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If SARS Hits U.S., Quarantine Could Too
By David Tuller |
| New York Times, December 9, 2003 |
| SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 8 — As the health officer of Alameda County, Dr. Anthony Iton is prepared to make tough choices if SARS re-emerges this winter or spring, as many infectious disease experts fear. |
| The county, just across the bay from here, has identified two large buildings where, if voluntary steps to quell an epidemic were to fail, the authorities could sequester not just people who were sick but also people who might have been exposed to the SARS virus, Dr. Iton said. |
| The buildings, he said, could house up to 100 people and could be guarded to keep anyone from leaving. |
| “It's a virtual certainty that sometime in the near future we will see a SARS-like event in the United States, a highly communicable infectious disease that will require mass quarantine or isolation,”Dr. Iton said. |
| Since last spring's outbreak of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, public health officials across the country have been spending extraordinary amounts of time and energy preparing for the prospect that the disease — or pandemic flu, smallpox or something as yet unknown — could require them to order a quarantine, a once common public health measure virtually abandoned for most of the past century. |
| In a draft SARS preparedness plan released this fall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises states and communities to impose restrictions on people's movements based on the severity of an outbreak. In the event of a quarantine, the plan envisions extensive tracing of contacts of SARS patients, combined with a largely home-based, voluntary regime. |
| The plan, however, also calls for health authorities to cooperate closely with law enforcement, and to consider in extreme cases “electronic forms of monitoring,“detention facilities”and the establishment of heavily guarded quarantine “zones.”It also calls for respecting civil liberties and keeping the public informed. |
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Monsanto invests to improve GMOs' image in Brazil
Mon December 8, 2003 |
| SAO PAULO, Brazil, Dec 8 (Reuters) - U.S. biotech giant Monsanto Co. said on Monday it was launching a 6 million real ($2 million) campaign to improve the image of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in Brazil, the company said on Monday. |
| The money will be used to target housewives, mothers, students for the next month through local news papers, radio and television. |
| “We hope the doubts over the safety of food and the environment will be removed and that the myths that have been invented will be exposed,”the marketing director of Monsanto in Brazil, Felipe Osorio, said in a statement. |
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Teens Lauded for West Nile, Mad Cow Research
Mon December 8, 2003 |
| By Cyrille Cartier |
| WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Research that may lead to a better understanding of how diseases like mad cow destroy the brain and how the West Nile Virus spreads were among discoveries by high school students honored at a national science contest on Monday. |
| Yin Li, a 17-year-old senior from New York City's Stuyvesant High School, won $100,000 in scholarship money for studying how a protein from a mouse's brain reproduced itself when inserted in yeast cells, advancing the understanding of neurological diseases like bovine spongiform encephalopathy, known as mad cow disease, or its human equivalent Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. |
| Li was among 19 high school students from around the nation who received prizes in the Siemens Westinghouse annual competition out of more than 1,000 who entered. |
| “There is a plan behind everything. It's just extraordinary to get a glimpse of what that is,”said Li who volunteered to work on the project in the laboratory of Nobel Prize-winner Eric Kandel after being inspired by his study on brain cells, memory and learning. |
| Science is considered an extremely noble profession in countries like China, India, and the former Soviet Union, said Albert Hoser, chairman and CEO of Siemens Foundation. “I'm afraid this is not so in this country.” |
| Mark Schneider, 18, and his brother Jeffrey Schneider, 16, will share $100,000 as winners of the team category for advancing ways to understand the spread of West Nile. |
| They were inspired to look at mosquitoes because the youngest of the brothers from South Windsor High School in Connecticut was especially susceptible to being bitten. They looked at the factors affecting the transmission and reproduction of the West Nile Virus using a computer program. |
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Indian scientists unveil protein-rich rice |
| Press Trust of India
Bangalore, December 10 |
| Indian scientists who created protein-rich potato by genetic modification (GM) say they have now put the same gene in rice to enhance its protein content. |
| “We have transformed the rice by adding the amaranthus gene (AmA1) in the laboratory,”Subhra Chakraborty of the National Centre for Plant Genome Research in New Delhi said. |
| “The project was initiated this year by the Department of Biotechnology,”she told the 10th congress of Federation of Asian and Oceanian Biochemists and Molecular Biologists here today. |
| The gene had been added to five rice varieties cultivated in India, including IR-72 and Pusa Basmati, Chakraborty said. |
| Rice normally contains about seven per cent protein. The gene addition was expected to improve the amount of protein and also the amino-acid content, she said. |
| Chakraborty said work had also started for putting the AmA1 gene into cassava and sweet potato that are eaten by the poor in several parts of the world. |
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OECD Urges Better Communication of Science Advances
Mon December 8, 2003 01:23 PM ET |
| PARIS (Reuters) - Governments must do more to educate people about scientific and technological advances to counter misinformation and often unfounded fears of risks to health and the environment, a free-market forum said Monday. |
| Innovation in areas like e-commerce, nuclear power, stem cell research and genetically modified crops offers huge growth potential, but public confidence is vital, Donald Johnston, secretary-general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), told a forum on investment. |
| “To preserve the vast potential of science to better the human condition, governments must do much more to ensure the maintenance of public confidence. Fears abound, stoked often by claims of some NGO activists who exercise media power without... shouldering responsibility,”Johnston said. |
| “Governments need to take back the initiative on science issues -- through transparency, education and broad consultation. The public must understand the trade-offs.” |
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Scientist Links Man to Climate Over the Ages
By KENNETH CHANG |
| New York Times, December 10, 2003 |
| SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 9 — Humans have altered the world's climate by generating heat-trapping gases since almost the beginning of civilization and even prevented the start of an ice age several thousand years ago, a scientist said on Tuesday. |
| Most scientists attribute a rise in global temperatures over the past century in part to emissions of carbon dioxide by human activities like driving cars and operating factories. |
| Dr. William Ruddiman, an emeritus professor at the University of Virginia, said at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union here that humans' effect on climate went back nearly 10,000 years to when people gave up hunting and gathering and began farming. |
| Dr. Ruddiman is also reporting his findings in the journal Climatic Change. |
| In a commentary accompanying the article, Dr. Thomas J. Crowley of Duke University, said he was first taken aback by Dr. Ruddiman's premise. “But when I started reading,” Dr. Crowley wrote, “I could not help but wonder whether he just might be on to something.” |
| The climate of the last 10,000 years has been unusually stable, allowing civilization to flourish. But that is only because people chopped down swathes of forest in Europe, China and India for croplands and pastures, Dr. Ruddiman said. Carbon dioxide released by the destruction of the forests, plus methane, another heat-trapping gas, produced by irrigated rice fields in Southeast Asia, trapped enough heat to offset an expected natural cooling, he said. |
| “The stability is an accident,”Dr. Ruddiman said. |
| Levels of carbon dioxide and methane rise and fall in natural cycles lasting thousands of years, and both reached a peak at the end of the last ice age 11,000 years ago. Both then declined as expected. |
| Both should have continued declining through the present day, leading to lower temperatures, and a new ice age should have begun 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, Dr. Ruddiman said. Instead, levels of carbon dioxide reversed 8,000 years ago and starting rising again. The decline in methane levels reversed 5,000 years ago, coinciding with the advent of irrigation rice farming. |
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| LA Times |
In Reversal, FDA Says It Will Not Regulate Bioengineered Fish |
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The agency won't monitor GloFish, which go on sale Jan. 5 in every state but California. |
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By Kenneth R. Weiss, Times Staff Writer |
| The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, reversing an earlier decision to regulate all genetically altered animals, announced on Tuesday that it sees no need to scrutinize a tropical zebra fish bioengineered to glow red and headed for sale in pet stores next month. |
| A Texas-based company and a pair of tropical fish farms in Florida plan to market the trademarked GloFish beginning Jan. 5 in every state except California, which has banned all transgenic fish except in biomedical laboratories that can enssure the fish will not escape into the wild. |
| But the Food and Drug Administration said it had no concerns about the zebra fish, which is infused with a red fluorescent gene of a sea anemone, so that it seems to glow red under ultraviolet light. |
| “Because tropical aquarium fish are not used for food purposes, they pose no threat to the food supply,”the FDA said in a terse statement. |
| “There is no evidence that these genetically engineered zebra danio fish pose any more threat to the environment than their unmodified counterparts which have long been widely sold in the United States,”the FDA said. “In absence of a clear risk to the public health, the FDA finds no reason to regulate these particular fish.” |
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| Science Daily News 2003-12-10 |
Ebola Virus-like Particles Prevent Lethal Ebola Virus Infection |
| Scientists have successfully immunized mice against Ebola virus using hollow virus-like particles, or VLPs, which are non-infectious but capable of provoking a robust immune response. These Ebola VLPs conferred complete protection to mice exposed to lethal doses of the virus. |
| The work could serve as a basis for development of vaccines and other countermeasures to Ebola, which causes hemorrhagic fever with case fatality rates as high as 80 percent in humans. The virus, which is infectious by aerosol, is of concern both as a global health threat and a potential agent of biological warfare or terrorism. Currently there are no available vaccines or therapies. |
| In a study published in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Sina Bavari and colleagues at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) describe creating VLPs from two Ebola virus proteins, glycoprotein (GP) and matrix protein (VP40). These VLPs resemble a shell of infectious viral particles but lack the genetic material necessary for reproduction. |
| When the VLPs were injected into mice, they activated both arms of the immune response. Specifically, they induced cell-mediated immunity via T cells and humoral immunity via B cells. Both are necessary for complete protection against the Ebola virus. |
| Having shown that the VLPs evoked a robust immune response, the team next examined whether this response could protect mice from lethal challenge with Ebola virus. Mice were vaccinated with VLPs three times at three-week intervals and challenged with the virus six weeks after the last vaccination. The result was 100 percent protection with no signs of illness in the immunized mice. |
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| Science Daily News2003-12-10 |
History Of Frog Deformities Suggests Emerging Disease |
| MADISON -- A historical examination of amphibian deformities - frogs with extra legs growing out of the abdomen, for example - suggests that these aberrations are not a new phenomenon, but part of an emerging disease that could jeopardize the survival of these organisms. |
| The research, described in the December issue of Conservation Biology, shows that while amphibian malformations and the parasitic worm that causes them have been found in lakes and ponds for more than 50 years, they have substantially increased in their abundance during this period. |
| Pieter Johnson, a University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student in zoology and lead author of the recent paper, says that frog deformities have been a hot topic since the mid-1990s, when the abnormalities began to be widely observed. To date, severely malformed frogs, toads and salamanders have been found among 60 different species in nearly all U.S. states, as well as parts of Canada, Japan and several European countries. |
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Science Daily News2003-12-09 |
Researchers Find Plant Immune System's 'Take Two Aspirin' Gene, Offering Hope For Disease Control Without Agricultural Pesticides |
| ITHACA, N.Y. -- Scientists have found the gene that sends a signal through plant immune systems, saying, in effect: “Take two aspirin and call out the troops — we're under attack!” |
| Discovery of the salicylic acid-binding protein 2 (SABP2) gene, by scientists at Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research (BTI) at Cornell University, is being called an important step toward new strategies to boost plants' natural defenses against disease and for reducing the need for agricultural pesticides. |
| Salicylic acid, the chemical compound found naturally in most plants (as well as in the most-used medication, aspirin), is a plant hormone produced at elevated levels in response to attack by microbial pathogens. According to a report on the Web today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS Early Edition, week of Dec. 7, 2003) by BTI's Dhirendra Kumar and Daniel F. Klessig, the aspirin-like hormone is perceived by the SABP2 protein and a message is transmitted, via a lipid-based signal, to activate the plant's defense arsenal. Says Klessig, “Now that we know a key signaling protein in plant immune systems, we can work on ways to enhance the signal and help plants fight disease without using potentially harmful pesticides.” |
| The PNAS authors say SABP2 plays an important role in restricting infections by inducing host cells at the site of infection to undergo programmed cell death and sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the rest of the plant. |
| SABP2 also plays a critical role in activating the innate immune system in other parts of the plant to guard against further attack or spread by the same pathogen — and even against unrelated pathogens. (Innate immune systems, which mount an immediate defense against infections, are found in all plants and animals. But only vertebrates, including humans and other mammals, have additional levels of defense — the antibody-producing B cell and T cell-mediated acquired immunity for a delayed response that can take weeks to develop.) |
| The Klessig laboratory discovered the presence of the SABP2 protein in plants in 1997. But it took five years to purify the protein, which occurs naturally in “excruciatingly small amounts,”then to clone the gene that encodes it, and finally to assess the role of SABP2 in disease resistance. The PNAS article tells how the researchers proved that SABP2 is a key player in innate immunity by silencing the SABP2 gene and watching the plant immune system fail. |
| Although the salicylic acid-signaling experiments were done with tobacco plants — because tobacco is a well-known plant species for studying disease resistance — similar salicylic acid-binding proteins are found in other plant species, the BTI researchers say, making their results applicable to other crop plants. |
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Global therapeutic cloning ban averted |
| 10 December 03 |
| NewScientist.com news service |
| A global ban on all medical applications of human cloning was averted by an eleventh-hour deal at the United Nations on Tuesday. Last-minute haggling in the aisles of the UN General Assembly in New York sealed a compromise which postpones debate on a cloning treaty until October 2004. |
| A total ban, backed by the US, the Vatican and other Catholic countries, would have caused a deep rift with nations such as the UK and the Netherlands that want the right to pursue new medical treatments from cloning. |
| All countries want a UN treaty that will ban the creation of cloned human babies. But a US-backed proposal put forward by Costa Rica sought to extend the ban to “therapeutic”cloning. This aims to use stem cells from cloned embryos to treat diseases such as Parkinson's disease, but requires the embryo to be destroyed. |
| The issue appeared to reach a stalemate in November when the UN's legal committee voted by 80 to 79 to postpone further debate on the treaty until 2005. But Costa Rica rekindled the crisis this week by proposing a vote in the General Assembly. This aimed to overturn the legal committee's decision and then put the original proposal for a total ban to a direct vote. |
| In the end, both sides backed down as neither was confident enough of winning. But the last-minute deal did bring forward the resumption of the debate by a year. |
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