Four types of dengue reported in Pakistan

KARACHI: The recent outbreak of dengue fever confirmed the presence of all four types of dengue viral infections in Pakistan. Experts also warned that dengue could spread severely throughout the country as it has in the province of Punjab.

This was stated by Dr. Javed Akram, the Head of Jinnah Hospital Lahore and chairman of dengue expert committee.
Until date, officially more than 3,500 people have been infected and over a dozen have died from the recent dengue outbreak in Pakistan.

“These are the official figures but I think the number of unreported dengue patients is more than 500, 000,”Akram told Dawn.com.

Akram said that in the past they had warned the authorities about the worst possible outbreak of dengue fever in Pakistan but this time they seemed to have been too late. Next year, the epidemic will be even more catastrophic than it has been now, he added.

Akram, along with others contributed a research paper about the 2008 dengue outbreak study in two hospitals of Lahore. The paper was published in 2009 in the International Journal of Infectious Disease.

An estimated 100 million persons worldwide get infected with dengue annually, a resurging viral infection spread by the mosquito Aedes aegyptii. In Pakistan Aedes aegyptii is mainly responsible for this disease.

Several hundred thousands of patients develop dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF) — a more severe, usually fatal form in which bleeding and shock occurs.

A study of two outbreaks in Lahore in 2008, conducted on 110 patients from two hospitals, showed more than half of them had developed the more severe form which is now confirmed by the current dengue outbreak in Punjab.

Malik Asif Humayoun, then the head of the department of medicine at Allama Iqbal Medical College and the Jinnah Hospital, and his colleagues describe this increase in the more severe form as compared to previous years as alarming.

Four strains of the dengue virus circulate worldwide, including South Asia, and the fatal DHF form occurs when a previously infected and cured dengue patient gets re-infected again, usually with a different strain of the virus.

Two of these were reported in previous outbreaks in Karachi city, while a third has been reported in the Lahore outbreak of 2008. Now all four types of dengue serotypes have been confirmed in Punjab.

“There is urgent need to have a countrywide epidemiological survey for multiple dengue serotypes (strains),” said Humayoun.

There is also a need for larger clinical studies in Pakistan and other South Asian countries to better understand the range of infections, endemic patterns and genetic susceptibility of different populations to the dengue virus, the researchers concluded.Read more at Dawn.com

Top official among four die of dengue

LAHORE, Sept 12: Dengue continues to haunt citizens as on Monday it claimed the lives of four more people, including Punjab mines and minerals department secretary Attaullah Siddiqui, a UAE-returned Pakistani youth and a school teacher.

Mr Siddiqui was the first senior government officer to have fallen prey to the fatal virus which, according to official figures, took the lives of seven people over the past one month or so. But sources claimed that more than 15 people had lost their lives in Lahore alone during the period.

Mr Siddiqui, a resident of GOR-IV and a grade-19 official, was suspected of contracting dengue a week ago. Later clinical reports tested him positive for the virus with low counts which continued to decline till his death. He remained on ventilator for three days. His body was taken to Muzaffargarh.

Thirty-year-old Haji Shahzad had returned from the UAE 15 days ago to celebrate the birth of his son. Shahzad, a resident of Iqbal Road, was taken to a private hospital on Ferozepur Road. He was diagnosed with dengue and his platelet counts continued to decline. He was later shifted to Ittefaq Hospital with massive bleeding from mouth, ears and nose. He died late on Sunday night.

Samina, a 25-year-old school teacher and resident of Waris Road, and 12-year-old girl Farwa Naveed, resident of Chungi Amer Sidhu, died in hospitals.

Six more Chinese engineers tested positive for dengue on Monday. They were working on the project site of under-construction Information Technology Tower on Ferozepur Road. They were taken to the Jinnah Hospital, where their other colleagues were already under treatment for the virus.

Two of them were kept in the intensive care unit because of low platelet counts. Allama Iqbal Medical College Principal Prof Dr Javed Arkam told Dawn that Mr Wong was immediately given two mega units of platelets and Mr Lee one mega unit.

Meanwhile, some 655 more people, including Abdul Latif (brother-in-law ofPML-N chief Nawaz Sharif), PML-N MPA Saiful Malook Khokhar, Housing Secretary Sohail Amir and three senior doctors, tested positive for dengue in Lahore, showing a visible surge in the number of patients suffering from the virus.

The number of dengue patients has shot up to 3,800 in Lahore and 4,000 in other parts of the province.

Soil bacterium helps kill cancers

A bacterium found in soil is a showing promise as a way of delivering cancer drugs into tumours.

Spores of the Clostridium sporogenes bacterium can grow within tumours because there is no oxygen.

UK and Dutch scientists have been able to genetically engineer an enzyme into the bacteria to activate a cancer drug.

Experts said it would be some time before the potential benefits of the work - presented to the Society of Microbiology - were known.

The work is being presented to the society's autumn conference at the University of York.

The spores grow only within solid tumours, such as breast, brain and prostate tumours and not in other tissue in the body, where oxygen is present.Read More

Nearly 40pc of Europeans suffer mental illness

ONDON: Europeans are plagued by mental and neurological illnesses, with almost 165 million people or 38 percent of the population suffering each year from a brain disorder such as depression, anxiety, insomnia or dementia, according to a large new study.

With only about a third of cases receiving the therapy or medication needed, mental illnesses cause a huge economic and social burden -- measured in the hundreds of billions of euros -- as sufferers become too unwell to work and personal relationships break down.

"Mental disorders have become Europe's largest health challenge of the 21st century," the study's authors said.

At the same time, some big drug companies are backing away from investment in research on how the brain works and affects behavior, putting the onus on governments and health charities to stump up funding for neuroscience.

"The immense treatment gap ... for mental disorders has to be closed," said Hans Ulrich Wittchen, director of the institute of clinical psychology and psychotherapy at Germany's Dresden University and the lead investigator on the European study.

"Those few receiving treatment do so with considerable delays of an average of several years and rarely with the appropriate, state-of-the-art therapies."

Wittchen led a three-year study covering 30 European countries -- the 27 European Union member states plus Switzerland, Iceland and Norway -- and a population of 514 million people.

A direct comparison of the prevalence of mental illnesses in other parts of the world was not available because different studies adopt varying parameters.

Wittchen's team looked at about 100 illnesses covering all major brain disorders from anxiety and depression to addiction to schizophrenia, as well as major neurological disorders including epilepsy, Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis.

The results, published by the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ENCP) on Monday, show an "exceedingly high burden" of mental health disorders and brain illnesses, he told reporters at a briefing in London.

Mental illnesses are a major cause of death, disability, and economic burden worldwide and the World Health Organization predicts that by 2020, depression will be the second leading contributor to the global burden of disease across all ages.

Wittchen said that in Europe, that grim future had arrived early, with diseases of the brain already the single largest contributor to the EU's burden of ill health.

The four most disabling conditions -- measured in terms of disability-adjusted life years or DALYs, a standard measure used to compare the impact of various diseases -- are depression, dementias such as Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia, alcohol dependence and stroke.

The last major European study of brain disorders, which was published in 2005 and covered a smaller population of about 301 million people, found 27 percent of the EU adult population was suffering from mental illnesses.

Although the 2005 study cannot be compared directly with the latest finding -- the scope and population was different -- it found the cost burden of these and neurological disorders amounted to about 386 billion euros ($555 billion) a year at that time.

Wittchen's team has yet to finalize the economic impact data from this latest work, but he said the costs would be "considerably more" than estimated in 2005.

The researchers said it was crucial for health policy makers to recognize the enormous burden and devise ways to identify potential patients early -- possibly through screening -- and make treating them quickly a high priority.

"Because mental disorders frequently start early in life, they have a strong malignant impact on later life," Wittchen said. "Only early targeted treatment in the young will effectively prevent the risk of increasingly largely proportions of severely ill...patients in the future."

David Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacology expert at Imperial College London who was not involved in this study, agreed.

"If you can get in early you may be able to change the trajectory of the illness so that it isn't inevitable that people go into disability," he said. "If we really want not to be left with this huge reservoir of mental and brain illness for the next few centuries, then we ought to be investing more now." (Reuters)


Source: Geo News

Hens evolve secret sex strategy

Scientists have discovered that female chickens have a remarkable ability to choose the father of their eggs.

Wily hens have evolved the ability to eject the sperm of unsuitable mates say researchers working with Swedish birds.

Promiscuous roosters try to ensure that their genes are passed on by mating with as many females as possible.

But by removing the genetic material of males they consider socially inferior, the hens have managed to retain control of paternity.

Many species ranging from zebras to insects use the strategy of sperm ejection - but the evolutionary ideas behind it are often uncertain.

Among birds, male Dunnocks force females to eject the sperm of other suitors in order to protect their own genes.

But this research indicates that among chickens the battle of the sexes seems to be all about female empowerment. Keep Reading at BBC

UK stem cell stroke trial passes first safety test

The world's first clinical trial of brain stem cells to treat strokes is set to move to its next phase.

An independent assessment of the first three patients to have had stem cells injected into their brain at Glasgow's Southern General Hospital has concluded it has had no adverse effect.

The assessment paves the way for the therapy to be tested on more patients to find a new treatment for stroke.

The hope is that the stem cells will help to repair damaged brain tissue.

The trial is being led by Prof Keith Muir of Glasgow University. He told BBC News that he was pleased with the results so far.

"We need to be assured of safety before we can progress to trying to test the effects of this therapy. Because this is the first time this type of cell therapy has been used in humans, it's vitally important that we determine that it's safe to proceed - so at the present time we have the clearance to proceed to the next higher dose of cells."

An elderly man was the first person in the world to receive this treatment last year. Since then it has been tried out on two more patients. Read more On BBC

Cheap Drugs to Cut Heart Risks 'Badly Underused'

Cheap generic drugs to cut heart risk are substantially underused worldwide, with more than half the people who could benefit estimated not to be getting any of four simple and effective types of medicine, researchers said on Sunday.

Underuse is most acute in low-income countries, where around 80 percent of people with a history of heart disease or stroke take none of the drugs, according to the largest clinical study to date on the issue.

But rich countries in the developed world are also not taking full advantage of the medicine.
Globally, around 60 percent of people with heart disease and up to half those who have had a stroke might not be taking a bloodthinner like aspirin, a cholesterol-lowering statin or one of two types of blood pressure pills, known as beta-blockers and ACE inhibitors or ARBs.

The findings were presented at the European Society of Cardiology annual meeting and published online in the Lancet medical journal, where they were described as "stark and alarming" in a commentary by Dr Tony Heagerty of the University of Manchester.

The disappointing uptake of proven treatments will provide more ammunition for campaigners arguing that the world needs to do more to confront the problem of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like cancer, lung problems and cardiovascular complaints.

Cardiovascular disease affects more than 100 million people worldwide and 75 percent are in low- and middle-income countries, where access to medical care is often limited.

The United Nations has scheduled a summit in September on NCDs and some health organizations are concerned that rich countries are blocking progress by not agreeing to set clear UN targets.

The study by Dr Salim Yusuf of Canada's McMaster University and colleagues looked at 154,000 adults from 17 countries, including Sweden, Canada, Brazil, China, India, Iran and Zimbabwe.

More than 7,500 of these self-reported either a history of coronary heart disease or stroke.

Overall, use of preventative drugs in this group was low with bloodthinners, mainly aspirin, taken by only 25.3 percent of individuals, beta-blockers by 17.4 percent, ACE inhibitors or ARBs by 19.5 percent and statins by 14.6 percent.

"GLOBAL TRAGEDY"
Yusuf said the findings were a wake-up call and showed that cardiovascular healthcare policy needed a major rethink, with a bigger role given to nurses to promote greater use of appropriate medicines in the community.

"It is terribly poor worldwide," he told reporters. "This is a global tragedy -- there is no other way to say this."

Blood pressure medicines used to be among the biggest sellers for pharmaceutical companies, but most are now off patent and available as cheap generics.

Statins, including Pfizer's Lipitor and AstraZeneca's Crestor, are still multibillion-dollar products but they also face increasing generic erosion, with the decline set to quicken when Lipitor loses U.S. patent protection later this year.

The researchers acknowledged their study had limitations, with self-reporting by patients potentially giving a misleading picture of disease incidence in some cases. They also said it was unclear to what extent the findings could be generalized to entire regions.

But the results of the study, which received funding from various sources, including drug companies, are in striking contrast to some smaller studies based on patients treated in hospitals or clinics that had indicated far higher drug use.

Yusuf said his team's study showed a different real-world picture of preventative treatment in the community, where many people regularly dropped out of medical care and stopped taking medicines after initial heart problems.

Read more ON FOX NEWS

Vaccines generally safe, cause some side effects'

WASHINGTON: Vaccines can cause certain side effects but serious ones appear very rare - and there's no link with autism and Type 1 diabetes, the Institute of Medicine says in the first comprehensive safety review in 17 years.

The report released Thursday isn't aimed at nervous parents. And the side effects it lists as proven are some that doctors long have known about, such as fever-caused seizures and occasional brain inflammation.

Instead, the review comes at the request of the government's Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which as the name implies, pays damages to people who are injured by vaccines. Federal law requires this type of independent review as officials update side effects on that list to be sure they agree with the latest science.

"Vaccines are important tools in preventing serious infectious disease across the lifespan, from infancy through adulthood. All health care interventions, however, carry the possibility of risk and vaccines are no exception," said pediatrician and bioethicist Dr. Ellen Wright Clayton of Vanderbilt University, who chaired the institute panel.

Still, the report stresses that vaccines generally are safe, and it may help doctors address worries from a small but vocal anti-vaccine movement. Some vaccine-preventable diseases, including measles, are on the rise.

"I am hopeful that it will allay some people's concerns," Clayton said.

The review echoed numerous other scientific reports that dismiss an autism link.

But it found convincing evidence of 14 side effects:
-Fever-triggered seizures, which seldom cause long-term consequences, from the measles-mumps-rubella, or MMR, vaccine.
-MMR also can cause a rare form of brain inflammation in some people with immune problems.
-The varicella vaccine against chickenpox sometimes triggers that viral infection, resulting in widespread chickenpox or a painful relative called shingles. It also occasionally can lead to pneumonia, hepatitis or meningitis.
-Six vaccines - MMR and the chickenpox, hepatitis B, meningococcal and tetanus-containing vaccines - can cause severe allergic reactions known as anaphylaxis.
-Vaccines in general sometimes trigger fainting or a type of shoulder inflammation.

There's suggestive evidence but not proof of a few other side effects, including anaphylaxis from the human papillomavirus, or HPV, vaccine and short-term joint pain in some women and children from the MMR vaccine.

On the other hand, the report cleared flu shots of blame for two long-suspected side effects: Bell's palsy and worsening of asthma.

That doesn't mean there aren't other side effects - the review couldn't find enough evidence to decide about more than 100 other possibilities. Some vaccines are just too new to link to something really rare. Another example: Flu shots have long come with a caution about rare, paralyzing Guillain-Barre syndrome, but Clayton said research hasn't settled if that's a coincidence since the disorder is more common during the winter.

The Health Resources and Services Administration, which runs the vaccine compensation program, is reviewing the report but said it's too early to predict if it will prompt changes to the injury list. (AP)

Experts Doubt Coconut Oil Will Give You a Body Like Miranda Kerr

U.S. experts are warning consumers against consuming large amounts of coconut oil after Australian supermodel Miranda Kerr said the high-fat oil was the key to her clear skin, shiny hair and trim figure.

Kerr told Australia's Cosmopolitan magazine that she had been consuming the oil since she was a teenager.

"I've been drinking it since I was 14 and it's the one thing I can't live without," the new mother said. "I will not go a day without coconut oil. I personally take four tablespoons per day, either on my salads, in my cooking or in my cups of green tea."

But experts said the oil, which is a saturated fat with a high calorie count and few vitamins and minerals, should not be consumed in such large doses, ABC News reported.

The World Health Organization has also warned the oil could contribute to an increased risk of coronary heart disease if taken to excess.

Keith Ayoob, director of the nutrition clinic at the Children's Evaluation and Rehabilitation Center at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said the oil will not give you the body of a supermodel.

"I can't say I'd want people consuming lots of coconut oil. You should use it sparingly," Ayoob said. "You want to cut back on saturated fats in your diet. I don't know what benefit it would have for weight management because it has just as many calories as any other fat."

Kerr's dose of four tablespoons a day adds up to about 460 calories, which Ayoob said was too much saturated fat for most people.

"She's getting two and a half times the amount of saturated fat I would recommend for a person consuming 2,000 calories per day," he said.

Ayood recommended people consume an ounce of dark chocolate — at about 150 calories —instead of coconut oil.

"It probably has more nutritional benefit than coconut oil," he said. "And it's certainly going to be more satisfying."(Read more on Fox News)

Specialized mosquitoes may fight dengue

NEW YORK: Scientists have made a promising advance for controlling dengue fever, a tropical disease spread by mosquito bites. They've rapidly replaced mosquitoes in the wild with skeeters that don't spread the dengue virus.

More than 50 million people a year get the dengue virus from being bitten by infected mosquitoes in tropical and subtropical areas, including Southeast Asia. It can cause debilitating high fever, severe headaches, and pain in the muscles and joints, and lead to a potentially fatal complication. There's no vaccine or specific treatment.

Some scientists have been trying to fight dengue by limiting mosquito populations. That was the goal in releasing genetically modified mosquitoes last year at sites in Malaysia and the Cayman Islands.

Australian scientists took a different tack, they report in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

First, they showed that Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, the chief carriers of the dengue virus, resist spreading that virus if they are infected with a particular kind of bacteria. Then they tested whether these resistant mosquitoes could displace their ordinary cousins in the wild, thus reducing the number of dengue-spreading mosquitoes.

The resistant mosquitoes have an advantage in reproduction. Resistant females can mate with either resistant or ordinary mosquitoes, and all their offspring will be resistant. But when ordinary females mate with a resistant male, none of the offspring survive.

For the experiment, scientists released more than 140,000 resistant mosquitoes over 10 weeks in each of two isolated communities near Cairns in northeastern Australia, starting last January. By mid-April, monitoring found that resistant mosquitoes made up 90 percent to 100 percent of the wild population.

The result is a "groundbreaking first step," Jason Rasgon of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore wrote in a commentary accompanying the paper. Rasgon, who did not participate in the study, said the next hurdle is to test the idea in areas where dengue is spread constantly, rather than sporadically as in Australia. Researchers will also have to show it works against varied strains of the dengue virus, he said.(GEo.tv)

Paintball shot ruptures woman's silicone breast implant

A woman has had one of her silicone gel breast implants ruptured after it was hit by a paintball shot.

The 26-year-old had been taking part in a game at an outdoor centre near Croydon on Saturday (20 August).

She went to her doctor's surgery on Monday, where it was discovered one of her implants had been torn apart.

"We respectfully ask that any ladies with surgical breast implants notify our team at the time of booking," says a statement on UK Paintball's website.

"You will be given special information on the dangers of paintballing with enhanced boobs and asked to sign a disclaimer.

"You will also be issued with extra padding to protect your implants while paintballing."

The woman involved hasn't been named. Read more on BBc

Drug may help ease Ramazan headaches: study

NEW YORK: A painkilling, anti-inflammatory drug may help prevent headaches in Muslims fasting from dawn to dusk for Ramazan, according to a study from Israel -- where a "Yom Kippur headache" is also known.

About four in every ten people who abstain from food and water all day during the month-long Ramazan period get headaches, said the study, published in the journal Headache.
Doctors aren't quite sure what causes them. It could be dehydration, or caffeine withdrawal in people who are used to getting their morning coffee, Drescher told Reuters Health.

Drescher and his Israel-based colleagues had already shown that Jews who took the drug known as etoricoxib, or Arcoxia, before fasting for 25 hours on the Yom Kippur holiday got fewer headaches than those who didn't.

Arcoxia, a cousin of the painkiller Vioxx, isn't approved for use in the United States because the Food and Drug Administration decided it was too similar to Vioxx, which Merck pulled from the market in 2004 when it was linked to a higher risk of heart attack. But Arcoxia is available in Israel, among other countries.

The drug has a longer-lasting effect than some other painkillers, which is important because taking a pill in the middle of the day when a headache sets in would be considered breaking the fast.

"If you take Tylenol (acetaminophen)... by the time you get around to feeling the effects of the fast, the medicine is long out of your system," Drescher said.

To see how Arcoxia would work during Ramadan, the researchers assigned 222 adults planning to fast in 2010 to either take the drug or an inactive placebo pill just before the start of fasting each day. All participants recorded how often they had a headache, and how severe it was.

After a week they switched treatments.

During the first day of fasting, when headaches are thought to be most common, 21 percent of people taking Arcoxia reported having a headache, compared to 46 percent of those who took the placebo pill.

The Arcoxia group also reported fewer total headaches during that first week, the researchers wrote. And when they did have headaches, they rated them as less severe than participants taking the placebo. (Reuters)

Mosquitoes 'developing resistance to bed nets'

Mosquitoes can rapidly develop resistance to bed nets treated with insecticide, a study from Senegal says.

In recent years the nets have become a leading method of preventing malaria, especially in Africa.

In the Lancet Infectious Diseases, the researchers also suggest the nets reduced the immunity of older children and adults to malaria infection.

But other experts say the study was too small to draw conclusions about the long-term effectiveness of nets.

In the war against malaria, the cheapest and most effective weapon to date has been the long-lasting insecticide-treated bed net.

Over the last few years the nets have been widely distributed in Africa and elsewhere - the World Health Organization says that when properly deployed they can cut malaria rates by half.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote

If indeed this is a real trend we are seeing in this part of Senegal then it has very important implications for future malaria prevention and control strategies”

End Quote Dr Joseph Keating Tulane University

In Senegal, around six million nets have been distributed over the last five years. In this study researchers looked at one small village in the country and tracked the incidence of malaria both before and after the introduction of nets in 2008.

Within three weeks of their introduction the scientists found that the number of malaria attacks started to fall - incidence of the disease was found to be 13 times lower than before the nets were used.

The researchers also collected specimens of Anopheles gambiae, the mosquito species responsible for transmitting malaria to humans in Africa. Between 2007 and 2010 the proportion of the insects with a genetic resistance to one type of pesticide rose from 8% to 48%.

By 2010 the proportion of mosquitoes resistant to Deltamethrin, the chemical recommended by the World Health Organization for bed nets, was 37%.

In the last four months of the study the researchers found that the incidence of malaria attacks returned to high levels. Among older children and adults the rate was even higher than before the introduction of the nets.

The researchers argue that the initial effectiveness of the bed nets reduced the amount of immunity that people acquire through exposure to mosquito bites. Combined with a resurgence in resistant insects, there was a rapid rebound in infection rates.

The scientists were led by Dr Jean-Francois Trape from the Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement in Dakar. The authors are worried that their study has implications beyond Senegal.

"These findings are a great concern since they support the idea that insecticide resistance might not permit a substantial decrease in malaria morbidity in many parts of Africa," they write.

But other experts in this field say that it is impossible to draw wider conclusions. Read more At BBC