pregnancy.

Meanwhile, only 12 percent of men and women between 31 to 40 used condoms against STDs while 14 percent said they did to prevent pregnancy.

Older respondents in between 40 to 50 reported lower condom use. Only 10 percent used protection against STDs while only 7 percent as contraception.

"It’s important that we gather relevant information to find solutions to this problem afflicting a growing number of Filipinos,” said lead researcher Fernando Paragas of the University of the Philippines.

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Extra protein boosts muscle with resistance-training, but only slightly

Extra protein from food or supplements does lead to increases in strength and muscle, but not as much as some might hope, researchers write in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. 

Presented as an infographic, the results are based on a review of data from 49 randomized controlled trials in 17 countries and more than 1,800 participants.

The upshot: supplementing protein while doing resistance training can increase strength by about 9 percent and add about a pound of muscle. The effect levels off at a certain point, after which extra protein provides no additional benefit.

“Lots of people take protein supplements with the expectation that they are going to gain lots of muscle because of the protein supplement,” said senior study author Stuart Phillips of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada.

“Supplement companies tout huge benefits,” Phillips told Reuters Health by email. “We thought it was time to do some science.”

Phillips and colleagues conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of research published on the topic of protein supplementation and resistance training, looking at how much extra muscle men and women gained, as well as how much stronger they became.

The studies had to be at least 6 weeks long, include resistance training at least twice a week, and one group had to be given a protein supplement that didn’t have other muscle-building ingredients such as creatine or testosterone-enhancing compounds.

Ten of the studies involved people who were experienced in resistance training and 14 studies had exclusively female participants.

The team found that protein supplementation led to an increase in muscle, but not much. In addition, protein supplements were more effective in people who were already lifting weights and less effective in people over age 60.

The analysis didn’t find any differences between types of protein supplements or a distinction between getting protein from food or from supplements.

When Phillips’ team analyzed the relationship between the amount of muscle gained and total amount of dietary protein consumed, they found that gains leveled off at around 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day, or about 0.7 grams per pound. That is twice the recommended daily amount in most official nutrition guidelines, they note.

“Going to the gym is where most of the benefits come from,” Phillips said.

Current studies are investigating the key amino acids in protein that aid this muscle-building process, particularly leucine, and especially for adults over age 60 who may have muscle and bone loss known as sarcopenia.

“It’s a big deal to have sufficient enough quantities to stimulate muscle growth,” he added.

Future studies will focus on ways to boost muscle mass and the effect of protein supplementation in older adults, including through everyday foods such as milk and meat.

“Older adults experience age-related physiological changes that affect body weight and body composition,” said Li-Qiang Qin of Soochow University’s School of Public Health in Suzhou, China.

Qin, who wasn’t involved in the current review, has studied the effect of milk protein supplementation among older adults taking part in a resistance training program.

“Milk proteins are excellent sources of all the essential amino acids and may represent an ideal protein source to promote muscle anabolism in older adults undergoing resistance training,” Qin said.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Who's a Good Boy? Wolves, not dogs, apparently

WASHINGTON, United States - If you're looking for a word to describe your adorable pet pup, "selfish" might not top the list.

But a new study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE suggests Fido's reputation for being caring is all a ruse -- at least if you're a fellow dog.

A series of touchscreen experiments carried out by the Wolf Science Center in Vienna, Austria found that wolves make for more selfless pack mates than dogs who were also raised in groups.

The study's authors say the findings suggest domestic dogs inherited their cooperative tendencies from their fierce wolf ancestors, rather than through their contact with human beings, a competing hypothesis.

Researchers trained the animals to use their snouts to press a "giving" symbol on a screen that delivered food to an adjacent enclosure, where a fellow animal may or may not be present.

Over multiple trials, wolves opted to deliver food to members of their own pack, knowing they would not get anything in return -- but lost interest if they were shown an unfamiliar wolf.

Dogs, on the other hand, showed no particular inclination to feed other dogs when no personal payoff was involved, regardless of whether they knew them or not.

"This study shows that domestication did not necessarily make dogs more prosocial," said lead author Rachel Dale.

"Rather, it seems that tolerance and generosity towards group members help to produce high levels of cooperation, as seen in wolves."

But don't write off your pooch just yet. The authors cautioned against applying the results of an experiment carried out on pack dogs to pet dogs, who have been found to have prosocial tendencies in past studies. 

The researchers believe those behaviors could be the result of training or encouragement, and say more research is needed to determine what accounts for the differences.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Americans waste 150,000 tons of food per day: study

TAMPA, United States - Americans waste nearly 150,000 tons of food per day, amounting to about one pound (422 grams) per person, and fruits and vegetables are mostly what gets tossed, said a study Wednesday.

The amount of land used annually to grow food that ends up in the garbage in the United States is 30 million acres, or seven percent of total US cropland. Some 4.2 trillion gallons of irrigation water gets wasted, too, said the report in the journal PLOS ONE.

Fruits and vegetables made up 39 percent of total food waste, followed by dairy (17 percent), meat (14 percent) and grains (12 percent).

Items least likely to be thrown out included salty snacks, table oils, egg dishes, candy and soft drinks.

"Higher quality diets have greater amounts of fruits and vegetables, which are being wasted in greater quantities than other food," said co-author Meredith Niles, an assistant professor at the University of Vermont. 

"Eating healthy is important, and brings many benefits, but as we pursue these diets, we must think much more consciously about food waste."

The report, based on government data and surveys about food waste from 2007 to 2014, found that the amount of wasted food equals about 30 percent of the average daily calories consumed for every American.

The costs to the environment and to farmers are "significant," it said.

"Food waste corresponded to harvests produced with the use of 780 million pounds of pesticide and 1.8 billion pounds of nitrogen fertilizer, annually."

Solutions may include teaching consumers how to better prepare and store fresh fruits and vegetables, revising "sell-by" dates, encouraging people to buy imperfect produce, and incorporating efforts to prevent food waste into government sustainability programs.

"Food waste is an issue that plays out at many different levels," said lead author Zach Conrad at the US Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service in North Dakota. 

"Looking at them holistically will become increasingly important to finding sustainable ways of meeting the needs of a growing world population."

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Doctor's own diagnosis drives quest for a cancer cure

BETHESDA, United States - Christian Hinrichs knew his life had forever changed the day he thought he was pouring milk into a glass, but heard it splashing on the floor instead.

It was 2005, and the young cancer surgeon had just undergone the removal of his right eye because of a rare cancer, called ocular melanoma, which affects 6 in a million people.

Prior to the operation, his doctors had been optimistic that he'd make a full recovery and be able to return to practicing surgery.

"But the reality for me personally was after I lost the eye, it really threw off my depth perception," said Hinrichs.

"I knew I couldn't operate anymore. So I decided not to."

At the time, Hinrichs was 33, and had spent 13 years in training and in the operating theater.

Even before his own diagnosis, he'd decided to focus on cancer surgery.

He also had an interest in cancer research, particularly the burgeoning field of adoptive T-cell therapy, which involved genetically engineering the immune cells to recognize and attack cancer.

But after his eye was removed, he felt like a "square peg" that didn't fit anywhere.

"I was a surgeon who couldn't operate, and I was interested in oncology but I wasn't an internal medicine doctor," he said.

So he went back to school to train as an internal medicine doctor and oncologist, a process that took 4 years.

Going back to being a medical resident -- while married with a one-year-old son at home -- was "a huge drop down the ladder," he recalled.

But he was more driven than ever to find another way to beat cancer, when surgery, chemotherapy and radiation failed.

For Hinrichs, the fight was now personal.

"If the cancer ever came back in me at a site distant from the eye, I would be in that group of incurable patients," he said, explaining that his cancer would then be considered metastatic, and fatal.

The odds of a recurrence, for his type of cancer, were about 50 percent.

'SCANXIETY'

Hinrichs, now 46, is an investigator at the National Cancer Institute, and leads experimental trials aimed at training the body's T-cells to eradicate cancers caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV).

Two women who participated in one of his early clinical trials against cervical cancer have been disease-free for 5 years, and are now considered cured.

Many of the trials he runs at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, the nation's top research hospital, are considered "first-in-human," aimed at testing an experimental treatment in people for the first time.

They typically enroll one or 2 dozen patients with advanced cancers that have stopped responding to every other treatment.

Most patients aren't cured. But some see their cancers disappear in months. And that can lead to new treatments which may one day reach the broader public.

Colleagues describe Hinrichs as blunt, honest and direct, traits that may have been sharpened by his cancer ordeal.

"He told me on day one," about his experience with cancer, said NCI researcher Lindsey Draper, who works in Hinrichs' lab and is testing a next-generation T-cell therapy that arose from an earlier HPV trial.

"I think he wanted me to understand his sense of urgency in pushing this research forward."

Hinrichs sometimes tells patients about his back story if they ask how he got into this field, or if he thinks it will help them somehow.

One of them, Aricca Wallace, who has been cancer-free since 2012, said he helps her manage her fear each time she goes for follow-up scans. She even has a word for it: "scanxiety."

"He knows that I am on pins and needles and don't sleep. So he will take a quick look and shoot me a thumbs up," she said, describing their rapport as "more family than doctor-patient."

For his part, Hinrichs decided to stop getting follow-up MRI and CT scans about five years after his eye was removed.

A long-time Presbyterian, he says his faith carries him through times of uncertainty.

When it comes to his particular cancer, "the statistics are really of limited value, anyway," he added.

So he presses on, designing trials that are intended to cure advanced cancer with a single infusion of billions of super-charged T-cells that will take aim at tumors wherever they lie in the body.

Hinrichs thinks pursuing any other work would be unsatisfying.

"Cancer patients don't want researchers to be focused on things that slow down the cancer or may have relatively minor effects," he said.

"What they really want is for their cancers to go away."

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Study of cancer-causing toxins finds e-cigarettes much safer than smoking

Consuming e-cigarettes is far safer and less toxic than smoking conventional tobacco cigarettes, according to the findings of a study analyzing levels of dangerous and cancer-causing substances in the body.

Researchers found that people who switched from smoking regular cigarettes to e-cigarettes or nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) such as gum or patches for at least six months had much lower levels of toxins in their saliva and urine than those who continued to smoke.

"Our study adds to existing evidence showing that e-cigarettes and NRT are far safer than smoking, and suggests that there is a very low risk associated with their long-term use," said Lion Shahab, a specialist in epidemiology and public health at University College London who led the work.

E-cigarettes, which heat nicotine-laced liquid into vapor, have grown into an $8 billion-a-year market, according to Euromonitor International - more than three times that of NRT products. They are, however, still dwarfed by a tobacco market estimated by Euromonitor to be worth around $700 billion.

Many health experts think e-cigarettes, or vapes, which do not contain tobacco, are a lower-risk alternative to smoking and potentially a major public health tool.

But some question their long-term safety and worry that they may act as a "gateway" to taking up conventional cigarettes. The U.S. surgeon general in December urged lawmakers to impose price and tax policies that would discourage their use.

Monday's study, published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, analyzed saliva and urine samples from long-term e-cigarette and NRT users as well as smokers, and compared levels of key chemicals found in their bodies.

It found that smokers who switched completely to e-cigarettes or NRT had significantly lower levels of toxic chemicals and carcinogens compared to people who continued to smoke tobacco cigarettes.

Those who used e-cigarettes or NRT but did not completely quit smoking did not show the same drop in toxin levels. This underlined that a complete switch was needed to get the long-term health benefits of quitting tobacco, the researchers said.

The World Health Organization says tobacco is the world's biggest preventable killer, with a predicted cumulative death toll of a billion by the end of this century if current trends continue. Tobacco smoking currently kills around 6 million people a year.

Kevin Fenton, national director of health and well-being at the government authority Public Health England, said the findings held a clear message for tobacco smokers.

"Switching to e-cigarettes can significantly reduce harm to smokers, with greatly reduced exposure to carcinogens and toxins," he said in a statement. "The findings also make clear that the benefit is only realized if people stop smoking completely and make a total switch.

"The best thing a smoker can do, for themselves and those around them, is to quit now, completely and forever."

(Reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

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Migraine sufferers at higher surgery stroke risk: study

PARIS - People who suffer migraines are at a higher risk of stroke after surgery, researchers said on Wednesday.

This means that a history of migraines, which affect about one in five people, should be taken into account when weighing the pros and cons of undergoing an operation, said a study in The BMJ medical journal.

"Given the high prevalence of migraine in the general population, the... association (with stroke) carries public health importance," the authors wrote.

A research team from the United States, Denmark and Germany analysed the records of nearly 125,000 surgical patients at Massachusetts General Hospital and two satellite campuses between January 2007 and August 2014.

Of the group, 771 (0.6 percent) suffered a stroke within 30 days of surgery.

Just over eight percent (10,179) of the surgery group had a history of migraine, compared to 11.5 percent (89) of the 771 who suffered a stroke.

The team calculated the risk of stroke at 2.4 attacks for every 1,000 surgeries -- a number which rose to 4.3 in 1,000 for migraine patients.

The risk was highest for those whose migraines had an "aura" -- described as flashing lights or other warning signals experienced before an attack.

According to the World Health Organization, about 6.7 million people died of stroke in 2012. Survivors often suffer long-term disability.

Stroke occurs when blood flow to an area of the brain is cut off due to a clot blocking the path or due to a leak in a blood vessel. Brain cells are starved of oxygen, and die.

Migraine, more common in women, is characterised by a severe headache often associated with disturbed vision, sensitivity to sounds, smells and light, and nausea.

Migraine has long been considered to increase the risk for stroke, the study authors said, but is still widely perceived as a benign condition.

This study was the first to assess whether migraines boost stroke risk after surgery.

"Physicians should be aware of this increased... risk," said the team. And further research was needed into preventing post-operative stroke in migraine sufferers.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Obama most admired by Americans, Trump comes in second: Poll

CHICAGO - In a survey released Wednesday, US President Barack Obama beat out Donald Trump as the man most admired by Americans in 2016.

Twenty-two percent of those surveyed by Gallup chose Obama, followed by 15 percent who chose Donald Trump. Pope Francis was a distant third with four percent.

Hillary Clinton topped the list of the most admired women in 2016, with 12 percent of Americans choosing her.

She and Obama have been at the top of the poll every year since 2008.

The survey, which tends to favor current and past presidents and first ladies, was released at an especially sensitive time.

Tensions between Trump and the current White House have been growing for weeks over US foreign and domestic policies.

Over the weekend, Obama suggested he may have won a third term were he not constitutionally barred, to which Trump tweeted, in part: "NO WAY!"

Tensions flared again early Wednesday, when in an unprecedented personal condemnation of his soon-to-be predecessor, Trump tweeted: "Doing my best to disregard the many inflammatory President O statements and roadblocks."

"Thought it was going to be a smooth transition - NOT!"

Trump might take solace in the fact that he has been in the top 10 rankings of the most admired men in America before — five times, in fact, with the most recent being in 2015. He first appeared among the top 10 in 1988.

Among women, Hillary Clinton has now earned the most admired spot 21 times. She first led the poll in 1993 when she was first lady.

The current First Lady Michelle Obama was the second most admired woman in 2016, with eight percent of Americans choosing her.

Also among the top five women, though far behind Obama and Clinton, were German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and former and current talk-show hosts Oprah Winfrey and Ellen DeGeneres.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Sex exists to avoid disease, study shows

From an evolutionary perspective, sexual reproduction could be seen as a non-starter.

Compared to cloning, which also exists in Nature, it's a major waste of time and energy.

Think of the ungainly, preening peacock -- an easy snack for tigers and wild dogs -- strutting his stuff to impress the ladies.

Even without predators, sex and its attendant rituals can be dangerous: when stags butt heads or alpha-male lions fight for mating rights, it does not always end well.

Some animals and plants -- starfish, bananas, to name two -- reproduce asexually. Even a few birds and bees do it solo, Cole Porter be damned.

Others, like the Komodo dragon, can work it either way, though asexually produced Komodo babies -- produced by their mothers -- are not clones.

In short, without males in the picture the business of reproducing is faster and less fraught.

And yet, sex remains by far the dominant means by which the world's fauna and flora pass on genes to future generations, ensuring the survival of the species.

"One of the oldest questions in evolutionary biology is, why does sex exist?" said Stuart Auld, a biologist at the University of Stirling in Scotland.

Darwin's laws of natural selection dictate that doing it the hard way -- sex rather than cloning, in this case -- must confer some major, if hidden, advantages.

Granted, sexual reproduction fuels genetic variation, which boosts the likelihood that offspring in the wild will have the genetic makeup to thrive in an ever-changing environment.

By contrast, clones do not vary, and so if the environment deteriorates, a clonal mother will produce offspring that lack the genes they need to succeed.

'Twofold cost of sex'

"But sex needs to be over twice as efficient as cloning to outweigh its costs," Auld told AFP.

"If sex is to be favored by natural selection, a sexual mother needs to either produce twice as many offspring as an asexual mother, or produce offspring that are twice as good."

Biologists have long agreed that the enhanced ability to fight off disease was a major advantage of the genetic changes that come with sexual reproduction.

But constructing an experiment to confirm this has always proved difficult: how do you compare the costs and benefits of sexual strategies in different species?

To get around that "apples and oranges" problem, Auld and two colleagues used an organism -- the humble waterflea -- that can reproduce both ways.

"By comparing clonal and sexual daughters from the same mothers, we found sexually produced offspring get less sick," Auld said.

The ever-present need to evade disease, it turned out, explains why sex persists in the natural world in spite of the high "costs" that come with it, he explained.

Parasites and their hosts are in a constant tug-of-war, each evolving and adapting to the other, one attacking immune defenses and the other rebuilding them.

Cloning offers fewer chances for genetic changes in the host that can rise to that challenge.

But sexual reproduction -- with a new genetic variations coming into the mix with each generation -- offers more opportunities to fight back against pathogens.

The findings were published in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

source: news.abs-cbn.com