COLUMBIA CONFIRMS 2 MICROCEPHALY CASES LINKED TO ZIKA VIRUS.

Two cases of microcephaly linked to the Zika virus have been confirmed in Colombia, but there has been no explosion of cases of the birth defect, the health ministry said on Thursday. Public health officials have been concerned about the possibility of a surge in the rare birth defect, seen in worrisome numbers in Brazil, as the mosquito-borne virus spreads rapidly in Latin America and the Caribbean. More than 1,100 Zika-related cases of microcephaly have been confirmed in Brazil, but the new figures indicated that its neighbor Colombia is not yet experiencing the same type of increase. There have been 33 microcephaly cases recorded this year in Colombia associated with various causes, the health ministry said in a statement. Eighteen were investigated for a suspected link to Zika, and 16 of those cases were ruled out, it said. Babies with microcephaly are born with unusually small heads that can result in developmental problems. “We have not seen an explosion in cases of microcephaly,” vice health minister Fernando Ruiz said, adding that in typical years Colombia records 11 or 12 cases a month. “We have a number of cases within normal range,” Ruiz added. There eventually could be a total of between 95 and 300 cases of microcephaly in Colombia this year, the ministry said. U.S. health authorities on Wednesday announced their conclusion that infection with the Zika virus during pregnancy causes microcephaly in babies. The World Health Organization has said there is a strong scientific consensus that Zika can cause microcephaly as well as Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare neurological disorder that can result in paralysis. Colombia’s national health institute director, Martha Lucia Ospina, said figures previously put forward by the WHO, the U.N. health agency, showing eight babies in the country with Zika-linked microcephaly were incorrect. “There are two confirmed cases in this country,” she said. One of those cases was in central Cundinamarca province. The other was in Norte de Santander, along the Venezuelan border.There were previous reports of Zika-linked microcephaly in Colombia, but until Thursday health officials had said they could not confirm any cases caused by the virus. There have been more than 60,000 reported cases of Zika infections in Colombia, including more than 11,000 in pregnant women, the national health institute said last week.Many Colombian pregnant women infected with Zika are not due to give birth until May or later, but more than 2,700 have already given birth, officials said. Brazil said on Tuesday it had confirmed 1,113 cases of Zika-related microcephaly. Brazil is investigating 3,836 additional suspected cases of microcephaly. Culled from News daily.

Swine veterinarians face adjustments in disease management and treatment

Adjusting to reduced drug access, use

SEA TURTLE RELEASED...

Brevard Zoo released a green sea turtle named Wow last night in Satellite Beach. Wow was originally brought to the zoo's Sea Turtle Healing Center after several hooks were found embedded in its flippers and digestive system. After months of rehabilitation, the turtle has been deemed ready to be reintroduced to the wild. Wow was named for Women of the Wild, a conservation group that was touring the facility when the turtle was admitted. Some of green sea turtles' top threats include incidental capture in commercial and recreational fisheries and entanglement in marine debris, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service. Green sea turtle populations in Florida are listed as endangered by the Endangered Species Act. story from floridatoday.com

Fighting pandemics should be funded 'like the military'.

Governments around the world need to invest in defending against pandemics such as Ebola and Zika in the same way they invest in the military, says the head of biomedical research charity the Wellcome Trust. Jeremy Farrar, an expert on infectious diseases explains We spend gazillions to defend ourselves from military attacks, but from the beginning of the twentieth century far more people have died from infection. We are hugely vulnerable from a public health perspective. Farrar, who is speaking at WIRED Health on 29 April, described sudden outbreaks of diseases with no known vaccines or treatments as the new normal. Farrar stated that We've had Ebola for the last two to three years, now Zika. He has been involved Since 1998 in about eight major epidemics including SARS and bird flu. This is the new world and these are not rare events. Diseases are more likely to spread these days because of a number of factors. Firstly, the world is more connected, which means people travel more frequently. Secondly, increasingly dense populations mean more interactions between humans and animals, where most diseases originate. Climate change also plays a role, with rising temperatures and humidity providing the perfect breeding ground for disease carriers. When there are no drugs, no vaccines and no diagnostic tests, an outbreak goes from being a relatively small affair to 30,000 people, referring to Ebola in West Africa, which quickly claimed more than 11,300 lives. While Zika is less deadly than Ebola, its long-term effects on unborn babies are not clear. Around 20 per cent of people infected with the virus become ill, with symptoms including fever, rash, headaches and joint pain. The virus has also been linked to a spike in babies born with microcephaly, a congenital condition that causes incomplete brain development. The risk of this neurological disorder has forced governments in Jamaica and Latin America to advise women against getting pregnant. There is currently no vaccine or medication to treat Zika infections. Symptoms are treated with fluids, rest and pain relief. "It's spread across a whole continent and it's likely to invade the United States. Then it's highly likely to spread around the world and we have no method to control it," Farrar says. "There won't be 11,000 deaths, but if you had a whole generation of babies born with developmental delays that would be a disaster." The Ebola can be sexually transmitted and cause long term mental and eye problems, Farrar predicts that more complications will be discovered with Zika. "We've learned lessons from Ebola and we hoped to have a couple of years to put in place some changes, but Ebola hasn't finished yet. There are still outbreaks happening today. And while that's going on we've got to deal with Zika. It's not impossible to imagine there might be a third thing happening in Asia," he explains. Farrar cites Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) as another example of a virus we are "completely unprepared" for. The illness was first reported in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and has since spread to several other countries, with many patients dying. Tackling these diseases requires being smarter about diagnosis, gathering data, sharing information and developing vaccines more quickly and in a more collaborative way. Public health organisations must also prepare to deal with entirely new threats, citing HIV as an example of a "completely unknown virus that we'd never seen before". The sharing of information is getting better and there's a movement towards developing vaccines quicker and making sure all of the potential interventions we could need are going to be available. read more at wired.co.uk

Bed bugs are growing thicker skin to combat insecticides.

Bed bugs are evolving thicker exoskeletons to help them resist widely used insecticides.Scientists at Australia's University of Sidney note that the thicker a bed bug's cuticle, the more resistant it was to pyrethroid insecticides. The team first took members of the Parramatta field strain of bed bugs, known to have high pyrethroid resistance, and exposed individuals to an insecticide. Using scanning electron microscopy, they found that "mean cuticle thickness was positively correlated to time-to-knockdown, with significant differences observed between bugs knocked-down at 2 hours, 4 hours, and those still unaffected at 24 hours." Insects with a cuticle thickness of around 10 micrometres were found to be effectively resistant to the pyrethroid, while those whose exoskeletons measured less than 9 micrometres succumbed in two hours or less. In a second test, they exposed and examined members of the pyrethroid-susceptible Monheim laboratory strain of Cimex lectularius, and found they typically had cuticles of less than 9 micrometres, compared to the Parramatta bugs' ~10 micrometre exoskeletons. The results suggest an explanation for why it's become increasingly hard to control bed bug infestation over time. Study co-author David Lilly says that this could have implications for future studies into methods of overcoming insecticide-resistant bed bugs, as well as other insects. "If we understand the biological mechanisms bed bugs use to beat insecticides, we may be able to spot a chink in their armour that we can exploit with new strategies." culled from wired.co.uk

VR SURGERY

On 14 April 2016 ,Ahmed – a surgeon, cancer specialist, and co-founder of virtual and augmented reality firm Medical Realities – is going to cut off a tumor from the colon of a London man in his 70s. 

That's a routine operation with no particular risk attached. But unlike any other operation, when Ahmed and his team remove the cancer, a 360-degree camera rig mounted over the operating table will capture the doctors' every movement in 4K and livestream it globally in VR. 

The broadcast will be available online and via apps for Android and iOS. Dr Ahmed says, close-up immersive streams could make trainees "feel part of the operation" more than if they were in the theatre. But surgery is a tactile job of lancets, scalpels and drills. 

To recreate that in VR, you need tactile feed. VR livestreams are the first step to what Ahmed calls "the virtual surgeon" – a project that involves shifting from live-capture VR to full computer-rendered simulations of surgical operations. And eventually, reactive virtual patients and gloves to provide tactile feedback. 

 "In my vision, you'll have a virtual body in front of you, you get haptic gloves, you pick up a scalpel, and you feel it normally, you make a cut, you see the incision, it's all realistic," he says. "Ultimately, people will be able to use VR to carry out operations and train themselves through virtual operations. That'd be our endgame." And that endgame might not be too far away: Ahmed predicts the necessary advances in VR and haptic technology could be just five years away. Ahmed has another theory, which relates to Ray Kurzweil's concept of singularity. 

The actual endgame, his argument goes, will be when AI and robots have developed to a point that they can carry out surgery better than human doctors can. "I call it 'surgical singularity'. And at some point it's definitely going to happen: it's just a question of when," he says. "In the meanwhile, we'll keep investing in VR. Robotic surgeons won't be here for a few years yet. Culled from wired.co.uk

The first VR surgery goes live

In his office on the first floor of The Royal London Hospital, Dr Shafi Ahmed keeps a classic Polaroid instant camera. Every time he meets a new trainee surgeon, Ahmed draws the camera out and takes a picture of them. The pic is printed straight away, and I put it in my diary," says Ahmed, a jovial 47-year-old with a mellow voice and an Apple Watch around his wrist. "Then I ask the trainees what they think they'll be doing in ten to twenty years, and I write it under their picture." If you wonder what Ahmed thinks he'll be doing in ten years, look no farther than his desk, currently piled with several unassembled Google Cardboards. In Ahmed's future, and in his vision of the future of surgery at large, VR will feature prominently. On 14 April, Ahmed – a surgeon, cancer specialist, and co-founder of virtual and augmented reality firm Medical Realities – is going to cut off a tumour from the colon of a London man in his 70s. That's a routine operation with no particular risk attached. But unlike any other operation, when Ahmed and his team remove the cancer, a 360-degree camera rig mounted over the operating table will capture the doctors' every movement in 4K and livestream it globally in VR. The broadcast will be available online and via apps for Android and iOS. Medical students, surgeon wannabes or anybody who wants to see and hear what goes on in an operating theater will be able to follow the two-hour intervention at close quarters, using Medical Realities' mobile app and a Cardboard headset. The video's main star, the patient, has consented to the initiative, and Ahmed describes him as "very supportive of how we are trying to teach medicine around the world." To stave off the grim eventuality of broadcasting an operation going awry, Ahmed explains that the video stream will be delayed by about one minute. "The operation isn't very risky, but if there's a major complication I'll stop [the stream] immediately," he says. "But it's also important that people who are training in medicine see problems. There is not perfect operation, ever. If we have some complications, you have to see how to deal with them." As a proud gadget geek – there's a hoverboard next to his office door.An associate Dean at Barts and the London Medical School, Ahmed has spent years experimenting with how consumer technology can benefit healthcare. In 2013, he pestered Google for months until he got hold of a pair of Google Glass, and grabbed headlines by using them to live-stream the removal of a liver cancer from a surgeon's POV. About 13,000 students from 113 countries tuned in, sending Ahmed questions that popped up on the lower corner of his Glass – to which he replied by simply speaking out loud. When AR and VR started to take off, Ahmed realized they could radically change the way surgery was taught, and solve a health equity crisis on the side. A 2015 report by the Lancet Commission on Global Surgery revealed that about five billion people worldwide didn't have access to safe surgery. If that is to change, a global shortage of some two million surgeons, anesthetists and obstetricians will need to be trained over the next 15 years. Thousands of medicine students can be trained by someone in Harvard, or in London, or in Rome. All they need is a smartphone's 3G or 4G connection. That's not just wishful thinking. Medical Realities, the company Ahmed founded in early 2015 together with VR innovator Steve Dann, is currently working to launch software that will enable Ahmed to teach remotely using 360-degree streaming and AR. Ahmed is also considering swapping his Google Glass with a new model of AR specs developed by San Francisco-based Osterhout Group. I recently went to Gaza to talk about how to raise health standard in a country that's barricaded. I thought: 'How do we free this people's minds?'," Ahmed says. "Now, with these technologies, I can regularly teach surgery to Gaza medicine students. I'll be part of a medical school there, but I'll be teaching from here remotely." VR could change traditional surgery training the West, too. Ahmed argues that the operating theatre's makeup hasn't really changed for centuries, and today students end up craning their necks for hours just to catch a vague glimpse of the action over the surgeon's shoulder. culled from wired.co.uk