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By Jack Kim
SEOUL (Reuters) - A bird flu outbreak in North Korea is probably extensive, South Korean officials said on Tuesday, but Pyongyang has yet to request Seoul's help to contain the virus.
North Korea officially confirmed on Sunday an outbreak of bird flu at two chicken farms in the capital Pyongyang. It said hundreds of thousands of birds had been culled in the secretive state, which suffers from severe food shortages.
"We suspect that it has spread quite extensively looking from the way North Korea disclosed this," said Unification Ministry official Kim Chun-sik, who oversees exchanges with the North.
Other ministry officials said Seoul was ready to help and would like more details about the outbreak in order to tailor an assistance package.
South Korea's National Veterinary Research and Quarantine Service sent a message to its equivalent in the North with an offer of assistance and a request for information on the outbreak.
What we are focusing on now is quarantine," Unification Ministry spokesman Kim Hong-jae said by telephone.
The South Korean government has stepped up quarantine measures at border points with the North and also at poultry farms in northern Kyonggi province, which borders the North.
Migratory birds are being tracked for tests, a Kyonggi official said.
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Japanese office equipment and camera firm Canon is branching out from bubble-jets into biotechnology to feed its future growth.
The firm has been spending money on biotech research for some years.
Its focus has been on DNA chips, which make it possible to compare genetic material with thousands of fragments of DNA at once.
Canon believes the ink-jet technology in its printers could lead to cheaper ways of mass-producing DNA chips.
The news pushed the company's shares up 0.4% in Tokyo, on a day when the blue-chip Nikkei 225 index staged its biggest fall for five months.
The company, the world's biggest manufacturer of office equipment, will put its plans for the expansion into biotech to its board on Wednesday.
Despite the name, DNA chips have nothing to do with semiconductors.
Instead, they consist of large arrays of genetic material mounted on a surface such as glass.
Their use is at present limited to basic biological research into the causes of genetic disorders, partly due to their expense.
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Stem cells found in hair follicles can develop into nerve cells and might be useful in medical treatment, U.S.-based researchers reported on Monday.
They found that stem cells taken from the follicles of mouse whiskers matured into neurons and other neural cells known as astrocytes and oligodendrocytes, as well as into skin cells, smooth muscle cells, and pigment-producing cells called melanocytes.
The finding, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers another potential source of the master cells, which scientists hope may provide a good source of new tissue and organ transplants.
The best known source of stem cells is the bone marrow, but researchers hope to find more easily accessible sites and want to experiment to see if different sources of stem cells may offer cells with different qualities.
Stem cells are the body's master cells. So-called adult stem cells are found throughout the body. A more controversial source comes from days-old embryos.
Robert Hoffman at San Diego-based AntiCancer Inc., and colleagues at the University of California San Diego and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said it may some day be possible to take a person's own stem cells from hair follicles and grow a tissue transplant.
Their findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, build on previous work that has found stem cells in hair follicles.
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By PHILIP BRASHER
Washington, D.C. - It's been a decade since the first genetically engineered crops were introduced in the United States.
But the disclosure last week that Syngenta had mistakenly sold an unapproved version of its biotech corn seed demonstrates that the industry and the government are still struggling with how to manage this technology.
That was obvious enough from the fact that the sales went on for four years before being discovered.
"The biotech community has said we can segregate, we can contain, we can control, yet we keep finding examples where we can't," said Lisa Lorenzen, director of industry relations and biotechnology liaison for Iowa State University.
"Fortunately, this was an error that doesn't have any bad consequences."
The government talked about its investigation of the incident only after the news leaked to a British science journal, Nature, which posted a story on its Web site last Tuesday afternoon.
The U.S. Agriculture Department had alerted the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture late Monday but did not notify the actual states involved, at least not Iowa, until late Tuesday.
Kendall Lamkey, a corn geneticist at ISU, served on a National Academy of Sciences study of the USDA's regulation of the biotech industry. Lamkey said the government risks undermining public confidence in biotechnology by keeping such investigations secret.
"It always looks like something is being hidden," he said. "When they don't let the public see everything, and don't divulge what is going on, it creates a lot of unknowns for everybody."
So far, the incident has been treated with a collective shrug, here and overseas.
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By Richard Black
UK scientists have developed a new genetically modified strain of "golden rice", producing more beta-carotene.
The human body converts beta-carotene into vitamin A, and this strain produces around 20 times as much as previous varieties.
It could help reduce vitamin A deficiency and childhood blindness in developing countries.
The World Health Organization estimates up to 500,000 children go blind each year because of vitamin A deficiency.
When the original strain of golden rice emerged from laboratories in Switzerland five years ago, it was hailed by some as an instant solution.
But that original strain did not produce enough beta-carotene to ensure that children would get their daily requirement from eating normal quantities of rice.
The new variety, developed at the UK laboratories of the biotechnology company Syngenta, produces much more beta-carotene.
Syngenta is making the rice available for free to research centres across Asia, who will, if they are given the go-ahead by their governments, begin field trials - probably within the next five years.
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By Charles Piller, Times Staff Writer
A 17-year-old girl in northern Vietnam has died of avian influenza, the 48th official bird flu fatality in Southeast Asia since outbreaks began 18 months ago, local authorities said Friday.
The girl's death followed an announcement a day earlier by Cambodian health officials that a 26-year-old man there had died of the disease, the country's second fatality.
The man lived in the southern province of Kampot, close to where the nation's first confirmed bird flu victim, a 25-year-old woman, became ill. The woman died in a Vietnamese hospital Jan. 31 after crossing the border to seek care.
The announcements of the latest victims come amid a spate of possible cases, suggesting the disease is well-rooted in the region.
"The evidence strongly suggests that the surveillance is not sensitive enough," said Klaus Stohr, head of the World Health Organization's global influenza program.
The largest cluster of possible cases emerged this week in Vietnam's Quang Binh province, where a 13-year-old girl with flu-like symptoms recently died. She was not tested for the bird flu virus. Her younger brother and aunt have been hospitalized with similar symptoms.
Nearly 200 people from one town in the province sought care for possible bird flu. The number of suspected cases was later sharply scaled back as many showed only mild symptoms.
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By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK WASHINGTON, March 25 - The Republican leadership of the House has told party moderates that the House will vote this year on a proposal to modify President Bush's stem cell research policy, opening another contentious moral, theological and scientific debate about when life begins and ends.
Representative Michael N. Castle, the Delaware Republican who is leader of a group of party moderates who have been pushing to ease restrictions on financing stem cell research, said the leadership pledged to take up some version of a proposal to allow federally financed research on stem cells taken from leftover frozen embryos from fertility clinics.
Under a policy set by President Bush in August 2001, federal research financing is available only for the finite number of stem cell lines in use before that time, a number initially thought to be about 60 but now thought to be 22.
Roman Catholic authorities and many conservative Protestants oppose any research on stem cells from human embryos as destruction of human life, and Mr. Bush said at the time that he sought to allow the research without using taxpayer money for the destruction of more embryos.
Mr. Castle said the Republican leadership agreed in meetings on Wednesday and Thursday of last week to consider the proposal. Those same days the House was racing to enact emergency legislation in the case of Terri Schiavo, the critically brain-damaged Florida woman whose feeding tube was disconnected last week. In contrast to the Congressional intervention in the Schiavo case, adoption of the stem cell proposal would be a setback for those who argue for the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death.
House Republican aides said the leadership had not committed to taking up the specific proposal Mr. Castle has backed.
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Martin Enserink
As many as 117 people have died in Angola during what could become the largest recorded outbreak of the Marburg virus, a rare cousin of the Ebola virus that also causes hemorrhagic fever, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced today. Also today, a Canadian team with a mobile lab was scheduled to arrive in the country, hoping to help staunch the epidemic and learn more about the mysterious disease.
Marburg--which can cause fever, pains, diarrhea, coughing, nausea, and hemorrhaging--was first discovered in 1967, when a shipment of monkeys from Uganda caused simultaneous outbreaks in the German towns of Marburg and Frankfurt and in Belgrade, then the capital of Yugoslavia, sickening 31 and killing seven. Three mini-outbreaks are known to have occurred in Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, involving six people. The largest outbreak so far occurred in the Democratic Republic of the Congo between 1998 and 2000, with 149 known cases and 123 deaths. There are no cures or vaccines against the disease.
To experts, the current outbreak's location and its manifestation are unusual. Because Marburg had been found only in Eastern and Central Africa, "you'd think this had to be Ebola," says Thomas Geisbert of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Ft. Detrick, Maryland. According to WHO, about 75% of the victims so far have been children under the age of 5, which is also strange for a hemorrhagic fever virus, says Thomas Ksiazek of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, the lab that first identified Marburg almost 2 weeks ago in samples shipped from Angola. Initial sequencing, however, does not suggest it's an unusual strain, Ksiazek adds.
Although a few cases have been identified in the Angolan capital Luanda, the current outbreak is concentrated in the northern province of Uige, according to WHO, which has a team on the ground to help local authorities. Logistical hurdles in a poor, war-ravaged country such as Angola can be a challenge, but stopping the outbreak shouldn't be "particularly problematic," Ksiazek says. Marburg is not highly contagious (infection requires close contact), and tracing and strictly isolating patients usually brings the virus under control.
To help with diagnosis, virologist Heinz Feldmann and lab technician Allen Grolla of Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory left for Angola this weekend, carrying with them a mobile lab to test samples locally. While stamping out the disease comes first, the team hopes to do some research as well, says Feldmann's colleague Steven Jones--for instance, by trying to find out which immune response protects some people from the disease.
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Relaxing the ban on genetic modification of human embryos is just one of the controversial suggestions contained in a report issued today by the United Kingdom's House of Commons Science and Technology committee. The report, part of a reevaluation of the country's regulation of medical and scientific use of human embryos, goes against mainstream public and scientific opinion in many areas. Reproductive research in the U.K. is regulated by the 1990 Human Fertilization and Embryology Act, drawn up before mammals had been cloned or embryonic cell lines created. As part of a planned reevaluation and updating of the Act, the U.K. Department of Health requested the report from the Parliament committee, who would eventually decide on any changes to the law.
Overall the report argues against the precautionary principle--the idea that a procedure should be avoided unless reasonably known to be safe, which has tended to guide U.K. regulation of embryo research and fertility treatments. Instead, the report supports deregulation except where ethical or health issues clearly argue against a procedure. For example, it recommends that parents be able to use reproductive technology to pick the sex of their children, a stance that flies in the face of overwhelming British public opinion.
The report, from a committee made up of 11 members of Parliament, also recommends legalizing research involving embryos of chimeras and hybrids, which includes cells created by fusing human and animal nuclei. The change would give research on chimeras and hybrids the same legal status as that on human embryos. It's logical but radical, says Robin Lovell-Badge of the U.K.'s National Institute for Medical Research in London, who argues the "yuck factor" accounts for much of the opposition to such research.
The committee is itself bitterly divided over the report's approach and conclusions, a situation many think will limit its impact. Five of the committee's members signed a statement disavowing themselves from the report. They say that other members adopted "an extreme libertarian approach," producing a report that is "unbalanced, light on ethics, [and] goes too far in the direction of deregulation."
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By Adam Tanner
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The United States has treated its indigenous people poorly for much of its history, yet today thousands of people are anxious to show their Native American heritage and are turning to DNA testing for help.
Some white Americans have long claimed distant ties to Cherokee princesses or other legendary figures among those explorer Christopher Columbus mistakenly called Indians when he thought he had arrived in South Asia.
Now Indian heritage -- which can make a person eligible for federal assistance programs or a share of tribal casino profits or just satisfy curiosity -- can be determined through genetic testing. Advances in DNA screening have provided new tools to document Native American ancestry, although some say such data is open to be interpretation.
"If you are interested in determining your eligibility for Native American rights or just want to satisfy your curiosity, our ancestry DNA test is the only method available for this purpose today," one firm, Genelex, advertises.
Although U.S. citizens typically know the broad outlines of their ancestry, for Native Americans the exact fractions of their heritage can take on heightened importance.
Nineteenth-century treaties obligate the U.S. government to provide education, health care and other services to many tribes. Indian sovereignty also means tribes can set up casinos on reservations, and Indian casinos now generate $18 billion annually and the numbers are growing.
Many tribes set as a membership standard that a person must have at least one Indian grandparent or one great grandparent. Others among the 562 federally recognized tribes require links to members on a tribal membership roll in past generations.
With individuals seeking to affirm membership in recognized tribes and dozens of unrecognized tribes seeking federal acknowledgment, commercial firms have in the last two years stepped up marketing of genetic ancestry tests. A positive test result is not sufficient to enable someone to claim Indian benefits because they must prove a link to a specific tribe.
"Nobody else in this nation has to prove their ancestry except for American Indians," said Ken Adams, chief of the Upper Mattaponni Tribe in Virginia which is not recognized by the U.S. government. "It's so ironic because we were the original ones."
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Few aware of how many genetically modified products they eat, study finds
TRENTON, N.J. - Can animal genes be jammed into plants? Would tomatoes with catfish genes taste fishy? Have you ever eaten a genetically modified food?
The answers are: yes, no and almost definitely. But according to a survey, most Americans couldn’t answer correctly even though they’ve been eating genetically modified foods — unlabeled — for nearly a decade.
“It’s just not on the radar screen,” said William Hallman, associate director of the Food Biotechnology Program at the Rutgers Food Policy Institute, which conducted the survey.
Today, roughly 75 percent of U.S. processed foods — boxed cereals, other grain products, frozen dinners, cooking oils and more — contain some genetically modified, or GM, ingredients, said Stephanie Childs of the Grocery Manufacturers of America.
Despite dire warnings about “Frankenfoods,” there have been no reports of illness from these products of biotechnology. Critics note there’s no system for reporting allergies or other reactions to GM foods.
Nearly every product with a corn or soy ingredient, and some containing canola or cottonseed oil, has a GM element, according to the grocery manufacturers group.
Little knowledge of GM products In the Rutgers survey, less than half the people interviewed were aware GM foods are sold in supermarkets. At the same time, more than half wrongly believed supermarket chicken has been genetically modified.
So far, non-processed meat, poultry, fish and dairy products, and fruits and vegetables (both fresh and frozen) are not genetically modified.
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Some theaters in South believe 'Volcanoes' a tough sell
CHARLESTON, South Carolina (AP) -- IMAX theaters in several Southern cities have decided not to show a film on volcanoes out of concern that its references to evolution might offend those with fundamental religious beliefs.
"We've got to pick a film that's going to sell in our area. If it's not going to sell, we're not going to take it," said Lisa Buzzelli, director of an IMAX theater in Charleston that is not showing the movie. "Many people here believe in creationism, not evolution."
The film, "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea," makes a connection between human DNA and microbes inside undersea volcanoes.
Buzzelli doesn't rule out showing the movie in the future.
IMAX theaters in Texas, Georgia and the Carolinas have declined to show the film, said Pietro Serapiglia, who handles distribution for Stephen Low, the film's Montreal-based director and producer.
"I find it's only in the South," Serapiglia said.
Critics worry screening out films that mention evolution will discourage the production of others in the future.
"It's going to restrain the creative approach by directors who refer to evolution," said Joe DeAmicis, vice president for marketing at the California Science Center in Los Angeles and a former director of an IMAX theater. "References to evolution will be dropped."
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