DISCOVERED: A new dangerous Malaria-transmitting mosquito in Africa.

Nairobi — Scientists from Kenya and the United Kingdom have discovered a new potentially dangerous malaria-transmitting mosquito, which they say does not behave like other mosquitoes. The mosquito, known only as Type A, was found in western Kenya and has biting patterns that the researchers say will make it harder to control than the commonly known Anopheles mosquitoes. Anopheles mosquitoes rest and feed on humans at night indoors while this newly identified mosquito bites people outdoors earlier in the evening, soon after sunset. Lead author Jennifer Stevenson, research fellow at the UK's London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), said: "80 per cent of the 'unidentified species' were caught outdoors, and of those, 70 per cent were caught before 10.30pm." She told SciDev.Net that the new mosquito had subtle differences in its physical appearance to the known mosquitoes in the area, and that the researchers had been finding it difficult to definitively identify it. The mosquito has differences in its DNA compared with Anopheles and the researchers have sent samples of the new species to the University of Notre Dame in the United States for detailed DNA analysis. The researchers are now calling for increased surveillance of the mosquitoes to detect any change in their behaviour that might affect malaria control, as well as a focus on integrating a wider range of malaria control tools to deal with the threat of outdoor transmission. "We still advocate universal access to and useof treated bednets. However, our study and others from East and West Africa have shown that some malaria-transmitting mosquitoes are resting or feeding outdoors. So, if outdoor transmission is shown to be of significance, it may be advisable to use a mix of interventions," said Stevenson. Willis Akhwale, head of the department of disease prevention and control in Kenya's Ministry of Public Health, said the mosquito could complicate the fight against malaria in Kenya and Sub-Saharan Africa. "The new species, coupled with recent findings which show the ordinary mosquito is also changing its feeding patterns and preferring an earlier meal before people go to bed, may require new control tools," said Akhwale. Jo Lines, reader in malaria control and vector biology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and former coordinator for the WHO's Global Malaria Programme, said: "These findings remind us that the basic biology of malaria transmission is subtle and complex and thereare still plenty of gaps in our knowledge and local variations that we do not understand". The research was published in Emerging Infectious Diseases on 27 August . *. This article has been produced by SciDev.Net's Sub-Saharan Africa desk.

Women: giving up smoking early can extend life

Women smokers who quit before the age of 30, can recover and avoid almost all of the increased risk of dying, according to the largest-ever study of the hazards of smoking. The study which looks at benefits of stopping for women has shown that female smokers lose at least ten years of lifespan, but that stopping before the age of 40, and preferably well before the age of 40, avoids more than 90% of the increased risk of dying caused by continuing to smoke, while stopping before the age of 30 avoids over 97% of it. The research, based on results from the Million Women Study, is published online first in The Lancet to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Sir Richard Doll, one of the first people to identify the link between lung cancer and smoking. For the study, 1.3 million women were recruited between 1996 and 2001, at ages 50 to 65 years. Participants completed a questionnaire about lifestyle, medical and social factors and were resurveyed by post three years later. The National Health Service in the United Kingdom (UK) notified the researchers when any participant died, also providing them with a cause of death. Women were traced for an average of twelve years from the time they first joined; thus far, 66,000 study participants died. Initially, 20 percent of the study participants were smokers, 28 percent were ex-smokers, and 52 percent had never smoked. Those who were still smokers at the 3-year resurvey were nearly three (2.97) times as likely as non-smokers to die over the next nine years, even though some reduced their risk by stopping smoking during this period. This threefold death rate ratio means that two-thirds of all deaths of smokers in their 50s, 60s, and 70s are caused by smoking, as most of the difference between smokers and non-smokers came from smoking-related diseases such as lung cancer, chronic lung disease, heart disease, or stroke. The risks among smokers increased steeply with the amount smoked, although even for those who were light smokers (between one and nine cigarettes per day) at the start of the study, mortality rates were double those for non-smokers. The key finding is that both the hazards of smoking and, correspondingly, the benefits of stopping are bigger than previous studies have suggested; smokers who stopped around age 30 avoided 97 percent of their excess risk of premature death, and although serious excess hazards remained for decades among those who smoked until age 40 before stopping, the excess hazards among those who continued smoking after age 40 were ten times bigger. “If women smoke like men, they die like men – but, whether they are men or women, smokers who stop before reaching middle age will on average gain about an extra ten years of life,” said Professor Sir Richard Peto, at the University of Oxford, who co-authored the study. “Both in the UK and in the USA, women born around 1940 were the first generation in which many smoked substantial numbers of cigarettes throughout adult life. Hence, only in the 21st century could we observe directly the full effects of prolonged smoking, and of prolonged cessation, on premature mortality among women,” he added. Writing in a linked comment, Professor Rachel Huxley, at the University of Minnesota, USA, adds: “That we had to wait until the 21st century to observe the full consequences in women of a habit that was already widespread in the mid-20th century, when tobacco smoking pervaded much of the developed world, might seem paradoxical. “But this is because, in most of Europe and the USA, the popularity of smoking among young women reached its peak in the 1960s, decades later than for men. Hence, previous studies have underestimated the full eventual impact of smoking on mortality in women, simply because of the lengthy time lag between smoking uptake by young women and disease onset in middle and old age.” Source: The Lancet

HEALTHY LIVING: Brain Scans Help Decode Sleepers' Dreams

HEALTHY LIVING: Brain Scans Help Decode Sleepers' Dreams: Scientists from Japan reported at a conference last week how brain scans helped them decode the visual content of volunteers' dreams as they...

Brain Scans Help Decode Sleepers' Dreams

Scientists from Japan reported at a conference last week how brain scans helped them decode the visual content of volunteers' dreams as they slept. They suggest their findings support the idea that dreaming and perception share the same brain circuits. Study leader Yukiyasu Kamitani of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, and colleagues, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of three male volunteers as they slept, while also recording electroencephalograms (EEG) of their brain waves. They presented their findings at Neuroscience 2012 in New Orleans on Sunday 14 October. Dreaming Research: Dreaming is a subjective experience that is often accompanied by visual content. However, little if anything is known about the brain circuits involved. Previous studies have tried to link physiological states with dreaming, but have not been able to show links between specific visual contents of dreams and patterns of brain activity. (Nevertheless, there have been some remarkable discoveries, such as that of the German scientists who reported in the July 2012 online issue of SLEEP , how they compared brain scans taken during "lucid dream" episodes, to brain scans taken during normal dream states, and found which centers of the brain become active when we are aware of ourselves, the so-called state of "metaconsciousness". Neural Decoding: Kamitani and colleagues decided to see if they could use a new technique called neural decoding, which infers specific contents of visual experience from patterns of brain activity . For example, the method shows how particular brain activity patterns are tied to the recognition of specific objects. They wondered if it might be possible to use it to look at brain activity during sleep, and thereby decode the visual content of dreams. Thus using fMRI and EEG, they took brain scans and recorded brain waves of the three men as they slept. They woke the men up when their EEGs showed a particular pattern, and asked them to freely describe their visual experiences just before awakening, and then asked them to go back to sleep. On some occasions it meant waking them up ten times per hour. Each volunteer reported having visual dreams just before waking six or seven times per hour. The researchers repeated the procedure until they collected over 200 dream reports over a total of 30 to 45 hours of experiment time for each volunteer. The experiment took several days for each participant. Most of the volunteers described dreaming about everyday things, but some dreams were more unusual, for example one described being in conversation with a famous actor. The researchers looked for keywords that appeared frequently in the content of the volunteers' dream reports and arrived at 20 categories, including words like "female", "male", "car", and "computer". Then, using photographs to represent each category, they scanned the volunteers' brains again as they looked at the images, and compared them with those taken just before the participants were woken up during the dream experiments. They analyzed activity in several brain areas, including V1, V2 and V3, which play a role in the early stage of visual processing, such as encoding basic characteristics like contrast and orientation. They also analyzed activity in areas involved in higher order visual processing (around LOC,FFA, and PPA), which are important for object recognition. Predicting Dream Content: When they analyzed their results, the researchers found the decoding performance was "significantly higher than chance level in the higher visual areas" . "We built a model to predict whether each category of content was present in the dreams," says Kamitani, in a report on the study by Nature News. "By analysing the brain activity during the nine seconds before we woke the subjects, we could predict whether a man is in the dream or not, for instance, with an accuracy of 75 - 80% ," he adds. He and his colleagues conclude their study shows that: "... fMRI signals in the visual cortex, especially in the higher visual areas, represent specific visual contents of dreams, allowing for the prediction of dream contents. Furthermore, it supports the hypothesis that dreaming and perception may share neural representations in the higher visual areas." The team now plans to do the same kind of experiment with rapid eye movement ( REM ) sleep, which also involves dreaming. They suggest knowing more about the content of dreaming will help us work out what it is for. Written by Catharine Paddock PhD

Scientists from Japan reported at a conference last week how brain scans helped them decode the visual content of volunteers' dreams as they slept. They suggest their findings support the idea that dreaming and perception share the same brain circuits. Study leader Yukiyasu Kamitani of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, and colleagues, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of three male volunteers as they slept, while also recording electroencephalograms (EEG) of their brain waves. They presented their findings at Neuroscience 2012 in New Orleans on Sunday 14 October. Dreaming Research: Dreaming is a subjective experience that is often accompanied by visual content. However, little if anything is known about the brain circuits involved. Previous studies have tried to link physiological states with dreaming, but have not been able to show links between specific visual contents of dreams and patterns of brain activity. (Nevertheless, there have been some remarkable discoveries, such as that of the German scientists who reported in the July 2012 online issue of SLEEP , how they compared brain scans taken during "lucid dream" episodes, to brain scans taken during normal dream states, and found which centers of the brain become active when we are aware of ourselves, the so-called state of "metaconsciousness". Neural Decoding: Kamitani and colleagues decided to see if they could use a new technique called neural decoding, which infers specific contents of visual experience from patterns of brain activity . For example, the method shows how particular brain activity patterns are tied to the recognition of specific objects. They wondered if it might be possible to use it to look at brain activity during sleep, and thereby decode the visual content of dreams. Thus using fMRI and EEG, they took brain scans and recorded brain waves of the three men as they slept. They woke the men up when their EEGs showed a particular pattern, and asked them to freely describe their visual experiences just before awakening, and then asked them to go back to sleep. On some occasions it meant waking them up ten times per hour. Each volunteer reported having visual dreams just before waking six or seven times per hour. The researchers repeated the procedure until they collected over 200 dream reports over a total of 30 to 45 hours of experiment time for each volunteer. The experiment took several days for each participant. Most of the volunteers described dreaming about everyday things, but some dreams were more unusual, for example one described being in conversation with a famous actor. The researchers looked for keywords that appeared frequently in the content of the volunteers' dream reports and arrived at 20 categories, including words like "female", "male", "car", and "computer". Then, using photographs to represent each category, they scanned the volunteers' brains again as they looked at the images, and compared them with those taken just before the participants were woken up during the dream experiments. They analyzed activity in several brain areas, including V1, V2 and V3, which play a role in the early stage of visual processing, such as encoding basic characteristics like contrast and orientation. They also analyzed activity in areas involved in higher order visual processing (around LOC,FFA, and PPA), which are important for object recognition. Predicting Dream Content: When they analyzed their results, the researchers found the decoding performance was "significantly higher than chance level in the higher visual areas" . "We built a model to predict whether each category of content was present in the dreams," says Kamitani, in a report on the study by Nature News. "By analysing the brain activity during the nine seconds before we woke the subjects, we could predict whether a man is in the dream or not, for instance, with an accuracy of 75 - 80% ," he adds. He and his colleagues conclude their study shows that: "... fMRI signals in the visual cortex, especially in the higher visual areas, represent specific visual contents of dreams, allowing for the prediction of dream contents. Furthermore, it supports the hypothesis that dreaming and perception may share neural representations in the higher visual areas." The team now plans to do the same kind of experiment with rapid eye movement ( REM ) sleep, which also involves dreaming. They suggest knowing more about the content of dreaming will help us work out what it is for. Written by Catharine Paddock PhD

HEALTHY LIVING: Exotic African Fruit Extract Melts Away Pounds, In...

HEALTHY LIVING: Exotic African Fruit Extract Melts Away Pounds, In...: An exotic super fruit called 'African Mango' is quickly becoming America's hottest new way to lose weight. And much to the chagrin of the na...

Exotic African Fruit Extract Melts Away Pounds, Inches — And Weight Loss Isn't the Best Part, Say Doctors.

An exotic super fruit called 'African Mango' is quickly becoming America's hottest new way to lose weight. And much to the chagrin of the nation's $40 billion-dollar diet industry, which sells outrageously expensive surgical procedures and drugs that have done little, if anything , to trim America's ever-growing collective waistline. Indeed, interest in the use of African Mango extract ( irvingia gabonensis ) as a safe, effective and inexpensive weight loss alternative surged after Dr. Mehmet Oz called it, mentioning no specific brand, a "breakthrough supplement" and a "miracle in your medicine cabinet" on his Emmy Award-winning The Dr. Oz Show, which aired on September 13, 2010. 3 Similarly, one of the show's leading medical contributors, Dr. Tanya Edwards, M.D. , called African Mango extract, mentioning no specific brand, a "miracle pill" after it helped her lose 7 pounds in less than a month without making any changes to her diet or exercise routine. According to a recent study published in the scientific journal Lipids in Health and Disease , men and women supplementing with African Mango extract for just 28 days lost an astonishing 3,990% more weight than those taking a placebo (8.9 lbs vs. 0.22 lbs). 1 Beyond the weight loss, the volunteers taking African Mango extract 30 minutes before meals lost a stunning average of 2.4 inches from their waistlines as well as 1.8 inches from their hips — and the reduction in pounds and inches isn't even African Mango's greatest benefit, according to researchers. Of more significance is the marked improvement in multiple measures of overall health, say the study's authors. Findings show that in volunteers supplementing with the super fruit extract, their bad LDL cholesterol, triglyceride, and glucose levels all plummeted — suggesting that, unlike many diet pills on the market, African Mango actually improves your health while promoting safe weight loss. What Is African Mango, and How Does It Work? Read more on: http://www.healthdiscoveriesmag.com

HEALTHY LIVING: Mistakes are still commonly made in prescriptions ...

HEALTHY LIVING: Mistakes are still commonly made in prescriptions ...: Findings among the research featured at first IDWeek conference. ...

HEALTHY LIVING: MENOPAUSE: Latest findings.

HEALTHY LIVING: MENOPAUSE: Latest findings.: Menopause Basics What Is Menopause? Menopause is a normal condition that all women experience as they age. The...

MENOPAUSE: Latest findings.

Menopause Basics What Is Menopause? Menopause is a normal condition that all women experience as they age. The term"menopause" is commonly used to describe any of the changes a woman experiences either just before or after she stops menstruating, marking the end of her reproductive period. What Causes Menopause? A woman is born with a finite number of eggs , which are stored in the ovaries. The ovaries also produce the hormones estrogen and progesterone, which regulate menstruation and ovulation. Menopause occurs when the ovaries no longer release anegg every month and menstruation stops. Menopause, when it occurs after the age of 40, is considered a normal part of aging. But some women can experience menopause early, either as a result of surgery, such as hysterectomy, or damage to the ovaries, such as from chemotherapy . Menopause that occurs before the age of 40, regardless of thecause, is called premature menopause. How Does Natural Menopause Occur? Natural menopause is the permanent ending of menstruation that is not brought on by any type of medical or surgical treatment. For women undergoing natural menopause, the process is gradual and is described in three stages: Perimenopause . Perimenopause typically begins several years before menopause, when the ovaries gradually produce less estrogen. Perimenopause lasts up until menopause, the point when the ovaries stop releasing eggs. In the last one to two years ofperimenopause, the decrease in estrogen accelerates. At this stage, many women experience menopause symptoms (see below). Menopause. Menopause is the point when it's been a year since a woman last had her last menstrual period. At this stage, the ovaries have stopped releasing eggs and producing most of their estrogen. Postmenopause. These are the years after menopause. During this stage, menopausal symptoms, such as hot flashes , ease for mostwomen. However, health risks related to the loss of estrogen increase as the woman ages. What Conditions Cause Premature Menopause? Premature menopause can be the result of genetics, autoimmune disorders, or medical procedures. Other conditions that may cause early menopause include: Premature ovarian failure. Normally, the ovaries produce both estrogen and progesterone. Changes in the levels of these two hormones occur when the ovaries, for unknown reasons, prematurely stop releasing eggs. When this happens before theage of 40, it is considered to be premature ovarian failure. Unlike premature menopause,premature ovarian failure is not always permanent. Induced menopause. "Induced" menopause occurs when the ovaries are surgically removed for medical reasons, such as uterinecancer or endometriosis. Induced menopause can also result from damage to the ovaries caused by radiation or chemotherapy. What are the symptoms of Menopause? Read on: http://www.webmd.com/menopause/default.htm

Mistakes are still commonly made in prescriptions of antiretroviral medications

Findings among the research featured at first IDWeek conference. Research presented at IDWeek 2012- concludes that despite advances in electronic medical records, mistakes are still commonly made in the prescription of antiretroviral medications for hospitalized HIV-positive patients. At the same time, a trio of studies suggests however, that electronic records in combination with increased clinical education can help to greatly decrease medical errors. The three studies are among the significant research being discussed at the inaugural IDWeek meeting, taking place through Sunday October 21 in San Diego. With the theme Advancing Science, Improving Care, IDWeek will feature the latest science and bench-to-bedside approaches in prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and epidemiology of infectious diseases, including HIV, across the lifespan. More than 1,500 abstracts from national and international scientists will be highlighted over five days. "Treatment of HIV infection is complex, involving the administration of multiple drugsthat often have the potential for major interactions," noted Joel E. Gallant, MD, IDWeekchair for the HIV Medicine Association."Hospitalized patients are at risk for serious medication errors, especially when drugs are added or changed by physicians without HIV expertise. These studies emphasize the critical importance of electronic medical records and early expert consultation in hospitalized HIV-infected patients to prevent dangerous and costly medication errors." Antiretroviral therapy, or HAART, combines three to four powerful drugs to prevent HIV resistance. These drugs can cause toxicity and serious side effects and improper administration can also lead to decreased efficacy . Two studies featured at IDWeek describe the challenges that hospitals face in ensuring that patients infected with HIV are not put at risk of treatment failure or drug toxicity through dosage, timing and/or other errors with these medications. In one study, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic looked retrospectively at the charts for 162 admissions of HIV patients over a 10-month period in 2011. The rate of prescription errors in their HAART regimens was 50 percent, and two-thirds of those mistakes were not identified and resolved before the patients were discharged. Lead researcher Elizabeth Neuner, PharmD, aninfectious disease clinical pharmacist at the clinic, points to the changing nature of HIV care as one explanation. Many hospital physicians are less familiar with HAART regimens because so much HIV care is now administered in outpatient settings, she said. "The number and complexity of medications used to treat HIV and an unfamiliarity with seeing patients with these medications can lead to errors," Neuner said. Since the study, the Cleveland Clinic has implemented numerous quality improvement measures, including increased education about potential drug interactions with antiretroviral medications and greater coordination of care between inpatient and outpatient settings. The clinic also added dosing and frequency alerts to its electronic medical records system. Similar error rates were seen over an 18-month period by the University of ChicagoMedical Center. Researchers in this second study reviewed 155 HAART regimens, which had been evaluated within 24 hours of the patients' admission. Nearly half of the initial hospital-prescribed HAART regimens requiredintervention, most typically so that dosages could be modified. Read more on: http://www.news-medical.net/news/20121020/Mistakes-are-still-commonly-made-in-prescriptions-of-antiretroviral-medications.aspx