Mediaboss Marketing

Saturday, March 17, 2012

DOGS are known as mans best friend, yet the fangs that hide behind the happy face can be deadly, a rabid dog can kill.

There are a lot of stray dogs and cats around the streets of Davao city that may be carrying the rabies virus and are a threat to the people around especially children. Thats why Davao City has an Animal Bite Center (ABC) office that became operational in 1998. It provides treatment to all dogs, cats, monkeys and rat bite patients of the city and from other provinces of Region XI. They offer free Post Exposure Treatment (PET) to 100% of high-risk animal bite patients.

Their goal is to reduce the incident of human rabies by year 2004 and eliminate human rabies and declare a rabies free Davao City by year 2020.

Are they anywhere near their target?

Marl Bohol, an entrepreneur and a victim, was bitten by a cat and so he went to ABC for treatment. When he got there, a lot of patients were waiting in line for treatment. But it was not the main problem, there were no medicines available. The registration area was full of patients lining up for their medical prescription.

The patients were advised to buy the anti-rabies vaccine with the box consisting of four vials worth P1,900, and their own syringe for 10 pesos each. Most of the patients could not afford to buy the whole box so they resort to group themselves into four so that each of them would only pay about 500 pesos each.

But the problem is each patient has to have three shots of anti-rabies within a period of time, so the scenario in the ABC office goes on every day, with one rabies patient returning for his next shot looking for three other patients to divide the cost of a box of vials with.

In Marls case, he said, that he waited for more than an hour, but still no medicine was available. He asked the lady in the registration area and the woman said that he could come back the next day for available medicine.

Marl was not willing to wait much longer and pestered the woman further. The woman told him to wait as she texted somebody. A few minutes later, a woman arrived offering to share her box.

The rest is here:
Killer bite

Newer and more effective drugs to be used in the treatment of HIV/AIDS. This came out of a gathering in Cape Town where delegates discussed how best to improve health care in Africa.

Efforts to reduce the burden of disease in Africa over the last 10 years have improved. But malaria, TB and HIV/AIDS are still critical issues facing African countries. At a meeting held in Cape Town to discuss health care in Africa, it was heard that new drugs are in the pipeline for the better treatment and management of HIV/AIDS.

"In the pipeline we have newer and better drugs. Better means down to one pill a day and, secondly, the drug is killing the virus more effectively and, thirdly, less side-effects. In the past we have had problems with the side-effects of HIV drugs. We still do, but much less because the quality of drugs has improved", said Sir Richard Feachem, Director of the US-based Global Health Group.

In the case of malaria, new diagnostics are now used to provide rapid and accurate tests for those in remote areas. Unni Karunakara, from Medecins Sans Frontiers (MSF), said this is a breakthrough for Africa.

"Before, we had to rely on microscopes, whereby people had to go to the health centers - and that's if they even had one and someone who can draw blood. And, previously, people with malaria were treated symptomatically and many did not have malaria. So, now we are accurate. We are treating people with the disease. That is a huge improvement", Karunakara said.

Yet malaria still remains a huge problem on the continent.

"It kills about 800 000 children every year. Children who do not die of it are weakened by malaria. This is because they are out of school a lot due to episodes of malaria. Their cognitive development is impaired because of frequent attacks of malaria. So, malaria produces generations who have not benefitted from schooling to the degree they might have".

But, with insufficient funding curbing the burden of disease is difficult, particularly as foreign funding for health care in Africa is drying up.

"Foreign companies are deterred from investing. If they think that their new investment will be in a highly malarious area, they go somewhere else. Malaria costs Africa many billions of dollars every year and getting rid of it will be a huge boost not only for human welfare, but for the economy of Africa", said Sir Richard Feachem.

With international funding cuts, domestic funds are just insufficient to carry the burden of disease single-handedly.

Go here to read the rest:
Africa: New Approaches Could Fight Killer Diseases

New approaches could fight killer diseases 13.03.2012 Ayanda Mkhwanazi

Audio File 1 Stream MP3 | Download MP3

Newer and more effective drugs to be used in the treatment of HIV/AIDS. This came out of a gathering in Cape Town where delegates discussed how best to improve health care in Africa.

Efforts to reduce the burden of disease in Africa over the last 10 years have improved. But malaria, TB and HIV/AIDS are still critical issues facing African countries. At a meeting held in Cape Town to discuss health care in Africa, it was heard that new drugs are in the pipeline for the better treatment and management of HIV/AIDS.

In the pipeline we have newer and better drugs. Better means down to one pill a day and, secondly, the drug is killing the virus more effectively and, thirdly, less side-effects. In the past we have had problems with the side-effects of HIV drugs. We still do, but much less because the quality of drugs has improved, said Sir Richard Feachem, Director of the US-based Global Health Group.

In the case of malaria, new diagnostics are now used to provide rapid and accurate tests for those in remote areas. Unni Karunakara, from Medecins Sans Frontiers (MSF), said this is a breakthrough for Africa.

See the original post:
New approaches could fight killer diseases

A study has boosted the prospects of a cure for HIV. For the first time, results have shown that a drug can safely kick-start production of the dormant virus in patients, so that it might be detected and attacked more easily by the immune system.

The finding was announced today at the 19th annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Seattle, Washington. But other studies released at the same event suggest that merely flushing the virus out of hiding is not enough to kill infected cells and that a cure is some way off.

HIV integrates itself into cell genomes, causing the cells to make new copies of the virus when they transcribe their own DNA. But in some cells, HIV survives for decades in a resting, or latent, state without transcribing its genes to make new viruses. This renders the infected cells in the 'latent reservoir' invisible to the bodys immune defences and to antiretroviral treatment.

Suberoylanilide hydroxamic acid seems to force HIV to make copies of itself, potentially making infected cells more visible to the body's immune system.

NIBSC/SPL

Studies had suggested that a drug called suberoylanilide hydroxamic acid (SAHA) could push the virus out of its slumber, but the approach had not been tested in people. So researchers led by David Margolis, a molecular virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, treated six people with a single dose of SAHA and tested its effect on CD4+ T cells immune cells that are targeted for infection by HIV. The study found that SAHA did kick-start transcription of HIV in latently infected CD4+ T cells: researchers detected nearly 5 times as many HIV transcripts in the patients resting CD4+ T cells after treatment as before. There were no serious side effects.

This study provides the first proof-of-concept demonstration of disruption of latency, which is a significant step towards eradication of HIV from the body, says Margolis.

But Margolis and other researchers are cautious about what the study means in the quest for an HIV cure. Sharon Lewin, an infectious-disease doctor at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, is also studying SAHA in patients; so far, 10 have taken the drug for two weeks without experiencing serious side effects. But, she says, no study has yet demonstrated that activating latent HIV leads to destruction of infected cells.

Margolis's study, says Lewin, looked at a small number of patients, and although it is an important step to show that the drug has caused some alteration in viral production, we dont yet know how that translates into getting rid of latent infected cells.

At the Seattle conference, Liang Shan, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, presented the results of a study, published today in Immunity1, in which CD4+ T cells were taken from people with HIV and treated with SAHA in vitro. The cells did not die, even when combined with the patients' own 'killer' T cells, which are specialized to destroy virus-infected cells. However, when the killer T cells were first exposed to pieces of HIV, they did destroy the infected cells.

Read more here:
Drug brings HIV out of hiding

ScienceDaily (Mar. 8, 2012) Mutations in HIV that develop during the first few weeks of infection may play a critical role in undermining a successful early immune response, a finding that reveals the importance of vaccines targeting regions of the virus that are less likely to mutate. A new study in the journal PLoS Pathogens, led by researchers at the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT and Harvard and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, applied the same next-generation technologies that have revolutionized sequencing of the human genome to study how HIV adapts within the first few weeks after infection.

Ragon and Broad investigators applied an approach called pyrosequencing that allows the simultaneous sequencing of hundreds of viral variants within an individual over the course of infection. These data provided a substantially deeper and more sensitive view of the complexity of mutant strains circulating in a patient following HIV infection and how each of those strains evolves over time. Combining these genetic data with detailed immunological analyses enabled a comprehensive evaluation of viral-host interactions during the critical acute phase of HIV infection.

The study revealed that the majority of early, low-frequency mutations developing during the first few weeks after infection represent rapid adaptations to avoid the response of CD8 'killer' T cells, which play a key role in recognizing and eliminating HIV-infected cells. "These data reveal the ability of HIV to rapidly avoid front-line immune responses attempting to contain the infection," says Todd Allen, PhD, senior author of the study and a Ragon Institute faculty member.

More importantly, Allen notes, their study revealed that rapid viral escape from a few dominant immune responses coincided with the inability of individual patients to maintain early control of HIV. "The ability to sensitively assess early virus evolution across the entire HIV genome revealed that limiting the ability of HIV to become resistant to the earliest immune responses may be a critical component of a successful vaccine," he says. "Therefore, the key to controlling a highly variable pathogen such as HIV may lie in a vaccine's ability to redirect immune responses towards more critical, highly conserved regions of the virus that are unable to successfully mutate."

An important component of the study was development of novel bioinformatics tools to handle the enormous and highly diverse sequence dataset and to assemble the thousands of sequencing reads into complete HIV genomes for analysis and detection of genetic mutations. While next-generation sequencing approaches have helped transform the sequencing of mammalian genomes, the high degree of sequence diversity within and between HIV strains has hindered the routine application of those powerful sequencing approaches to highly variable pathogens such as HIV. In the current study the researchers were able to apply their approach to successfully sequence the entire HIV genome from dozens of infected individuals.

"The genomic and computational tools developed as part of this study allow researchers to interrogate the complete HIV genome and to identify genetic variants of the virus with unprecedented resolution, allowing us to obtain a novel map of how the virus is changing during the course of an infection." says Matthew Henn, PhD, the lead author of the study and director of Viral Genomics at the Broad Institute.

Efforts to develop an effective vaccine against HIV have been thwarted in large part because of the virus's ability to rapidly mutate and avoid host immune responses. However, notes Allen -- an associate professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School -- "HIV is not able to mutate at will. Some of these mutations substantially cripple the virus' ability to replicate, which appears to be critical to enabling a few individuals to uniquely control HIV without the need for therapy."

Understanding more precisely how HIV evolves in an individual and how mutations correlate with the ability to control HIV may provide critical insight into the design of more effective vaccines to contain and possibly prevent infection altogether. Efforts are underway at the Ragon Institute to harness these findings to develop and test novel vaccine approaches against HIV that limit its ability to mutate and escape immune control.

The study was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

Read the original post:
Deeper view of HIV reveals impact of early mutations