2/18/14 Health News Mom Pleads~ DON’T FEED CHILDREN RAW MILK - Stem Cell Lines Not Fit for Clinic- New Antibiotic for TB - Testing Your Breath To Diagnose Disease

A MOM AND A DAIRYMAN PLEAD: DON’T FEED

Two years ago, when Oregon parents Jill Brown and Jason Young met Brad and Tricia Salyers, the families had no idea that they would eventually be sharing in a tragedy that sickened four of the Salyers’ children and left Brown and Young’s youngest child, Kylee – 23 months old at the time – with such... Continue Reading

Diagnosis Just a Breath Away With New Laser

University of Adelaide physics researchers have developed a new type of laser that will enable exciting new advances in areas as diverse as breath analysis for disease diagnosis and remote sensing of critical greenhouse gases. They have been able to produce 25 times more light emission than other lasers operating at a similar wavelength - opening the way for detection of very low concentrations of gases. Research has shown that with various diseases, minute amounts of gases not normally exhaled can be detected in the breath; for example, acetone can be detected in the breath when someone has diabetes..Continue Reading

A Faster Way to Flag Bacteria-Tainted Food — and Prevent Illness

On the horizon is a new approach for pathogen screening that is far faster than current commercial methods. Scientists are reporting the technique in the ACS journal Analytical Chemistry. Sibani Lisa Biswal and colleagues note that Salmonella is one of the pathogens most commonly associated with foodborne illness, which can cause fever, diarrhea and abdominal cramps. They used an array of tiny “nanomechanical cantilevers,” anchored at one end, kind of like little diving boards. The cantilevers have peptides attached to them that bind to Salmonella. When the bacteria bind to the peptides, the cantilever arm bends, creating a signal. The screening system rapidly distinguished Salmonella from other types of bacteria in a sample. One of the peptides was even more specific than an antibody, Continue Reading

Stem Cell Lines Not Fit for Clinic

Most stem cell lines registered with the NIH don’t comply with the FDA’s guidelines for human use, according to a new report. Many of the stem cell lines used by academics and registered with the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) would not be eligible for commercialization because they don’t pass muster with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agencies’ standards throws up a potential roadblock on the path from the laboratory to the clinic. “The main concern . How do we move this technology [to the clinic]? How do we translate it?”.Continue Reading

Promising Class of Antibiotics Discovered for Treatment of Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital scientists have discovered a promising new class of antibiotics that could aid efforts to overcome drug-resistance in tuberculosis (TB), a global killer. The drugs increased survival of mice infected with TB and were effective against drug-resistant strains of TB. St. Jude led the international research effort, The antibiotics, called spectinamides, were created by changing the chemical structure of an existing antibiotic, spectinomycin, which does not work against TB. In multiple trials of mice with both active and chronic TB infections, researchers report that one version of the new drug—an analog known as 1599—was as good as or better than current TB drugs at reducing levels of the bacteria in the lungs of mice. In addition, 1599 caused no serious side effects.Continue Reading