Bird Influenza Virus

May Persist on Feathers

Fallen from Domestic Ducks

ScienceDaily (Aug. 22, 2010) — Highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (H5N1) may persist on feathers fallen from the bodies of infected domestic ducks and contribute to environmental contamination. Researchers from the National Institute of Animal Health, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan report their findings in the August 2010 issue of the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

Since the emergence of Asian avian influenza virus in 1997, it has spread to Europe, the Middle East and Africa causing significant mortality and economic loss in the poultry industry. Although the virus is mainly found in waterfowl and transmitted through fecal contamination in water, humans as well as other mammalian species have contracted the virus through close contact with infected birds.

A prior study showed that H5N1 could replicate in the skin cells of feathers and further suggested that those that drop off the body could potentially contaminate the environment. Here, researchers evaluated the environmental risk posed by contaminated feathers by inoculating domestic ducks with H5N1, collecting feathers, feces and drinking water three days following, and then storing them at 39 degrees and 68 degrees Fahrenheit for 360 days. Results showed that H5N1 persisted the longest in feathers at both temperatures.

“These results indicate that feathers detached from domestic ducks infected with highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (H5N1) can be a source of environmental contamination and may function as fomites with high viral loads in the environment,” say the researchers.

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Deathstalker Scorpion Venom

Could Improve Gene Therapy

for Brain Cancer

Science (Aug. 11, 2010) — An ingredient in the venom of the “deathstalker” scorpion could help gene therapy become an effective treatment for brain cancer, scientists are reporting. The substance allows therapeutic genes — genes that treat disease — to reach more brain cancer cells than current approaches, according to the study in ACS Nano.

Miqin Zhang and colleagues note that gene therapy — the delivery of therapeutic genes into diseased cells — shows promise for fighting glioma, the most common and most serious form of brain cancer. But difficulties in getting genes to enter cancer cells and concerns over the safety and potential side effects of substances used to transport these genes have kept the approach from helping patients.

The scientists describe a new approach that could solve these problems. Key ingredients of their gene-delivery system are chlorotoxin, the substance in deathstalker scorpion venom that can slow the spread of brain cancer, and nanoparticles of iron oxide. Each nanoparticle is about 1/50,000th the width of a human hair. In tests on lab mice, the scientists demonstrated that their venom-based nanoparticles can induce nearly twice the amount of gene expression in brain cancer cells as nanoparticles that do not contain the venom ingredient. “These results indicate that this targeted gene delivery system may potentially improve treatment outcome of gene therapy for glioma and other deadly cancers,” the article notes.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

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News in Science

Mangrove bark dulls the pain

Wednesday, 23 June 2004 Judy Skatssoon
ABC

The bark of the freshwater mangrove, which is found in monsoonal areas, is used as a painkiller in Aboriginal medicine (Image: Len Webb Collection, Griffith University)

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Queensland researchers are working to develop a new pain-killing drug from a native Australian plant traditionally used by Aboriginal people.

Professor of chemistry at Griffith University Ron Quinn is identifying and testing compounds from the freshwater mangrove Barringtonia acutangula for their analgesic properties.

The mangrove, which is also known as the Indian Oak or Kandu almond, grows by creeks and lagoons and is distributed throughout east Asia, south-east Asia, eastern Africa, the south-west Pacific and northern Australia.

Quinn said he first learned of the plant’s analgesic potential after hearing about an Aboriginal man in the Kimberley region of north-western Australia whose finger had been bitten off by a crocodile.

“He used the bark of the tree, chewed it around in his mouth and then put it on the wound,” Quinn said.

It was unclear whether the benefit came from chewing the plant or using it as a poultice on the wound.

Quinn said researchers had isolated several compounds from the plant’s bark and tested them on rats.

One compound showed signs of being effective when administered orally.

“We started out looking at the crude extract and we’ve isolated some components of it and we’ve now tested a couple of these and found one of them is actually active in the animal model,” he said.

He said a A$174,500 (US$119,000) grant from the latest round of National Health and Medical Research Council development funding, announced earlier this month, would enable more detailed testing of the plant and help assess its commercial potential.

A large-scale extraction and isolation process would obtain the compounds in large enough quantities to allow them to be pharmacologically evaluated as potential analgesic drugs.

“There’s an unmet need in management of pain so there’s a potential market opportunity,” he said.

“It will depend a bit on the precise mechanism and precise biology that we see.”

Quinn said the active compound appeared to be novel and structurally unrelated to opiate painkillers.

Quinn said Griffith University held a provisional patent on several compounds extracted from the plant and hoped to develop a drug under a joint agreement with the local Aboriginal people, who would receive 50% of any returns once the product was brought to market.

Human trials remain some years away.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

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Scientists Grow New Lungs

Using ‘Skeletons’ of Old Ones

Science (June 28, 2010) — For someone with a severe, incurable lung disorder such as cystic fibrosis or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a lung transplant may be the only chance for survival. Unfortunately, it’s often not a very good chance. Matching donor lungs are rare, and many would-be recipients die waiting for the transplants that could save their lives.

Such deaths could be prevented if it were possible to use stem cells to grow new lungs or lung tissue. Specialists in the emerging field of tissue engineering have been hard at work on this for years. But they’ve been frustrated by the problem of coaxing undifferentiated stem cells to develop into the specific cell types that populate different locations in the lung.

Now, researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have demonstrated a potentially revolutionary solution to this problem. As they describe in an article published electronically ahead of print by the journal Tissue Engineering Part A, they seeded mouse embryonic stem cells into “acellular” rat lungs — organs whose original cells had been destroyed by repeated cycles of freezing and thawing and exposure to detergent.

The result: empty lung-shaped scaffolds of structural proteins on which the mouse stem cells thrived and differentiated into new cells appropriate to their specific locations.

“In terms of different cell types, the lung is probably the most complex of all organs — the cells near the entrance are very different from those deep in the lung,” said Dr. Joaquin Cortiella, one of the article’s lead authors. “Our natural matrix generated the same pattern, with tracheal cells only in the trachea, alveoli-like cells in the alveoli, pneumocytes only in the distal lung, and definite transition zones between the bronchi and the alveoli.”

Such “site-specific” cell development has never been seen before in a natural matrix, said professor Joan Nichols, another of the paper’s lead authors. The complexity gives the researchers hope that the concept could be scaled up to produce replacement tissues for humans — or used to create models to test therapies and diagnostic techniques for a variety of lung diseases.

“If we can make a good lung for people, we can also make a good model for injury,” Nichols said. “We can create a fibrotic lung, or an emphysematous lung, and evaluate what’s happening with those, what the cells are doing, how well stem cell or other therapy works. We can see what happens in pneumonia, or what happens when you’ve got a hemorrhagic fever, or tuberculosis, or hantavirus — all the agents that target the lung and cause damage in the lung.”

The researchers have already begun work on large-scale experiments, “decellularizing” pig lungs with an eye toward using them to produce larger samples of lung tissue that could lead to applications in humans. They’re also taking on the challenge of vascularization — stimulating the growth of blood vessels that will enable the engineered tissues to survive outside the special bioreactors that the researchers now use to keep them alive by bathing them in a life-sustaining cocktail of nutrients and oxygen.

“People ask us why we’re doing the lung, because it’s so hard,” Cortiella said. “But the potential is so great, and the technology is here. It’s going to take time, but I think we’re going to create a system that works.”

Other authors of the Tissue Engineering Part A paper are UTMB research associate Jean Niles, associate professor Gracie Vargas, medical student Sean Winston, graduate student Shannon Walls, summer research fellows Andrea Brettler and Jennifer Wang, Andrea Cantu of Stanford University and Dr. Anthony Pham of Brown Medical School

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

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Lead in Ammunition Contaminates

Game Meat

ScienceDaily (June 6, 2010) — Eating the meat of animals hunted using lead ammunition can be more dangerous for health than was previously thought, especially for children and people who consume large quantities. This is reflected in a study carried out by British and Spanish researchers that has been published by the journal PLos One.

A team of scientists from the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT), along with researchers from other British institutions and from the Spanish Research Institute on Cynegetic Resources (IREC in Spanish), has proven that the levels of lead in some game meat that has already been cooked exceed the maximum allowances set by the European Union, due to the presence of remains of ammunition.

“Depending on the species and type of recipe used, between 20 and 87.5% of the samples analysed exceeded the maximum level of lead set by the EU in meat from livestock animals of 100 parts per billion (0.1 mg/kg of the fresh weight of meat),” Rafael Mateo, co-author of the study and researcher for IREC (a joint centre composed of the University of Castilla-La Mancha, the Community Board of Castilla-La Mancha and the CSIC), indicated.

To carry out the study, published recently in the free access journal PLoS ONE, the researchers analysed the meat of six species of game birds (red partridge, pheasant, wood pigeon, grouse, woodcock and mallard) shot by hunters in the United Kingdom. “In Spain and other countries hunting is done in the same way and using the same ammunition, meaning that the issue with this type of contamination in meat is the same across the board,” Mateo points out.

Cooked pellets

The pieces were x-rayed to detect the presence of pellets and minute fragments of lead. Afterwards, the pellets in the meat were cooked and removed, as we would normally do when eating. Finally, the concentration of the metal in the food was measured using atomic absorption spectroscopy.

“Although the levels set by the EU are for meat that is consumed more frequently than game, in species like the woodcock, 5.4% of the birds cooked displayed more than 10 mg/kg, which indicates that by eating 200g of this meat on a single occasion, the tolerable weekly intake of lead for a person weighing 80g could be exceeded,” the researcher highlights.

The study concludes that the potential health risk of consuming game shot with lead could be greater than was thought up until now, especially for vulnerable groups like children and people who consume large quantities of this meat.

Vinegar increases lead contamination

Today at the conference of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC), that is taking place in Seville this week, Mateo explained how the bioavailability of lead varies: “In metallic form it cannot be absorbed easily by the intestine, but when cooked, especially with recipes done in pickle, it transforms into forms of lead that can reach the blood more easily through the digestive system.”

“In big game hunting, and contrary to what is believed, the lead bullets also fragment,” explains Mateo, who, with his team, has confirmed the presence of high concentrations of lead in samples of deer and wild boar from Sierra Madrona (Ciudad Real): “Mining sites in the region can influence the results, but they alone do not explain the extremely high levels detected in some samples.”

Alternatives to lead

Lead is a heavy metal that is very toxic, which explains why its use is being restricted more and more. For the same reason, lead pellets and bullets have started to be substituted by others made from different materials.

For small game hunting steel ammunition already exists, especially recommended for use in humid areas (where there is little risk of ricochet), and in cases when shooting into the air is required, like in driven partridge shoots. When you have to aim at the ground -to shoot rabbits and hares, for example-, the alternative is pellets made from tungsten or bismuth in different compounds and alloys with metals or plastics.

For big game hunting, some countries like Germany and the United States have already started to use copper bullets. This material hardly fragments and is not as toxic as lead.

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 7th June 2010

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Humans May Give Swine Flu To Pigs

In New Twist To Pandemic

ScienceDaily (July 10, 2009) — The strain of influenza, A/H1N1, that is currently pandemic in humans has been shown to be infectious to pigs and to spread rapidly in a trial pig population.

In research published July 9 in Journal of General Virology, Dr Thomas Vahlenkamp and a team of virologists from the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut in Greifswald-Insel Riems, Germany, experimentally infected five pigs with the strain of swine flu that is causing the current human pandemic. Within four days the virus had spread to three uninfected pigs housed with the infected ones and all pigs were showing clinical signs of swine flu.

“Although in the early stages of the swine flu pandemic there were worries that humans would catch the virus from pigs, this has so far not been documented and pigs and other animals have not been involved in the current spread of A/H1N1 influenza in humans,” said Dr Vahlenkamp, “However, with the increasing numbers of human infections, a spill over of this human virus to pigs is becoming more likely. The prevention of human-to-pig transmissions should have a high priority in order to avoid involvement of pigs in the epidemiology of this pandemic”.

Although the virus spread quickly to the non-infected pigs, it did not spread to five chickens that were housed together with the pigs. This may imply that while the virus can pass from human to pig it does not pass from pig to chicken. The experiments were done under strict containment conditions (Biosafety Level BSL3+), to prevent any further transmission of the virus from the infected pigs.

The scientists recommend that persons who are suspected of having swine flu should not be allowed to have contact with pigs and that regulatory bodies should agree on appropriate restriction measures for swine holdings where A/H1N1 infection is detected. Experiments are underway to determine whether currently available vaccines may be able to provide pigs with a certain immunity to stop a potential spread of the virus.

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 21st April 2010

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Goats Make Drugs, World Doesn’t Change

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Pets could be called ‘wonder drugs’

COLUMBIA, Mo. (UPI) — Pets lower hypertension, spur exercise and improve psychological health, and if this appeared in pill form it would be called a wonder drug, a U.S. expert says.

“Research in this field is providing new evidence on the positive impact pets have in our lives,” Rebecca Johnson, an associate professor in the University of Missouri Sinclair School of Nursing, the College of Veterinary Medicine and director of the Research Center for Human-Animal Interaction, says in a statement.

Johnson says the International Society for Anthrozoology and Human-Animal Interaction Conference in Kansas City, Mo., Oct. 20-25 will include conference discussions on ways that human-animal interaction benefits humans and animals.

“Pets are of great importance to people, especially during hard economic times,” Johnson says. “Pets provide unconditional love and acceptance and may be part of answers to societal problems, such as inactivity and obesity.”

ReCHAI sponsored the Walk a Hound, Lose a Pound and Stay Fit for Seniors program that matched older adults with shelter dogs, while another group of older adults walked with humans. For 12 weeks, participants were encouraged to walk on an outdoor trail for one hour, five times a week.

“The older people who walked their dogs improved their walking capabilities by 28 percent,” Johnson says. “They had more confidence walking on the trail, and they increased their speed. Those who walked with humans had a 4 percent increase in their walking capabilities.”

Copyright 2009 by United Press International

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 7th Oct 2009

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Hendra virus update

Batman beats Superman

Batman is related to a bat.

Bats carry the deadly

Henda Virus.

Vet dies from the deadly

disease.

26 August 2009

fact sheet for the community.

community engagement calendar.

Find out more information on Hendra testing.

Published by Henry Sapiecha 4th Sept 2009

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