[sunnykerr]

I don't know.

I think so, but it's hard to know with my dad.

He's one of those people who become an expert on any given topic the second they have a bit of knowledge about it.

(And I'm well aware that the fruit didn't fall too far from the tree on that one.)

[quaist]

Oh, don't be so self-critical, Sunny

As far as your dad is concerned, I suppose with diabetes they would put emphasis on thoroughly educating people about what's important relating to their diet at that class.

[sunnykerr]

I hear they do try.

Of course, you can only lead the horse to water.

My dad's not an uneducated man and even he will, occasionally, only hear what he wants to hear.

The thing about my dad and his diabetes, which I'm sure I've mentioned before but here I go again, is that it was diagnosed quite late it life (age 69) and is "mild" enough that he can control it with diet alone.

All that to say that, to the extent that he heard what he thinks he heard, he has been controlling his health through diet and exercise. So, to a certain extent, I am willing to go along with him on the whole "fiber counteracts sugar content" thing.

[sunnykerr]

"Ten-fold rise" in new cases of malaria in Chad An emergency operation is under way in the Salamat region of Chad after an "alarming" rise in cases of malaria. Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said the number of reported new cases rose from 1,228 in the first week of August to 14,021 by the end of the month. Cases of the mosquito-borne disease do peak during the July to November rainy season. But MSF Health Advisor for Chad Dr Turid Piening said the sudden high spike in this area is unusual. She said: "More than 80% of people who are coming for consultations are coming because they are infected with malaria, normally its 30%-40% at this time of year. "It is now the top illness diagnosed in our clinics and that is unusual for this area." A quarter of all deaths in Chad are attributed to malaria and it is the most common cause of death for children, according to MSF. Latest available figures from the World Health Organization show more than 650,000 people died around the world from the disease in 2010, most of them children in Africa. An MSF team working in the town of Am Timan was alerted to a sharp increase in cases in July by government health officials. However, this sudden rise has not been officially recognised as an outbreak.

Full story

The really frustrating thing, I would imagine, is that this is an illness that shouldn't kill people any more.

We have the remedy.

It's getting it to the people that's difficult.

[sunnykerr]

Potential good news:

Heart attack technique 'could save lives' A new, relatively simple way of treating heart attacks could save thousands of lives, according to specialists at a Clydebank hospital. It involves clearing all narrowed arteries when someone is admitted with a heart attack, rather than just the one which is completely blocked. A trial, involving the Golden Jubilee National Hospital, was so successful that the research was stopped early. Jubilee heart specialist Prof Colin Berry said the results were "striking". Fatty deposits Another cardiologist, Prof Keith Oldroyd, said: "At the moment when patients come in with a heart attack they have an emergency angiogram and we usually only treat the artery that has caused the heart attack. "Many of these patients have additional narrowings in other arteries. We're treating all the narrowed arteries at the same time to see if that confers additional benefit." Every year 25,000 people in the UK have the kind of heart attack which is treated with an angioplasty. This involves inserting a stent, or thin tube, to open an artery and restore the blood flow. Arteries become narrowed by fatty deposits, so although a blood clot may have only blocked one artery, other narrowed arteries are common. Current UK recommendations advise specialists only to treat the artery which is completely blocked. "Most cardiologists thought it wasn't safe to treat a second or third artery at the same time as the first artery," Prof Oldroyd said. "Sometimes the patients would be brought back several weeks later or sometimes only medication would be used. The results of this trial suggest that this recommendation should be revisited." Reducing costs The trial involved 465 patients in five specialist heart centres around the UK. In addition to the Golden Jubilee, they were the London Chest Hospital, Morriston Hospital in Swansea, Freeman Hospital in Newcastle, and Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital. Half of the trial participants had all their arteries cleared, the rest were treated in the conventional way. The researchers found that the new technique reduced the combined risk of dying, having another heart attack or being left with angina by two-thirds - such a significant finding that the trial was stopped early. It also only added an average of 20 minutes to each treatment. The results have been published in the New England Journal of Medicine and were presented at an international conference in Amsterdam earlier this month. Prof Colin Berry, heart specialist at the Golden Jubilee and the University of Glasgow, said: "They were some of the most striking results for a treatment that I have ever seen. The results of this trial really challenge clinical practice." Heart specialists are now keen that even larger studies get under way as quickly as possible. In the past, it has taken a decade or more for the latest evidence to be adopted into frontline medical care. Prof Berry added: "It's appealing because it's a form of usual care that can be readily adopted across the UK. "On the other hand there are logistical considerations and cost considerations. However, we would argue that reducing the likelihood of further cardiac events, potentially reducing the heart failure admissions to hospital, is going to reduce costs overall and this should be implemented as soon as possible."

Source

The reduced risks of death, complications and the more affordable procedure are all good things.

But, as ever, the testing pool is as yet too small to know for sure.

Still, I find this encouraging.

[quaist]

Vaccine seems to clear monkeys of HIV-like infection; humans next? Scientists have developed a vaccine that protected monkeys against simian immunodeficiency virus, or SIV, offering fresh hope that a similar vaccine can save humans from HIV. When the monkeys were intentionally infected with SIV, the new vaccine cleared the infection and kept the animals virus-free for up to three years, according to a report this week in the journal Nature. Although there are medications to keep HIV in check for long periods of time, they can’t eliminate the virus altogether. Efforts to develop an HIV vaccine have so far failed. Vaccines typically contain a harmless amount of the virus it’s designed to protect against. By introducing it to the body in a non-threatening way, the immune system gets a chance to develop antibodies that will be ready to attack the virus if it ever reappears. Most vaccines are designed to trigger a large-scale immune system attack, which then weakens over time. Producing the immune cells required for such an attack can take weeks. These conventional vaccines are no match for SIV and HIV, which are fast-acting, persistent viruses. So the new vaccine — a modified version of a herpes virus known as cytomegalovirus, or CMV — contains just enough SIV to elicit an ongoing immune response that keeps the body “armed and ready” to search out and destroy the virus, said Louis Picker, an immunologist at Oregon Health and Science University who helped design the vaccine. Picker and his colleagues tested the vaccine on 16 rhesus macaques. They vaccinated the monkeys, waited about two months, then infected them with SIV. Seven of the monkeys got sick and died. But the other nine didn’t develop any outward symptoms of SIV. They did show signs of infection – the immune system cells that had been hijacked by the virus were still producing small amounts of it, for example – for weeks to months after exposure. But these signs decreased over time. After one year, eight of the nine animals had no evidence of infection. They remained SIV-free for up to three years after exposure. The virus reappeared in one of the monkeys, but at low levels. As a final test, the researchers injected blood and lymph cells from the eight apparently virus-free monkeys into other rhesus macaques that had never been exposed to SIV. None of the recipients became infected. That suggests the vaccine had completely cleared the virus from the eight monkeys originally infected, since it takes only one virus to establish an infection. “It’s remarkable because HIV is a virus that everyone thought of as permanent,” Picker said. “This is really the first demonstration that a pathogenic virus can be eliminated by the patient’s own immune system.” But the researchers still can’t say for sure whether the vaccine completely eradicated SIV from the monkeys, since they didn’t search everywhere for the virus. “We claim that this is clearly a functional cure,” although small amounts of SIV may still be present, Picker said. Still, the findings are “consistent with eradication,” he added. The researchers are now investigating why half of the vaccinated monkeys didn’t benefit from the treatment. The answer may lead to a better vaccine design. In a future trial, the team plans to test whether the vaccine has the ability to not only prevent SIV, but to treat monkeys that already have the disease. This time, they’ll expose the animals to SIV before vaccinating them to see whether they also show clearance of the disease. But “the really big challenge” will be to see whether the new findings translate to humans, Picker said. He and his colleagues hope to begin early-stage clinical trials as soon as 2015. The team should take extra precautions when developing a vaccine based on CMV for humans, since the herpes virus is still live, said Dr. Steven Deeks, a clinical researcher at UC San Francisco who wasn’t involved in the study. “We may end up exchanging one virus for another,” he said. But if all goes well, the vaccine “might have a major impact on the global epidemic,” Deeks said. Current antiretroviral therapies vastly diminish HIV but don’t eradicate it, he said. They can also be expensive, and patients need to take them every day for the rest of their lives. “In theory, we can give them a CMV vaccine engineered to attack HIV, and they’re cured,” Deeks said.

Of course, news like this need to be treated with caution because we've heard too much about science being 'on the edge' of developing a HIV vaccine/cure in the past.

But maybe they're onto something this time.

[sunnykerr]

Maybe they are unto something.

That would nice.

I suppose it depends on the differences between SIV and HIV.

[quaist]

Hopefully then, there's not much difference between the two.

[sunnykerr]

In genetics, it doesn't take a big difference to make all the difference in the world.

I think humans and simians have, like, 96% of the same DNA. Or some percentage that's equally high.

And yet you couldn't exactly mistake one for the other, could you?

So I would imagine that even if SIV and HIV and almost exactly the same thing, it's the tiny ways in which they're not that will prove the big hurdle to overcome.

[sunnykerr]

Not breaking news by any stretch of the imagination, but perhaps an indication that the predictions are starting to become reality:

Elderly care needs 'set to treble' by 2050 The number of older people needing care is set to nearly treble globally by 2050, campaigners say. Currently 101 million people require care, but a report from Alzheimer's Disease International warns the figure will rise to to 277 million. Many needing care have dementia, and the report warns there will be a "global Alzheimer's epidemic". The report's author said countries like India and China would be hard hit - and must start planning services now. Alzheimer's is the most common cause of dementia. Symptoms include loss of memory, mood changes, and problems with communicating and reasoning. More than 35 million people live with dementia across the world, according to the World Health Organization. More than half are living in low and middle income countries. The report reveals that as the world population ages, the traditional system of informal care by family, friends and the community will need much greater support. Just over one in 10 people aged 60 or over needs long-term care, according to the report. This includes daily help with things like washing, eating, dressing and using the toilet. It can put huge pressure on families. Carers often have to give up work to look after elderly relatives. 'Older people left behind' Treating and caring for people with dementia currently costs the world more than £376bn per year. That includes the cost of health and social care as well as the loss of earnings. Prof Martin Prince, from King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry, the author of the report, said lower and middle income countries including India and China need to urgently start planning services to deal with the "epidemic". "The social and economic changes happening in those countries are inevitably going to mean that family carers will be less available. "Things like the decline in fertility rates mean people are going to have fewer children. "Women are also better educated so are more likely to join the paid workforce and are going to be less likely to be available to provide care." And he said an increase in migration between countries, and from rural to urban areas amongst younger people meant there would be a lot of older people "left behind". The report makes a range of recommendations including giving paid and unpaid carers "appropriate financial rewards" and monitoring the quality of care both in care homes and in the community. A spokesperson for the Alzheimer's Society in the UK said: "Dementia is the biggest health crisis facing the world today. "This report is a wake-up call to governments across the world about the immediate need to put in place more care and support. "The UK government's G8 summit on dementia this year will be a key opportunity to rally support from world leaders to tackle dementia together. We need to see political leadership to avoid a spiralling global crisis," the spokesperson added.

Source

Obviously, a lot of this will depend on just how populations grow and age in different areas.

[quaist]

That's certainly gonna be one of the biggest tasks our generation will have to learn to shoulder.

And apparently, we're anything but prepared for it yet.

[sunnykerr]

It's like climate change, isn't it?

People are waiting to be faced with the full disastrous situation before doing much of anything about it.

[quaist]

A somewhat sad but very accurate comparison, I think.

[sunnykerr]

It's just troubling to think this is what awaits us.

[quaist]

Well, mankind has proven to be quite virtuous in adapting to hostile environments as well as in dealing with previously unexpected circumstances, so I assume we can put our hopes in that being the case here again.