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Basics: Tiny Specks of Misery, Both Vile and Useful
By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times, January 8, 2008
I spent New Year’s Eve with friends and family. A couple of days later, my pathologically healthy mother called to say she’d gotten very sick after the party, like nothing she’d experienced before. She thought it had been a stomach bug. Hey, it’s just like in “The Devil Wears Prada,” I said lightly, the perfect way to jump-start your new diet!
Hardy har. By that afternoon, my husband and I had been drafted into the same violent weight-loss program, and for the next 18 hours would treat the mucosal lining of our stomachs like so much pulp in a pumpkin, while our poor daughter ran around scrubbing her hands and every surface in sight as she sought to stay healthy. I am relieved to report that she succeeded, and that her parents lost 10 pounds between them.
The agent of our misery was a virus, very likely a type of norovirus. Named for Norwalk, Ohio, the site of a severe outbreak of vomiting, nausea and diarrhea among schoolchildren in the late 1960s, the norovirus is a small, spherical, highly contagious virus that targets the digestive system. Its sour suite of symptoms is often referred to as “stomach flu,” but norovirus infection is distinct from the flu, which is caused by the influenza virus and targets not the gut but the lungs.
Well, not that distinct. Noroviruses, flu viruses, the rhino and corona viruses that cause the common cold, the herpes virus that causes the cold sore, all are active players in the wheezing ambient pleurisy of January.
( Read More )
Ancient Yucatán Soils Point to Maya Market, and Market Economy
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, January 8, 2008
Scientists using improved methods of analyzing the chemistry of ancient soils have detected where a large marketplace stood 1,500 years ago in a Maya city on the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico.
The findings, archaeologists say, are some of the first strong evidence that the ancient Maya civilization, at least in places and at certain times, had a market economy similar in some respects to societies today. The conventional view has been that food and other goods in Maya cities were distributed through taxation and tributes controlled by the ruling class.
( Read More )
Jump-Start on Slow Trek to Treatment for a Disease
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, January 8, 2008
Last month, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated $19 million to the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative to further one of its goals: finding a new drug for African sleeping sickness.
Not that $19 million will come close to doing that. Even if a miracle cure is found, it will take lab work and clinical trials that could easily cost $100 million to prove it is really a miracle and not the Vioxx of the African savannah.
But the gift spotlights just how tricky the search for new treatments can be when the disease is fearsome but nearly forgotten because its victims are poor and obscure.
( Read More )
Study Finds Vaccine Preservative Is Not Linked to Risks of Autism
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, The New York Times, January 8, 2008
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Autism cases in California continued to climb even after a mercury-based vaccine preservative that some people blame for the neurological disorder was removed from routine childhood shots, a study has found.
Researchers from the State Public Health Department found that the autism rate in children rose continuously in the study period from 1995 to 2007. The preservative, thimerosal, has not been used in childhood vaccines since 2001, except for some flu shots.
Doctors said that the latest study added to the evidence against a link between thimerosal exposure and the risk of autism and that it should reassure parents that vaccinations do not cause autism. If there was a risk, the doctors said, autism rates should have dropped from 2004 to 2007.
( Read More )
By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times, January 8, 2008
I spent New Year’s Eve with friends and family. A couple of days later, my pathologically healthy mother called to say she’d gotten very sick after the party, like nothing she’d experienced before. She thought it had been a stomach bug. Hey, it’s just like in “The Devil Wears Prada,” I said lightly, the perfect way to jump-start your new diet!
Hardy har. By that afternoon, my husband and I had been drafted into the same violent weight-loss program, and for the next 18 hours would treat the mucosal lining of our stomachs like so much pulp in a pumpkin, while our poor daughter ran around scrubbing her hands and every surface in sight as she sought to stay healthy. I am relieved to report that she succeeded, and that her parents lost 10 pounds between them.
The agent of our misery was a virus, very likely a type of norovirus. Named for Norwalk, Ohio, the site of a severe outbreak of vomiting, nausea and diarrhea among schoolchildren in the late 1960s, the norovirus is a small, spherical, highly contagious virus that targets the digestive system. Its sour suite of symptoms is often referred to as “stomach flu,” but norovirus infection is distinct from the flu, which is caused by the influenza virus and targets not the gut but the lungs.
Well, not that distinct. Noroviruses, flu viruses, the rhino and corona viruses that cause the common cold, the herpes virus that causes the cold sore, all are active players in the wheezing ambient pleurisy of January.
( Read More )
Ancient Yucatán Soils Point to Maya Market, and Market Economy
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, January 8, 2008
Scientists using improved methods of analyzing the chemistry of ancient soils have detected where a large marketplace stood 1,500 years ago in a Maya city on the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico.
The findings, archaeologists say, are some of the first strong evidence that the ancient Maya civilization, at least in places and at certain times, had a market economy similar in some respects to societies today. The conventional view has been that food and other goods in Maya cities were distributed through taxation and tributes controlled by the ruling class.
( Read More )
Jump-Start on Slow Trek to Treatment for a Disease
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, January 8, 2008
Last month, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated $19 million to the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative to further one of its goals: finding a new drug for African sleeping sickness.
Not that $19 million will come close to doing that. Even if a miracle cure is found, it will take lab work and clinical trials that could easily cost $100 million to prove it is really a miracle and not the Vioxx of the African savannah.
But the gift spotlights just how tricky the search for new treatments can be when the disease is fearsome but nearly forgotten because its victims are poor and obscure.
( Read More )
Study Finds Vaccine Preservative Is Not Linked to Risks of Autism
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, The New York Times, January 8, 2008
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Autism cases in California continued to climb even after a mercury-based vaccine preservative that some people blame for the neurological disorder was removed from routine childhood shots, a study has found.
Researchers from the State Public Health Department found that the autism rate in children rose continuously in the study period from 1995 to 2007. The preservative, thimerosal, has not been used in childhood vaccines since 2001, except for some flu shots.
Doctors said that the latest study added to the evidence against a link between thimerosal exposure and the risk of autism and that it should reassure parents that vaccinations do not cause autism. If there was a risk, the doctors said, autism rates should have dropped from 2004 to 2007.
( Read More )
