Body

NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ—Americans love pumpkins. The growing popularity of rural fall festivals, grade school farm tours, and "u-pick" pumpkin farms has resulted in an increase in consumer demand for pumpkins throughout the country. A critical challenge for pumpkin farmers promoting entertainment agriculture, or "agritourism", is maintaining fields that are weed-free, attractive, and safe for consumers.

STATESBORO, GA—Growers in southeastern Georgia have the perfect combination of climate and soil to produce some of the world's best onions: the famous Vidalia sweet onions. Prized for their mild taste and sweetness, Vidalia onions are shipped throughout North America for use in recipes and relishes.

GIZA, EGYPT—Interest in organic crop production is increasing around the world. Organics are healthy for consumers while adding environmental benefits and decreasing the amount of synthetic herbicides in foods, soil, and water. While organics gain popularity with consumers, organic farmers are faced with new production challenges, especially managing and reducing invasive weeds.

A new study examining the aftereffects of a chlorine gas disaster in a South Carolina town gives larger metropolitan areas important insight into what to expect and how to prepare emergency response systems for an accidental or terrorist release of the potentially deadly gas. The study is now available in the January 2009 issue of the American Journal of Emergency Medicine.

Ricin, a lectin from the castor bean plant Ricinus communis is considered one of the most potent plant toxins. Ricin poisoning can cause severe tissue damage and inflammation and can result in death. Most accidental exposures occur by ingestion of the seeds of castor beans whereby the toxin is released after the seed coat is damaged. The ingested toxin causes severe gastrointestinal damage with symptoms and death due to multiorgan failure or cardiovascular collapse.

While older large series of patients with hepatic granulomas have found sarcoidosis and tuberculosis to be the most common causes of hepatic granulomas, recent works have noted some patients with chronic hepatic C and hepatic granulomas and no other obvious associations. Today, patients that undergo liver biopsy often have chronic hepatitis C that is being staged prior to possible anti viral therapy. The age of HIV and immunosuppression for organ transplants has also made opportunistic infections associated with hepatic granulomas more likely.

Severe acute pancreatitis (SAP) remains a lethal disease. It is defined as an inflammatory process of the pancreas with possible peripancreatic tissue and multi-organ involvement inducing multi-organ dysfunction syndrome (MODS) with an increased mortality rate. Protease inhibitors are widely applied to treat acute pancreatitis in Japan, but the protease inhibitors used to treat acute necrotizing pancreatitis cannot easily reach the pancreas when administered intravenously, and, because of ischemia or impaired microcirculation, they hardly penetrate into pancreatic tissue.

Chronic gastrointestinal symptoms are highly prevalent in different geographic populations and cause various gastrointestinal symptoms that greatly inconvenience the lives of those affected. Examples include GERD, uninvestigated dyspepsia, irritable bowel syndrome, and chronic constipation. These problems have an impact on the individual's quality of life. There is a lack of community-based research evaluating the impact of chronic gastrointestinal symptoms on the quality of life.

Evaluation of chronic abdominal pain of luminal etiology is a challenging problem for the primary care physicians and gastroenterologists. The exact localization of lesion to either small or large bowel remains an elusive identity in many subjects. In tropical countries, where most of the population is of low socioeconomic status, one needs an imaging modality which screens small and large bowel lesions simultaneously at a reasonable cost with good sensitivity and specificity.

New research in an animal model suggests that a diet high in inorganic phosphates, which are found in a variety of processed foods including meats, cheeses, beverages, and bakery products, might speed growth of lung cancer tumors and may even contribute to the development of those tumors in individuals predisposed to the disease.

Some patients with severe asthma who also have allergic sensitivity to certain fungi enjoy great improvements in their quality of life and on other measures after taking an antifungal drug, according to new research from The University of Manchester in England.

The findings were reported in the first issue for January of the American Thoracic Society's American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

Critically ill patients frequently have uncertain prognoses, but their families overwhelmingly wish that physicians would address prognostic uncertainty candidly, according to a new study out of the University of San Francisco Medical Center.

Adult Cystic Fibrosis patients can provide important information that helps to predict their prognosis, according to research that asked 223 adult CF patients to assess their own health and well-being.

"We wished to see whether patients themselves had clinically relevant insight to their disease, and we found that they did," said lead author of the study, Janice Abbott, Ph.D., of the University of Central Lancashire in England.

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 29, 2008 ­- For the first time, researchers have established a clear link between family rejection of lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) adolescents and negative health outcomes in early adulthood. The findings will be published in the January issue of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, in a peer-reviewed article entitled "Family Rejection as a Predictor of Negative Health Outcomes in White and Latino Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Young Adults."

The worldwide financial crisis puts a new emphasis on infrastructure spending, seen by many governments as a way to head off economic downturn, and as a way of holding on to achievements made in the developing world. Recent research by the Economic and Social Research Council finds that Project Finance (PF), one of the most commonly used methods of funding major infrastructure projects in the developing world, can pose potential risks in the communities in which it is deployed.