Golden Genius Garden

Scientists have developed a vaccine that protects mice against a deadly form of the Ebola virus.

First identified in 1976, Ebola kills more than 90% of the people it infects.

The researchers say that this is the first Ebola vaccine to remain viable long-term and can therefore be successfully stockpiled.

The results are reported in the journal Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.

Ebola is transmitted via bodily fluids, and can become airborn. Sufferers experience nausea, vomiting, internal bleeding and organ failure before they die.

Although few people contract Ebola each year, its effects are so swift and devastating that it is often feared that it could be used against humans in an act of terroism.

All previously developed vaccines have relied on injecting intact, but crippled, viral particles into the body.

Long-term storage tends to damage the virus, paralysing the vaccine's effectiveness.

The new vaccine contains a synthetic viral protein, which prompts the immune system to better recognise the Ebola virus, and is much more stable when stored long-term.

The vaccine protects 80% of the mice injected with the deadly strain, and survives being "dried down and frozen," said biotechnologist Charles Arntzen from Arizona State University who was involved in its development.

He said the next step is to try the vaccine on a strain of Ebola that is closer to the one that infects humans.

By Jennifer Carpenter.BBC

A dangerous dose might just be a few pills too many taken regularly over days, weeks or months, they said.

Researchers at Edinburgh University saw 161 cases of "staggered overdose" at its hospital over a 16-year period.

People taking tablets for chronic pain might not realise they were taking too many or recognise symptoms of overdose and liver injury, they said.

The researchers told the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology that this life-threatening condition could be easily missed by doctors and patients.

Doctors may not initially spot the problem because blood tests will not show the staggeringly high levels of paracetamol seen with a conventional overdose, where someone may have swallowed several packets of the drug.

Patients who have taken a staggered overdose tend to fare worse than those who have taken a large overdose, the study suggests.

Dr Kenneth Simpson and colleagues looked at the medical records of 663 patients who had been referred with paracetamol-induced liver injury to the Scottish Liver Transplantation Unit at the university hospital.

The 161 who had taken a staggered overdose were more likely to develop liver and brain problems and need kidney dialysis or help with their breathing. They were also more likely to die of their complications.

Dr Simpson said: "They haven't taken the sort of single-moment, one-off massive overdoses taken by people who try to commit suicide, but over time the damage builds up, and the effect can be fatal."

Professor Roger Knaggs of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society said patients should heed the warning.

"If people experience pain and paracetamol doesn't help, rather than thinking a 'top up' dose may work, they should consult their pharmacist for alternative pain control or referral to someone who can help with the cause of the pain.

"The message is clear: if you take more paracetamol than is recommended, you won't improve your pain control but you may seriously damage your health.

"At this time of year people should also take care with combination cold and flu products which may have paracetamol as one of the ingredients. It's easy to take more than intended, so if in doubt consult your pharmacist."

Meanwhile, researchers at King's College London and Lund University in Sweden say they have discovered precisely how paracetamol works in the body. It is via a protein on nerve cells called TRPA1, says Nature Communications.

Now that they understand this principal mechanism, scientists can start to look for molecules that work in the same way to effectively relieve pain, but are less toxic and will not lead to serious complications following overdose.

ရင့္က်က္တယ္ဆိုတာ အသက္အရြယ္နဲ႔ ဆံုးျဖတ္လို႔မရပါဘူး။ အသက္အရြယ္ဆိုတာ
ကိုယ္ပိုင္းဆိုင္ရာ ရင့္က်က္မႈပါ စိတ္ပိုင္းဆိုင္ရာ
ရင့္က်က္မႈမဟုတ္ပါဘူး။

ရင့္က်က္တယ္ဆိုတာ တိုက္စားျခင္းမခံဘူး၊ သံေယာင္မလိုက္ဘူး၊ တျခားသူရဲ႕
အရိပ္အကဲကိုမၾကည့္ဘူး၊ သြက္သြက္လက္လက္ ပါးပါးနပ္နပ္ရွိတာကို မေခၚဘူး၊
ေလသင့္ရာ ပဲ့ထိုးတာမဟုတ္ဘူး၊ ဉာဏ္နီဉာဏ္နက္မ်ားတာကို ေခၚတာမဟုတ္ဘူး။

ရင့္က်က္တယ္ဆိုတာ အခက္အခဲနဲ႔ရင္ဆိုင္ရသည့္တိုင္ မိမိကိုယ္ကိုယ္ယံုၾကည္မႈ
မဲ့မသြားဘူး၊ ဂုဏ္ျပဳခ်ီးမြမ္းခံရသည့္တိုင္ မဝင့္ၾကြား၊ မေထာင္လႊားဘူး။

ရင့္က်က္တယ္ဆိုတာ သူတစ္ပါးရဲ႕ အလိုက္မသိတဲ့ ေနာက္ေျပာင္မႈကို
သည္းခံနားလည္ေပးတယ္။ ထင္မွတ္မထားတဲ့ အေႏွာင့္အယွက္၊ ထိုးႏွက္ခ်က္ေတြမွာ
စိတ္ကိုတည္တည္ၿငိမ္ၿငိမ္ထားႏို

WASHINGTON, June 17, 2011 - Two Iranian doctors who were jailed three years ago for allegedly plotting to overthrow the government were awarded a global health prize on Thursday for their efforts to treat patients with HIV.

Kamiar and Arash Alaei were arrested in June 2008 and accused of communicating with the United States in a bid to unseat the regime of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Kamiar, 37, was released several months ago and was on hand to accept the award in Washington, but his elder brother Arash, 42, remains in Tehran's Evin prison where he is serving a six-year sentence.

Until Arash is set free, Kamiar said he cannot move forward with his life.

"I feel I am not released yet," he said in an interview with AFP before he accepted the Global Health Council's Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights.

"The majority of nights I go back to prison and I continue my life in prison," he said.

Kamiar served two and a half years -- a term he remembers as "870 days, 3,800 hours" -- and is hopeful that Arash will be eligible for release soon because he has now served half his sentence.

He declined to discuss the details of his detention, except that he was kept in solitary confinement for two months. After eight months in prison, he was allowed to see his brother, he said.

The pair, known for their efforts to help drug addicts infected with HIV and improve conditions for sick prisoners, were not allowed to work as doctors while behind bars.

Instead, Kamiar said they took on the role of peer counselors, teaching fellow prisoners about basics such as hand-washing, and holding informal talks with them about HIV, tuberculosis, and infectious diseases.

The Alaei brothers are regarded as pioneers of AIDS treatment in Iran, where discussions about sex and drugs are often taboo.

Data is scarce about the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in the Islamic republic, but according to UNAIDS there were 5,000-10,000 infections in 2009 and about nine percent of people with advanced HIV infection were being treated with antiretroviral drugs.

The brothers began treating HIV-positive patients in the late 1990s, and they developed a three-pronged program that integrated prevention, care and social support.

This "triangular" approach to AIDS care was first tried in a prison in their hometown of Kermanshah and later became recognized as a best practice model in the Middle East.

The Alaei brothers were not born in poverty but were taught by their father, a Persian literature teacher, to use their education to help others.

"He motivated us to do the public good, even if the community doesn't understand the situation," said Kamiar.

Physicians for Human Rights has helped organize a letter-writing campaign across 80 countries urging the brothers' release.

"The appeal has been to allow the brothers to do their work," said Susannah Sirkin, deputy director of PHR.

"This is not a political campaign. This is a campaign by colleagues, many of whom know the brothers and their work directly because they have worked in concert with them or been inspired by their pioneering efforts inside Iran."

Kamiar said he was detained when he took a summer break from his US studies and went to work in Iran for a few months, and has been unable to understand why he was jailed.

"When you do some good, you don't expect to be in prison," Kamiar said.

"But I never got disappointed because I believe what I did was right. I love my work, and until the last moment of my life I will do public health, specifically for neglected populations."

After his release, Kamiar quietly returned to Albany, New York where he lives with his sister and is finishing up his doctoral degree.

The dean of the school of public health at the State University of New York at Albany, Philip Nasca, told AFP that Kamiar used some of his time in jail to teach himself Spanish, and was able to speak it with local patients during a recent trip to the Dominican Republic.

"I think he kept his intellectual life alive and his mental life alive," said Nasca.

According to Jeff Sturchio, president of the US-based Global Health Council which gave out the $10,000 award, the brothers serve as a powerful symbol for health professionals worldwide.

"They really put themselves at risk in advocating for the rights of people living with HIV and AIDS," said Sturchio.

"If there are still places in the world where people are put in prison just because they are advocating for the rights of people with HIV, then that is a world that we would like to see changed."