A new study has found high levels of infection with hepatitis C (HCV) across Africa, particularly in people infected with HIV. In the largest study of its kind to date, researchers from Imperial College London and Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) collated data on over 1.1 million individuals from 213 studies to provide policymakers with robust estimates of the burden of HCV infection. The report, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, found that around three per cent of people in sub-Saharan Africa have been infected with HCV ...

Private practice directly affects the quality of care that NHS patients receive and doctors should not be allowed to work "on both sides of the divide", writes a senior doctor in The BMJ this week. John Dean, a consultant cardiologist at Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust Hospital, describes how he quit private practice after realising "it has direct adverse effects on the NHS." To begin with, he says he felt that he needed the money "to renovate the house, educate the children, and so on." And he was sure that he could keep the private work separate from the ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Ethanol fuel refineries could be releasing much larger amounts of some ozone-forming compounds into the atmosphere than current assessments suggest, according to a new study that found emissions of these chemicals at a major ethanol fuel refinery are many times higher than government estimates. New airborne measurements downwind from an ethanol fuel refinery in Decatur, Illinois, show that ethanol emissions are 30 times higher than government estimates. The measurements also show emissions of all volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which include ethanol, ...

URBANA, Ill. - While consumer demand for edamame or vegetable soybean remains on the rise in the United States, it's not widely grown in this country. Nearly 85 million acres of grain-type soybean were grown in the U.S. in 2014, yet edamame imported from Asia appears to dominate what we eat in this country, said a University of Illinois crop scientist. There have been limitations to growing edamame in the U.S. Midwest, including little research on the cultivars that could be used here and how to grow the crop sustainably, explained Marty Williams, who is also an ecologist ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. - A majority of American adults say they've tried dieting to lose weight at some point in their lives, and at any given time, about one-third of the adult population say they're currently dieting. Yet 60 percent of American adults are clinically overweight or obese and more than 16 percent of deaths nationwide are related to diet and physical activity. "There is clearly a disconnect if we have a majority of the population that has tried to lose weight and a majority of the population that is overweight," says Marc Kiviniemi, a public health researcher at ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- What's the only thing worse than having a urinary catheter when you're in the hospital? Having one and getting a urinary tract infection (UTI) - or worse - as a result. Now, a new detailed guide gives doctors and nurses information to help decide which hospital patients may benefit from a urinary catheter - and which ones don't. And that should help spare patients the pain, embarrassment, and potentially serious side effects that can come with having a catheter placed -- which may bring more risk than benefit to the patient. Called the Ann ...

Fairfax, Va., May 5, 2015--The American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) is issuing a new guideline, "Definitive and adjuvant radiotherapy in locally advanced non-small cell lung cancer: An American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) evidence-based clinical practice guideline." The guideline's executive summary is published in the May-June issue of Practical Radiation Oncology (PRO), ASTRO's clinical practice journal. The complete guideline, which cites 35 years of data to help guide current treatment and future research, is available online as an open-access ...

They may not be on Facebook or Twitter, but dolphins do, in fact, form highly complex and dynamic networks of friends, according to a recent study by scientists at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute (HBOI) at Florida Atlantic University. Dolphins are known for being highly social animals, and a team of researchers at HBOI took a closer look at the interactions between bottlenose dolphins in the Indian River Lagoon (IRL) and discovered how they mingle and with whom they spend their time. Through intensive photo-ID surveys conducted along the IRL, which were carried ...

A recent and famous image from deep space marks the first time we've seen a forming planetary system, according to a study by U of T astrophysicists. The team, led by Daniel Tamayo from the Centre for Planetary Science at U of T Scarborough and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, found that circular gaps in a disk of dust and gas swirling around the young star HL Tau are in fact made by forming planets. "HL Tau likely represents the first image taken of the initial locations of planets during their formation," says Tamayo. "This could be an enormous ...

TORONTO, ON - Adults who experienced multiple incidents of childhood maltreatment were more than two times as likely to have trouble sleeping than their counterparts who were not maltreated during childhood, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Toronto, University of Ottawa, and Western University. The study appears online in the journal Sleep Medicine. "We found a significant association between childhood maltreatment and difficulty sleeping later in life," says lead author Philip Baiden, a PhD Student at the University of Toronto's Factor-Inwentash ...

New technology developed at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) may extend the benefits of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to many patients whose access to MRI is currently limited. A redesign of the wire at the core of the leads that carry signals between implanted medical devices and their target structures significantly reduces the generation of heat that occurs when standard wires are exposed to the radiofrequency (RF) energy used in MRI. The novel system is described in a paper published in the online Nature journal Scientific ...

AMHERST, Mass. -- A revolution is coming in flexible electronic technologies as cheaper, more flexible, organic transistors come on the scene to replace expensive, rigid, silicone-based semiconductors, but not enough is known about how bending in these new thin-film electronic devices will affect their performance, say materials scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Writing in the current issue of Nature Communications, polymer scientists Alejandro Briseño and Alfred Crosby at UMass Amherst, with their doctoral student Marcos Reyes-Martinez, now ...

ALEXANDRIA, VA, MAY 5, 2015 -- A statistical analysis of Job Corps data strongly suggests positive average effects on wages for individuals who participated in the federal job-training program. Results of the analysis recently were included in an article in the Journal of Business & Economic Statistics (http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ubes20/current), a professional journal published by the American Statistical Association . The study was conducted by Xuan Chen of Renmin University of China and Carlos A. Flores of California Polytechnic State University. Job Corps is ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- A 12-week dose of an investigational three-drug hepatitis C combination cleared the virus in 93 percent of patients with liver cirrhosis who hadn't previously been treated, according to a study in the May 5, 2015, issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association. Bristol-Myers Squibb funded the trial of the combination of three drugs -- daclatasvir, asunaprevir, and beclabuvir. None of the three drugs are FDA-approved, but daclatasvir is currently under review by the FDA. Duke Medicine researchers collaborated on the design and analysis of the ...

In two studies appearing in the May 5 issue of JAMA, patients with chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) genotype 1 infection and with or without cirrhosis achieved high rates of sustained virologic response after 12 weeks of treatment with a combination of the direct-acting-antiviral drugs daclatasvir, asunaprevir, and beclabuvir. Current estimates indicate that 130 million to 150 million people worldwide are chronically infected with HCV, resulting in up to 350,000 deaths per year. Of the 7 HCV genotypes identified, genotype 1 is the most prevalent worldwide, accounting for ...

Among patients with Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) who recovered following standard treatment with the antibiotics metronidazole or vancomycin, oral administration of spores of a strain of C difficile that does not produce toxins colonized the gastrointestinal tract and significantly reduced CDI recurrence, according to a study in the May 5 issue of JAMA. C difficile is the cause of one of the most common and deadly health care-associated infections, linked to 29,000 U.S. deaths each year. Rates of CDI remain at unprecedented high levels in U.S. hospitals. Clinical ...

In what is a major step towards the prevention of recurring bouts of Clostridium difficile (Cdiff) infection, an international team led by Dale Gerding, MD, Hines Veterans Administration (VA) research physician and professor of Medicine at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine, has shown that giving spores of non-toxic Cdiff by mouth is effective in stopping repeated bouts of Cdiff infection which occurs in 25-30 percent of patients who suffer an initial episode of diarrhea or colitis. The study is published in the May 5 issue of the Journal of American ...

For the first time, scientists have imaged thunder, visually capturing the sound waves created by artificially triggered lightning. Researchers from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) are presenting the first images at a joint meeting of American and Canadian geophysical societies in Montreal, Canada, May 3-7. "Lightning strikes the Earth more than 4 million times a day, yet the physics behind this violent process remain poorly understood," said Dr. Maher A. Dayeh, a research scientist in the SwRI Space Science and Engineering Division. "While we understand the general ...

Employing online training programs to teach psychotherapists how to use newer evidence-based treatments can be as successful as in-person instruction, according to a new RAND Corporation study. Psychotherapy treatments can lag years behind what research has shown to be effective because there simply are not enough clinicians trained in new methods. That means that many people with mental health disorders are not getting the most effective nonpharmacological treatments, RAND researchers say. For one such treatment, Interpersonal and Social Rhythm Therapy to treat bipolar ...

Tropical Storm Noul is still threatening Yap Island located in the Caroline Islands of the western Pacific Ocean, and a part of the Federated States of Micronesia. Micronesia has posted a typhoon warning for the tiny island. The storm is currently 22 miles south-southwest of Ulithi (one of the outer islands of the State of Yap) and is moving west at 2 knots per hour. Maximum sustained winds for the storm is 55 knots gusting to 70 knots and maximum wave height is 20 feet. Noul is moving to the west and is expected to veer west northwest and later to the northwest. ...

After gobbling the fourth Oreo in a row while bathed in refrigerator light, have you ever thought, "That wasn't enough," and then proceeded to search for something more? Researchers at BYU have shed new light on why you, your friends, neighbors and most everyone you know tend to snack at night: some areas of the brain don't get the same "food high" in the evening. In a newly published study, exercise sciences professors and a neuroscientist at BYU used MRI to measure how people's brains respond to high- and low-calorie food images at different times of the day. The ...

Anxiety disorders affect approximately one in six adult Americans, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. The most well-known of these include panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and social anxiety disorder. But what of brief bouts of anxiety caused by stressful social situations? A new study by Tel Aviv University researchers, published recently in the Journal of Oral Rehabilitation, finds that anxiety experienced in social circumstances elevates the risk of bruxism - teeth grinding which causes tooth wear and ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Cells that relay information from the ear to the brain can change in significant ways in response to the noise level in the environment. That's one major finding of a study out today in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Expose the cells to loud sounds for a prolonged period of time, and they alter their behavior and even their structure in a manner that may aid hearing in the midst of noise. End the ruckus, and the cells change again to accommodate for quieter environs. "The brain is amazingly adaptable: The ...

A multidisciplinary team of Johns Hopkins researchers has developed two new strategies to treat depression in young people using the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) class of medications. These strategies, published May 5 in the journal Translational Psychiatry, incorporate a new understanding of how to mitigate the risk of suicide while on SSRI treatment. "These medications have to be dosed in a careful way," says senior investigator Adam Kaplin, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychiatry and neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. ...

(Winston-Salem, N.C. - May 5, 2015) - Researchers from Wake Forest University and the University of Utah are the first to successfully fabricate halide organic-inorganic hybrid perovskite field-effect transistors and measure their electrical characteristics at room temperature. "We designed the structure of these field-effect transistors that allowed us to achieve electrostatic gating of these materials and determine directly their electrical properties," said lead author, Oana Jurchescu, an assistant professor of physics at Wake Forest. "Then we fabricated these transistors ...