The extreme toxicity of botulism makes it a potentially lethal type of food poisoning – and a possible agent of bioterrorist attack

The extreme toxicity of botulism makes it a potentially lethal type of food poisoning – and a possible agent of bioterrorist attack. Data from the Republic of Georgia (a former Soviet nation south of Russia) suggest that an infected person’s symptoms could help doctors predict how immediate the risk of death is, allowing physicians to prioritize victim

A brain imaging study by the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has found that an emotion-regulating brain circuit is overactive in people prone to depression – even when they are not depressed. Researchers discovered the abnormality in brains of those whose depressions relapsed when a key brain chemical messenger was experimentally reduced. Even when in remission, most subjects with a history of mood disorder experienced a temporary recurrence of symptoms when their brains were exper

Findings: UCLA researchers for the first time identified and then stopped a type of adult stem cell from migrating to the lung and contributing to pulmonary fibrosis in an animal model. Pulmonary fibrosis (i.e, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis) in humans is a devastating terminal disorder that causes an overabundance of scar tissue to form in the lung.

Impact: The new study may offer novel therapies to treat idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis– currently there are no effective treatments and the m

It’s a medical mystery: Exactly how do emerging viruses such as SARS, HIV and hantavirus suddenly burst forth, seemingly from nowhere, to start infecting people and causing lethal diseases, sometimes in epidemic proportions?

In research that shines light on this worrisome phenomenon, a team of scientific sleuths based at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB) has examined and tested viruses from two late-20th-century outbreaks of Venezuelan equine encephalitis (

The site where Europe’s spacecraft are launched into orbit, the Atlantic shoreline of French Guiana, is also the starting point for another hardly less remarkable journey: the epic migration of the critically endangered leatherback turtle.

Scientists have been using tracking sensors to follow the long treks of individual leatherbacks, then overlaying their routes with sea state data, including near-real time maps of ocean currents gathered by satellites including ESA’s ERS-2

A study by biological anthropologists at University of Kent has revealed that contemporary, British women who believed they had a longer time to live, were more likely to give birth to a son than women who thought that they would die earlier. According to Dr Sarah Johns, who led the research, this may be because it requires more effort to be pregnant with, give birth to, and raise a son to adulthood.

The study, which is published today in the journal Biology Letters, suggests that the sex ra

Duke University Medical Center researchers have developed a combination immune suppression and thymus transplantation technique to save infants born with complete DiGeorge Syndrome, a fatal genetic disorder.

Babies with complete DiGeorge Syndrome have no thymus, a gland important in the maturation of T cells — specialized immune cells that help protect the body against viruses, bacteria and other pathogens. The thymus teaches T cells to fight infection while not attacking the infant

A new technology assessment from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) states that the use of chemotherapy sensitivity and resistance assays (CSRAs) to select chemotherapeutic agents for cancer patients should not be undertaken outside of the clinical trial setting.

CSRAs are an in-vitro laboratory analysis used to help determine whether a specific chemotherapy regimen might inhibit tumor growth in a specific patient. This type of analysis contrasts with so-called empiric

The first study to compare survival between women with breast cancer whose treatment was based on consensus guidelines and those whose treatment was not shows that adhering to established guidelines improves survival and reduces the risk of recurrence. The study retrospectively examined whether the systemic therapy prescribed after surgery for women with early-stage breast cancer was consistent with treatment guidelines established for at the time. Systemic therapy includes chemotherapy and hormonal

Staph bacteria are not uncommon in health care settings. In fact, they account for a large number of hospital-related infections each year. Methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is one of these types of bacteria which is now found among athletes, military recruits and others in the general population. What is particularly concerning to medical experts is that MRSA is resistant to many common antibiotics.

An MRSA infection causes skin and soft tissue lesions and, when left untre

As American college students gear up to head back to campus later this month, they’ll look forward to all the usual college traditions: football games, late-night discussions, and pizza with new friends after classes.

But almost half of all college students share a tradition that could wreck their futures: heavy alcohol drinking that puts them at risk for everything from bad grades and date rape to fights, serious injuries and even death.

At a time when kegs of beer and shots of

Just a few years ago, hormone therapy was thought to be the best way to protect bone health during and after menopause. After menopause, your body no longer makes as much new bone as it did before — setting the stage for osteoporosis.

Because research has revealed health risks associated with long-term hormone therapy, other medications have begun to emerge as better options for treating and preventing postmenopausal bone loss and fractures.

The August issue of Mayo Clinic

What’s your risk of having a heart attack or stroke in the next 10 years?

The August issue of Mayo Clinic Women’s HealthSource tells how you can calculate it and why it’s important.

Heart disease is the leading killer of women in the United States, and about 85 percent of women with coronary heart disease have at least one main risk factor — smoking, diabetes, high cholesterol or hypertension. Because many risk factors are either preventable or treatable, learning about

Researchers at the University of Warwick have found a way of using a test devised in the 1930s, and used to gauge the stress on the superchargers in wartime spitfire fighter planes, to model the stress that surgical procedures would put on an aortic aneurysm. An aortic aneurysm is a dangerous bulge in the body’s largest artery -the aorta. The aorta is a crucial artery as it carries all the blood pumped from the heart.

Photoelasticity is a technique that has been used for decades in industr

A new study suggests that wounds on mice that prefer multiple mates heal at the same rate, whether the mice are housed with a mate or live in isolation.

But the same doesn’t ring true for monogamous mice, said Courtney DeVries, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Ohio State University.

She and Erica Glasper, a doctoral student in psychology at Ohio State, took a closer look at the effects social bonding had on wound healing in monogamous and non-monoga

Everyone knows not to get between a mother and her offspring. What makes these females unafraid when it comes to protecting their young may be low levels of a peptide, or small piece of protein, released in the brain that normally activates fear and anxiety, according to new research published in the August issue of Behavioral Neuroscience.

“We see this fierce protection of offspring is so many animals,” says Stephen Gammie, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor of zo