and estimating them has been a headache for researchers. The uncertainties have been as large as 20%3. Guan s study is the first close, systematic look that is based on official energy figures.
Mapping identifies best targets for malaria preventiona slim but substantial swathe of Africa stands to gain from a new strategy in malaria control.
Preemptive treatment of children living in regions where the mosquito-transmitted disease is prevalent only during the rainy season could avert 11 million cases and 50,000 deaths a year.
The estimates are based on the world s first guidance on seasonal malaria chemoprevention, issued by the World health organization (WHO) in March.
and donors seeking to use anti-malaria drugs as prophylactics in African children, and the analysis pinpoints where the strategy would be most effective,
an infectious-disease physician at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and co-author of the analysis,
director of THE WHO's Global Malaria Programme in Geneva.""But for policies with a number of requirements, we need these sorts of analyses to help policymakers chart the path forward.
malaria burden, predicted malaria seasonality and the efficacy of the drug combination sulphadoxine, pyrimethamine and amodiaquine (SP-AQ.
because sulphadoxine and pyrimethamine were used to treat the disease before the wormwood wonder drug artemisinin became the gold standard cure.
if they acquire the disease. At about US$1. 50 for up to four monthly treatments, a season's worth of SP-AQ would cost less than malarone or mefloquine,
the malaria-prevention pills that many tourists take when they visit these countries. At this low price
if just one in every five children treated avoided the disease, says Greenwood. from Ref 1areas with seasonal rainfall (orange-red) are most suitable for seasonal malaria chemoprevention.
One of the world s largest malaria-control organizations, the President s Malaria Initiative in WASHINGTON DC, may help carefully selected countries to implement the strategy,
says Bernard Nahlen, deputy coordinator of the initiative. That's because in addition to procuring the drugs,
 Toxicity is one reason that African children have received never medicine to prevent the potentially lethal disease,
Another argument was based on the idea that African children are more vulnerable to severe malaria than adults
because they acquire a degree of immunity against the disease in youth. But little evidence supports the hypothesis that people who don't get malaria as a child will fare worse than those who do
if they get infected as adults, says Greenwood. Critics also argue that chemoprevention in Africa  is logistically
and financially impractical because malaria ravishes impoverished countries with feeble infrastructure. Debates about chemoprevention came to a halt when simpler modes of malaria prevention,
like bednets, hit the scene.""Once bed nets came along, everyone, including me, took their eyes off the ball
bed nets have halved the number of malaria cases, and seasonal chemoprevention has reduced the remaining cases  by about 80%.
%Seasonal chemoprevention would not be effective in some of the countries with the highest mortality from malaria,
because there the disease kills year-round and people rarely respond to SP-AQ. Newman therefore calls the strategy a"lower hanging fruit."
Philip Rosenthal, a malaria researcher at the University of California, San francisco, agrees, but stresses the need to explore strategies that could be used elsewhere, too.
"but I d counter that the international community has gotten millions of children antiretroviral therapy to treat HIV in the developing world,
Glybera, a treatment for a rare disease in which patients cannot produce enough lipoprotein lipase (an enzyme crucial for breaking down fat),
and genetically modifying plants to feed the world s population. go. nature. com/m128l22 August The governing board of the Cancer Prevention
George s"liver and kidneys appear to have some abnormalities, which the laboratories need to investigate in depth.
A lot of health problems are attributable to people not knowing about food. Of course other factors are involved, but at the end of the day, education is where it s at.
and livestock provide ripe conditions for endemic zoonotic diseases to arise and spread, the study says.
and the United kingdom, are hotspots of emerging zoonotic infections, such as avian influenza.""Zoonoses present a major threat to human and animal health.
The burden for poor farmers is big, says Delia Grace, a veterinary epidemiologist at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Nairobi,
and the Hanoi School of Public health in Vietnam, analysed 1, 000 surveys of disease covering 10 million people and 6 million animals.
but zoonotic disease are a major obstacle to this goal. For example, the study estimates that one in eight livestock animals in poor countries are affected by brucellosis,
reducing milk and meat production in cattle by 8%.In addition, 27%of livestock in developing countries showed signs of current
or past infection with bacterial food-borne disease. The latest research will help direct efforts
so that they can have the greatest impact in tackling disease and poverty, says Grace. The study builds on previous efforts to rank zoonotic diseases affecting the poor.
But those efforts relied on the opinions of experts and farmers and so were less objective than this study,
and adds to existing disease maps, which focused on emerging human diseases covering the years 1940-20042.
The new report includes data up to 2012, finding an additional 30 disease reports both before and since 2004.
It shows that the United states, the United kingdom and Australia are the key hotspots for emerging zoonotic diseases.
It is unclear why endemic diseases and emerging diseases follow different geographical patterns, says Grace,
a finding that conflicts with the idea held by many scientists that the crucible of disease emergence is biodiversity hotspots,
which tend to be found in developing countries.""We don t know why this is. It could be reporting and detection bias,
she says. Patchy surveillance and under-reporting is a huge problem in developing countries, where farmers fear they will lose their livestock without receiving compensation
if they report cases of disease.""Developing countries need help to develop reporting and surveillance networks and training for farmers and veterinarians in spotting
and reporting incidents of disease, says Bernard Vallat, director-general of the World organisation for Animal health (OIE) in Paris. The OIE is pushing for the World bank to establish a fund to compensate poor farmers in the case of large-scale disease outbreaks,
says Vallat.""It is for the global public good to have a worldwide reporting network that extends into remote areas,
NIH funding The US National institutes of health (NIH) will fund an initiative to help extramural researchers to diagnose mysterious maladies
and making unsupported safety claims about its diabetes drug Avandia (rosiglitazone). The settlement was announced last November,
is buying Amylin for its lucrative diabetes treatments. As part of the deal, announced on 29 Â June,
Pig fever sweeps across Russiarussian authorities have incinerated tens of thousands of pigs and closed roads in the past few weeks,
in an attempt to contain an emerging outbreak of African swine fever, a viral disease so lethal to the animals that it has been likened to Ebola.
The spread of the disease comes with a heavy economic toll last year, the Russian Federation lost 300,000 of the country s 19 million pigs to swine fever, at an estimated cost of about 7. 6  billion  roubles (US$240  million).
African swine fever was detected also for the first time in Ukraine in late July, and European and Asian countries are on the alert to deal with outbreaks that could cost their pork industries billions of dollars.
With no vaccine or cure for the disease, mass culls and vigilant hygiene offer the main defence.
Scientists first encountered African swine fever in the 1920s in domestic pigs in Kenya, where the vicious haemorrhagic fever felled nearly every animal infected.
The virus, which is carried also by warthogs and ticks without causing disease, is now endemic in much of Sub-saharan africa,
limiting pig farming there. It does not infect humans. In 1957, the virus jumped to Portugal after pigs near Lisbon s airport were fed infected human food scraps (the virus particles can survive meat curing processes.
It then hit Spain, and import of the region s ham including the coveted jam  n ibã rico was banned by many countries,
until the disease was eradicated in Spain and Portugal in the mid-1990s. The cases now flaring up in Russia,
says Linda Dixon, an expert on African swine fever at the Institute for Animal health in Pirbright, UK.
The disease quickly jumped to neighbouring Azerbaijan, Armenia and Chechnya, before fanning out across Russia (see Pig plague).
Source: C. Netherton/OIETHE recent spread of the virus means that the Ukrainian outbreak, now under control after authorities culled 208 pigs
To the east, the disease has been detected on the doorstep of Kazakhstan, which shares a long border with China,
The variety of ways in which African swine fever spreads only increases the uncertainty. Pigs can leave virus particles on transport vehicles,
or heat-sterilizing the food scraps can prevent disease transmission, says Dixon."I remember being taken to a little backyard farm near Nairobi,
The FAO warns that continued spread of African swine fever could be very costly Russia does not export its pork,
but trade restrictions could prove expensive for other countries where the disease becomes endemic.""If you are a small producer,
African swine fever was especially costly in South Ossetia during a 2008 conflict with Georgia,
While animal health officials focus on containing the spread of African swine fever, scientists believe that it should be possible to develop a vaccine to eradicate the disease.
The lucky few pigs that survive infection are rendered immune, so Dixon s lab and others are working to identify which of the virus s 175
or so genes trigger the immune system. In principle researchers could engineer these genes into the genome of a harmless virus to create a vaccine.
Alternatively, identifying and switching off the disease-causing genes in the virus could lead to an attenuated vaccine.
earlier this year, a cigarette tax that would have funded disease research was defeated narrowly at the ballot after 67%of voters initially supported it.
Swine-flu alert The number of reported cases in an outbreak of H3n2v virus a variant strain of swine flu that can pass from pigs to humans took a sudden spike last week.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, reported 154 cases on 10 Â August, up from 16 on 3 Â August;
because it contains a gene from the H1n1 pandemic strain that may increase transmissibility among humans.
3 9 august 2012h5n1 moratorium Researchers should continue a self-imposed moratorium on lab studies that give new properties to the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus H5n1, according to Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute
of Allergy and Infectious diseases. Fauci was speaking at a meeting of flu researchers in New york city.
The moratorium has been in place since late January; it was planned originally to last 60 days. See go. nature. com/3zwwq5 for more.
because they could bring pathogens into the facility. See go. nature. com/t7am4p for more.
Texas grant review The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) in Austin has appointed a compliance officer to review
Cancer vaccine The biotech firm behind the first approved cancer vaccine will slash 41%of its workforce, after tepid sales of its Provenge (sipuleucel-T) therapy for some prostate cancers.
Alzheimer s setback Research has been halted on a keenly watched experimental drug aimed at treating Alzheimer s disease after it failed two late-stage clinical trials.
that may cause neurodegeneration in patients with Alzheimer s. But in two phase III trials one reported on 23 july
Officials act to secure cattle-plague virusrinderpest, a devastating cattle disease, has not been seen in the wild for a decade,
but it lives on in scores of labs. Twelve months after the world celebrated the success of a years-long vaccination campaign that made rinderpest only the second disease after smallpox to be eradicated,
Rinderpest is as deadly to cattle as highly pathogenic H5n1 avian flu is to chickens. In past decades, outbreaks ripped through herds and wiped out up to 90%of animals, often leaving famine,
a member of a seven-person multidisciplinary Joint Advisory Committee (JAC) on rinderpest that was set up to consolidate the eradication by the Rome-based Food and agriculture organization of the united nations (FAO) and the Paris-based World organisation for Animal health (OIE).
The committee would also approve all future research on live rinderpest virus to ensure that its benefits outweigh the risks.
or shipped to approved high-security labs. The approach is modelled on the post-eradication phase of the smallpox campaign
the Middle east and Asia, where rinderpest outbreaks were common until recently, and a handful of established rinderpest research centres,
such as the Institute for Animal health in Pirbright, UK, and the Plum Island Animal disease Center in New york state.
After smallpox was eradicated, a lab accident in Birmingham, UK, resulted in two infections and one death.
And an accidental release of foot -and-mouth virus from the Pirbright facility, which houses  a high-biosecurity,
-and-mouth and rinderpest, caused an outbreak in the United kingdom in 2007. Active research on rinderpest has waned as the disease has been brought under control over the past few decades,
says Michael Baron, a rinderpest researcher at the Pirbright centre. He and others say that the biggest threat is forgotten from long samples of virus from past research programmes,
and serum and other samples collected for diagnostic or other purposes, that may be lurking in lab freezers.
Rinderpest vaccine strains, which are stocked in many countries and consist of live attenuated virus, are also a concern.
and cause disease outbreaks. Until the world is certain that rinderpest is gone for good, vaccine strains will need probably to be maintained in high-security labs in several regions
so that they can be shipped swiftly to any outbreak, says Baron. But he says that just a couple of pure-research labs would be enough to pursue the valuable scientific opportunities that rinderpest still offers.
Although the virus is closely similar to the human measles virus, for example, cattle don t catch measles
and humans don t catch rinderpest. Understanding why this is so could provide insight into the pathology and basic biology of viruses,
Baron says. Of more immediate interest, investigators would also like to know whether vaccines can be developed against another related virus, the sheep and goat disease called peste des petits ruminants,
that might also protect against rinderpest. That would eliminate the need to keep any stocks of live attenuated rinderpest virus at all.
Baron s home lab contains more than 100 Â different rinderpest virus isolates, which he says represent"basically the history of the disease.
He intends to sequence them all in the next few years so that they can be recreated if ever needed
and then destroy them
Seven days: 21 27 september 2012drug-makers unite Ten giant pharmaceutical companies have formed a nonprofit organization called Transcelerate Biopharma, with the goal of making clinical trials more efficient.
By setting universal standards in trial design and data collection, the group could shave time
and expense off the drug-development process, says Garry Neil, head of Transcelerate and a former vice-president of science and technology at Johnson & johnson. Smaller companies are invited to join the team.
See go. nature. com/jj2sky for more. Dark Energy Survey Collaboration/FERMILABFIRST light for dark-energy lens A camera designed to hunt for signs of dark energy
Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State Univ. AZT-maker dies Jerome Horwitz, the chemist who inadvertently created the first antiretroviral drug for AIDS,
Horwitz (pictured) created AZT in the 1960s to combat cancer, but he shelved the drug after it showed little efficacy against the disease.
A company that later became part of Glaxosmithkline patented AZT in the 1980s when it was found to be effective against AIDS.
Horwitz received no money for his discovery because he no longer owned the compound, but he did go on to produce treatments for diseases such as cancer at the Wayne State university School of medicine in Detroit, Michigan,
until he retired in 2005. Development boost Chinese President Hu Jintao announced a US$1. 5-million donation to TWAS, the academy of sciences of the developing world, on the opening day of the organization s 23rd
Cancer ambitions A leading US cancer centre said last week that it will spend up to US$3 Â billion over the next ten years on a programme to significantly increase the odds of surviving eight cancers.
Under the Moon shots initiative, research teams at the MD Â Anderson Cancer Center in Houston,
Texas, will focus on cancer of the prostate, lung and ovary, and on a type of breast cancer as well as melanoma, two leukaemias and a related blood syndrome.
See go. nature. com/lrevbl for more. XMRV ruled out The retrovirus XMRV is linked not to chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS
a definitive study that cost US$2. 3  million concluded on 18  September. A 2009 paper found signs of XMRV infection in people with CFS (V.  C.  Lombardi et  al.
Science 326,585-589; 2009), but was retracted in 2011 because of concerns that the results were caused by contamination.
The latest study (H.  J.  Alter et  al. mbio 3, e00266-12;
It reported that the rats developed higher levels of cancers had larger cancerous tumours and died earlier than controls.
The researchers have not conclusively identified a mechanism for the effect. The rats were monitored for two years (almost their whole life  span),
Other scientists point out that the Sprague-Dawley strain of rats used in the experiments has been shown to be susceptible to developing tumours spontaneously,
and that many fewer control rats developed tumours in middle age. The 90-day trial of Monsanto s NK603 maize used in its authorization also used Sprague-Dawley rats,
which can harbour human pathogens and must be kept at precise temperatures and fed particular nutrients.
For example, the rare lysosomal storage disease mucopolysaccharidosis I is treated using enzyme-replacement therapy. The enzymes must be made in cells,
Canada, whose husband works with people who have lysosomal storage disorders, decided to develop a way to manufacture the necessary enzymes in maize (corn).
In May, the US Food and Drug Administration approved Elelyso (taliglucerase alfa) a drug for the lysosomal storage disorder Gaucher disease which is produced in cultured carrot cells.
"Reversing possible bad epigenetic marks in human physical and psychological diseases is already a big research interest in biomedicine.
Need for flu surveillance reiteratedthe emergence of the H1n1 influenza virus that leapt from pigs to humans in 2009,
triggering a global pandemic, reminded us of the need to monitor animals such as pigs that can host the development of dangerous viral strains.
and his colleagues have isolated a new strain of H1n2 influenza from Korean pigs that kills infected ferrets the model animal of choice for influenza work
Like that responsible for the 2009 pandemic, the new strain, known as Sw/1204, is a'triple-reassortant'virus that is, one with genes from avian, swine and human flu.
Choi wanted to assess the pandemic potential of Korean strains. His team tested two H1n2
and two H3n2 viruses isolated from pig abattoirs before the 2009 pandemic. Most of these viruses did not cause any signs of serious disease in ferrets.
Sw/1204 was the exception. It replicated in the airways and lungs of three infected ferrets
killing one and causing such severe disease in the others that they had to be euthanized.
but not transmissibility, in the pandemic H1n1 strain. NA315N has also been found before, but its role is less clear.
or preventing some of life s most daunting and debilitating diseases, develop powerful new medicines,
and even define strategies that will prevent disease from occurring in the first place. We have made also critical investments in research and development to bolster our national security and defense.
Recent experiments show how Avian flu may become transmissible among mammals. In an era of constant and rapid international travel,
what steps should the United states take to protect our population from emerging diseases, global pandemics and/or deliberate biological attacks?
To further improve preparedness, we must continue to invest in the best public health monitoring systems that can be built.
and manufacturing to increase scientific understanding of new pathogens and improve response time when they emerge.
One in four people were getting sick every year due to food-borne illness, and children and the elderly were more at risk.
bolstered surveillance used to detect contamination problems earlier, and responded to illness outbreaks faster. I am also working to bolster the use of organic farming methods
and minimize pesticides and antibiotics in our food. I set the ambitious goal to increase the number of certified organic operations by 20 percent â oe
This will help ensure that antibiotics are used only address diseases and health problems and not for enhancing growth and other production purposes.
Preventive practices are the best tool to reduce the incidence of food-borne illnesses because they provide the greatest control over the potential risks of contamination
and are generally the most cost-effective. These practices are developed best by growers, handlers, processors,
to develop specific guidance for the commodities most often associated with food-borne illness outbreaks.
boosting the risk of food-borne illnesses and diarrhoeal diseases, they add.""Food safety will in future be a crucial issue.
Subsequent epidemiological studies involving tens of thousands of people have looked for links between acrylamide and various forms of cancer in humans
among those who had smoked never, women consuming about 40 â°micrograms of acrylamide per day doubled their risk of developing cancers of the womb
Phones and tumours Italy s highest civil court has stated that mobile phones can cause brain tumours to the dismay of medical experts who say no study has proven a clear causal link between health risks
the court ruled in favour of a commerce manager who claimed his tumour was a consequence of the heavy phone usage demanded by his job.
The cull was scheduled to start imminently as part of efforts to control bovine tuberculosis, which badgers can transmit to cattle (see Nature 490,317-318;
spent more than a decade developing a spinal-cord-injury treatment derived from human embryonic stem cells
saying that Geron s cancer therapeutics are a better investment. See go. nature. com/tihbe6 for more.
WHONEW cases of tuberculosis (TB) fell by 2. 2%between 2010 and 2011, the World health organization said in its annual report on the disease.
But some 3. 7%of new TB cases are now multi-drug resistant. In some countries in Eastern europe and Central asia, multi-drug resistance occurs in more than 20%of cases (see chart.
and noticed these lesions that looked like they were from injuries, explains Joseph Peterson, a palaeontologist at the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh.
He wondered whether the fossilized injury was one of a kind or whether such lesions were common.
To find out, Peterson and his colleague Collin Dischler started examining more domes. Together, they were able to look at 102 domes from fossil collections around the world.
Of these, 23 had lesions. Fascinated by the presence of so many injuries, Peterson and Dischler produced a three-dimensional computer model of a pachycephalosaur skull
and mapped injuries onto it. They noted that the shape of the dome differed from fossil to fossil
and that the placement of the injuries depended on the shape of the skull. Skulls with low domes tended to have injuries at the front,
whereas skulls with higher domes had distributed lesions evenly between the front and back. The finding hinted that the pachycephalosaurs with differently shaped skulls were bumping heads in different ways.
To find out what those ways were considered, the researchers the butting of sheep, goats and bison."
"The lesions we were seeing were strikingly similar to those that we often see on the skulls of modern mammals that ram heads,
says Peterson. The team found that bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) charge each other head on; that mountain goats (Oreamos americanus) bump one another in the flanks;
On the basis of these examples, Peterson and Dischler speculate that the high-domed pachycephalosaurs with parietal injuries were side-bumping like mountain goats,
and that the frontal injuries are indicative of bison-like wrestling.""It could be that we are seeing two different species bashing in different ways,
whether the lesions really are butt prints.""It is an intriguing study but after examining one of these injuries
I found it hard to rule out the possibility that this might have simply been the skull being chipped after death,
if the lesion sites actually suffered trauma, he says. Whatever the outcome, seven-year-olds will undoubtedly keep on bashing
Alzheimer s disease and type 2 diabetes in the United states cannot be taken seriously. But the film reflects attitudes that have thwarted Van Eenennaam s research into the genetic modification of animals to reduce food costs
In one case, James Murray, another geneticist at the University of California, Davis, was told in 2003 that the USDA had rejected his proposal to develop a goat that produces milk rich in human lysozymes enzymes that fight diarrhoeal disease
The US National institutes of health (NIH) occasionally supports research on transgenic pigs that model human diseases, but rarely funds proposals to produce drugs or vaccines in the milk of transgenic livestock.
the childhood diarrhoea that the goats milk is intended to treat is a serious problem in the north of the country.
including chickens engineered to be resistant to the bird-flu virus. A BBSRC spokesperson told Nature:"
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