The person was involved in the care of a patient with the disease, Public Health England says.
Monkeypox: Heathcare worker is third UK case of disease
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Category Archives: Mind Building
Hernia mesh complications ‘affect more than 100,000’
Jen Coles had to use a cane to walk following her mesh implant, which left her in chronic pain.
Mediterranean diet ‘may help prevent depression’
An expert urges more research to confirm a possible link between fruit, veg, nuts and grains and mood.
Stalled Royal Liverpool Hospital to be publicly funded
Work on the Royal Liverpool Hospital stopped following the collapse of construction giant Carillion.
Liquid metal discovery to make toxic water safe and drinkable
UNSW and RMIT researchers have discovered a revolutionary and cheap way to make filters that can turn water contaminated with heavy metals into safe drinking water in a matter of minutes.
Recent UNSW SHARP hire Professor Kourosh Kalantar-zadeh and his former colleagues at RMIT showed that nano-filters made of aluminium oxide could be cheaply produced using virtually no energy from a fixed amount of liquid metal gallium.
In a paper published in Advanced Functional Materials, lead author Dr Ali Zavabeti (RMIT) and Professor Kalantar-zadeh explained that when a chunk of aluminium is added to the core of liquid gallium at room temperature, layers of aluminium oxide are quickly produced at the surface of the gallium.
The authors discovered that these aluminium oxide nano-sheets were highly porous and went on to prove they were suitable for filtering both heavy metal ions and oil contamination at unprecedented, ultra-fast rates.
Professor Kalantar-zadeh, who was recently awarded an ARC Australian Laureate Fellowship soon after joining UNSW’s School of Chemical Engineering, said that low cost and portable filters produced by this new liquid metal based manufacturing process could be used by people without access to clean drinking water to remove substances like lead and other toxic metals in a matter of minutes.
“Because it’s super porous, water passes through very rapidly,” Professor Kalantar-zadeh said.
“Lead and other heavy metals have a very high affinity to aluminium oxide. As the water passes through billions of layers, each one of these lead ions get attracted to one of these aluminium oxide sheets.
“But at the same time, it’s very safe because with repeated use, the water flow cannot detach the heavy metal ions from the aluminium oxide.”
Professor Kalantar-zadeh believes the technology could be put to good use in Africa and Asia in places where heavy metal ions in the water are at levels well beyond safe human consumption. It is estimated that 790 million people, or one in 10 of the Earth’s population, do not have access to clean water.
“If you’ve got bad quality water, you just take a gadget with one of these filters with you,” he said.
“You pour the contaminated water in the top of a flask with the aluminium oxide filter. Wait two minutes and the water that passes through the filter is now very clean water, completely drinkable.
“And the good thing is, this filter is cheap.”
There are portable filtration products available that do remove heavy metals from water, but they are comparatively expensive, often costing more than $100.
By contrast, aluminium oxide filters produced from liquid gallium could be produced for as little as 10 cents, making them attractive to prospective manufacturers.
“Up until now, to produce aluminium oxide, you need to process aluminium at above 1000 degrees or use other energy intensive processes,” Professor Kalantar-zadeh said.
“It would normally consume so much energy to make anything like this filter, making it hugely expensive.
“Now we’re talking about something you can do even under the sun in summer at 35 degrees.”
While aluminium is a plentiful and cheap metal, gallium is relatively expensive. But what makes gallium the hero in the process is the fact that it remains pure and unchanged after each production of aluminium oxide.
“You just add aluminium to the gallium and out comes aluminium oxide when its surface is exposed to water. You can use gallium again and again. Gallium never participates in the reaction,” Professor Kalanter-zadeh said.
Professor Kalantar-zadeh said the manufacture process is so cheap and requiring such low expenditure of energy, these filters could even be made out of a kitchen.
“We are publishing this concept and releasing it to the public domain, so people around the world can use the idea for free and implement it for enhancing the quality of their lives,” he said.
“This is all about a new paradigm. We haven’t even begun to explore how we can use liquid metals as a base for manufacturing things that are cheap, green and safe for humans.”
The work led by Professor Kalantar-zadeh and Dr Zavabeti was funded by The ARC Centre for Future Low-Energy Electronics Technologies (FLEET).
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Materials provided by UNSW Sydney. Original written by Lachlan Gilbert. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Once majestic Atlantic Forest ’empty’ after 500 years of over-exploitation
Five centuries of over-exploitation has halved mammal populations in South America’s Atlantic Forest — according to new research from the University of East Anglia.
A new analysis of mammal populations, published today in the journal PLoS ONE, has revealed the devastating effects of human disturbance over the last 500 years.
More than half of the local species assemblages — sets of co-existing species — of medium and large mammals living in the forest have died out since the area was first colonised in the 1500s.
Human activity is largely responsible for this overwhelming biodiversity loss according to the study, which compared inventories published over the past 30 years with baseline data going back to historical times in Colonial Brazil.
Originally covering around 1.1 million square km, the Atlantic Forest lies mostly along the coast of Brazil and is the world’s longest continuous latitudinal stretch of tropical forest. Activities such as farming and logging — as well as fires — have reduced the Forest to about 0.143 million square km which has, in turn, had a significant impact on mammalian populations.
Dr Juliano Bogoni — currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of São Paulo, Brazil — led the study, along with Professor Carlos Peres from the University of East Anglia (UEA), and collaborators from the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil.
The team analysed species loss among almost 500 medium-to-large-bodied local sets of mammal species that had been surveyed within the vast Atlantic Forest region.
As well as looking at individual species, the team examined species groups, to try to understand which ecologically related groups of species had diminished most rapidly. They found that apex predators and large carnivores, such as jaguars and pumas, as well as large-bodied herbivores, such as tapirs were among the groups whose numbers had suffered the most.
Prof Peres, from UEA’s School of Environmental Sciences, said: “Our results highlight the urgent need for action in protecting these fragile ecosystems.
“In particular, we need to carry out more comprehensive regional scale studies to understand the local patterns and drivers of species loss.
“Efforts to protect the Atlantic Forest and other tropical forest ecosystems often rests on uncooperative political will and robust public policies, so we need compelling data to drive change.”
Dr Bogoni, first author of the study, said: “The mammalian diversity of the once majestic Atlantic Forest has been largely reduced to a pale shadow of its former self.
“These habitats are now often severely incomplete, restricted to insufficiently large forest remnants, and trapped in an open-ended extinction vortex. This collapse is unprecedented in both history and pre-history and can be directly attributed to human activity.”
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Materials provided by University of East Anglia. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Sensitive babies become altruistic toddlers
Our responsiveness to seeing others in distress accounts for variability in helping behavior from early in development, according to a study published September 25 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Tobias Grossmann of the University of Virginia, and colleagues.
Altruistic behavior such as helping an unfamiliar person in need is considered a key feature of cooperation in human societies. Yet our propensity to engage in altruistic acts varies considerably among individuals, ranging from extraordinarily altruistic kidney donors to highly antisocial psychopaths. Past studies have suggested that greater sensitivity to fearful faces is linked to heightened levels of prosocial behavior, which can already be seen in preschool children. Examining responsiveness to fearful faces and its variability early in human development represents a unique opportunity to shed light on the precursors of altruistic behavior.
To address this question, Grossmann and colleagues tracked eye movements to examine whether attentional responses to fear in others at seven months of age predict altruistic behavior at 14 months of age. The analysis revealed that altruistic behavior in toddlerhood was predicted by infants’ attention to fearful faces but not happy or angry faces. Moreover, infants’ attentional bias to fearful faces and their altruistic behavior was predicted by brain responses in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex measured through functional near-infrared spectroscopy.
According to the authors, the findings suggests that, from early in development, variability in altruistic helping behavior is linked to our responsiveness to seeing others in distress and brain processes implicated in attentional control. These findings critically advance our understanding of the emergence of altruism in humans by identifying responsiveness to fear in others as an early precursor contributing to variability in prosocial behavior.
“Our results are in line with the notion that a caring continuum exists, along which individuals differ in their tendency to display sensitive responses to others’ distress that motivate prosocial action,” said Grossmann. “This study provides new insights into the nature of human altruism by uncovering its developmental and brain origins.”
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Materials provided by PLOS. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Health24.com | Calls for action at historic TB meeting
President Cyril Ramaphosa will join other world leaders on Wednesday to decide on how to fight TB: the world’s, and South Africa’s, deadliest infectious disease.
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has called on Ramaphosa to reverse the “sluggish global progress in combatting TB” by making decisive commitments at the first-ever United Nations High-Level Meeting on TB taking place in New York on Wednesday.
“78 000 people in South Africa died of TB in 2017, and while this is fewer than estimated for the previous year, TB treatment coverage remains low at 68 percent, meaning that up to one third of all people living with TB are being missed,” said MSF’s Dr Amir Shroufi.
He said that while the country has shown leadership in the TB fight, significant gaps still remain.
The organisation is calling on the South African government to commit to closing these gaps including registering one of only a handful of new medications to treat drug-resistant forms of the disease: delamanid.
While South Africa was the first country to include the blockbuster anti-TB drug bedaquiline in routine treatment, delamanid remains largely inaccessible to patients.
“South Africa has done well to improve the [drug-resistant TB] treatment regimen for adults and adolescents, but new strategies are urgently needed for ensuring that younger children have access to better treatment. This situation would be improved in the very short term by the registration of delamanid, which has proven to be safe in the paediatric population,” said Dr Justine Fargher, who treats drug-resistant TB patients for MSF in Khayelitsha.
The International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease praised Ramaphosa’s participation at the meeting.
“It is especially encouraging to see leadership from the Africa region, where the rates of TB are the highest in the world,” said the Union’s Paul Jensen.
The United Nations represents 193 nations yet only 32 heads of state have so-far been confirmed to attend the meeting.
Despite TB being preventable and curable, it killed 1.6 million people around the world in 2017 and is ranked as the number-one infectious disease killer.
MSF’s Sharonann Lynch urged governments to make TB a “political priority”.
“How is it possible that more than sixty years ago we managed to send people to the moon and to the deepest point in the ocean, yet people affected with one of the most ancient diseases in human history continue to suffer and die because we’ve failed to find a fast, safe and simple cure for TB? World leaders this week must show some spine and take collective responsibility to fight this global health emergency, so we don’t keep losing one fellow human to TB every 18 seconds,” she said.
– Health-e News
Health24.com | Air pollutants could harm your unborn baby
Scientists warn that soot from polluted air is reaching the placenta of pregnant women, possibly harming the health of unborn babies.
Tiny carbon particles released by the burning of fossil fuels enter a woman’s bloodstream when she breathes polluted air, said a research team at Queen Mary University of London in the United Kingdom.
Direct impact on the foetus
“Our results provide the first evidence that inhaled pollution particles can move from the lungs into the circulation and then to the placenta,” said Dr Norrice Liu, a paediatrician.
“We do not know whether the particles we found could also move across into the foetus, but our evidence suggests that this is indeed possible,” Liu said.
“We also know that the particles do not need to get into the baby’s body to have an adverse effect, because if they have an effect on the placenta, this will have a direct impact on the foetus,” Liu added in a news release from the European Respiratory Society.
China is known for having extremely high levels of pollution. South Africa also has high levels of pollution in certain areas. According to a Health24 article, the WHO found that South Africa ranks 30th in the world for bad air quality, with Johannesburg ranked as the 99th most polluted city in the world.
The study involved five pregnant London women scheduled to have C-section deliveries. None smoked and all had uncomplicated pregnancies, which resulted in a healthy baby. After their babies were born, the researchers examined the placenta.
The study findings were presented at the European Respiratory Society International Congress, in Paris.
The team looked for specific immune cells called placental macrophages, which swallow up harmful particles like bacteria and pollution particles.
Stricter clean air policies needed
Overall, the researchers analysed 3 500 macrophage cells under a high-powered microscope. They found 60 cells that contained a combined total of 72 small black areas, which were thought to be carbon particles. On average, each placenta contained about five square micrometres of this substance.
Using an electron microscope, the investigators examined the macrophages from two of the placentas in more detail. They found the same suspected carbon particles from the air.
“We were not sure if we were going to find any particles and if we did find them, we were only expecting to find a small number of placental macrophages that contain these sooty particles,” Liu said. “This is because most of them should be engulfed by macrophages within the airways.”
These findings underscore previous studies, which have linked air pollution to premature birth, low birth weight, infant death and lung issues among children.
According to Mina Gaga, president of the European Respiratory Society, “Previous research shows that pregnant women living in polluted cities are more prone to pregnancy issues such as restricted foetal growth, premature birth and low birth weight babies.” Gaga was not involved in the new study.
“This new research suggests a possible mechanism of how babies are affected by pollution while being theoretically protected in the womb,” she added. “We need stricter policies for cleaner air to reduce the impact of pollution on health worldwide.”
Image credit: iStock
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Health24.com | Teenagers in denial continue to risk unwanted pregnancies
Despite ongoing campaigns and intervention programmes promoting safe sex, contraceptive use remains a controversial issue for South African youth.
Contraceptive use remains low as substantiated by the high rate of unwanted pregnancies reported.
More education is needed, particularly for young women who are not always aware of the side-effects of contraceptives or all the dangers of unprotected sex.
There is a range of contraceptive methods, including long acting reversible contraceptive such as an implant, hormonal contraceptives like the pill or injection and barrier methods such as condoms as well as permanent solutions such as vasectomies or tubal ligation.
In the Eastern Cape Siphesande Mtelu, who lives in Flagstaff, said she uses the injection.
“Ever since I gave birth when I was 15 years old, I started making sure I would not fall pregnant again. Prevention helps me raise the baby with love and happiness. Prevention helps me to reach my goals and make my career success. At first I experienced changes in my body and I suffered from headaches and uterus aches. But now I am using the depo injection and I’m comfortable with it,” she said.
Babalwa Maphetshana said prevention is not her thing.
“I don’t prevent and that is because I have a womb problem which has troubled me ever since I gave birth. Doctors told me that I have yeast infection so I need to avoid eating some foods. Now I’m afraid of using contraceptives as they also have side effects,” she explained.
She said she needed to explore the contraceptive options available, as did many other young women. She said education and awareness campaigns were lacking in her province.
Nomsa Mkula, who works in family planning at Sipetu Hospital, said there were awareness programmes conducted by the Department of Health, educating your people on the challenges facing them and what they can do to protect themselves.
“Government is doing all it can but it looks like it’s just waste of time because teenage pregnancy is high. People listen and forget, and they don’t seem to understand that they are not just risking unwanted pregnancies. They are doing something that can endanger their lives because out there, there are diseases.”
“I think if young girls can teach one another about importance of contraceptives, the country will have a lower number of teenage pregnancies. Contraceptives can prevent pregnancy and also prevent other infections,” Mkula said.
– Health-e News
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