The bill comes after repeated outbreaks of food-borne illness, and gives the Food and Drug Administration broad new food-policing powers.
The agency would also have to identify the most significant contaminants and issue science-based guidance on how to fight them.
against several conditions, including multiple myeloma. But GSK, of London, has scuttled development of SRT501, it confirmed to the patient website Myeloma Beacon last week.
Instead, the company is focusing on other chemicals thought to activate the same biological pathway as resveratrol.
Trend watch Growth of the global AIDS epidemic seems to have stabilized, said the UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) on 23 november (see chart).
Numbers of new HIV infections have dropped, thanks in part to increased condom use and availability.
But there are still two new infections for every person starting treatment, said UNAIDS, and funds for prevention are inadequate and poorly allocated.
US$15. 9 billion was available for AIDS response in 2009, $10 billion short of 2010 needs,
and international funding is declining. Coming up 11-15 december The chemical and physical signals that influence pluripotency in stem cells are among many topics discussed at the American Society for Cell biology's 50th annual meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
for any contamination of their neighbours'non-GM fields. The Federal Constitutional Court said on 24 november that the 2004 (amended in 2008) legislation,
Patient protection US President Barack Obama has asked his bioethics commission to review the recent discovery that US government-funded scientists intentionally infected subjects with syphilis in a study in Guatemala in the 1940s (see Nature 467,645;
adequately protect those taking part in federally funded scientific research from harm. UK immigration UK government quotas on immigration,
Q-fever delay A report has found that the Dutch government took too long to respond to an outbreak of Q fever,
and made almost 4, 000 ill in The netherlands. The disease caused by the bacterium Coxiella burnetii,
can trigger abortions in goats and sheep and cause flu-like symptoms and sometimes pneumonia in humans.
The seven-man panel, whose evaluation was released last week, found that the health and agriculture ministries coordinated their efforts poorly before they ordered a cull of more than 50,000 dairy goats in 2009,
which seems to have quashed the disease. Nations pledge to double tiger numbers Thirteen countries that are home to the world's last wild tigers have pledged to try to double the animal's numbers to about 7
and poses cancer risks. Tuna quotas Fisheries regulators are showing little mercy to the Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus),
Business Orphan drugs European spending on research and development (R&d) of'orphan'drugs for rare diseases jumped from ¢ 158 million (US$207 million) in 2000 to nearly ¢Â
Nature Newspolicy Research People Business Trend watch Coming up Number crunch Policy Haiti's cholera fight Health officials have outlined plans for a proposed cholera vaccination
even though questions were raised about its impact on heart disease more than a decade ago, a delay that the report says may have contributed to some 500 premature deaths.
Arrivals include Nobel laureate Timothy Hunt (pictured), a biologist at the London Research Institute of Cancer Research UK.
Trend watch Even without the more expensive treatments for cancer that are to be adopted soon,
the cost of caring for those with the disease will rapidly increase in the coming years.
A team from the US National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, modelled predicted changes to US population, cancer incidence and survival rates for the initial,
final and continuing care stages of the disease and found that spending could rise by more than 20%by 2020.
Transgenic chickens curb bird flu transmission: Nature Newsresearchers have made genetically modified chickens that can't infect other birds with bird flu.
The H5n1 strain of influenza which raged through Southeast asia a decade ago and has killed hundreds of people to date remains a problem in some developing countries,
where it is endemic. The birds carry a genetic tweak that diverts an enzyme crucial for transmitting the H5n1 strain.
Although they die of the disease within days, the molecular decoy somehow impedes the virus from infecting others.
We have more ambitious objectives in terms of getting full flu resistance before we would propose to put these chickens into true production,
It would be a bit like combination drug therapy for HIV, he says. Other experts point out that
even if the GM chickens carried full resistance to influenza, there are political and economic hurdles to their widespread commercial use not least the public's aversion to GM food.
This doesn't prevent them from silently acquiring mild forms of the disease and if not monitored well,
What's more, flu viruses mutate quickly and are famous for evading vaccines. If made commercially available,
which includes genetic sequences that match up with an enzyme that influenza viruses use for replication and packaging.
Most of the birds that received the primary infection died, but didn't pass on the flu to any of their uninfected cagemates.
The researchers found that the amount of virus present in the infected GM birds was not significantly different from that in non-transgenic controls.
but for using similar cassettes to create resistance to other common poultry diseases. Tiley's study was funded partially by Cobb-Vantress, a major international chicken-breeding company.
New york. Schat is paid a consultant for another company that is also funding research on using transgenes for disease resistance.
Animal diseases Livestock plagues are on the rise globally owing to increasingly intensive farming practices and the world's growing taste for meat and other animal products.
and Asia, lag dangerously behind in controlling these diseases, says John Mcdermott, deputy director-general for research at the ILRI.
Trend watch Funding for work on neglected diseases totalled US$3. 26 billion in 2009 墉 an 8%rise in real terms over 2008, according to the third annual'G-Finder'investment survey by Policy Cures
Livestock plagues are spreading: Nature Newslivestock plagues are on the rise globally, owing to increasingly intensive farming practices and the world's growing taste for meat and other animal products.
The warning comes from scientists at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), based in Nairobi, Kenya,
who argue that different approaches are needed to curb these diseases. A new infectious disease emerges every four months,
and 75%of them originate in animals, according to ILRI figures. They can have severe socioeconomic, health and environmental impacts:
some of the most damaging diseases are Rift valley fever (Phlebovirus), which can sometimes cause a haemorrhagic fever,
and Bluetongue disease (Orbivirus). Whereas rich nations are controlling livestock diseases effectively, developing countries, including many in Africa
and Asia, lag dangerously behind, says John Mcdermott, deputy director general for research at the ILRI.
This gap could imperil food security in the developing world, where up to 40%of household income can depend on livestock,
Over the past 10 years, the number of emerging diseases has increased, agrees Alejandro Thiermann, who is in charge of setting international standards for animal health at the World organisation for Animal health based in Paris, France.
and animal diseases will be critical in controlling the spread of diseases, he adds. Mcdermott points out that methods need to be tailored to the circumstances in developing countries to control the spread of livestock diseases.
For example, some diseases, such as contagious bovine pleuropneumonia a respiratory disease with high death rates can be controlled in Western countries by quarantine
and slaughtering affected animals. But these methods are not always effective for herds in Africa
where animal movements are not as easily controlled. In these cases, vaccines should be developed, Mcdermott says.
Medical detectives An effort to find the causes of mystery illnesses has declared its first success. Researchers at the Undiagnosed Diseases Program at the National institutes of health in Bethesda,
ALS prize American neurologist Seward Rutkove has won a US$1-million prize for creating a noninvasive tool that tracks the progress of the neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS.
to spur breakthroughs in treating the disease. Trend watch Obesity rates worldwide almost doubled between 1980 and 2008,
Biodiversity's ills not all down to climate change: Nature Newsclimate change is affecting the world in many ways.
I argue more complex than climate science humans are doing much more harm to wild species than just adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
new specimens from abroad are held in quarantine houses until they've been checked for diseases or fungus that might pose a threat.
says that conserving global plant genetic diversity is the only way to develop crops that are adapted to changing climates and resistant to new diseases.
The commission met in part to discuss last year's revelations that US government researchers secretly gave syphilis to hundreds of Guatemalan prison inmates in the 1940s (see Nature 467,645;
All had been disclosed publicly, unlike the syphilis experiments, but did not draw the condemnation at the time that they would today.
aims to create plants that can withstand strains of the evolving stem-rust pathogen Ug99.
Coming up 3 6 march The American Association for Cancer Research hosts a conference in Vancouver,
and cancer. go. nature. com/5lwqim 7 11 march Preliminary analysis of dust picked up from a distant asteroid last year by the Hayabusa spacecraft will be among highlights of the 42nd Lunar and Planetary Science
near Houston, Texas. go. nature. com/eugq9g 9 13 march The 10th International Conference on Alzheimer's
& Parkinson's diseases will take place in Barcelona, Spain, and focus on new possibilities for treating the conditions. go. nature. com/jcgygu Â
Virus sharing In the event of a future flu pandemic, member states of the World health organization (WHO) will send samples of flu virus to laboratories and drug makers around the world,
in return for greater access to any vaccines created. The deal announced by THE WHO on 17 april,
Poul Thorsen was a visiting scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta in the 1990s.
Grants aim to fight malnutrition: Nature Newsnearly US$20 million in new grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will be spent on getting nutritionally enhanced rice and cassava to market and decreasing malnourishment in Asia and Africa.
and contribute to around 7%of deaths and 10%of the disease burden in low-income countries, according to Juan Pablo Pena-Rosas, coordinator of the Micronutrients Unit at the World health organization in Geneva, Switzerland.
and disease burden related to nutritional deficiencies, according to Lawrence Kent, head of agricultural development at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington.
focusing on regions important for freshwater resources and where pollution has had a negative impact on health such as villages with high rates of cancer or endemic diseases.
The team then plugged those concentrations into a piece of software called ERICA (Environmental Risk from Ionising Contaminants) to calculate the radiation dose that various groups of wildlife would have received.
the harm would probably have been much more severe, especially for plants. Radiation effects on egg hatching and the survival of newborn mammals still need to be surveyed
Nature Newspolicy Business Events Research People Trend watch Coming up Policy Smallpox stocks The World health organization (WHO) has failed to decide
when to destroy the world's last two remaining stocks of the virus that causes smallpox.
HIV scandal The last plaintiff suing Japan's government and five biomedical companies over HIV infection caused by tainted blood products settled last week for ¥28 million (US$340, 000) in damages.
Since 1989, nearly 1, 400 patients 墉 mostly haemophiliacs 墉 have sued after being infected in the 1980s by blood coagulants that were treated not to kill viruses.
In 1996 Naoto Kan, then health minister and now prime minister of Japan, admitted partial government responsibility in the scandal (see Nature 379,663;
devoted to understanding the biological pathology behind psychiatric disorders is held in Prague. go. nature. com/uxjkz1 Â
Cornman, a geneticist for the Bee Research Laboratory of the US Department of agriculture (USDA) in Beltsville, Maryland, is trying to characterize the various pathogens that plague the honeybee (Apis mellifera), arguably the world's most important insect.
Then we can start looking at the interactions of pathogens and see if they're more virulent than any by themselves.
There has been made a lot of progress on how disease affects honeybees at the molecular level, says Christina Grozinger, director of Pennsylvania State university's Center for Pollinator Research in University Park, one of the conference organizers.
A syndrome dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) has been causing the insects to die off in large numbers,
In some insects, double stranded-rna RNA, a hallmark of viral infection, can provoke a specific antiviral immune response.
Research Cholera in Haiti The cholera epidemic currently raging through Haiti was introduced inadvertently to the country through faecal contamination of river water,
(which matches cholera strains circulating in Nepal). The outbreak 墉 the first in Haiti in nearly a century 墉 had killed by Mid-april almost 4,
900 people and made 286,000 ill. Gravity probe B NASA announced on 4 may that its Gravity Probe B mission 墉 conceived
whether to destroy smallpox stocks. go. nature. com/th3feu 16 19 may Eighteen Nobel laureates are participating in a symposium on global sustainability in Stockholm. go. nature. com/f7mow7 Â
Researchers from the United kingdom studied the direct transmission of foot-and-mouth disease from one cow to another in a unique experimental setup that might also find applications in the study of other pathogens.
Foot-and-mouth is a highly infectious disease that can have a huge impact on farmers'livelihoods.
Endemic in many parts of Africa and South america, the virus that causes the disease has been eradicated in much of Europe and North america.
Now a paper published in Science1 suggests that the aggressive approach taken in 2001 to control infection may not be necessary.
It shows that the window in which infected cattle can transmit the disease to other animals is actually shorter than previously believed and
crucially, that the infectious period occurs after the appearance of disease symptoms. Bryan Charleston, a foot-and-mouth expert at the UK Institute for Animal health in Pirbright, Surrey which is on the site where the virus leaked in 2007
while monitoring a complex set of data such as blood samples, temperature and lesions on the animals.
the first study in a target host of an actual viral disease where we've looked at transmission parameters by carrying out one-to-one infections rather than looking at proxies,
during an epidemic, culling on farms that are at risk of infection could be unnecessary.
Careful monitoring for signs of infection could be used instead. In the 2001 outbreak, some 700,000 cattle were culled to fight the disease,
says co-author Mark Woolhouse, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Only a small fraction of these actually had the virus,
he says. Neil Ferguson, a mathematical biologist at Imperial College London, says that there has been some debate in the foot
-and-mouth community about whether the disease was transmitted pre-clinically or not. He adds: The paper is fantastic in terms of being one of the few studies that quantify how infectious animals are as a function of how long they've been infected and
It puts greater emphasis on really trying to speed up diagnoses of infection on farms. However, improving the speed of diagnosis could prove logistically difficult in practice.
so less-aggressive measures were used to stop the disease from spreading. Matthew Keeling, an expert on disease modelling at the University of Warwick
near Coventry, UK, also points out that much of the modelling used to predict disease spread and best responses to outbreaks actually works on the level of the farm, rather than of the individual animal.
He agrees that the study does highlight the benefits of early detection. It tells us
if to other infectious diseases such as influenza. The difference in foot-and-mouth disease infectiousness predicted previously and that found through the experimental study shows a need for better evidence
when forming policy on the control of acute diseases, he says. The pioneering experiment has been welcomed by many researchers in the field,
but Keeling points out that these one-to-one infection studies are not an easy undertaking:
The amount of work that went into this for just eight animals being infected was enormous.
Nature Newspolicy Funding Events Research Trend watch Coming up Policy Pathogen dangers A US panel has named the most dangerous pathogens with potential for misuse.
The pathogens include bacteria and viruses that cause smallpox, the plague, anthrax, Ebola and foot-and-mouth disease.
Bacterial infections often originate from contaminated food, but it is now about six weeks since the start of this outbreak and the trail is going cold.
Pathogenic E coli are passed typically to humans from ruminant animals (cows or sheep) via faecal contamination in the food chain or through consumption of raw milk or meat products.
which is responsible for the severe diarrhoea and kidney damage in patients whose E coli infections develop into haemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS).
The genes for the Shiga toxin are not actually bacterial genes, but phage genes being expressed by infected bacteria.
which is why antibiotics are used not usually to treat E coli infections (see'Europe's E coli outbreak:
The potential for the creation of new pathogens via phage release is absolutely a factor in the broader environmental danger of overuse of antibiotics.
Shiga toxins have been causing diarrhoeal disease in humans for centuries the bacterial genus Shigella and the Shiga toxins were named first for Kiyoshi Shiga,
a Japanese medical doctor who identified the bacterium during an outbreak of dysentery in Japan in 1897.
EAEC strains are associated not typically with zoonotic infections, and EAEC and Shiga toxin is a very unusual combination,
Nature Newsthe bacterium responsible for the current outbreak of enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC) infections in Germany is a strain that has never before been isolated in humans.
means that the infection could prove unusually difficult to bring under control. Scientists in Germany are feverishly analysing the genome sequence of the bacterium,
Patients with E coli infections are treated not typically with antibiotics anyway, because the bacteria are thought to respond to the medication by increasing production of the Shiga toxin,
which can lead to the life-threatening complication haemolytic-uremic syndrome. But antibiotic resistance might have helped the bacteria to survive
a microbiologist based in Wernigerode who works for the Robert Koch Institute, the federal agency responsible for disease control.
cucumbers and salad vegetables prior to contracting the disease, but exactly which vegetables are responsible,
Tellurium oxides were used as antimicrobial agents against diseases such as leprosy and tuberculosis before the development of antibiotics.
EHEC infections usually occur in children and affect boys and girls equally. Initial theories suggested that young adult women are the people most likely to purchase,
But he suspects that the strain might have biological characteristics that make adults more susceptible to the infection.
Eae-negative E coli have been associated specifically with adult infections before although it is still unclear why this particular protein is more effective in adult guts than in those of children.
a decades-old law intended to safeguard against plant pathogens from overseas. Previous types of GM plants are covered
because they they were made using plant pathogens. The bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens which can cause tumours on plants shuttled foreign genes into plant genomes.
Developers then used genetic control elements derived from pathogenic plant viruses such as the cauliflower mosaic virus to switch on the genes.
measuring contamination levels and assessing the long-term threat. Their first results, to appear in the Japanese journal Radioisotopes in August,
with combined levels of caesium-134 and caesium-137 ranging from thousands to about 1 Â million Bq kg-1. But leaves that unfolded afterwards were largely free of contamination.
Without data on the true depth of soil contamination, local schools are using large machines to scoop up the top 50 Â centimetres of soil probably much more than is necessary
Biotechnology has the potential to help solve some agricultural and health problems in Kenya. So it should be harnessed,
The most important finding of the consortium's initial analysis is the identification of more than 800 disease-resistance genes, each
of which has potential for use in fighting devastating diseases such as the potato cyst nematode and the potato blight pathogen Phytophthora infestans, famous for causing The irish potato famine of the 1840s.
Most of the people in the group are now asking how we can use information from the sequencing to learn about some of the traits we work on, such as disease resistance, tuber dormancy,
Nature Newskey weapons in the fight against malaria, pyrethroid insecticides, are losing their edge. Over the past decade, billions of dollars have been spent on distributing long-lasting pyrethroid-treated bed nets and on indoor spraying.
where most malaria deaths occur, these efforts have reduced greatly the disease's toll. But they have created also intense selection pressure for mosquitoes to develop resistance.
Data are coming in thick and fast indicating increasing levels of resistance, and also of resistance in new places, says Jo Lines, an entomological epidemiologist and head of vector control at the Global Malaria Programme of the World health organization (WHO) in Geneva,
Switzerland. THE WHO now intends to launch a global strategy to tackle the problem by the end of the year.
Pyrethroids are the mainstay of malaria control because they are safe, cheap, effective and long-lasting.
says Robert Newman, director of the Global Malaria Programme. The international community has been slow to respond to the threat despite warnings
'But Lines says that the malaria-control community felt too many lives were at stake to let the threat of resistance stand in the way of massively scaling up the bed-net and spraying campaigns.
Teasing out the impact of resistance on the success of malaria-control interventions is difficult
Malaria-control programmes often lack insect-resistance monitoring, and detection of all forms of resistance is not easy.
Ultimately, entirely new classes of insecticides particularly those that can be applied to bed nets are needed to alleviate the dependence of malaria-control efforts on pyrethroids.
Research targeting mosquito control is compared grossly underfunded with that on malaria drugs and vaccines she adds,
West africans at risk from bat epidemics: Nature Newsserious viruses carried by bats pose a considerable risk to people in West Africa,
including Ebola haemorrhagic fever and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), an outbreak of which killed more than 900 people in 2002-03.
Researchers hope that by studying how the viruses jump to people they can come up with ways to limit the spread of disease without culling the bats
and his colleagues fear that the next big epidemic could come from henipaviruses, which can cause fatal encephalitis or respiratory disease in humans.
There is no vaccination to protect against Hendra virus or Nipah virus, the two established species of henipavirus.
Spread of infection from bats to humans is an increasing problem in Asia and Africa
their protected status. Zoonotic spill over only occurs where you have contact, says Peter Hudson, a wildlife epidemiologist at Pennsylvania State university in State College.
Conservation and disease must be managed together. Cunningham and his team started investigating the risk from henipaviruses five years ago.
and may misdiagnose it as cerebral malaria. Cunningham says it's too early to say for sure how many people are infected with the viruses in Ghana.
an infectious-disease ecologist at Princeton university in New jersey who commends the project's focus. To control the increasing occurrence of diseases making the jump from animals to humans,
he says, researchers need a deeper understanding of the triggers for such spill over events.
Science enters desert debate: Nature Newsa desert may need no defining, but desertification is not so easy to pin down.
including poverty and child malnutrition, can drive these processes. They also need to learn how best to track desertification using satellite data.
But M. giganteus is a headache in the lab. Its genome has few markers to help would-be breeders keep track of desirable genes,
or prevent illness are under increasing pressure to substantiate the claims about their products. The pressure was increased earlier this year
Just 8%of patients taking alemtuzumab experienced a worsening in disability according to standard measures, in comparison with 11%taking Rebif.
The patients recruited in this trial showed very little worsening of disability, he says. Ludwig Kappos, chair of neurology at the University Hospital of Basel in Switzerland, who has been involved in several MS drug trials,
says he is disappointed that there was no significant effect on disability progression. This is in contrast to
of which merely slow the progression of the disease. But alemtuzumab has the potential to reverse it:
The drug brings an increased risk of autoimmune diseases. In the trial, 18.1%of people taking alemtuzumab experienced thyroid-related autoimmune responses,
and 0. 8%developed the potentially life-threatening condition immune thrombocytopenia. But, says Coles, these findings mirror those from earlier trials,
The drug is approved already in many countries as a treatment for some forms of leukaemia and lymphoma, under the name Campath.
whereas some other GM CROPS produce unfamiliar proteins that could in theory cause an allergic reaction when eaten, the GM pinto bean produces only small snippets of RNA,
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