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Food safety act calls for inspections on produce farms

Legislation introduced by Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin (D-IA) would establish a national program to assure the safety of fresh produce.

20 Sep 2007

FDA expands use of influenza vaccine FluMist

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved expanding the population for use of the nasal influenza vaccine FluMist to include children between the ages of 2 and 5.

20 Sep 2007

Public health response to the poisoning of Mr Alexander Litvinenko

The poisoning of Mr Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium-210 in London in November 2006 had political consequences internationally and presented the Health Protection Agency with some unique public health challenges. Professor Pat Troop, Chief Executive of the Agency, will open a session on the response to the incident at the HPA conference at Warwick University today and give a keynote address on how it was handled.

20 Sep 2007

Cases of invasive pneumococcal disease in children reduced

The number of cases of invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD) in children has fallen since the introduction of a new vaccine a year ago. Enhanced surveillance by the UK's Health Protection Agency has shown that cases of IPD caused by the seven major types of the pneumococcus bacteria which the new pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV) protects against have gone down by almost 50%.

20 Sep 2007

Modelling data reveals cost effectiveness of HPV vaccine

New modelling research presented at the Health Protection Agency's annual conference will show that up to 70% of cases of cervical cancer and 95% of cases of genital warts in men and women could be prevented by the introduction of human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccination into the UK 's national immunisation programme. This is in addition to the cancer cases already prevented by the NHS cervical screening programme.

20 Sep 2007

10% of women infected with human papillomavirus by age 16

A new study by the Health protection Agency estimates at least 10% of young women in England have been infected with one or more strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV) by the age of 16. The study will be discussed on the last day of the Health Protection Agency annual conference in Warwick.

20 Sep 2007

Heat shock proteins are co-opted for cancer

A Jekyll-Hyde mechanism that both protects healthy cells and enables cancer cells could be the basis for new cancer-fighting drugs.

20 Sep 2007

Some cancer cells mimic stem cells to evade chemotherapy

Anti-cancer treatments often effectively shrink the size of tumors, but some might have an opposite effect, actually expanding the small population of cancer stem cells believed to drive the disease, according to findings presented in Atlanta, Georgia at the American Association for Cancer Research's second International Conference on Molecular Diagnostics in Cancer Therapeutic Development.

20 Sep 2007

Nerve growth factor positively related with liver cancer - potential therapy target

Nerve growth factor (NGF), as the name says, is an essential peptide factor for the growth and differentiation of neuronal cells.

20 Sep 2007

Study looks at mitochondrial variation in sperm traits and sperm competitive ability

University of Nevada, Reno researchers Jeanne and David Zeh of the Department of Biology have received a five-year, $650,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate the effects of natural mitochondrial variation on sperm traits and sperm competitive ability.

20 Sep 2007

Testes offer a promising new source of stem cells

After a decade of research, Howard Hughes Medical Institute scientists have succeeded in reprogramming adult stem cells from the testes of male mice into functional blood vessels and contractile cardiac tissue.

20 Sep 2007

Hydrogen sulfide limits severe heart attack damage

Administering hydrogen sulfide (H2S) directly into the heart during a simulated heart attack significantly reduces the tissue and cell damage often seen in oxygen-starved organs, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham

20 Sep 2007

Selective attention increases both gain and feature selectivity of the human auditory cortex

On Sept. 19, a research report by Helsinki University of Technology, Laboratory of Computational Engineering scientists will appear in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE, showing that selective attention increases both gain and feature selectivity of the human auditory cortex.

20 Sep 2007

Secondhand smoke exposure could interfere with academic test performance

Teens exposed to secondhand smoke at home are at increased risk of test failure in school, suggests a new study in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

20 Sep 2007

Discovery of cause of Job's syndrome

The rare immunodeficiency disorder known as Job's syndrome is caused by a specific genetic mutation that both overstimulates and understimulates the human immune system, leading to harmful bacterial and fungal infections and the physical features characteristic of the syndrome, according to two independent groups of scientists, one from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the other from the Tokyo Medical and Dental University.

20 Sep 2007

Researchers provide genetic associations from a genome-wide scan for cardiovascular disease traits

Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM), Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH), and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), have completed analyses of a genome-wide scan on a group of two generations of participants from the landmark Framingham Heart Study (FHS).

20 Sep 2007

Repeat steroids to premature infants linked to cerebral palsy

Repeated courses of a drug that is used to improve the survival of unborn premature babies also may increase the risk of cerebral palsy in those children, according to results from a multi-center study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and led by Ronald Wapner, M.D., professor of obstetrics and gynecology, Columbia University Medical Center and attending obstetrician and gynecologist at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia.

20 Sep 2007