Body

When influenza pandemics arrive, the specter of disease spread through person-to-person contact can mean that schools close, hand sanitizer sales rise, and travellers stay home. But is severing social and business interactions with our neighbors really better than taking a chance on getting sick?

"Infectious disease can mean making trade-offs between the risks and rewards of meeting others," says Eli Fenichel, an Arizona State University scientist. "It's critical that we more clearly understand the role that human decisions play in transmitting disease."

Working with Professor Jeremy Harvey and Professor Adrian Mulholland of Bristol's School of Chemistry, Dr Julianna Olah, an EU Marie Curie Fellow in Bristol at the time, studied a class of enzymes – cytochromes P450 – which play an important role in removing drug molecules from the body.

STANFORD, Calif. — Heart transplant recipients and their physicians are likely more concerned with the function of the donated organ than with the donor's DNA sequences that tag along in the new, healthy tissue. However, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have shown that an increase in the amount of the donor's DNA in the recipient's blood is one of the earliest detectable signs of organ rejection.

NEW YORK (March 28, 2011) -- Bariatric surgery should be considered earlier in the treatment of eligible patients to help stem the serious complications that can result from diabetes, according to an International Diabetes Federation (IDF) position statement presented by leading experts at the 2nd World Congress on Interventional Therapies for Type 2 Diabetes in New York.

Just like snowflakes, no two people are alike, even if they're identical twins according to new genetic research from The University of Western Ontario. Molecular geneticist Shiva Singh has been working with psychiatrist Dr. Richard O'Reilly to determine the genetic sequencing of schizophrenia using identical or monozygotic twins. The study is published in this month's PLoS ONE.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – How exactly bacterial pathogens cause diseases in plants remains a mystery and continues to frustrate scientists working to solve this problem. Now Wenbo Ma, a young plant pathologist at the University of California, Riverside, has performed research on the soybean plant in the lab that makes major inroads into our understanding of plant-pathogen interactions, a rapidly developing area among the plant sciences.

For the first time, a virus that causes respiratory disease in humanshas been linked to the deaths of wild mountain gorillas, reports ateam of researchers in the United States and Africa.

The finding confirms that serious diseases can pass from people tothese endangered animals.

The researchers are from the non-profit Mountain Gorilla VeterinaryProject; the Wildlife Health Center at the University of California,Davis; the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University;and the Rwanda Development Board.

New Delhi, India – The Indian Government today released new tiger population numbers for the first time since 2007, indicating that numbers have increased in the country that has half of the world's remaining wild tigers.

The government estimated current tiger numbers in India at 1,706, up from 1,411 during the last count in 2007. However, the 1,706 figure includes an additional tiger reserve in the count, the Sundarbans, that contained 70 tigers. This area was not counted in 2007.

Russia's boreal forest – the largest continuous expanse of forest in the world, found in the country's cold northern regions – is undergoing an accelerating large-scale shift in vegetation types as a result of globally and regionally warming climate. That in turn is creating an even warmer climate in the region, according to a new study published in the journal Global Change Biology and highlighted in the April issue of Nature Climate Change.

LEXINGTON, Ky., (March 28, 2011) – University of Kentucky plant pathologists recently discovered a metabolite that plays a critical role early on in the ability of plants, animals, humans and one-celled microorganisms to fend off a wide range of pathogens at the cellular level, which is known as systemic immunity. This mode of resistance has been known for more than 100 years, but the key events that stimulate that resistance have remained a mystery.

Recent findings on the differences in heart disease among women and men and among blacks and whites show that characteristics such as gender and ethnicity matter when it comes to health research. The Health of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People: Building a Foundation for Understanding, a new report from the Institute of Medicine, recommends steps to ensure that clinical researchers identify and address the needs of LGBT populations. The report was written in response to a request from the U.S.

A drug approved to treat certain types of cancer has shown promising results in the treatment of patients with scleroderma, according to results from an open-label Phase II trial. While the drug's efficacy must be demonstrated in a Phase III trial, the gold standard for testing a drug, researchers are optimistic that Gleevec™ (imatinib) could potentially be a weapon against the chronic connective tissue disease for which a treatment has remained elusive.

All medications have side-effects from common aspirin to herbal remedies and from standard anticancer drugs to experimental immunosuppressants. However, predicting important side effects, serious adverse drug reactions, ADRs, is with current understanding almost impossible. However, a neural network technology trained with past data could give drug companies and healthcare workers a new tool to spot the potential for ADRs with any given medication.

The global economy depends on marine transportation. But in addition to cargo, the world's 50,000-plus commercial ships carry tiny stowaways that can cause huge problems for the environment and economy. A new model created by Smithsonian scientists will facilitate accurate screening of vessels for dangerous species before they unload. The team's findings are published today in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Interventional radiologists have been the leaders in the use of intra-arterial yttrium-90 radioembolization, since its introduction in 2000, to treat liver cancer. Now, new results from a large multi-institutional study show that treating liver tumors with higher doses of Y-90 than previously tried is safe, provides results when chemotherapies have failed, preserves the patient's quality of life—and can be done on an outpatient basis.