The toxin that causes botulism is the most potent that we know of. Eating an amount of toxin just 1000th the weight of a grain of salt can be fatal, which is why so much effort has been put into keeping Clostridium botulinum, which produces the toxin, out of our food. The Institute of Food Research on the Norwich Research Park has been part of that effort through studying the bacteria and the way they survive, multiply and cause such harm. In new research, IFR scientists have been mining the genome of C. botulinum to uncover new information about the toxin genes. There ...

WASHINGTON -- Recent studies that examine links between sodium consumption and health outcomes support recommendations to lower sodium intake from the very high levels some Americans consume now, but evidence from these studies does not support reduction in sodium intake to below 2,300 mg per day, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine. Despite efforts over the past several decades to reduce dietary intake of sodium, a main component of table salt, the average American adult still consumes 3,400 mg or more of sodium a day – equivalent to about 1 ½ teaspoons ...

New research at The University of Nottingham is calling for changes to a government scheme which engages community nurses in the prevention of child abuse and neglect in the home as part of a maternal and child health care programme. The study, published online by the Journal of Public Health, has found that despite being set up to help reduce the numbers of child abuse cases, the £10 million Family Nurse Partnership will only be able to tackle around 10% of families involved in child maltreatment. And, the researchers say, by using different, less common risk factors ...

(Boston) – A new Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) study has found that low-income and minority parents may be more receptive to vaccinating their daughters against Human Papillomavirus (HPV), while white, middle-class parents are more likely to defer the vaccination. The findings appear online in the May issue of the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved. Cervical cancer incidence and mortality are markedly higher for low-income and minority women due to higher rates of HPV and limited access to screening and treatment. Vaccination for HPV has ...

Berkeley — Some racial groups are more likely to bear the brunt of extreme heat waves because of where they live, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. The findings, published today (Tuesday, May 14) in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, highlight racial disparities at a time when the frequency and intensity of extreme heat waves is expected to increase with climate change. Researchers used satellite imagery data to identify areas where there is no tree canopy to provide shade, and where half or more of the ...

Boston, MA, May 14, 2013—A new report assessing the economic viability of services provided by practicing midlevel dental providers in the U.S. shows that they are expanding preventive dental care to people who need it most: children and those who can't afford care. At the same time, they are providing that care at a reduced cost to the dental practice. The report, released today by Community Catalyst, determined that midlevel dental providers currently practicing in Alaska and Minnesota cost their employers 27 and 29 percent respectively of the revenue they generate. The ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Most consumers who are shopping for a new car depend on good crash safety ratings as an indicator of how well the car will perform in a crash. But a new University at Buffalo study of crashes involving cars and sport utility vehicles (SUVs) has found those crash ratings are a lot less relevant than vehicle type. The study is being presented May 16 at the annual meeting of the Society of Academic Emergency Medicine in Atlanta. In head-on collisions between passenger cars and SUVs, the UB researchers found that drivers in passenger cars were nearly 10 ...

KANSAS CITY, MO—A small ensemble of musicians can produce an infinite number of melodies, harmonies and rhythms. So too, do a handful of workhorse signaling pathways that interact to construct multiple structures that comprise the vertebrate body. In fact, crosstalk between two of those pathways—those governed by proteins known as Notch and BMP (for Bone Morphogenetic Protein) receptors—occurs over and over in processes as diverse as forming a tooth, sculpting a heart valve and building a brain. A new study by Stowers Institute for Medical Research Investigator Ting ...

1. U.S. Should Maintain a 'High Level of Alert and Preparedness' for Chinese Avian Flu The United States should maintain a high level of alert and preparedness for influenza A (H7N9), as its global pandemic potential is still unknown. In March, Chinese public health officials notified the World Health Organization that an avian influenza virus that had never before been detected in humans had infected three adults, resulting in critical illness. Since then, more than 100 people have been infected, and 24 have died. About a fifth of those who have been infected are still ...

San Francisco, CA (May 13, 2013) – Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that conserving rainforests in the Amazon River Basin will increase the amount of electricity that hydropower projects in the area can produce. The study is the first to quantify the impact of regional rainforest cover on energy production. Its findings reveal that rainforests are more critical than previously thought in generating the rainfall that drives river flow, and ultimately power production, in tropical areas. The research shows that if deforestation ...

Once famously described as "orphan diseases, too small to be noticed, too small to be funded" in the Hollywood drama Lorenzo's Oil, rare diseases are getting unprecedented attention today among drug manufacturers, who are ramping up research efforts and marketing new medicines that promise fuller lives for children and other patients with these heartbreaking conditions. That's the finding of a major examination, published today in the weekly newsmagazine of the world's largest scientific society, of the status of new drugs for the 7,000 conditions that affect 200,000 ...

A study by Michael F. Jacobson, Ph.D., of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Washington, D.C., and colleagues suggest voluntary reductions in sodium levels in processed and restaurant foods is inconsistent and slow. (Online First) The study measured the sodium content in selected processed foods and fast-food restaurant foods in 2005, 2008, and 2011. Between 2005 and 2011, the sodium content in 402 processed foods declined by approximately 3.5 percent, while the sodium content in 78 fast-food restaurant products increased by 2.6 percent. Although some products ...

A research letter by Mary R. L'Abbe, Ph.D., of the University of Toronto, Canada, and colleagues examined the nutritional profile of breakfast, lunch, and dinner meals from sit-down restaurants (SDR). (Online First) A total of 3,507 different variations of 685 meals, as well as 156 desserts from 19 SDRs were included in the study. Nutrients evaluated included calories, fat, saturated fat, and sodium; excess consumption of these nutrients is associated with obesity, hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Nutrient values were calculated as a percentage of the ...

Creative arts therapies (CATs) can improve anxiety, depression, pain symptoms and quality of life among cancer patients, although the effect was reduced during follow-up in a study by Timothy W. Puetz, Ph.D., M.P.H., of the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md., and colleagues. Authors reviewed the available medical literature and included 27 studies involving 1,576 patients. Researchers found that during treatment, CAT significantly reduced anxiety, depression and pain, and increased quality of life. However, the effects were greatly diminished during follow-up, ...

A study by David Finkelhor, Ph.D., of the University of New Hampshire, and colleagues updates estimates and trends for childhood exposure to a range of violence, crime and abuse victimizations. (Online First) The study used the National Survey of Children's Exposure to Violence, which was based on a national telephone survey conducted in 2011. The participants included 4,503 children and teenagers between the ages of one month to 17 years. According to the results, 41.2 percent of children and youth experienced a physical assault in the last year; 10.1 percent experienced ...

A novel drug candidate, J147, is able to reverse memory deficits and improve several aspects of brain function in mice with advanced symptoms of Alzheimer's disease (AD), finds research in BioMed Central's open access journal Alzheimer's Research & Therapy. Previous studies have demonstrated that several compounds, including J147, are able to prevent or delay onset of AD-like symptoms in young mice. This does not mimic the situation in humans where symptoms usually precede the diagnosis. To address this problem, researchers from the Salk Institute used older mice, whose ...

Human intelligence cannot be explained by the size of the brain's frontal lobes, say researchers. Research into the comparative size of the frontal lobes in humans and other species has determined that they are not - as previously thought - disproportionately enlarged relative to other areas of the brain, according to the most accurate and conclusive study of this area of the brain. It concludes that the size of our frontal lobes cannot solely account for humans' superior cognitive abilities. The study by Durham and Reading universities suggests that supposedly more ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Every cell in our bodies runs on a 24-hour clock, tuned to the night-day, light-dark cycles that have ruled us since the dawn of humanity. The brain acts as timekeeper, keeping the cellular clock in sync with the outside world so that it can govern our appetites, sleep, moods and much more. But new research shows that the clock may be broken in the brains of people with depression -- even at the level of the gene activity inside their brain cells. It's the first direct evidence of altered circadian rhythms in the brain of people with depression, ...

Non-smokers should give hotels that allow smoking in certain rooms a wide berth, say the authors, and instead choose completely smoke free hotels. The researchers analysed the surfaces and air quality of rooms for evidence of tobacco smoke pollution (nicotine and 3EP), known as third hand smoke, in a random sample of budget to mid-range hotels in San Diego, California. Ten hotels in the sample operated complete bans and 30 operated partial smoking bans, providing designated non-smoking rooms. Non-smokers who spent the night at any of the hotels, provided urine and ...

The authors base their findings on more than 1100 adults who had sustained a stroke between 1999 and 2004 and had been admitted to hospital in the greater Boston area of Massachusetts in the US. On admission, each patient's serum creatinine was measured. This is a by-product of muscle metabolism and is filtered out of the body by the kidney, known as the glomerular filtration rate or GFR. The GFR is therefore an indicator of the health of the kidneys and how well they are working. Half the patients lived within 1 km of a major road, with the rest living between 1 and ...

CHICAGO --- The dangerously high salt levels in processed food and fast food remain essentially unchanged, despite numerous calls from public and private health agencies for the food industry to voluntarily reduce sodium levels, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study conducted with the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The study, which will be published May 13 in JAMA Internal Medicine, assessed the sodium content in selected processed foods and in fast-food restaurants in 2005, 2008 and 20011. The main finding was that the sodium content of food is as ...

BOSTON, MA (EMBARGOED UNTIL Monday, May 13, 2013, 4pm EDT) – As the restaurant industry prepares to implement new rules requiring chains with 20 or more locations to post calorie content information, the results of a new study suggest that it would be beneficial to public health for all restaurants to provide consumers with the nutritional content of their products. Researchers at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (HNRCA) at Tufts University analyzed meals from independent and small-chain restaurants, which account for approximately 50% of the ...

Environments containing species that are distantly related to one another are more productive than those containing closely related species, according to new research from the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC). The experimental result from Marc William Cadotte confirms a prediction made by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species, first published in 1859. Darwin had said that a plot of land growing distantly related grasses would be more productive than a plot with a single species of grass. Since then, many experiments have shown that multi-species plots are ...

Researchers have identified the dose of dengue virus in human blood that is required to infect mosquitoes when they bite. Mosquitoes are essential for transmitting the virus between people so the findings have important implications for understanding how to slow the spread of the disease. By defining the threshold of the amount of virus needed for transmission, the research also provides a target that experimental dengue vaccines and drugs must prevent the virus from reaching in order to be successful at preventing the spread of disease during natural infection. Dengue, ...

Scientists at Imperial College London have identified four new proteins that act as receptors for an essential signalling molecule in bacteria such as MRSA. The receptors are thought to play an important role in enabling bacteria to respond to their environment. Their discovery provides scientists with vital clues in the hunt for new antibiotics, which are increasingly in need as bacteria become resistant to existing treatments. The bacterium Staphylococcus aureus causes life-threatening diseases in hospital patients and in previously healthy people. Methicillin-resistant ...