A couple of coffees a day keeps bowel cancer at bay: Study

A couple of coffees a day keeps bowel cancer at bay: Study: Coffee consumption decreases the risk of developing colorectal cancer, according to US researchers.

Caffeine abuse common among English Premier League footballers

Caffeine abuse common among English Premier League footballers: Follow-up investigations to recent widespread doping allegations
 attached to a UK-based doctor have found caffeine gel and pill abuse common among professional footballers in England.

Neurological, psychiatric symptoms persist in Ebola survivors .

Researchers at the University of Liverpool discovered that a broad set of neurological and psychiatric symptoms persisted in Ebola virus survivors more than 1 year after the patients were discharged from the hospital. Janet T. Scott, PhD, MRCP, clinical lecturer in pharmacology and infectious disease at the University of Liverpool and a researcher. The results of two related studies assessing the effects of post-Ebola syndrome (PES) shows that the Post-Ebola syndrome is not going away, as more people are seen now 2 years later, still suffering from the after effects of this terrible disease according to Janet T. Scott, PhD, MRCP, clinical lecturer in pharmacology and infectious disease at the University of Liverpool and a researcher on both studies. The worst Ebola outbreak in history began in December 2013 and killed more than 11,000 people before it was declared over in January. Most of the deaths occurred in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, which all have seen recent disease flare-ups. According to Scott, there are more than 17,000 Ebola survivors in West Africa, including about 5,000 in Sierra Leone, where the research was conducted. Among patient notes of 354 Ebola survivors, Scott and colleagues found 87 individuals who fit predetermined criteria: The patients were aged 16 years or older and had significant symptoms such as weakness, tremor, blindness, deafness, confusion, depression, psychosis and double vision. Forty-five of these patients were contacted, and 38 visited the clinic. The patients were mostly female (63%), and their median age was 34 years. They were hospitalized with Ebola for a median duration of 21 days, and the median length of time between their release and the screening clinic was 431 days. Forty-five percent of the patients reported loss of consciousness, and 18% experienced seizures during their acute phase of the disease. Scott and colleagues learned that 28 patients reported headaches — the most frequent neurological feature — and five of them had focal upper motor neuron weakness. Common psychiatric symptoms included insomnia, depression and anxiety. “Our experience suggests that there is a need for tertiary-level neurological and psychiatric referral clinics and larger, case-controlled studies,” Scott and colleagues wrote. “Our data are limited by the challenges of contacting many patients from our selected group.” A more diverse range of eye complications are experienced by patients suffering from PES, according to the ophthalmology aspect of the study. The researchers used a number of eye tests to evaluate 150 Ebola survivors who had vision complications, including panuveitis and also cataracts in younger Ebola survivors. “The data in both sets of research support the need for larger, case-controlled studies,” Scott said in the release. "Those with PES deserve better treatment, so we will continue to research and provide hands-on support to ensure this happens.” read more here ; European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases.com

New mosquito traps offer nontoxic alternatives in Zika fight.

Canadian and Mexican researchers have developed a novel, low-cost and effective method for capturing and destroying Aedes spp. mosquito eggs by using traps made from used tires. This new solution to mosquito control, which does not use pesticides or noxious chemicals, may have implications for the prevention of vector-borne diseases like dengue and Zika. Gérardo Ulíbarri, PhD, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Laurentian University, Ontario, said in a press release that they decided to use recycled tires because tires already represent up to 29% of the breeding sites chosen by the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, partly because tires are a universally affordable instrument in low-resource settings, and partly because giving old tires a new use creates an opportunity to clean up the local environment. Over the course of 10 months in a remote community in Guatemala — where dengue, chikungunya and Zika viruses are endemic — Ulíbarri and colleagues studied the effectiveness of a mosquito egg ovitrap called an “ovillanta.” The device, which is designed to imitate a natural breeding site for mosquitoes and attract egg-laying females, is fashioned from two sections of a used car tire that overlap in the shape of a mouth. According to the researchers, a nontoxic attractant solution is poured into the bottom half of the trap, which has a fluid release valve. Female insects lay their eggs on strips of pellon paper inside the ovillanta, and the eggs are counted to monitor the density of the mosquito population and then destroyed with fire or ethanol. Once emptied, the solution is filtered and used again, building up a higher concentration of a natural pheromone left with each egg that will attract other female mosquitoes to the site. In the study, Ulíbarri and colleagues compared the ovillanta with standard ovitraps made from buckets containing 1 L of clean water. According to the researchers, the contents of standard ovitraps are typically discarded onto the ground instead of being recycled, which can sometimes allow surviving Aedes eggs that did not adhere to the strip to hatch on dry soil up to several months later. Moreover, the need to replace clean water on a regular basis can be challenging in remote areas with limited infrastructure. Eighty-four ovillantas were used in seven neighborhoods in the urban core of Sayaxché, which has a population of approximately 15,000. Results indicated that significantly more mosquito eggs were trapped using the ovillantas as more than 181,000 eggs were destroyed during the 10-month period using the new method, almost seven times as many as control sites. Argentinian researchers from the Centro de Investigaciones de Plagas e Insecticidas (CIPEIN) also have designed a new ovitrap prototype — a cup made of low-density polyethylene infused with the larvicide pyriproxyfen, a WHO-recommended juvenile hormone analog that targets mosquito larvae during the pupal stage of development. Once the cup is filled with water, the larvicide is released from the plastic container, killing the eggs of A. aegypti mosquitoes. The CIPEIN researchers tested the plastic ovitrap on laboratory-raised A. aegypti and found that the device was 100% effective at preventing larvae from developing into adults during a 30-week period, even after the water in the container had been changed once a week. However, the researchers noted that field trials are necessary to test the prototype’s effectiveness to suppress A. aegypti populations. A practical tool for managing dengue vectors, must be a specific trap, effective, inexpensive, simple to construct and operate, and it should not require frequent maintenance. . Traps without toxic pesticides are more likely to be accepted by homeowners because of concerns about potential health and environmental hazards. This prototype in the study meets all these requirements. culled from; healio.com

MONKEY MALARIA.

New research shows that Plasmodium knowlesi, a form of malaria common in monkeys in South East Asia, is capable of flourishing in people. The monkey malaria is just a few steps away from becoming a major human disease. Manoj Duraisingh, a professor of immunology and infectious disease at the Chan School of Public Health at Harvard. Duraisingh is one of the authors of a new paper on P. knowlesi malaria published in Nature Communications. The team are really trying to understand whether what is normally thought to be a zoonotic disease( transmitted from animals to humans ) or is actually becoming something that is now transmitted between humans.There is growing concern that this simian parasite is adapting to infect humans more efficiently as stated in this new paper. In the last decade human cases of knowlesi malaria have been on the rise in parts of Southeast Asia. The So-called "monkey malaria" has become the most common form of malaria now detected in hospitals and clinics in Malaysian Borneo. Patients with knowlesi malaria suffer from intense bouts of fever and the symptoms are so similar to regular garden-variety malaria that it's often misdiagnosed as one of the five other human strains. The Plasmodium knowlesi parasites reside in forest-dwelling macaques as the parasites are well-adapted to the monkeys and the pests can reproduce easily in the macaques' blood. Mosquitoes that feed on the primates then spread the parasites to more and more monkeys. The knowlesi parasites and macaques were a closed system/end but as deforestation and the expansion of palm oil plantations in Malaysia that have cut into the monkeys' natural habitat, people and macaques have come in closer and more constant contact. This proximity has led to more people being bitten by mosquitoes laden with knowlesi parasites. "In many parts of Malaysia now it's the predominant malaria parasite that [doctors] actually see," Duraisingh says. The knowlesi parasite however generally doesn't reproduce as efficiently in human blood as in monkey blood because of a gene mutation — a complicated fork in the evolutionary tree — that happened 3 million years ago. Macaques got one gene. We got another. Our gene makes it much harder for knowlesi parasites to invade our red blood cells compared to those of macaques. This explains why most of the human cases of knowlesi malaria are fairly mild. Duraisingh says his team noticed a subset of malaria cases in Borneo that weren't mild at all,in these patients as the parasites multiply there are cyclical spikes of intense fever. Knowlesi malaria can be fatal but it does respond to standard malaria treatment if identified early. These intense cases of knowlesi malaria made Duraisingh and his colleagues think that there's something going on with the knowlesi parasite that might allow it to become more dangerous. In the lab Duraisingh found that the knowlesi parasite was able to find new ways to invade human red blood cells. They write: "It has been shown that P. knowlesi can expand its preferred host cell niche by invading older red blood cells and this is an important factor influencing adaptation of P. knowlesi to the human population."This new research shows that the knowlesi parasite is capable of adapting to life in a new host as demonstrated in the laboratory,that it can learn how to invade human blood cells quite quickly. The great concern is that as people, macaques and knowlesi-infected mosquitoes come into close contact, the parasite will increasingly adapt to the point where there's sustained transmission from human to human. When this happen, monkey malaria could become the next emerging infectious disease threat. Read more here;http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/04/08/473385975/monkey-malaria-creeps-closer-to-being-a-major-human-threat.

Space-time pattern and environmental drivers of bovine anaplasmosis.

Researchers at the Kansas State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory and the Center of Excellence for Vector-borne Diseases, both in the university’s College of Veterinary Medicine, have established a set of models to evaluate the space-time pattern and environmental drivers of a devastating cattle disease, bovine anaplasmosis, in Kansas. Bovine anaplasmosis affects beef and dairy production in almost all the U.S. states, causing significant economic losses to producers. The control of this disease currently relies primarily on infection-avoidance, although an experimental vaccine is used in many areas of the U.S. The causative bacterium anaplasma marginale lives in red blood cells and causes a hemolytic disease in cattle, which manifests as anemia, abortion, icterus(jaundice) and lethargy. It can cause death, primarily in older animals. Cattle that survive infection are persistent carriers of the bacteria and are a source of infection for other cattle through inadvertent mechanical transmission via blood-contaminated multi-use needles and surgical equipment, as well as via tick and fly transmission. The number of positive anaplasmosis samples submitted to the Kansas State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory has increased over the years, and the geographical area from where these samples originated has expanded, as noted by Gregg Hanzlicek, director of production animal field disease investigations for the diagnostic laboratory. These changes may have occurred because veterinarians have become more aware of the disease, but this study suggests environmental conditions and management practices may have also played a role. Ram Raghavan, a spatial epidemiologist at the diagnostic laboratory, worked closely with Hanzlicek in evaluating the space-time patterns of this disease. The increase in the expansion of tick-borne diseases in the Midwestern region may be attributed to geographic expansion of tick populations over time. New evidence suggests a growing potential threat for bovine anaplasmosis in newer areas, but a quantitative evaluation of whether or not bovine anaplasmosis has spread to previously unreported areas over time is not readily available. Likewise, information on any potential environmental and climatological drivers behind the space-time expansion of bovine anaplasmosis cannot be easily found, which has disease management implications. Three climate change indices—minimum land surface temperature, diurnal temperature range and relative humidity—are drivers of the space-time pattern for bovine anaplasmosis . This finding is significant in the context of climate change implications on infectious diseases and adds to the mounting evidence of climate change linkages to animal health. The results appear in PLOS ONE, “Bayesian Space-Time Patterns and Climatic Determinants of Bovine anaplasmosis.” Data used in the study were from diagnostic samples submitted to the diagnostic laboratory between the years 2005-2013.(http://www.hpj.com/livestock/kansas-state-veterinary-diagnostic-laboratory-researchers-evaluate-space-time-pattern/article_63d900aa-daba-5ebe-aa9b-5e11436abb37.html)

AVIAN MALARIA DETECTED IN NEW ENGLAND LOON.

A New England loon has died from avian malaria, according to researchers who believe this to be the first known case of a loon dying of the tropical disease. Loons can live for decades, so losing any adult loon to a new cause casts a long shadow says John Cooley, a senior biologist for the Loon Preservation Committee. Finding a new cause like this malaria strain, raises a real cause for concern. This indicates a new type of stressor associated with climate change. Avian malaria is carried by certain species of tropical mosquitoes. There is no evidence that avian malaria parasites are harmful to humans, according to Mark Pokras, professor emeritus of wildlife medicine at Tufts University. The world is changing, and the distribution of mosquitoes is changing for a whole variety of reasons,. Tropical mosquitoes that don’t occur here now are going to move farther north, and so are biting flies and ticks and a whole bunch of lovely parasites. The dead loon was spotted by campers at Umbagog National Wildlife Refuge and quickly retrieved by a refuge employee. The bird, specifically a “common loon,” was then put on ice and brought to the New Hampshire Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory in Durham for examination. The examination was done by Inga Sidor, a New Hampshire state senior veterinary pathologist and she wasn’t even considering malaria to be the cause of death. Although she previously had detected malaria parasites in captive birds, such as penguins kept in zoos, but she had never seen malaria in a wild bird. At necropsy the spleen was really enlarged and tissue looked wet referred to as edema. Sidor then started to look for avian malaria, a disease that attacks red blood cells, affecting the vascular system. “These are tiny, tiny little parasites,” Sidor said. “They fit into a single cell, so you really have to have a body that’s in good condition to find them — and you have to be looking for them.” Having such a fresh specimen was crucial to the discovery. Sidor found widespread malaria parasites in the bird’s brain and heart, which leads her to believe the bird died either from a heart attack or cerebral paralysis. Furthermore, the degree of the infection leads Sidor to believe the disease was transmitted to the loon in New Hampshire, not when it migrated south to winter off the coast of mid-Atlantic states. After Sidor’s examination, the loon was inspected by Ellen Martinsen of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, who discovered that the bird contained not one but two different malaria parasite species — an unusual find. Read more here;http://bangordailynews.com/2016/04/08/outdoors/loon-dies-of-tropical-disease-stirring-talk-of-climate-change/