Wired News - Late Shift Work Linked to Cancer

Wired News - AP News

Linked because I like the improbable, but simple, hypothesis:

"Back then, [Richard Stevens] was trying to figure out why breast cancer incidence suddenly shot up starting in the 1930s in industrialized societies, where nighttime work was considered a hallmark of progress. Most scientists were bewildered by his proposal."

Richard Stevens is a cancer epidemiologist, which is interesting in its own right. He is a professor at the University of Connecticut Health Center.

Apparently, this is old news. From his bio:

"He proposed in 1987 a radical new theory that use of electric lighting, resulting in lighted nights, might produce "circadian disruption" causing changes in the hormones relevant to breast cancer risk. Accumulating evidence has generally supported the idea, and it has received wide scientific and public attention. For example, his work has been featured on the covers of the popular weekly Science News (October 17, 1998) and the scientific journal Cancer Research (July 15, 1996)."

Government H5N1 Sites

CDC and government sites concerning H5N1:

• background on the disease (CDC)


• Monitoring current outbreaks (CDC)


• PandemicFlu.gov: "One-stop ... U.S. Gov. avian and pandemic flu information." (Dept. of Health and Human Services)

The map at bottom left of the Pandemic Flu site provides links to

• state pandemic planning info


• state pandemic web site info


• local state contacts

Technology Review: Liver Models Go to Market

Technology Review: Liver Models Go to Market:

'Only one of every ten compounds tested by pharmaceutical companies becomes a product, says Shuler, and half of the failures are due to toxicity.'

(There's the bottleneck which cheminformatics has not been able to widen.)

'"The liver is a complex organ that has many different cell types," says Tannenbaum. These cells exchange chemical signals and even exert mechanical forces on each other that help maintain their function...'

'"In order to get any functionality [in a model], you have to have multiple cell types organized into a structure like a liver," he says. When cells are taken out of the liver and cultured using traditional means, their gene-expression profiles change very quickly, and they begin to deteriorate in a few days.'

'For four to six weeks, [Hepregen's] cells maintain gene-expression profiles comparable to those of liver cells in the human body; they continue to produce the enzymes that break down and modify drugs; and they even form functioning bile ducts, important transport systems in the liver.'

MIT's News Office has a similar article.

Drug brings hope for a universal flu vaccine - health - 27 October 2007 - New Scientist

Drug brings hope for a universal flu vaccine - health - 27 October 2007 - New Scientist

Ordinary flu vaccine contains dead influenza A viruses from the H1 and H3 families. When the researchers put this, plus the RNA-like drug Ampligen, into the noses of mice, the mice made antibodies not only to the vaccine viruses but also to H5N1 bird flu - without ever having been exposed to it. Better, when groups of nasally vaccinated mice were exposed to different strains of live H5N1, [at least half] of each group survived... The team think antibodies in mucus reacting with proteins in the virus could be key.

UK bird flu outbreak confirmed as H5N1

From New Scientist: UK bird flu outbreak confirmed as H5N1

To go along with this news, some useful terms from Dictionary.app:

A disease that quickly and severely affects a large number of people and then subsides is an epidemic.

A disease that is continually present in an area and affects a relatively small number of people is endemic.

A pandemic is a widespread epidemic that may affect entire continents or even the world.

Volcanic clay found to kill 99 per cent of MRSA superbugs

Volcanic clay found to kill 99 per cent of MRSA superbugs:

[Researchers] said that the clay was found to wipe out bug colonies in a day during laboratory experiments. They also revealed that control samples of MRSA, which were not treated with agricur, grew 45-fold over the same period.

The World health Organisation welcomed [the work of French doctor Line Brunet de Course] when she approached it in 2002 with 50 case studies. However, it denied her funding because of a lack of scientific evidence.

"It is possible that it is not one single element that is toxic to the bacteria."

The researchers also backed the possibility that the clay worked through a physical rather than a biochemical process, meaning that bacteria could never develop resistance. "It's fascinating. Here we are bridging geology, microbiology, cell biology. A year ago, I'd look at the clay and say, 'Well, that's dirt,'" Dr Haydel, a microbiologist, said.