»medicine«

The hotspots for the risks that new infectious diseases emerge are located in India, China, tropical Africa and Central America, states a report in the journal Nature and a related Nature News story (20.2.2008) by Michael Hopkin. But also the western part of Germany, NL, BE, and the UK are at risk, according to deep red spots on the map. High population density is a main risk factor, explains Kate Jones of the Zoological Society of London. In the supplementary information of the paper there's a list of all 335 new infections diseases emerged since 1940, and a lot came first on the stage in western Europe.

Susan Love demands in an opinion piece for the NY Times (1.4.2007) a revised strategy for cancer research. The peer review system and funding schemes support the old boy network and mainstream science and hypothesis'. There's little room for alternative research approaches: 'alternative' in a sense that researchers, mostly clinicians, deduce hypothesis of a disease from long work with patients and test them in the lab. Today's approach is, actually, the other way round: lab discoveries were brought to patients to make them fit.
"The curious clinician is becoming increasingly rare. Medicine and science have become so complicated that it is almost impossible for one person to be an expert at both. Researchers tend to take a discovery from the lab and apply it to patients; the reverse trip is more and more uncommon. More often than not, someone makes an interesting discovery in the lab and then tries to find a clinical application. There is little chance, much less financing, for the wild idea that might prove revolutionary," writes Love.

Amy Harmon reports in the NY Times (18.3.2007) about an American 23-year-old woman who made a genetic check for Huntington’s disease and got a positive result. "The gene that will kill [her] sits on the short arm of everyone’s fourth chromosome, where the letters of the genetic alphabet normally repeat C-A-G as many as 35 times in a row. In people who develop Huntington’s, however, there are more than 35 repeats," describes Harmon. The author writes on how people cope with the knowledge of their future death by the lethal gene, "a vanguard of people at risk for Huntington’s who are choosing to learn early what their future holds. Facing their genetic heritage, they say, will help them decide how to live their lives."

The British government's attempt to ban hybrid embryos for stem cell research will hobble UK's medical future, says Alok Jha in an opinion piece for the Guardian (19.2.2007): "Hybrids do not open up a Pandora's box of hideous half-men, half-beasts. Creating these embryos involves hollowing out an animal egg, usually a cow's or a rabbit's, and replacing it with the nucleus of a human cell. They need only be grown to the size of a pinhead for up to 14 days to produce useful stem cells, which would be 99.5 percent human." Jha argues that the governments decision making that relies on a public consultation process is flawed by the intervention of lobby groups. Other organisations like the Wellcome Trust, Britain's greatest charity, are in favour of research with hybrid organisms.

Taking a nap during the day may actually save your life, recommends the Economist (15.2.2007) the corporate sector regarding a Greek study on siestas and related health benefits. The study was controlled for diet, exercise, smoking and other relevant variables - except one: "Before buying a sofa for the office, however, it might be wise to consider the possibility of selection bias. Dr Trichopoulos concedes that 'Type A' personalities, whose hard-working lives may make them prone to heart attacks, are also much less likely to take naps during the day. That bias might be skewing the study's results. Even so, he advises, 'Take a nap if you can'," writes the Economist.

Heike Le Ker is fed up with all those studies on breast-milk that seemingly only follow our prejudice: breast-milk is best, makes us beautiful and handsome, enhances our I.Q. and the more like that. On the other hand, reports Le Ker in Spiegel online (14.2.2007) most of these studies have questionable bases and conclusions. The only established claim is according to Le Ker the fact that breast feeding supports the mother-child-relation and thus does us all good. (Thanks to Marcus Anhäuser for bringing the issue to our attention.)

Is it possible to read in the brain simple intentions before any concretion of the act or thought? It is, say researchers. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) makes it possible to visualize the zones in the brain which are active while a person reads, memorizes, listens, feels a pain, or imagines a scene. John-Dylan Haynes of the Max Planck Institute in Germany and his colleagues wanted to know if our intentions could be read in the brain. For that they asked three men and five women to decide secretly if they were going to proceed to an addition or a subtraction. The results were good in 70 percent of the cases, explain the researchers (knowing that at best guess a fifty percent chance would yield the right answer), reports Cécile Dumas for the Nouvel Observateur (11.2.2007).
by Marie Chantal Schmitz

Scientists beside the mainstream often struggle hard to receive funding or acknowledgment by their peers. Take the BSE case. A very, very tiny minority of researchers still thinks its a virus causing the human type of it, Creutzfeldt–Jakob, or scrapie in sheep. Common sense among scientists is that protein particles, prions, are the cause. Even more, the prion evidence has been awarded a Nobel prize. Laura Manuelidis of Yale now published on the virus hypothesis in well-known journal PNAS. Heidi Ledford reports on the case and comments by the scientific community in Nature magazine (7.2.2007).

Erika Check reports in Nature online (15.1.2007) about the role of statisticians in medical papers. Often they are not named as co-authors for the publications. But the play a key role as they check and prepare the data to make conclusions, especially when they are affiliated with the funding company as it is generally the case. Even more, most companies are very reluctant to give researchers the rare data.

The Economist (18.1.2007) writes about a simple blood testing method that is largely inspired by considerations of Albert Einstein, in 1926, on why tea leaves spiral to the bottom of the cup after being stirred. In a blood sample the heavy stuff -- the red blood cell -- could by this principle get separated from the blood plasma. The later harbours most indicators for health and diseases.