To see how long the idea of repressed memories have been around, a group of psychologists and literature scholars turned to historical writings.
They could not find a single description of repressed memory, also referred to as dissociative amnesia, in fiction or factual writing before 1800.
Investigators at the University of Alberta have recently reported that a drug previously used in humans for the treatment of rare disorders of metabolism is also able to cause tumor regression in a number of human cancers growing in animals. This drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), appears to suppress the growth of cancer cells without affecting normal cells, suggesting that it might not have the dramatic side effects of standard chemotherapies.
At this point, the University of Alberta, the Alberta Cancer Board and Capital Health do not condone or advise the use of dichloroacetate (DCA) in human beings for the treatment of cancer since no human beings have gone through clinical trials using DCA to treat cancer. However, the University of Alberta and the Alberta Cancer Board are committed to performing clinical trials in the immediate future in consultation with regulatory agencies such as Health Canada.
The 22-year-old died after feathering and disembowelling an infected chicken. She was from Lagos, the commercial capital of Africa's most populous country, Information Minister Frank Nweke said.
Test [sic] on three other victims, one of them the woman's mother, were inconclusive.
Nigeria was the first African nation to detect the H5N1 virus in poultry last year and had conducted tests on 14 people suspected of having the virus.
World Health Organisation spokesman Gregory Hartl said a human case of bird flu in Nigeria was to be expected because of the experience in other countries, such as Indonesia, with huge poultry populations where chickens and hens live in close proximity to humans.
"It does not change anything from a public health point of view," Hartl said. "It had to happen sooner or later."
Chairul Anwar Nidom of Airlangga University in Surabaya, Indonesia, told journalists last week that he had taken blood samples from 500 stray cats near poultry markets in four areas of Java, including the capital, Jakarta, and one area in Sumatra, all of which have recently had outbreaks of H5N1 in poultry and people.
Of these cats, 20 per cent carried antibodies to H5N1. This does not mean that they were still carrying the virus, only that they had been infected - probably through eating birds that had H5N1. Many other cats that were infected are likely to have died from the resulting illness, so many more than 20 per cent of the original cat populations may have acquired H5N1.
[...]
Osterhaus emphasises that the cat infections still pose a potential threat. "We know the 1918 pandemic was a bird flu virus that adapted to mammals in some intermediate mammalian host, possibly pigs," he says. "Maybe for H5N1 the intermediate host is cats." If similar percentages of cats are infected at every outbreak location, there must have been many thousands of cat infections since the virus emerged, compared to 267 confirmed cases in humans. Every sick cat is a chance for the virus to adapt, and with renewed outbreaks this year in birds, people or both in China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, Egypt and Nigeria, it is getting plenty of such chances.
Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.
DCA attacks a unique feature of cancer cells: the fact that they make their energy throughout the main body of the cell, rather than in distinct organelles called mitochondria. This process, called glycolysis, is inefficient and uses up vast amounts of sugar.
By infecting monkeys with the virus, the team was able to show that the 1918 virus prompted a deadly respiratory infection that echoed historical accounts of how the disease claimed its victims.
Importantly, the new work shows that infection with the virus prompted an immune response that seems to derail the body's typical reaction to viral infection and instead unleashes an attack by the immune system on the lungs. As immune cells attack the respiratory system, the lungs fill with fluid and victims, in essence, drown.
The same excessive immune reaction is characteristic of the deadly complications of H5N1 avian influenza, the strain of bird flu present in Asia and which has claimed nearly 150 human lives, but has not yet shown a capacity to spread easily among people.
"What we see with the 1918 virus in infected monkeys is also what we see with H5N1 viruses," Kawaoka says, suggesting that the ability to modulate immune response may be a shared feature of the most virulent influenza viruses.
In the new study, conducted in a high-level biosafety laboratory (BSL 4) at the Public Health Agency of Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory, seven primates were infected with the reconstructed 1918 virus. Clinical signs of disease were apparent within 24 hours of infection, and within eight days, euthanization was necessary. The rapid course of the disease mirrors how quickly the disease ran its course in its human victims in 1918.
In addition to the increases seen in emergency rooms, an outbreak of GI illness has occurred at Simmons College in Boston. As of December 15, eighty-one (81) students and staff have reported experiencing nausea, vomiting diarrhea and stomach cramps. Many of the affected individuals have reported being ill for approximately two days after symptoms began. The outbreak at the school appears to be on a downward trend with only a few new cases having been reported in the last several days. Early implementation of control measures including education on hand washing, availability and use of hand sanitizer, and increased frequency of restroom cleaning appears to have decreased the transmission of illness at Simmons.
Even as health officials and food distributors zeroed in yesterday on a California farm as the possible source of the contaminated green onions that have sickened Taco Bell customers, the E. coli outbreak widened considerably, with cases reported for the first time in New York City, Delaware, South Carolina and Utah.
In all, the number of cases that have been reported ballooned, to at least 169 yesterday, with most concentrated on Long Island and in New Jersey.
In New York, health officials said they were investigating 103 confirmed or suspected cases in 10 counties, up from 49 on Wednesday. Nearly three-quarters of the cases were found on Long Island, but cases were reported for the first time in New York City as well as Westchester, Rockland, St. Lawrence and Herkimer Counties.
In New Jersey, 12 new cases were reported, bringing the total to 55. There were no new cases reported in Pennsylvania, where seven people have been sickened thus far. In Delaware, one case was confirmed and another was suspected. According to federal health officials, “the vast majority of patients reported eating” at a Taco Bell.
Disease investigators have said they believe whooping cough was carried into Children's by a 19-month -old patient. They continue to investigate whether a 3-year-old girl who has the illness contracted it at the hospital or before she arrived there.
Barry said the eight additional cases reported yesterday do not reflect recent infections. Instead, she said, most of those staff members began displaying symptoms in mid-October. So far, no hospital workers or patients have faced life-threatening complications as a result of the outbreak.
Hola. I'm C. jejuni.
I am a curved Gram Negative rod.
You can find me in lots of domestic animals.
I am part of the normal bacterial flora of poultry and cattle.
Developmental prosopagnosia came to light in large part because of Internet groups. Before that, most people born with the condition assumed they were just bad with faces. It's not the type of thing most would go to a doctor about, and even if they did, their physician probably couldn't help, because many doctors are unaware of it. In many ways, this is a neurological condition discovered by Yahoo.
"Historically it's a near fatal disease and so it's always touch and go, but given treatment today we're hopeful that this individual is going to survive this case," said Dr. Judith Monroe, Indiana State Department of Health.
A bag of tainted Dole baby spinach found in the refrigerator of a New Mexico patient was a "smoking gun" that allowed investigators to zero in on farms in the Salinas Valley.
The spinach tested positive for the same strain of E. coli linked to the outbreak. Dole is one of the brands of spinach recalled late last week by Natural Selection Foods LLC of San Juan Bautista, California.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is issuing an alert to consumers about an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 in multiple states that may be associated with the consumption of produce. To date, preliminary epidemiological evidence suggests that bagged fresh spinach may be a possible cause of this outbreak.
Based on the current information, FDA advises that consumers not eat bagged fresh spinach at this time. Individuals who believe they may have experienced symptoms of illness after consuming bagged spinach are urged to contact their health care provider.
Since July, nine people have become ill probably from food poisoning associated with Spam musubis sold at four stores in Central Maui, officials said yesterday.
Most of the ill have been children, ranging from ages 3 to 9, and two of them received emergency medical care, officials said.
A favorite Hawaiian way to eat Spam is in the form of a musubi (pronounced moo-soo-bee, with no accent). It is a fried slice of spam on rice pressed together to form a small block, then wrapped with a strip of seaweed. A special kitchen gadget, known as the Spam Musubi Maker, is responsible for the proliferation of this treat. It is a special plexiglas mold with the outline of a single Spam slice. The Spam musubi is eaten as a sandwich, and it is perhaps the Island's favorite "to go" or snack food. Spam musubi is literally everywhere in Hawaii, including local convenience stores, grocery stores, school cafeterias, and even at the zoo. Eating a Spam musubi seems to serve as a rite of passage for newcomers anxious to attain "local" status.
A deadly squirrel disease which only affects reds could see the species disappear from some of its last remaining English strongholds within a decade, new research revealed today.
Previously scientists believed that grey squirrels were wiping out native reds simply by taking over their habitats, but an international study has blamed a virus which they transmit to the red population, killing them within a fortnight.
Earlier research [at Mount Sinai and elsewhere] suggests that schizophrenia is associated with changes in myelin, the fatty substance or white matter in the brain that coats nerve fibers and is critical for the brain to function properly. Myelin is formed by a group of central nervous cells called oligodendrocytes, which are regulated by the gene oligodendrocyte lineage transcription factor 2 (OLIG2). Patients with schizophrenia are known to have insufficient levels of oligodendrocytes, however the source of this [deficiency] has not been identified, explains study co-author Joseph D. Buxbaum, PhD, the G. Harold and Leila Y. Mathers Research Professor of Geriatrics and Adult Development, Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, and Co-Principal Investigator of the Siliva O. Conte Center for the Neuroscience of Mental Disorders.
Dr. Buxbaum and a team of Mount Sinai researchers collaborated with researchers from the Cardiff University School of Medicine in the United Kingdom to analyze DNA in blood samples taken from 673 unrelated patients with schizophrenia and compared their genetic information to 716 patients who did not have the disease. The controls were matched for age, sex, and ethnicity; none were taking medications at the time of the study.
The study showed that genetic variation in OLIG2 was strongly associated with schizophrenia. In addition, OLIG2 also showed a genetic association with schizophrenia when examined together with two other genes previously associated with schizophrenia--CNP and ERBB4--which are also active in the development of myelin. The expression of these three genes was also coordinated. Taken together the data support an etiological role for oligodendrocyte abnormalities in the development of schizophrenia.
The parents of 3 young children from North Sumatra's Karo regency who were earlier reported as exhibiting classic bird flu symptoms plan to sue the provincial administration and the central government for saying their children most likely had bird flu.
