Carbon nanotubes have been proposed for use in everything from space elevators to synthetic muscles to sports equipment. But a new study shows that they can severely damage lungs if inhaled. There have long been fears that the nanotubes might cause mesothelioma, cancer of the lining of the lungs, because of their structural similarity to asbestos fibers. Now research has shown significant health risks from the tubes, which confirms previous studies about the dangers of this comparatively simple nanotech.

The research comes out of North Carolina State University, and is published in this month's Nature Nanotechnology. It showed that within a day of exposure, mice's lungs were reacting to the particles, with clusters of immune cells gathering on the outer walls (pleura) of their lungs. Within two weeks, fibrosis, or localized scarification, had occurred. This same scarring occurs after exposure to asbestos. Three months after this single exposure, the scarification and immune response had dissipated. However, chronic exposure might lead to a different result, with cancer as one possible outcome. And chronic exposure is exactly what humans have to worry about, when carbon nanotubes are rolled out for use in a variety of technologies. Workers may be exposed to the tiny tubes every day.

Previous studies out of the UK and Japan show similar results: that the nanotubes have a nasty habit of reaching the outer tissue of your lungs, the same location where asbestos causes cancer. The Japanese study from 2007 is particularly damning, as researchers were able to induce mesothelioma in mice using the carbon nanotubes.

Given the already-existing issues with asbestos remaining in the environment, and the unknown ecological impact of carbon nanofibers, this raises very troubling issues for the tube's long term effects. As useful as they may be, what will happen if they have a tendency to hang around in the local ecosystem for a very long time? Will its potentially damaging side effects overrule the mammoth benefits it may have in modern production? What about the safe disposal of objects containing nanotubes? If they do become ubiquitous, getting rid of the things may be a major problem. For all the fears of grey goo, it might just be one of the simplest forms of nanotech that does us in.

via Nature Nanotechnology

An American family on holiday get stuck on the back roads of Ireland, and fall into the hands of a group of deformed, infected and mutated children. Damn, I hate evil kids.

Plague Town is out today on DVD, clips via Bloody Disgusting.

The new case of CJD affected a man whose genetic makeup was of a type researchers call "MV," and it was previously believed to make people immune to the brain disease that causes mental deterioration and death. CJD affects people who eat cows that also have it. During the last outbreak of CJD, only people of the genetic type "MM" were affected.

In an op-ed in Lancet Neurology, the researchers say:

To put it prudently, a second wave of CJD with a longer incubation time might hit these shores, but we do not know whether this will be a tidal wave or just an imperceptible ripple.

One researcher speculated there might be between 50-350 cases in this new wave of infections. It will be harder to track the cases in the short term, however, because the MV infected have a longer incubation time.

[via Nature]

Image via Tips from the Top Floor.

The WHO report updates information on the global burden of disease based on measurements from 2004 and projects how disease will affect the human population through 2030. Perhaps the most significant change it predicts is a global decline in deaths from communicable diseases. HIV/AIDS, the sixth leading cause of death in 2004 worldwide, is expected to peak around 2012 and drop to the number ten position by 2030. Other communicable diseases are expected to decline more quickly; tuberculosis, the seventh leading cause of death in 2004, is expected to plummet to number 23.

The sharp decline in communicable disease death will mean an increased aging population, especially in lower income countries, which means a greater proportion of the global population will die from diseases developed later in life, such as ischemic heart disease and cancers. But changes in global development and behaviors will also contribute to increases in certain causes of death. The WHO indicates that a global increase in tobacco smoking in middle- and low-income countries will bolster deaths from cardiovascular disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and some cancers. And increased transportation development and more crowded roads will help increase deaths from traffic accidents.

[WHO Burdens of Disease via Foreign Policy via Metafilter]

To make its predictions accurate, researchers first looked over the data on where influenza-like illness (ILI) outbreaks took place in the U.S. over the past five years. Then they pored over search data, looking for key phrases that popped up again and again when the outbreaks occurred. You can see to the left a chart of some of the searches that correlated most strongly to a spike in ILI cases. Note that the terms listed in the chart are not exact search terms (nobody actually searches on the phrase "influenza complication"), but instead capture the idea of what people searched on. So "influenza complication" would mean people searched on things like "runny nose" or "aches and chills."

After analyzing the data, researchers came up with a system where they weighted certain search topics for how much they seemed connected to ILI outbreaks. In the chart, you can see searches on flu symptoms rank high for a correlation with hospital data on lots of flu patients. Searches on specific types of antibiotics might be connected to flu, but weren't weighted as heavily.

Eventually, they began using the list of weighted search topics against real-time data coming in during the early part of 2008, trying to see if a rise in certain topics in a given region meant that flu was on the rise there. And as you can see in the chart above, the Google prediction (in black) was uncannily similar to the actual rise in flu cases in the region they picked (in red).

So what's the advantage of the Google system of disease surveillance? Traditional methods of disease tracking rely on data from hospitals and pharmacies, and often it takes a week or more to figure out any pattern. The Google system takes about a day. If epidemiologists see a huge spike in data that points to a massive disease outbreak, they can begin to prepare for it. And more importantly, they might be able to track where the disease is heading.

What this means is that the Centers for Disease control will probably hear about the next big pandemic from Google, rather than hospital researchers. It also means that when you do a search on Google, you're revealing a lot more information about yourself than you probably realize.

Detecting Influenza Outbreaks Using Search Query Data [via Nature]

It turns out that Ebola exploits a vulnerability in something called the "PI3 kinase pathway," a biochemical mechanism that is responsible for cell longevity and movement, as well for causing the cell to pull things from outside into the cell via a little bubble called an "endosome." Ebola tricks the cell into wrapping it in the endosome bubble and pulling it inside — sort of like a trojan horse. Once inside the cell, the virus breaks out of the endosome and starts replicating.

What the researchers discovered was that if they used a drug that shut down the PI3 kinase pathway, the Ebola remained trapped inside that endosome. Essentially, they used a drug to patch the cell's vulnerable system and keep the virus out.

University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston immunology professor Robert Davey, an author on the paper, said in a statement:

The nice part about identifying entry mechanisms is you can prevent the virus from infecting the cell. You can stop the whole show before it even gets started. Up to that point, it's really a bus ride for these viruses, and PI3 kinase is the bus driver. Whether you're talking about Ebola or Ebola virus-like particles, they've all got the virus envelope proteins that trigger the PI3 kinase pathway, which is the first step of getting the virus onto that bus.

He also noted that there are other viruses that exploit the PI3 kinase vulnerability, though Ebola is the first that has been observed in the act of doing it. That means the team's breakthrough might affect how other viruses are treated too. And how cells are manipulated, since once you start mucking around with PI3 kinase pathways, you are playing with cellular movement and longevity. Maybe Ebola will actually prove to be the key to unlocking the secret of longevity at a cellular level.

PI3 Kinase-Akt Pathway Controls Cellular Entry of Ebola Virus [PLoS Pathogens via Eurekalert]

HealthMap could be extra helpful in places where access to public health information is hard to come by. For instance China, whose official line for a while back in 2002 and 2003 was "SARS? I don't know what you're talking about. There' no one dying of a mysterious disease here."

And according to the Wired article, plans could be in the works to bring Healthmap down to the street level:

Back in 2006, Google.org head Larry Brilliant told Wired.com about his vision for a service that looks a lot like HealthMap.

"I envision a kid (in Africa) getting online and finding that there is an outbreak of cholera down the street. I envision someone in Cambodia finding out that there is leprosy across the street," Brilliant said.

HealthMap doesn't have quite that level of resolution just yet — outbreaks are only mapped to the state/province level...

Knowing about outbreaks as they happen is a good thing, and potentially really empowering, but HealthMappers and Larry Brilliant seem to be wandering into a privacy minefield.

A house-by-house account of who's got what disease would sure help out public health researchers, but what would it do to a community? Should I be able to find out who on my block has Hepatitis, Dengue Fever, or HIV? And to what extent is someone suffering from that disease allowed to not tell anyone about it? That's a tough question, but one that'll need answering before HealthMap goes hyper-local.

Source: PLoS Medicine via Wired

According to UPI:

The department also assessed the possibility of a terrorist attack releasing pathogens from the lab — which will work on the most infectious animal diseases, like Foot and Mouth; and on those most deadly to humans, like the Hendra and Nipah viruses. The overall risk assessment for a release at the five mainland sites was "moderate" because of "the potential easy spread of a disease through livestock or wildlife" nearby, the statement said.

DHS is currently considering five possible sites in the mainland United States. They'd better hope nobody in those towns has read The Hot Zone or seen 28 Days Later.

New Report on Bio-War Lab Danger [UPI via Space War]

All four families have a few things in common. First, the people with Unertan syndrome are all the products of incestuous marriages. Children of closely-related people often suffer birth defects. Also, the children who walk on all fours are developmentally disabled; some are unable to talk. What shocked the researchers was that the families with quadrupedal members did not share the same kinds of genetic mutations. One of the researchers, Tayfun Ozcelik, gave a talk today at the European Society of Human Genetics about the genetic study. According to a release from the Society:

Although the families lived in isolated villages 200-300 km apart and reported no ancestral relationships, the scientists expected to find a single genetic mutation implicated in the condition. They were surprised to find that this was not the case.

"We carried out genome-wide screening on these families", said Professor Ozcelik, "and found regions of DNA that were shared by all those family members who walk on all fours. However, we were surprised to find that genes on three different chromosomes are responsible for the condition in four different families.

"In families A and D there were mutations in VLDLR on chromosome 9, and in family B the phenotype maps to chromosome 17 to a region that contains at least 157 genes, and we are still looking for the precise mutation. Neither region appears to be implicated for family C."

In all cases, the affected individuals were the offspring of consanguineous marriages, which suggests that if they had married outside the family they would not have had the condition. All of them had significant developmental delay in infancy. "Whereas normal infants make the transition to walking on two legs in a relatively short period", said Professor Ozcelik, "these individuals continued to move on their palms and feet and never walked upright. Although they can stand from a sitting position and maintain this upright position with flexed hips and knees, they virtually never initiate bipedal walking on their own."

It has been suggested in the past that lack of access to medical care exacerbated the effects of an under-developed cerebellum, and that this led to quadrupedality. "Although it may be true that family B lacked proper medical care, families A and D had consistent access to good medical attention, and both families sought a correction of quadrupedality in their affected children", said Professor Ozcelik. "Indeed, an unaffected member of family A is a physician, who has been actively involved in the medical interventions. In addition, the parents in family A also discouraged their affected children from walking on all fours, to no avail. We think that social factors are unlikely to be involved in the development of quadrupedal locomotion."

Along with brain enlargement, speech, and the ability to make tools, upright walking has long been regarded as one of the key traits that have led to modern humans. Professor Ozcelik's team have opened a window on how mutations in VLDLR affect brain development and influence gait in humans.

"It will be interesting to see if the VLDLR gene is involved in other types of cerebellar ataxias. In addition, we hope to identify the defective genes associated with quadrupedal locomotion in families B and C", he says.

All the families do share genetic factors in common, and Ozcelik's team says similar genetic factors are found in a few North American families whose members cannot walk at all.

If it turns out that there are several groups of genes that control for bipedalism, it might be possible to genetically modify people to walk on all fours. It's hard to imagine why anyone would want to do this outside a mad scientist movie. However, many human genes are shared with our quadrupedal mammalian cousins. Perhaps discovery of the bipedal gene could be the first step in helping cats, dogs, and apes to walk upright. Yes, it could be the first key to "uplifting" other species.

Genetic Mutation Linked to Walking on All Fours [Eurekalert]

Millions of humans are infected with Leptospirosis every year, and the new strain could be spreading without detection. If new strains are transmitted beyond the relatively isolated jungle area where they were found, a catastrophic global pandemic could result.

There is no vaccine for humans, and treatment usually requires multiple antibiotics. Joseph Vinetz, M.D. was studying Leptospirosis in the Amazon region of Peru on behalf of the UC San Diego Division of Infectious Diseases when he discovered several humans and rats carrying the new strain. Dr. Vinetz fears that Leptospira licerasiae may have infected hundreds of humans in the remote region. Photo by: CDC.

New Species Of Infectious Disease Found In Amazon. [Science Daily]

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