We Speak For Earth

whatsoeverpleasesme:

A new human coronavirus (hCoV) has emerged recently in the Middle East. The disease it caused resembled that seen from SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) which was the source of a fatal epidemic in 2002/2003.
A study published today, Dec 11, has determined that this new hCoV has many potential hosts & could pass from animals to humans repeatedly. Researchers compared receptor sites used by this new coronavirus called hCoV-EMC and those used by the SARS-CoV to reach their conclusions.
The results implicate that the new virus might use a receptor that is conserved between bats, pigs and humans suggesting a low barrier against cross-host transmission.  Read more on the study here: http://bit.ly/QTValu Access the journal article at mBio, an open access online journal published by the American Society for Microbiology: http://bit.ly/TNy1OF  
A coronavirus is illustrated here. These RNA viruses have a pleomorphic viron 80-160 nm in diameter consisting of a lipid containing membrane with large peplomers surrounding a helical nucleocapsid. Source: Wellcome Images

(via scinerds)

ikenbot:

laboratoryequipment:

Plastic in Implantable Medical Devices is Not Suitable

Scientists have discovered a previously unrecognized way that degradation can occur in silicone-urethane plastics that are often considered for use in medical devices. Their study, published in ACS’ journal Macromolecules, could have implications for device manufacturers considering use of these plastics in the design of some implantable devices, including cardiac defibrillation leads.

Kimberly Chaffin, Marc Hillmyer, Frank Bates, from the Univ. of Minnesota, and colleagues explain that some implanted biomedical devices, such as pacemakers and defibrillators, have parts made of a plastic consisting of polyurethane and silicone. While these materials have been extensively studied for failure due to interaction with oxygen, no published study has looked at interaction with water as a potential failure mechanism in this class of materials.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2012/12/plastic-implantable-medical-devices-not-suitable

More stem cells plz.

How Drug Company Money is Undermining Science

When Robert Lindsay chose to become a medical researcher in the early 1970s, he did not do it for the money. His field—the effect of hormones on bone—was a backwater. It was also a perfect opportunity for a young researcher to make his mark and, he hoped, help millions of people who suffered from the bone disease osteoporosis. As the body ages, sometimes bones lose the ability to rebuild themselves fast enough to keep pace with the normal process of deterioration, and the skeleton weakens. Neither Lindsay nor anyone else understood much about why this happened, but there was reason to think that hormones might play a role. Some women develop osteoporosis shortly after menopause, when their hormone levels drop sharply, perhaps upsetting that balance between bone creation and destruction. If so, Lindsay reasoned, replacing the hormones with a pill might halt or even reverse the progress of the disease. From a tiny, underfunded clinic in Glasgow, Scotland, he set up one of the first clinical trials of estrogen replacement therapy for bone loss in postmenopausal women. Lindsay’s star was rising.

His next project had big commercial implications and got the attention of the drug industry. Having moved to Helen Hayes Hospital, a rehabilitation center north of New York City, in 1984 he published work that established the minimum effective dosage of an antiosteoporosis estrogen drug called Premarin. Because the findings suggested that fighting osteoporosis was tantamount to encouraging millions of women to use the drug, it made Lindsay an important person in the eyes of the drug’s manufacturer, Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories. Indeed, the company gave him a role as an author of its informational video Osteoporosis: A Preventable Tragedy.

By the mid-1990s, when Wyeth got caught in a patent battle over Premarin, Lindsay was a staunch Wyeth ally. He came out against approval of a generic version of the drug that would have cut into sales even though the generic form would have made it easier for osteoporosis patients to receive therapy. His reasoning was that such versions might not be precisely equivalent to the brand-name drug, a fact that can be true with certain drugs but was also a position that happened to echo the company line. “All we’re asking is that we don’t approve something now and regret it” later, he told the Associated Press in 1995. Lindsay’s close relationship with Wyeth and other drug companies carried on for decades, in ways that were sometimes hidden. He started allowing Wyeth to draft research articles and began taking tens of thousands of dollars from pharmaceutical interests that stood to gain from his research.

The scandal is not what Lindsay did so much as that his case is typical. In the past few years the pharmaceutical industry has come up with many ways to funnel large sums of money—enough sometimes to put a child through college—into the pockets of independent medical researchers who are doing work that bears, directly or indirectly, on the drugs these firms are making and marketing. The problem is not just with the drug companies and the researchers but with the whole system—the granting institutions, the research labs, the journals, the professional societies, and so forth. No one is providing the checks and balances necessary to avoid conflicts. Instead organizations seem to shift responsibility from one to the other, leaving gaps in enforcement that researchers and drug companies navigate with ease, and then shroud their deliberations in secrecy.

“There isn’t a single sector of academic medicine, academic research or medical education in which industry relationships are not a ubiquitous factor,” says sociologist Eric Campbell, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Those relationships are not all bad. After all, without the help of the pharmaceutical industry, medical researchers would not be able to turn their ideas into new drugs. Yet at the same time, Campbell argues, some of these liaisons co-opt scientists into helping sell pharmaceuticals rather than generating new knowledge.

Continue to Full Article

(via drugpolicyreform)

ikenbot:

Better Medical Care, On Cue

Software for managing the busy schedule of the Hubble Space Telescope has led to technology that does the same for hospitals.

Scientists around the world have clamored to use the Hubble Space Telescope for their research. The only problem is there are thousands of scientists—and only one Hubble.

When it first became operational, Hubble functioned under a variety of scheduling restraints. For example, in order to conserve energy, it could have only two scientific instruments operating at one time. In order to compensate for these scheduling constraints, Hubble’s software team designed a system that worked around these conflicts using a variety of methods.

One of the team members who worked on Hubble, NASA computer scientist Don Rosenthal, helped develop the scheduling system, refining the algorithms and consequently increasing the telescope’s efficiency. After working on Hubble, Rosenthal acquired intellectual property rights to the scheduling technology. He then went on to co-found Menlo Park, California’s Allocade Inc. Using Rosenthal’s experience with Hubble’s software, Allocade created its On-Cue software suite, which optimizes schedules for another hectic field where time is of the essence: medicine.

laboratoryequipment:

Grapes Can Reduce Age-Related Blindness

New research from a Fordham Univ. cell biologist suggests that a diet rich in anti-oxidants and begun at a young age can significantly reduce age-related blindness. Silvia Finnemann, associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, conducted the three-plus-year study by comparing the vision of three groups of mice fed differing diets: One group received a diet rich in freeze-dried grapes, a fruit very high in anti-oxidants. Another group received a diet rich in lutein, an anti-oxidant derived naturally from marigolds. The third group, the control group, received a normal diet.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news-Antioxidants-in-Grapes-Help-Aging-Eyes-011312.aspx

(via scinerds)

laboratoryequipment:

New Resources Offer Clues About Medical Potential of Plants

Scientists at Purdue Univ. and eight other institutions have developed new resources poised to unlock another door in the hidden garden of medicinally important compounds found in plants. The resources were developed by the Medicinal Plant Consortium, led by the Univ. of Kentucky College of Agriculture. They grew out of a $6 million initiative from the National Institutes of Health to study how the genes of plants contribute to production of various chemical compounds, some of which are medicinally important.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news-Research-Explores-Medical-Potential-of-Plants-121611.aspx

(via scinerds)

scinerds:

Report: Harmful Chimpanzee Research Not Worth the Pain

Human ingenuity and compassion have prevailed in an Institute of Medicine declaration that invasive medical experiments on chimpanzees are largely unnecessary.

Update 2 p.m. ET: 90 minutes after the IOM report’s public release, NIH director Francis Collins announced that “I have considered the report carefully and have decided to accept the IOM committee recommendations.” The report recommended the NIH establish an independent oversight committee to evaluate each study, limiting biomedical experiments only to what is absolutely necessary and ensuring that all research is ethically conducted. No new research funding will be granted until the recommendations are in place.

Though the report’s suggestions are not legally binding, the Institute is widely respected. Its judgments often shape government and academic policy. According to the report, experiments that inflict physical and mental harm to humanity’s closest living relatives are justified only when absolutely indispensable, and when no other alternatives exist.

Yes! now let’s get to working on more alternatives that leave out using animals. I’m sure if heavy brain power by leading scientists and experts were applied, we’d have a lot more alternatives that completely render using real live animals for testing moot.

fyearth:

Here ye, here ye!

FYEarth’s admin Bethany is heading to India! 

Her goal, along with a small team of medical professional friends, is to come alongside community leaders and facilitate health care and education within impoverished rural communities in India.

She is half way to her goal of raising $3000, but she needs your to help make it the rest of the way!

Click here for details on donating, and please reblog!

Much love,

FYE

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