Category: Health

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From Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now: With New Nicotine Vaccine, Cigarettes Give You No Pleasure

Smoking Kills Challiyil Eswaramangalath Vipin via Wikimedia
By denaturing nicotine before it reaches the heart and brain, a new vaccine could mute the addictiveness of tobacco productsNicotine addiction is a hard habit to break. But what if you could never get hooked in the first place? Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York report in the journal Science Translational Medicine that they have developed a potential vaccine for nicotine addiction. In mice, the vaccine inhibits the effects of nicotine before they reach the heart or brain, making it seem as though the nicotine never entered the bloodstream.

The vaccine works by using the liver to churn out a steady flow of antibodies that destroy nicotine as it enters the bloodstream, before it can make the circulatory loop to the brain and the heart. Previous therapies have proven effective at doing this, but they have to be administered on a regular basis. In mice, one dose of the vaccine activated the antibody-producing function in the liver for life.

That raises the possibility of a single vaccination, introduced to a person once in his or her lifetime, that would free that person from nicotine’s addictive qualities for life. That person could still choose to enjoy a cigarette for the sheer pleasure of sucking sweet, sweet tarred tobacco smoke into his or her lungs, but the capacity for addiction would be muted. It could also be used to treat smokers who have exhausted other quitting aids.

[C-Health]

 

from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now

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From Gizmodo: 9-Year-Old School Lunch Blogger Silenced By Politicians

For the past two months, one of my favorite reads has been Never Seconds, a blog started by 9-year-old Martha Payne of western Scotland to document the unappealing, non-nutritious lunches she was being served in her public primary school. Payne, whose mother is a doctor and father has a small farming property, started blogging in early May and went viral in days. She had a million viewers within a few weeks and 2 million this morning; was written up in Time, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, and a number of food blogs; and got support from TV cheflebrity Jamie Oliver, whose series “Jamie’s School Dinners” kicked off school-food reform in England. More »
 

from Gizmodo

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From Discover Magazine: Some Imported Shrimp on Grocery Store Shelves are Contaminated with Antibiotics | 80beats

shrimp

Most of us assume that by the time food arrives at the grocery store, it’s been checked for any chemicals that might harm us. That’s not necessarily the case: food manufacturers and federal employees test for some known culprits in some foods, but the search isn’t exhaustive, especially when it comes to imported items. Recently, scientists working with ABC News checked to see whether imported farmed shrimp bought from grocery stores had any potentially dangerous antibiotic residue, left over from the antibiotic-filled ponds in which they are raised. It turns out, a few of them did.

Out of 30 samples taken from grocery stores around the US, 3 turned up positive on tests for antibiotics that are banned from food for health reasons. Two of the samples, one imported from Thailand and one from India, had levels of carcinogenic antibiotic nitrofuranzone that were nearly 30 times higher than the amount allowed by the FDA. The other antibiotics the team discovered were enroflaxin, part of a class of compounds that can cause severe reactions in people and promote the growth of drug-resistant bacteria, and chloramphenicol, an antibiotic that is also a suspected carcinogen.

These findings aren’t entirely surprising. …

from Discover Magazine

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From Discover Magazine: 20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Allergies

peanuts

1. Our immune system may be like those small bands of Japanese “holdout” soldiers after World War II. Not knowing that the war was over, they hid for years, launching guerrilla attacks on peaceful 
villages.

2. With our living environment well scrubbed of germs, our body’s immune “soldiers” mistakenly fire on innocent peanuts and cat dander.

5. Most food allergies result from an immune response to a protein. In 2004 a team at Trinity College Dublin tried to counter that reaction by injecting mice with parasites, giving the animals’ immune systems the sort of threat they evolved to fight, thus distracting them from the food proteins.

6. The experiment worked.

7. Excited by such findings, in 2007 British-born entrepreneur Jasper Lawrence flew to Cameroon and walked barefoot near some latrines. His aim was to acquire hookworms, which he hoped would defeat his asthma and seasonal allergies.

8. That worked too.

9. Lawrence has since started a business shipping the parasites worldwide (but not here, where the FDA prohibits it). For $3,000, customers receive up to 35 hookworm larvae…

from Discover Magazine