Health and Medicine – Page 30

Australian Produce Banned by US

Vegemite ban And you thought Brussels was crazy for banning bananas that were too curved, for forcing manufacturers to relabel brandy butter as “modified distilled wine spreadable fat product”, and for limiting pizzas to an eleven-inch standardised diameter only! Now, the US is searching Aussies coming into the country to make sure they’re not bringing that most infamous of products with them – Vegemite!

According to News.com.au, the iconic spreadable brown stuff in a jar is faithfully carried around the world by travellers from down under. But, a legal technicality in the US means that only breads and cereals are allowed to contain added folic acid (aka folate or vitamin B9), so Vegemite has become hot outlaw property.

A spokeswoman for the manfacturer Kraft, Joanna Scott said: “The (US) Food and Drug Administration doesn’t allow the import of Vegemite simply because the recipe does have the addition of folic acid.” She added that the US is actually only “a minor market” for Vegemite.

Presumably, the reason the folate law exists is to prevent manufacturers of other products from cashing in on folate health publicity surrounding folic acid and campaigns aimed at women hoping to get pregnant but reduce the risk of their child having spina bifida. But, Vegemite, Australians will tell you, is almost as old as toast itself. Its certainly something most will be very reluctant to give up in the final count. If the “ban” persists one can anticipate a rather rapid decline in quality bar staff across the US, especially among those who can mix a Singapore sling and play the digeridoo. Or, maybe the whole story is simply a PR campaign in itself aimed at boosting the Vegemite share price and Aussie bar staff will be able to cope just fine!

Resistance is not futile

Platensimycin antibiotic As antibiotics fall to bacterial resistance one by one, it is essential that medicinal chemists keep ahead of the game by finding compounds with new modes of attack. Recently a new antibiotic, platensimycin has been found to act potently through a novel mechanism. Now, US chemists have devised a total synthesis for this unique compound and tracked their progress using mass spectrometry and NMR spectroscopy.

You can read the full story on how Scripps chemist KC Nicolaou and his colleagues have devised a total synthesis of this molecule that could be used as the starting point for manufacturing a new class of antibiotics.

More…

Bible Reading Science Writer Wanted

Geordie Boffin Podcast I received a job ad indirectly from the Living Fuel website today, it seemed like a fairly run of the mill science writing job asking for a ghost writer-researcher to assist in writing a weekly health newsletter etc…

Usual kind of online job ad in other words.

The prospective candidates need experience in health and nutrition, obviously, and must be skilled at taking complex information and effectively communicating it to lay people. So far, so good.

One final qualification was asked for: “Working knowledge of the Bible a plus.”

Now, that’s not a run of the mill request for a science writing job. In fact, that has to be one of the most peculiar requirements for a scientific writing job I’ve ever seen. I don’t think even CS Monitor expect their science journos to have a working knowledge of the Bible. I was, however, intrigued and so took a look at the site. The first thing I noticed is that they’re basically selling some kind of health supplements. Fair enough. A testimonial from a satisfied customer provides no clues as to the Biblical intent, although the effects do seem miraculous.

Here’s the quote:

“I have had asthma since running competitively in high school and don’t like taking medications. Living fuel keeps my body alkalized and in balance so I can breathe clearly and naturally. Since using Living Fuel, I made the 4k World Cross Country Championships and finished 4th in the 2004 Olympic trials for the Steeplechase. I’m counting on Living Fuel to fuel me all the way to the 2008 Olympics!”
-Isaiah Festa, Madison, Wisconsin, USA”

Most of us don’t like taking medications, but the word medications is just that, a word. Taking any kind of supplement that has such a radical effect on the body as “alkanization” is essentially a medication whatever you call it. After all, nutraceuticals don’t sound like nutritional pharmaceuticals for nothing. The web seems to be full of product sites selling foods and supplements that claim to “alkanize the body” but I could find no mention of this “process” on any .edu or .ac.uk site and only one mention of the phrase in PubMed with regard to cell pH. Am I missing something, here?

Regardless, I’m still confused as to where the Bible reading comes into the job, I could find no mention of Christ on the site, and only a pdf file that cites Genesis in the references in the context of longevity. Needless to say, I probably won’t be applying for the job. I’m sure after reading my review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, they wouldn’t want to take me on anyway.

Indoor air pollution

Sick building syndrome and multichemical sensitivity may not hit the headlines as often as they used to, but they do continue to represent an important health and safety issue for those who manage work place environments.

Now, researchers in Sweden have carried out a detailed analysis of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), such as aldehydes, amines, and acids, that are found in the air of various buildings. They compared their results for buildings in which people with non-specific building-related symptoms (also called sick building syndrome, SBS) perceive health problems and for buildings where they do not.

More on this in my latest news featured in SpectroscopyNOW.com.

Pac-man enzyme fights Alzheimer’s

Insulin degrading enzyme The day the UK’s medicines approval agency NICE, announces that certain Alzheimer’s drugs are to be limited to those in the latter stages of the disease to get the best value for money, I read a Nature press release announcing a novel approach to treating the disease based on supercharging an enzyme that looks like the video game character Pac-man. US researchers have determined the crystal structure of a protein-degrading enzyme as it binds to its natural protein substrates.

Their work suggests a possible way to design drugs that either inhibit the enzyme to slow the degradation of insulin in diabetes or boost its activity to help it clear out amyloid-beta from the brain cells of Alzheimer’s disease sufferers.

Read on in my latest news round up on Spectroscopynow.com

Desktop bird flu test

It always come down to money. From Friday, the ability of London’s financial services industry to cope with a bird flu pandemi will be put to the test as money-oriented firms across The City (London’s financial district) check their metaphorical handkerchiefs and determine whether they are ready or not. So says a report just in from Reuters. In fact, Reuters refers to an “outbreak of a bird flu pandemic”. I’m not sure what that means, an outbreak of a pandemic…but you get the point.

The six-week desktop exercise will figure out whether Britain’s banks, insurers, stock exchange, traders and all the other suit-wearing types will be able to cope with the pandemic. It is important, of course, if a pandemic hits and no one can buy shares in the flu drug manufacturers there would be an immediate crisis. Probably best to stock up now, before they find there’s no way their braces not belt approach will be able to handle it.

I Can Has Cheezburger

Cheeseburger I received a press release today from a US company addressing me by name and asking me whether I’d like to write about nanocardiology. Apparently, the company has a nanotech product in pre-clinical trials that cleans up arterial plaques. The putative product from St Louis company Kereos is based on endothelial alpha-v-beta-3 integrin-targeted fumagillin nanoparticles and can seek out markers for arterial plaques and help break them down.

Obviously, the implications for prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease could be enormous, and the medical profession will be keen to see whether the company is successful with this product once it moves on to the clinical stage.

Remarkably though, the person who sent the press release signed off with a rather flippant remark: “Now bring on the cheeseburgers!”

Okay, it’s a joke. Haah, haah. But, hidden within that seemingly throwaway remark is decades of meat-eating substance abuse and an attitude to diet and health that underlies the very reason we in the west, and in particular in the US, are suffering such tragic levels of obesity, diabetes, hypertension and heart disease, surely?

We cannot continue to shovel in vast quantities of fatty red meat smothered with reconstituted dairy products and a guilty sliver of gherkin without long-term repurcussions. Never mind the vast tracts of wilderness, rainforest, and habitat that is being raised so that beef stocks can remain secured. Never mind the huge fences that segregate our cattle from the wildlife and in so doing block migratory routes to seasonal watering holes that have existed for countless millennia.

But, don’t worry about the buffalo and the wildebeest, the rainforest canopy, or the other effects of overindulgence on your health. Let’s all carry on eating those cheeseburgers safe in the knowledge that we’ll soon be able to pop a little pill that will scrape our arteries clean before that first heart attack.

X-rays solve transport problem

X-ray crystallography has provided new insights into how the microscopic motorised transport system that operates in our cells is powered. The study could have implications for understanding the symptoms of Down syndrome, the neuromuscular condition Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, and some cancers, all of which arise through some form of breakdown of this system. The work may ultimately lead to possible new treatments for such disorders.

The researchers behind the work are from Duke University Medical Center, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan, and the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in the UK. They explain that molecular motors are responsible for driving the separation of chromosomes during cell division. This process does not proceed normally in certain genetic disorders and if unchecked can lead to cancer.

Read the full story in my latest news round-up from spectroscopynow.com

Baby poop

It’s not a subject for polite conversatio, but anyone who has ever had to handle a soiled nappy (or diaper as our colleagues Stateside refer to them) will know that baby poop comes in a range of colours (unlike the apocryphal Ford Model T). The BabyPoop lens over on Squidoo offers a kind of litmus test, or more appropriately, a universal indicator paper strip, for the spectrum of options available.

Mustard coloured

poop is common for breastfed babies.

Whereas

Blue poop can only mean one thing…

Extra virgin solvents

Olive Oil Extracting oil from olives requires solvents and residues of halogenated solvent can sometimes leave a toxic taint in the product. European Union rules restricted the acceptable levels of these residues for the sake of public health but new sensitive and precise analytical procedures are needed to allow strict quality control and regulatory testing to be carried out.

Now, Spanish researchers have turned to chemical informatics to help them optimise the extraction-analysis process. Bromoform, chloroform, ethylene dichloride, trichloroethene, tetrachloroethene, dibromochloromethane, and bromodichloromethane are all employed to extract crude olive-pomace oils from the solid residue obtained in the pressing of olive oils. The EU limits the residues of these solvents to 0.1 milligram per kilogram for individual compounds and double than that for total content. “These solvents have a great negative influence on both the quality of oils and human health,” JosÃ© Luis GÃ³mez-Ariza of Huelva University told SpectroscopyNOW, “They are all considered to be possible carcinogens and, therefore, human exposure to such compounds should be minimized.”