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Viruses designed to target and kill cancer cells could boost the effectiveness of chemotherapy to the arms and legs and help avoid amputation, a new study reports.

Scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, tested the effectiveness of a genetically engineered version of the virus used to vaccinate against smallpox.

They found use of the virus alongside isolated limb perfusion chemotherapy – given directly to blood vessels supplying the affected arm or leg as an alternative to amputation – was more effective in rats than either treatment on its own.

Lacrosse is one of the fastest-growing high school sports in the United States, with more than 170,000 students now playing the sometimes hard-hitting game. The growing participation numbers, however, mean that more young people than ever are at risk of injury in lacrosse practice and competition.

"Detecting biological risk factors on this scale shows that schizophrenia can be tackled by the same approaches that have already transformed outcomes for people with other diseases.

"We now believe they can also do so for schizophrenia which has, until now, been so poorly understood," he added.

Schizophrenia is a debilitating psychiatric disorder that affects more than 24M people worldwide.

A major new analysis from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013 published in The Lancet, shows that accelerated progress against the global burden of HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis (TB) has been made since 2000 when governments worldwide adopted Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 6 to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and TB.

Across the world, in high- and low-income countries, women, men, and transgender people who sell sex are subjected to repressive and discriminatory law, policy, and practice, which in turn fuel human rights violations against them, including violence and discrimination. All of these factors are preventing sex workers from accessing the services which they need in order to effectively prevent and treat HIV infection, according to a major new Series on HIV and sex workers, published in The Lancet.

BATON ROUGE – LSU's Mark Batzer, Boyd Professor and Dr. Mary Lou Applewhite Distinguished Professor in Department of Biological Sciences in the College of Science, contributed to an article in the scientific journal Nature Genetics, titled "The Common Marmoset Genome Provides Insight into Primate Biology and Evolution," published on July 20.

Batzer contributed analysis of "jumping genes," or mobile elements that move by a sort of "copy and paste" mechanism in the genome. The marmoset is important because it is the first "New World" monkey genome to be sequenced.

Eating probiotics regularly may modestly improve your blood pressure, according to new research in the American Heart Association journal Hypertension.

Probiotics are live microorganisms (naturally occurring bacteria in the gut) thought to have beneficial effects; common sources are yogurt or dietary supplements.

WHAT:

Scientists have generally believed that HIV and its monkey equivalent, SIV, gain a permanent foothold in the body very early after infection, making it difficult to completely eliminate the virus even after antiretroviral therapy has controlled it. Now NIH-supported researchers report that SIV can become entrenched in tissues fewer than 3 days after infection, before the virus is detectable in blood plasma (the liquid part) or blood cells.

The mystery of why mycobacteria—a family that includes the microbe that causes TB—are extraordinarily hardy organisms is being unravelled by University of Otago, New Zealand, research that offers new hope for developing a revolutionary class of antibiotics to tackle TB.

In collaboration with researchers in the US and Germany, Otago microbiologists have teased out the mechanisms by which the aerobic soil microbe Mycobacterium smegmatis is able to persist for extreme lengths of time in the absence, or near-absence, of oxygen.

Scientists from the RIKEN Center for Life Science Technologies in Japan have gained new clues that suggest the existence of a regulatory network that contributes to the irregular proliferation of cells in diseases such as cancers and psoriasis.

In taking that closer look, the researchers noticed that the cell body traces a wobbly, helical trajectory as it moves—a trajectory that looks a bit like the body is traveling though an invisible spiral tube. The spiral was less pronounced when the bacteria go in reverse compared to when they go forward. Using a mathematical model based on "resistive force theory", the researchers show that the thrust produced by the different body motions accounts for the differences in swimming speed. The bacterial body, it turns out, is more than just a docile passenger.

We are told that eating beef is bad for the environment, but do we know its real cost? Are the other animal or animal-derived foods better or worse? New research at the Weizmann Institute of Science, conducted in collaboration with scientists in the US, compared the environmental costs of various foods and came up with some surprisingly clear results.

Today's food production relies heavily on irrigation, but across sub-Saharan Africa only 4 percent of cultivated land is irrigated, compared with a global average of 18 percent. Small-scale farming is the main livelihood for many people in the region, who depend on rainfall to water their crops.

The female condom is one of just two barrier methods that can protect against sexually transmitted infections and unplanned pregnancies, yet many young adults are not aware of the device, a new study by two UT Arlington researchers has found.

They say the reason could lie in the way information about the female condom is communicated to young people.Charla Markham Shaw, associate professor of communication, and Karishma Chatterjee, an assistant professor of communication studies in The

A University of California, San Diego School of Medicine-led study suggests that parents of obese children often do not recognize the potentially serious health consequences of childhood weight gain or the importance of daily physical activity in helping their child reach a healthy weight.

The study is published online in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.