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Australia: Could killer horse virus spread amongst humans?

Rachel Nowak
New Scientist
Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:08 UTC


horse
©Unknown

Australia is suffering the biggest outbreak of the highly virulent Hendra virus since the disease was identified in 1994.

Now a change in its symptoms in Queensland horses is raising fears that new strains may have emerged - and even that a strain capable of spreading from human-to-human could appear.

"The different clinical presentations, and some very preliminary [DNA] sequencing data, suggest that the Hendra virus may be somewhat different in this outbreak," says epidemiologist Hume Field of the Australian Biosecurity Cooperative Research Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases in Brisbane.
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Syringe

Brain implants curing depression

Sharon Kirkey
CanWest News Service
Tue, 22 Jul 2008 09:08 UTC
Testing on severely depressed patients shows that electrical brain implants can successfully "reset" the brain's mood switch from sad to normal, with results that last for at least a year, Canadian researchers are reporting.
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Sherlock

Tough Choices: How Making Decisions Tires Your Brain

On Amir
Scientific American
Tue, 22 Jul 2008 08:41 UTC


Dice
©Onur Dongel/iStockphoto

The human mind is a remarkable device. Nevertheless, it is not without limits. Recently, a growing body of research has focused on a particular mental limitation, which has to do with our ability to use a mental trait known as executive function.
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Health

We're in chemical overload

William Marsden
The Gazette
Fri, 20 Jun 2008 23:01 UTC
Viviane Maraghi expected the blood tests to show she would have some chemical pollution in her body, but nothing like this.

After all, she viewed herself as "very environmentalist," carefully monitoring what she ate and and the household products and items she purchased.

Nevertheless, lead, arsenic, mercury, PCBs, PBDEs (a flame retardant banned in Europe and eight U.S. states but still in use in Canada), plus an array of other chemicals that have been linked to cancer, birth defects and neurological diseases were all well represented in her bloodstream.

Her blood tested positive for 36 of 68 potentially toxic chemicals, many of which never actually leave the body, but continue to accumulate over time in tissues such as fat or bone.

Image
©Phil Carpenter, The Gazette
Viviane Maraghi and son Aladin, 12, were tested for chemical contaminants as part of a 2005 Environmental Defence study.

They get there because they are in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat and the products we use.
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Eye 1

A delusion for the reality-TV era

Craig Offman
The National Post
Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:23 UTC
Joel and Ian Gold, brothers and psychiatrists from Montreal, believe they have discovered a signature mental illness of the YouTube era: patients who claim they are subjects of their own reality TV shows.

Truman Show Delusion
©National Post
Montreal psychiatrists Joel and Ian Gold have coined 'the Truman Show Delusion,' where patients claim that the world around them is an elaborate production.
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Health

Prostate cancer 'wonder pill'

Daniel Martin
Mail Online
Tue, 22 Jul 2008 18:15 UTC
British researchers have made a dramatic breakthrough against a lethal form of prostate cancer.

Trials of a new pill have shown that it can shrink tumours in up to 80 per cent of cases, and end the need for damaging chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

Experts hailed the advance as potentially the biggest in the field of prostate cancer for decades, capable of saving many thousands of lives.
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Health

Fibromyalgia improved by balanced exercise program


Health Bulletin News
Sun, 18 Nov 2007 17:06 UTC
A recent fibromyalgia study reveals that an exercise program that incorporates walking, strength training and stretching may improve daily function and alleviate symptoms in women with fibromyalgia, as reported in the November 12, 2007 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine. These benefits appear to be enhanced when the exercise is combined with education about managing fibromyalgia.
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Briefcase

UK: Mother wins £800,000 payout after 'four pints of water a day' detox diet leaves her brain damaged


The Daily Mail
Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:50 UTC
Mother-of-two Dawn Page has won more than £800,000 in damages at the High Court after a radical new detox diet left her brain damaged and epileptic.

The 52-year-old was told to drink an extra four pints of water per day and reduce her salt intake in a bid to prevent fluid retention and lose weight.

She began vomiting uncontrollably within days of going on 'The Amazing Hydration Diet'.

But nutritionist Barbara Nash assured her it was all 'part of the detoxification process'.

Mrs Nash even urged her to increase the amount of water she drank to six pints per day and eat fewer salty foods.

But Mrs Page - who weighed just 12 stone - suffered a massive epileptic fit brought on by severe sodium deficiency less than a week after she started the diet in 2001.

She was rushed to intensive care, but doctors were unable to prevent permanent brain injuries.

Image
©Unknown
Dawn Page was told to drink four extra pints of water a day and reduced her salt intake
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Magic Wand

How carrots help us see the color orange

Holger Mitterer
Association for Psychological Science
Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:40 UTC
One of the easiest ways to identify an object is by its color -- perhaps it is because children's books encourage us to pair certain objects with their respective colors. Why else would so many of us automatically assume carrots are orange, grass is green and apples are red?

In two experiments by Holger Mitterer and Jan Peter de Ruiter from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, perception of color and color constancy (the ability to see the same color under varying light conditions) were examined using different hues of orange and yellow. By using these hues on different objects, the researchers hoped to show that knowledge of objects can be used to identify color.
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Syringe

Using tobacco plants to fight cancer

Julie Steenhuysen
Reuters
Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:09 UTC
Image
© visualphotos.com
The divine tobacco plant
A personalized vaccine made using tobacco plants -- normally associated with causing cancer rather than helping cure it -- could aid people with lymphoma in fighting the disease, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

The treatment, which would vaccinate cancer patients against their own tumor cells, is made using a new approach that turns genetically engineered tobacco plants into personalized vaccine factories.

"This is the first time a plant has been used for making a protein to inject into a person," said Dr. Ron Levy of Stanford University School of Medicine in California, whose research appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"This would be a way to treat cancer without side effects," Levy said in a statement. "The idea is to marshal the body's own immune system to fight cancer."

Comment: Or you could skip all that and just smoke the plant! Nicotine is best infused through smoking.

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