Category: Health

{Research by scientists in the US and UK has estimated that up to 1.65 million childbearing women in Central and South America could become infected by the Zika virus by the end of the first wave of the epidemic.}

Researchers from the WorldPop Project and Flowminder Foundation at the University of Southampton and colleagues from the University of Notre Dame and University of Oxford have also found that across Latin America and the Caribbean over 90 million infections could result from the initial stages of the spread of Zika.

The team’s projections, detailed in the paper Model-based projections of Zika virus infections in childbearing women in the Americas and published in Nature Microbiology, also show that Brazil is expected to have the largest total number of infections (by more than three-fold), due to its size and suitability for transmission.

The estimates reflect the sum of thousands of localised projections of how many people could become infected within every five x five km grid cell across Central and South America. Because the virus may not reach each corner of this region, or may do so slowly, the total figure of 1.65 million represents an upper limit estimate for the first wave of the epidemic.

Geographer at the University of Southampton and WorldPop and Flowminder Director Professor Andrew Tatem comments: “It is difficult to accurately predict how many child-bearing women may be at risk from Zika because a large proportion of cases show no symptoms. This largely invalidates methods based on case data and presents a formidable challenge for scientists trying to understand the likely impact of the disease on populations.”

In fact, an estimated 80 per cent of Zika infections don’t show symptoms and of those which do, some may be due to other viruses. Coupled with inconsistent case reporting and variable access to health care for different populations, these factors make case based data unreliable.

However, this latest research has built a picture of the projected spread of the disease by examining its likely impact at very local levels -at a scale of five kilometres squared. The researchers have brought this local data together to model infection rates across the region.

The team took into account disease patterns displayed in similar epidemics, along with other factors such as how the virus is transmitted (in this instance by mosquito), climate conditions and virus incubation periods. They also examined transmission behaviour in dengue and chikungunya viruses. Their projections for Zika are largely consistent with annual, region-wide estimates of 53 million infections by the dengue virus (2010), which has many similarities to Zika.

Coupled with existing data on population, fertility, pregnancies, births and socio-economic conditions for the region, the team has been able to model the possible scale of the projected spread of the Zika virus and provide a detailed understanding of the places likely to be most affected — helping to inform which areas will need the most support in combatting the disease and helping sufferers.

Professor Tatem adds: “These projections are an important early contribution to global efforts to understand the scale of the Zika epidemic, and provide information about its possible magnitude to help allow for better planning for surveillance and outbreak response, both internationally and locally.”

Scientists are still investigating the potential link between microcephaly in babies and Zika.

{Bad breath is one of the most embarrassing things one can experience, and by that, I mean both as the one suffering the condition, and the one on the receiving end of it— no matter the part of the divide you fall in, it just can’t be good.
}

Bad breath is caused by bacteria that have built up in the mouth over time. So to get rid of it, you need something that can work from the inside. A gum or minty candy can come in handy, but they’ll not get rid of it completely. If you want to get free from bad breath, you need the following…

{{1. LEMON}}

Like most citrus fruits, lemons are acidic in nature. They prevent the growth of most bacteria. Now, to use lemon against bad breath, add a teaspoon of it to a cup of water, add a pinch of salt, and gargle this mixture before bed every night.

{{2. BAKING SODA}}

As the name implies, this substance is mostly used for baking, but that’s not all it does, it can also help fight bacteria that cause bad breath. All you need do is, mix a teaspoon of baking soda in warm water, and gargle the mixture. Do it twice a day for maximum effect.

{{3. TEA}}

Not the regular tea, I mean black, green or herbal teas.They are great for banishing mouth odour. Simply drinking green tea 3 times a day can cure your bad breath.

{{4. APPLE CIDER VINEGAR}}

Apple cider vinegar has antiseptic properties, and they’re strong in fighting bad breath. Simply mix a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar with a cup of water and drink every day after meals. If you do that consistently, your bad breath should disappear within a few weeks.

{Treating diabetes early can help prevent serious complications. It’s important you listen to your body and see your doctor if you notice these signs.}

Below are 8 warning signs of diabetes

1. Frequent urination is the most common sign of diabetes. Frequent urination occurs because the excess sugar the kidneys are unable to absorb must be urinated.

2. Increased thirst even at night is another warning sign of diabetes.The increased thirst is usually the body’s response to the frequent urination.

3. Feeling weak and tired is another warning sign of diabetes. You find yourself feeling too weak to do the things you used to do with ease before.

4. Increased hunger especially after eating is another warning sign of diabetes. When you have diabetes, the body loses its ability to self-regulate blood sugar leading to fluctuations in blood sugar levels.The fluctuation makes the brain think you are starving and crave for more food.

5. Blurred vision is another warning sign of diabetes.

6. Unexplained weight loss is another common warning sign of diabetes.

7. Itchy or dry skin is another warning sign of diabetes.This occurs as a result of the body losing excess fluid due to frequent urination.

8. Wounds or cuts that take time to heal could signal diabetes. Diabetes stop wounds or cuts from healing on time because diabetes damage the arteries and veins, thereby restricting circulation.

{The first in vivo evidence that strains of chimpanzee-carried simian immunodeficiency viruses can infect human cells has been reported by a team of scientists.}

No one knows exactly how it happened. It may have entered through a cut or bite wound, the blood of a chimpanzee seeping into an exposed fingertip or forearm or foot.

But in the early 1900s, probably near a West African rainforest, it’s thought that a hunter or vendor of bush meat — wild game that can include primates — acquired the first strain of a simian immunodeficiency virus that virologists consider the ancestor of HIV.

A new study led by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has supported this hypothesis by reporting the first in vivo evidence that strains of chimpanzee-carried SIVs can infect human cells. They include the SIV ancestor of HIV-1 M — the strain responsible for the global HIV pandemic — and another ancestral strain of HIV found only among residents of Cameroon.

Yet the researchers further discovered that the SIV ancestors of two HIV strains not identified in humans also managed to invade human cells after multiple exposures in the lab.

“The question was whether SIV strains that have not been found in humans have the potential to cause another HIV-like infection,” said senior author Qingsheng Li, associate professor of biological sciences and member of the Nebraska Center for Virology. “The answer is that, actually, they do. They get replicated at a very high level. It’s surprising.”

Li and his colleagues came to the conclusions after inoculating mice that were implanted with human tissues and stem cells, which stimulated the growth of other cells essential to the human immune system. To explore why humans have acquired certain HIV strains while avoiding others, the team injected low doses of the four SIV strains into separate groups of the mice.

The authors found that the inferred SIV forerunners of HIV-1 M and the Cameroon-specific strain required fewer opportunities to infect the mice than did the two SIV strains whose HIV descendants have not been found in humans.

According to Li, this may stem from the fact that the genetic makeup of the latter two strains differs more from HIV-1 M than does the Cameroon strain, which shares more genes with its pandemic cousin.

“Based on our experiments, we clearly see some differences between the strains,” said Li, whose team collaborated with the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research. “That implies that there might be differences in the likelihood of cross-species transmission when a person is exposed to one strain versus another.”The team also found evidence for the long-suspected notion that SIV strains mutate upon entering cells to overcome human-specific barriers to infection. Within 14 weeks, the same viral gene in two different SIV strains — including the ancestor of HIV-1 M — regularly underwent mutations at two key positions on that gene.

Li and lead author Zhe Yuan, a doctoral student in biological sciences, said the recent outbreak of the Zika virus — which remained relatively quiet for decades following its 1947 discovery in a monkey — underscores the value of pre-emptively identifying viruses that can jump from animals to humans.

“The emergence and re-emergence of infectious diseases has become a constant threat to global health, social stability, safety and economic systems,” Li said. “Bill Gates recently said that nuclear war is no longer the (biggest) threat to our safety; emerging infectious diseases are. That’s probably true.”

The experimental approach employed by the team could help assess the threat posed by additional SIVs and numerous other animal-carried viruses, Yuan said. This could prove especially vital given the dynamic nature of HIV and other zoonotic diseases, he said, many of which have caused new epidemics or even pandemics.

“I think this analysis of the disease is very important for public health,” said Yuan, noting that a new group of HIV strains was discovered in 2009. “We want to explore this platform for evaluating new, emerging infectious diseases.”

{According to a study, if you’re not having sex at least a few times a week, your health may be in danger. If you are surprised, you are not alone because I am surprised too.}

According to the study from the National Cancer Institute, men who have sex 21 times or more every month are about 15 per cent less likely to develop prostate cancer when compared to men who have sex just once in a week. Now this is getting serious.

Prostate cancer is the most common form of cancer among men, and it’s also one of the deadliest.

If you are wondering how having regular sex helps protect against prostate cancer, then you should continue reading. When you ejaculate during sex, semen and other fluids that may block or inflame parts of your prostate are cleared.

So what do you think about the study? Do you agree with the study or you think they might be mixing things up?

{Having a broken heart can have serious implications on your heart.}

According to researchers at Mayo Clinic, when your heart gets broken, blood pumping in and out of your heart becomes temporarily disrupted by a surge of stress hormones which are secreted in response to the devastating news.

This life threatening condition is called broken heart syndrome. According to the researchers, this may have you killed.

According to Medical Daily, broken heart syndrome was first discovered by Japanese researchers in 1991.It is characterized by sudden chest pain and shortness of breath and it is often triggered by a tragic event like receiving emotionally difficult news.

Researchers from Minneapolis Heart Institute in a study published in the American Journal of Medicine found that women are more likely to experience the broken heart syndrome.

Dr Scott Sharkey, a research cardiologist at the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation told Yahoo News that the more fragile a person’s health is, the more likely his/her broken heart could worsen his/her medical condition.

So before you break anyone’s heart, always remember they could get killed by experiencing broken heart syndrome.

{Scientists have mathematically modeled the coevolutionary processes that describe how antibodies and viruses interact and adapt to one another over the course of a chronic infection, such as HIV/AIDS.}

{It has remained frustratingly difficult to develop a vaccine for HIV/AIDS, in part because the virus, once in our bodies, rapidly reproduces and evolves to escape being killed by the immune system.}

“The viruses are constantly producing mutants that evade detection,” said Joshua Plotkin, a professor in the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Biology in the School of Arts & Sciences. “A single person with HIV may have millions of strains of the virus circulating in the body.”

Yet the body’s immune system can also evolve. Antibody-secreting B-cells compete among themselves to survive and proliferate depending on how well they bind to foreign invaders. They dynamically produce diverse types of antibodies during the course of an infection.

In a new paper in PLOS Genetics, Plotkin, along with postdoctoral researcher Jakub Otwinowski and Princeton University research scholar Armita Nourmohammad, mathematically modeled these dueling evolutionary processes to understand the conditions that influence how antibodies and viruses interact and adapt to one another over the course of a chronic infection.

Notably, the researchers considered the conditions under which the immune system gives rise to broadly neutralizing antibodies, which can defeat broad swaths of viral strains by targeting the most vital and immutable parts of the viral genome. Their findings, which suggest that presenting the immune system with a large diversity of viral antigens may be the best way to encourage the emergence of such potent antibodies, have implications for designing vaccines against HIV and other chronic infections.

“This isn’t a prescription for how to design an HIV vaccine,” Plotkin said, “but our work provides some quantitative guidance for how to prompt the immune system to elicit broadly neutralizing antibodies.”

The biggest challenge in attempting to model the co-evolution of antibodies and viruses is keeping track of the vast quantity of different genomic sequences that arise in each population during the course of an infection. So the researchers focused on the statistics of the binding interactions between the virus and antibodies.

“This is the key analytical trick to simplify the problem,” said Otwinowski. “It would otherwise be impossible to track and write equations for all the interactions.”

The researchers constructed a model to examine how mutations would affect the binding affinity between antibodies and viruses. Their model calculated the average binding affinities between the entire population of viral strains and the repertoire of antibodies over time to understand how they co-evolve.

“It’s one of the things that is unique about our work,” said Nourmohammad. “We’re not only looking at one virus binding to one antibody but the whole diversity of interactions that occur over the course of a chronic infection.”

What they saw was an S-shaped curve, in which sometimes the immune system appeared to control the infection with high levels of binding, but subsequently a viral mutation would arise that could evade neutralization, and then binding affinities would go down.

“The immune system does well if there is active binding between antibodies and virus,” Plotkin said, “and the virus does well if there is not strong binding.”

Such a signature is indicative of a system that is out of equilibrium where the viruses are responding to the antibodies and vice versa. The researchers note that this signature is likely common to many antagonistically co-evolving populations.

To see how well their model matched with data from an actual infection, the researchers looked at time-shifted experimental data from two HIV patients, in which their antibodies were collected at different time points and then “competed” against the viruses that had been in their bodies at different times during their infections.

They saw that these patient data are consistent with their model: Viruses from earlier time points would be largely neutralized by antibodies collected at later time points but could outcompete antibodies collected earlier in infection.

Finally, the researchers used the model to try to understand the conditions under which broadly neutralizing antibodies, which could defeat most strains of virus, would emerge and rise to prominence.

“Despite the effectiveness of broadly neutralizing antibodies, none of the patients with these antibodies has been cured of HIV,” Plotkin said. “It’s just that by the time they develop them, it’s too late and their T-cell repertoire is depleted. This raises the intriguing idea that, if only they could develop these antibodies earlier in infection, they might be prepared to combat an evolving target.”

“The model that we built,” Nourmohammad said, “was able to show that, if viral diversity is very large, the chance that these broadly neutralizing antibodies outcompete more specifically targeted antibodies and proliferate goes up.”

The finding suggests that, in order for a vaccine to elicit these antibodies, it should present a diverse set of viral antigens to the host. That way no one specialist antibody would have a significant fitness advantage, leaving room for the generalist, broadly neutralizing antibodies to succeed.

The researchers said that there has been little theoretical modeling of co-evolutionary systems such as this one. As such, their work could have implications for other co-evolution scenarios.

“Our theory can also apply to other systems, such as bacteria-phage co-evolution,” said Otwinowski, in which viruses infect bacteria, a process that drives bacterial evolution and ecology.

“It could also shed light on the co-evolution of the influenza virus in the context of evolving global immune systems,” Nourmohammad said.

The work was supported by funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation, James S. McDonnell Foundation, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, U.S. Army Research Office and U.S. Department of the Interior.

{Swiss experts have discovered what you need to do if you want to live long and be cancer free and the secret is eating pomegranates.}

According to the researchers, pomegranates may strengthen ageing muscles and add years to your life.

This is down to chemicals known as ellagitannins which are found in pomegranates.The experts reveal this chemical is found in high levels in pomegranates.

The researchers found that when we eat pomegranate, our gut bacteria converts ellagitannins found in pomegranates into a compound called urolithin A. Lab studies have shown that urolithin A can help us live longer.

Pomegranate has also been found to fight cancer by blocking the growth of cancer cells. This is according to University of California study in 2006.