Health News

Study Of Giant Viruses Shakes Up Tree Of Life

Date: Sep-17-2012
A new study of giant viruses supports the idea that viruses are ancient living organisms and not inanimate molecular remnants run amok, as some scientists have argued. The study reshapes the universal family tree, adding a fourth major branch to the three that most scientists agree represent the fundamental domains of life. The new findings appear in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology. The researchers used a relatively new method to peer into the distant past...

Scientists Use Sound Waves To Levitate Liquids, Improve Pharmaceuticals

Date: Sep-17-2012
It's not a magic trick and it's not sleight of hand - scientists really are using levitation to improve the drug development process, eventually yielding more effective pharmaceuticals with fewer side effects. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have discovered a way to use sound waves to levitate individual droplets of solutions containing different pharmaceuticals. While the connection between levitation and drug development may not be immediately apparent, a special relationship emerges at the molecular level...

172K Mutation Breaks HIV's Resistance To Drugs, Says MU Researcher

Date: Sep-17-2012
The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) can contain dozens of different mutations, called polymorphisms. In a recent study an international team of researchers, including University of Missouri scientists, found that one of those mutations, called 172K, made certain forms of the virus more susceptible to treatment. Soon, doctors will be able to use this knowledge to improve the drug regimen they prescribe to HIV-infected individuals...

Daily Disinfection Of Isolation Rooms Reduces Contamination Of Healthcare Workers' Hands

Date: Sep-17-2012
New research demonstrates that daily cleaning of high-touch surfaces in isolation rooms of patients with Clostridium difficile (C. difficile) or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) significantly reduces the rate of the pathogens on the hands of healthcare personnel. The findings underscore the importance of environmental cleaning for reducing the spread of difficult to treat infections. The study is published in the October issue of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA)...

Should I Marry Him? If You're Having Doubts, Don't Ignore Them, Suggests UCLA Psychology Study

Date: Sep-17-2012
In the first scientific study to test whether doubts about getting married are more likely to lead to an unhappy marriage and divorce, UCLA psychologists report that when women have doubts before their wedding, their misgivings are often a warning sign of trouble if they go ahead with the marriage. The UCLA study demonstrates that pre-wedding uncertainty, especially among women, predicts higher divorce rates and less marital satisfaction years later...

UMass Amherst Chemists Develop Nose-Like Sensor Array To 'Smell' Cancer Diagnoses

Date: Sep-17-2012
In the fight against cancer, knowing the enemy's exact identity is crucial for diagnosis and treatment, especially in metastatic cancers, those that spread between organs and tissues. Now chemists led by Vincent Rotello at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a rapid, sensitive way to detect microscopic levels of many different metastatic cell types in living tissue. Findings appear in the current issue of the journal ACS Nano...

Study Shows Signature Placement Curbs Cheating

Date: Sep-17-2012
Tax collectors and insurance agencies trying to boost honest reporting could improve compliance simply by asking people to sign their forms at the beginning instead of at the end. That's because attesting to the truthfulness of the information before a form is filled out tends to activate people's moral sense, making it harder for them to fudge their numbers after, says a new paper...

Cloned Receptor Paves Way For New Breast And Prostate Cancer Treatment

Date: Sep-17-2012
Researchers at Uppsala University have cloned a T-cell receptor that binds to an antigen associated with prostate cancer and breast cancer. T cells that have been genetically equipped with this T-cell receptor have the ability to specifically kill prostate and breast cancer cells. The study was published last week in PNAS. Genetically modified T cells (white blood corpuscles) have recently been shown to be extremely effective in treating certain forms of advanced cancer...

Poorest Miss Out On Benefits, Experience More Material Hardship, Since 1996 Welfare Reform, USA

Date: Sep-17-2012
Although the federal government's 1996 reform of welfare brought some improvements for the nation's poor, it also may have made extremely poor Americans worse off, new research shows. The reforms radically changed cash assistance - what most Americans think of as 'welfare' - by imposing lifetime limits on the receipt of aid and requiring recipients to work. About the same time, major social policy reforms during the 1990s raised the benefits of work for low-income families...

Children's Intensive Care Units Performing Well Despite Low Staffing Levels

Date: Sep-17-2012
Standards of care in children's intensive care units come under scrutiny in a new audit report published today by the University of Leeds and the University of Leicester. The report, commissioned by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership and carried out by the Paediatric Intensive Care Audit Network (PICANet) showed that death rates in children's intensive care units are low and continue to fall. However, there continues to be a higher risk of mortality for children of south Asian origin observed in earlier years...