Christine Heim at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, US, and colleagues carried out a survey of 100 adults aged about 50-years-old, 43 of whom had CFS. Participants were asked whether they had experienced neglect or emotional, physical or sexual abuse during their childhood.

Those diagnosed with CFS were significantly more likely to have experienced childhood abuse, the team found. CFS patients were also more likely than the control subjects to have psychiatric disorders, such as depression and anxiety.

Heim believes that mental illness is a contributing factor but not a cause of CFS - not all of the CFS patients had a psychiatric disorder, she notes. Nevertheless, CFS might have a larger psychological component than some experts believe, Heim says.
Brain development

Some researchers currently promote the idea that CFS is a purely biological illness. But Heim says that biology and experience probably both contribute to the disorder. It is unclear why trauma and stress may predispose a person to CFS, but such experiences early in life might influence brain development, she speculates.

A second study, by Kenji Kato at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and colleagues examined the records of more than 19,000 twins born between 1935 and 1958, of whom 1600 had CFS. Individuals who reported having a stressful childhood were five times more likely to have CFS, the team found.

Chronic fatigue syndrome is estimated to affect between 400,000 and 900,000 adults in the US. Symptoms of the illness include fatigue that lasts longer than six months, difficulties with memory and concentration, joint pain and tender lymph nodes.

Journal reference: Archives of General Psychiatry (vol 63, p 1258 and 1267)

"The problem of fair division is one of the oldest existing problems. The cake is a metaphor for any divisible object where people value different parts differently," explains Christian Klamler, at the University of Graz, Austria, who solved the problem with fellow mathematicians Steven Brams and Michael Jones.

According to Klamler, for any division to be acceptable, it must ideally be equal among all parties, envy-free so that no one prefers another's share and equitable, where each places the same subjective value on their share.

Traditional methods, such as the "you cut, I choose" method, where one person halves the cake and the other chooses a piece, are flawed because though both get equal shares and neither is envious, the division is not equitable - one piece may have more icing or fruit on it than another, for example.
Impartial cutter

Enter the "Surplus Procedure" (SP) for cake-sharing between two people, and the "Equitability Procedure" (EP) for sharing between three or more. Both involve asking guests to tell the cake-cutter how they value different parts of the cake. For example, one guest may prefer chocolate, another may prefer marzipan.

Under SP, the two parties first receive just half of the cake portion that they subjectively valued the most. Then the "surplus" left over is divided proportionally according to the value they gave it. EP works in a similar way: the guests first get an equal proportion of the part of the cake they each value the highest - a third each if they are three; a quarter each if they are four, etc - and then the remainder is again divided along the lines of subjective value.

The result is everyone is left feeling happy, Klamler says. Two people, for example, may feel they are each getting 65% of what they want rather than just half.

"These procedures are new and have never been tried out in real-world applications," says Brams. "But where there is a divisible good like land or water, which players value differently, the procedure could be used to allocate more-than-proportional shares, making everybody as happy as possible."

Intriguingly, the procedures are "tamper-proof" - people cannot manipulate the process and must be truthful with the referee, or else they could end up with less than makes them happy.

Journal reference: Notices of the American Mathematical Society (Vol 53, p1014)

Yi Guan and colleagues at the University of Hong Kong have been testing poultry in markets across southern China for bird flu for years. In 2004, 0.9 per cent of market poultry tested positive for H5N1, including 2 per cent of ducks, a major carrier of the virus. But between the middle of 2005 and June this year the virus turned up in 2.4 per cent of market poultry - a nearly threefold increase - and 3.3 per cent of ducks. The virus is also showing up in chickens for 11 months of the year, up from only four months previously.

The reason, says Guan, is a new "Fujian-like" strain of the virus, descended from one first seen in a duck in Fujian, China, in 2005. It caused 3 per cent of poultry infections in September 2005 but was responsible for 95 per cent of infections by June 2006. "The predominance of Fujian-like virus appears to be responsible for the increased prevalence of H5N1 in poultry," write Guan and colleagues in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0608157103).

A higher number of infected but apparently healthy birds in Chinese markets for more of the year means a greater risk for humans, says Guan. All but one of China's 21 officially reported human cases of H5N1 have occurred since November 2005 - after the Fujian strain started its rise. Some of these people lived far away from any known outbreak in poultry, but close to urban poultry markets, suggesting the new strain is spreading silently in some of the world's most crowded cities.

That means there could be many more unrecognised human cases. In China and elsewhere, people with serious cases of flu are only tested for H5N1 if poultry have suddenly died nearby. If seemingly healthy birds are infected with H5N1 and spreading it, they could also be passing it to humans without anyone knowing. "If death of poultry is used as the only indication of H5N1 infection, but the emergence of human cases is ignored, the consequence will be increased transmission of the virus in poultry," says Guan, who believes surveillance needs to be stepped up to include routine testing of birds throughout areas infected with H5N1.

Based on what previous H5N1 viruses have done in China, Fujian now seems poised to start a third epidemic wave, potentially worldwide, following the first in 2004 and H5N1's spread across Eurasia in 2005. So far the Fujian virus has reached Thailand, Malaysia and Laos.

Its sudden emergence suggests that a selection pressure is acting on the virus. In November 2005 China ordered compulsory vaccination of all poultry. The law has been imperfectly applied, however: Guan and colleagues found vaccine-induced antibodies in only 16 per cent of birds tested. What's more, they found these antibodies do not recognise the Fujian virus, even though they attack the previous strains of H5N1. "This novel variant may have become dominant because it was not as easily affected as other strains by the current avian vaccine," Guan says.

In 2004, an investigation by New Scientist concluded that vaccinating poultry against bird flu can lead to the emergence of novel strains that can circulate undetected in vaccinated birds unless there are scrupulous controls (New Scientist, 27 March 2004, p 6). The risk is that whatever strain emerges might have unexpected features, such as an ability to kill humans.

While Guan's team has no evidence to suggest that the Fujian strain is more virulent or likely to transmit between humans than previous strains, so far it has killed one person in Thailand and caused five of the Chinese cases for which the team has virus samples. "As far as I know all (20) human cases since November 2005 were caused by this virus," Guan told New Scientist.

The discovery is a warning bell to researchers working on human vaccines for H5N1. The pandemic vaccine now being developed by pharmaceutical companies is based on strains of H5N1 isolated from Vietnam in 2004 and Indonesia last year - but antibodies to these strains do not recognise the Fujian strain. This means the vaccine would not work against any pandemic virus carrying surface proteins from the Fujian strain.

Guan and colleagues say comprehensive influenza surveillance is needed in both people and animals throughout the region affected by H5N1, both to track the real spread of the virus and to provide updates for vaccine developers.
THE sudden emergence of a "super-strain" of H5N1 that sweeps away all other strains may seem unsettling, but it is something we could have predicted. Human flu does this all the time. The reason people get flu year after year is because the virus evolves slightly different surface proteins that our immune systems don't recognise from the last time we had flu. Researchers had thought this was a continual process, with individual mutations being selected for if they give the virus an advantage over the others. Now David Lipman and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, have shown that the process is far more sporadic. Using a large collection of recent flu strains, they showed that H3N2, the most common human strain, generally floats in evolutionary limbo accumulating random mutations, none of which gives any virus an advantage over the rest. As more and more people become immune, flu seasons become milder. Then every few years, one virus happens to collect a winning combination of these individually useless changes that enables it to avoid recognition by human flu antibodies. It out-competes other H3N2 viruses and rapidly becomes the dominant strain that sweeps the world (Biology Direct, DOI: 10.1186/1745-6150-1-34). In 1998, for instance, one strain from Australia acquired a novel surface change, but it wasn't until 2003, after a few more key mutations, that it suddenly emerged as the most murderous H3N2 of recent years. Lipman's team suggests that by monitoring these random mutations, we might learn to predict what dominant strain is about to emerge, giving vaccine makers more warning.
From issue 2576 of New Scientist magazine, 04 November 2006, page 8-9

Perhaps surprisingly, countries where people have the most sexual partners - the developed world - also have the lowest incidence of sexually transmitted infections and unplanned pregnancies. The reason could be that condom use is far more common in these countries, Wellings says.

Religion is a real problem in reproductive health, says Joy Phumaphi, assistant director general of the World Health Organization. People who follow religions that frown on contraception still have more children than they can support, and the lack of safe abortion centres harms thousands of women, she says. Only part of the blame lies with Catholicism and other major religions, Phumaphi says. "The biggest problem is many independent churches have huge influence and very extremist views."

The survey is part of a batch of sex and reproductive health papers published this week in The Lancet.

From issue 2576 of New Scientist magazine, 04 November 2006, page 7

Warts are caused by a virus in the skin that often clears up on its own. They can also be frozen off in a treatment called cryotherapy, or burned off chemically using a strong formulation of salicylic acid.

In 2002, Dr. Dean Focht of Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Washington, and colleagues reported in the same journal that using duct tape on warts worked better than cryotherapy.

The Maastricht University research team, led by Dr. Marloes de Haen expressed disappointment with their own findings.

"Considering the serious discomfort of cryotherapy and the awkwardness of applying salicylic acid for a long time, simply applying tape would be a cheap and helpful alternative, especially in children," de Haen's team wrote.

The study of 103 children aged 4 to 12 showed duct tape worked only slightly better than using a corn pad, a sticky cushion that does not actually touch the wart and was used as a placebo during the study.

"After 6 weeks, the warts of eight children (16 percent) in the duct tape group and the warts of three children (6 percent) in the placebo group had disappeared," the researchers wrote.

They said this difference was not statistically significant.

In addition, some of the children who used duct tape reported itching, rashes and other effects, although none of the children who wore corn pads did.

Following the 2002 study, the idea of using duct tape to treat warts quickly became common wisdom and is advocated widely on the Internet.

The Dutch researchers said that Focht's team did not actually examine their patients to determine whether the warts had disappeared, but called them on the telephone to ask.

They think Titan's atmosphere, packed with organic aerosol particles created when sunlight reacts with methane gas, may offer clues about Earth's climate when primitive organisms were first arising 3.6 billion years ago.

University of Colorado scientist Margaret Tolbert and her colleagues conducted laboratory experiments based on conditions in Titan's atmosphere measured last year by the Huygens space probe during the NASA-European Space Agency's Cassini mission.

They irradiated methane gas with an ultraviolet lamp, then mixed in carbon dioxide to see whether conditions that may have existed eons ago on Earth could yield a comparable organic haze. They found that such a haze formed in the lab using various methane and carbon dioxide concentrations.

Tolbert said the chemical composition of the haze was organic molecules that are digestible to organisms alive today and could have nourished simple living organisms along ago.

"That would have been a food source for any budding life," Tolbert said in an interview. "And it would have been, importantly, a global food source. And so life, instead of being confined to certain very special environments, could have thrived in every puddle."

Scientists previously have concentrated on isolated, extreme environments such as hydrothermal vents bursting with energy and nutrients to understand primordial life.

Beyond merely providing a food source for early life forms, this organic haze also may have played a role in providing the very building blocks needed for living organisms to first form, Tolbert said.

The study appears in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.

Earth was formed perhaps 4.6 billion years ago and liquid water was present about 3.8 billion years ago. Tolbert said this haze may have been a dominant feature of Earth's early atmospheric landscape from about the time of the first evidence of life 3.6 billion years ago until the rise of the oxygen content about 2.3 billion years ago.

The thick haze not only may have nourished organisms, but may have protected them from harmful ultraviolet rays. The haze may have placed more than 100 million metric tons of organic material on Earth's surface annually, the study estimated.

"It's exciting to see that the early Earth experiments produced so much organic matter," Carl Pilcher, director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute in California, said in a statement.