09.22.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:00 am by ceo
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Coughed on by somebody with the flu? Duke University researchers are developing a test to determine - with a mere drop of blood - who will get sick before the sniffling and fever set in. And they're turning to hundreds of dorm-dwelling freshmen this fall to see if it works.
It's a novel experiment: Students report daily whether they have any cold or flu symptoms. If they do, a team swoops in to test not just the sneezer but, more importantly, seemingly healthy friends and hallmates who might be incubating the infection.
"We're redefining the definition of being ill," says Col. Geoffrey Ling, a physician with the Defense Research Projects Agency, the Defense Department's research arm, which came up with the idea.
The reason: The military faces huge problems when flu or other viruses sweep through crowded barracks, and knowing an outbreak was brewing could allow them to separate and protect those not infected. We're not just talking about the challenge of replacing fevered soldiers on the day's patrol. Your body may be slowing down even before that fever erupts, as it tries to fight off a brewing virus.
And flu is contagious up to 24 hours before people show symptoms, one of the insidious ways that it spreads.
"If you've got a group of people living together and you can identify who's likely to become sick, you can much more efficiently use whatever your intervention is - a vaccine, an antiviral - to prevent disease," explains Duke infectious disease specialist Dr. Christopher Woods.
Respiratory viruses sweep through crowded college dorms just as easily as military squads, and with the new swine flu - the 2009 H1N1 strain - targeting mostly the young, Duke scientists may learn sooner than they had hoped just how well their experimental test really works.
It's based on a simple principle: Your immune system revs up to fight infection long before you show symptoms or before today's tests could detect the actual virus in your body. The Duke team discovered a so-called genomic fingerprint, a pattern of subtle molecular changes as genes are activated to fight viral respiratory infections.
Working with colleagues at the University of Virginia and in London, the Duke team first dripped various viruses into the noses of healthy volunteers. The people were quarantined, and scientists collected daily blood, saliva and nasal-fluid samples. Sure enough, they spotted the RNA-based fingerprint that separated who got sick from who didn't, in a few cases just hours after the person was exposed.
But does it work in the real world?
Armed with a $19.5 million Defense grant, Duke is trying to find out - and to create an easy-to-use test kit that could read a blood drop in minutes and signal with, say, a color change who's going to get sick.
"A vision for this would be similar to a diabetic who pricks their finger every day," says project leader Dr. Geoffrey Ginsburg, director of Duke's Center for Genomic Medicine. "The science will tell us what the limitations will be."
Enter the Duke dorm study. It's enrolling up to 800 students who agree to log onto a Web site every day and report if they have any cold- or flu-like symptoms.
Researchers signed up Sean Cadley, a freshman from New York City, when she walked by them already hacking. She admits being enticed in part by $75 in compensation for the pokes and prods of testing.
"I'm getting something out of being sick, which is always nice," said Cadley, a sharp cough still punctuating every few sentences nearly two weeks later.
Cadley, 18, thought nothing of the bug at first, but a fever of 103 hit a few days after the cough and she says she didn't leave her room for two days. Researchers won't say if it was the flu or another virus. But they quickly e-mailed her dorm-mates to say someone in the building was sick, and Cadley's friends raced to volunteer for up to five days of tests - pocketing $150 apiece - to see if they, too, would fall ill.
Beyond the pre-symptom test, the dorm study could shed crucial new light on how flu ripples through communities. Using sophisticated mapping techniques, researchers will tease out social aspects of infection - how close you must be to the sick to catch their bug, for example. And they may identify hot spots of transmission where they can warn students to take extra precautions.
If the study pans out, the Defense agency's Ling hopes to seek Food and Drug Administration approval for a pre-symptom test within two years, aimed at crowded quarters like the military, colleges, nursing homes, even hospital intensive care units.
To Ginsburg, the work is only the beginning. He envisions catching deadly bacterial or fungal infections far earlier in vulnerable people like organ transplant recipients, or even a day when there's a treatment for the common cold - should you detect it early enough.
"Infectious disease is ripe for this," Ginsburg says.
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EDITOR's NOTE - Lauran Neergaard covers health and medical issues for The Associated Press in Washington.
© 2009 The Associated Press.
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LONDON (AP) -- Heart patients who catch the flu may have more to worry about than just a fever or the sniffles: the virus could also spark a heart attack, new research shows.
Amid the global outbreak of swine flu, experts say it's crucial that heart patients get vaccinated against both regular flu and swine flu to avoid medical problems. Doctors said swine flu isn't any more dangerous than regular flu, but it's important for heart patients to get vaccinated because more flu viruses will be circulating this year.
British researchers analyzed 39 previous studies of heart patients and found a consistent link between flu and heart attacks. Up to half of all unexpected flu deaths were due to heart disease, the researchers found.
The study was published online Tuesday in the British medical journal, The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
"The message here is so strong and so logical that it's hard for us to ignore," said Dr. Ralph Brindis, vice president of the American College of Cardiology. "If we can convince cardiac patients to get a flu vaccine, that could ultimately save lives."
Only about one-third of heart patients in the U.S. regularly get vaccinated.
Doctors have long known that flu viruses can worsen existing medical conditions and that heart patients are especially vulnerable during flu pandemics. Flu viruses cause inflammation in the body, usually in the lungs. But they can also cause swelling in the heart itself or in the coronary arteries, which could lead to dangerous clots breaking off and causing a heart attack.
Once heart patients get the flu, they are also more vulnerable to complications like pneumonia and other infections.
"We know influenza vaccine is effective in preventing influenza and therefore in theory, ought to be effective in preventing the complications of influenza," said Andrew Hayward of University College London, one of the study authors. He said two of the studies analyzed showed heart patients who got a flu shot had fewer heart attacks than those who didn't.
Hayward said flu viruses might merely act as triggers for heart attacks in cardiovascular patients.
"Influenza may be bringing forward an event that might have happened anyway," he said, adding there is evidence that when the virus peaks, so too do heart attacks.
Experts are unsure whether the study results apply to otherwise healthy people with no history of heart disease. But they say flu viruses could potentially trigger heart attacks in people with no apparent heart disease, if they have risk factors like high blood pressure or are overweight.
For heart patients, doctors said the evidence is clear.
"Flu has too often been off the radar screen," said Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a spokesman for the American Heart Association and professor of medicine at Yale University. "But flu is as important to think about as cholesterol or blood pressure."
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On the Net:
http://www.lancet.com
© 2009 The Associated Press.
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WASHINGTON (AP) -- U.S. health officials have ordered more swine flu vaccine - bringing the nation's eventual total to 251 million doses.
The government on Monday ordered an extra 27.3 million doses from Sanofi Pasteur of France, which produces flu shots at its Swiftwater, Pa., factory. It also ordered 29 million more doses of the nasal-spray version of swine flu vaccine, MedImmune LLC's FluMist.
The news came as health officials announced Monday that while people 10 and older are protected by one dose of swine flu vaccine, children 9 and younger almost certainly will need two.
© 2009 The Associated Press.
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WASHINGTON (AP) -- More than 35 million people around the world are living with Alzheimer's disease or other types of dementia, says the most in-depth attempt yet to assess the brain-destroying illness - and it's an ominous forecast as the population grays.
The new count is about 10 percent higher than what scientists had predicted just a few years ago, because earlier research underestimated Alzheimer's growing impact in developing countries.
Barring a medical breakthrough, the World Alzheimer Report projects dementia will nearly double every 20 years. By 2050, it will affect a staggering 115.4 million people, the report concludes.
"We are facing an emergency," said Dr. Daisy Acosta, who heads Alzheimer's Disease International, which released the report Monday.
The U.S. and other developed countries long have been bracing for Alzheimer's to skyrocket. But the report aims to raise awareness of the threat in poorer countries, where finally people are living long enough to face what is mostly a disease of the 65-and-older population.
While age is the biggest driver of Alzheimer's, some of the same factors that trigger heart disease - obesity, high cholesterol, diabetes - seem to increase the risk of dementia, too. Those are problems also on the rise in many developing countries.
In poorer countries, "dementia is a hidden issue," Acosta said, and that's complicating efforts to improve earlier diagnosis. "You're not supposed to talk about it."
For example, the report notes that in India, such terms such as "tired brain" or "weak brain" are used for Alzheimer's symptoms amid widespread belief that dementia is a normal part of aging - when it's not.
That mistake isn't confined to the developing world. Even in Britain, the report found, just over half of the families caring for someone with dementia believed the same thing.
The new study updates global figures last reported in 2005, when British researchers estimated that more than 24 million people were living with dementia. Using that forecast, scientists had expected about 31 million people would be struggling with dementia by 2010.
But since 2005, a flurry of research on Alzheimer's in developing countries has been published, leading Alzheimer's Disease International - a nonprofit federation of more than 70 national groups - to ask those scientists to re-evaluate. After analyzing dozens of studies, the scientists projected 35.6 million cases of dementia worldwide by 2010.
That includes nearly 7 million people in Western Europe, nearly 7 million in South and Southeast Asia, about 5.5 million in China and East Asia and about 3 million in Latin America.
The report puts North America's total at 4.4 million, although the Alzheimer's Association of the U.S. uses a less conservative count to say more than 5 million people in this country alone are affected. The disease afflicts one in eight people 65 and older, and nearly one in two people over 85.
The report forecasts a more than doubling of dementia cases in parts of Asia and Latin America over the next 20 years, compared with a 40 percent to 60 percent jump in Europe and North America.
The report urges the World Health Organization to declare dementia a health priority and for national governments to follow suit. It recommends major new investments in research to uncover what causes dementia and how to slow, if not stop, the creeping brain disease that gradually robs sufferers of their memories and ability to care for themselves, eventually killing them.
There is no known cure; today's drugs only temporarily alleviate symptoms. Scientists aren't even sure what causes Alzheimer's.
But major studies under way now should show within a few years if it's possible to at least slow the progression of Alzheimer's by targeting a gunky substance called beta-amyloid that builds up in patients' brains, noted Dr. William Thies of the U.S. Alzheimer's Association. His group is pushing for an increase in U.S. research spending, from just over $400 million to about $1 billion.
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On the Net:
Alzheimer's Disease International: http://www.alz.co.uk/
Alzheimer's Association: http://www.alz.org
© 2009 The Associated Press.
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PARIS (AP) -- Sanofi-Aventis SA will begin delivering the first doses of its new swine flu vaccine in the United States by mid-October, the head of France's largest pharmaceutical company said Monday.
In an interview with French daily Le Figaro, Chris Viehbacher said Sanofi-Aventis will be able to produce at least 800 million doses of the vaccine per year.
Separately, the company's vaccines division announced in a statement Monday that it had received a new order from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to produce the equivalent of 27.3 million doses, bringing the total U.S. order to 75.3 million doses.
As for deliveries in France, Viehbacher told Le Figaro that they could begin by late November, after approval by European drug regulators.
Last week the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the new swine flu vaccine, a long-anticipated step as the U.S. government works to start mass vaccinations next month.
The vaccine is being made by CSL Ltd. of Australia, Switzerland's Novartis Vaccines, Maryland-based MedImmune LLC and Sanofi Pasteur of France - which produces flu shots at its Swiftwater, Pennsylvania, factory.
London-based GlaxoSmithKline also was expected to supply vaccine.
Typically fewer than 100 million Americans seek flu vaccine every year, and it's unclear whether swine flu - what scientists prefer to call the 2009 H1N1 strain - will prompt much more demand.
© 2009 The Associated Press.
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