Cuba to develop two cholera vaccines
Cuban researchers are working on developing two cholera oral-vaccines, one of which is in advanced clinical trials, experts said here. Reinaldo Acevedo, deputy director of Cuba’s Finlay Institute, told the 20th Latin American Pharmacology and Therapeutics Congress that the institute is working on a live vaccine and an inactive one, Xinhua reported Thursday. The live vaccine, in development for more than 10 years, “is composed of live cholera bacteria after extracting the virulence factors. Thus, it is a strain of the disease, but is not pathogenic,” Acevedo said.
The vaccine elicits “an immune response” but patients won’t get sick, he said.
Compared with other existing vaccines worldwide, the Cuban version has the advantage of being administered in a single oral dose which eliminates the virus in less than 72 hours, he said. The live vaccine is still under development stage, but has been tested in Cuba and Mozambique with good results in both safety and effectiveness. “New clinical trials in children are likely later this year,” he added. Cholera, an acute diarrhoea disease, causes 100,000 to 120,000 deaths each year worldwide, according to the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). Cuba witnessed a cholera outbreak in 2012. The Finlay Institute is also developing an inactive vaccine, composed of dead micro-organisms which is much cheaper to develop, said Sonsire Castillo, deputy director of the institute. “Live vaccines usually require abundant resources, technologies, and logistics for production,” she added. (IANS)
How sweat glands may help heal skin injuries
A team of researchers have determined that under certain conditions, the sweat gland stem cells could heal skin wounds. They have claimed that the glands can also help regenerate all layers of the epidermis. USC faculty member Krzysztof Kobielak and his team used a system to make all of the sweat gland cells in a mouse easy to spot: labeling them with green fluorescent protein (GFP), which is visible under ultraviolet light. Over time, the GFP became dimmer as it was diluted among dividing sweat gland cells. After four weeks, the only cells that remained fluorescent were the ones that did not divide or divided very slowly — a known property among stem cells of certain tissues, including the hair follicle and cornea. Therefore, these slow-dividing, fluorescent cells in the sweat gland’s coiled lower region were likely also stem cells. Then, the first author of this paper, graduate student Yvonne Leung, tested whether these fluorescent cells could do what stem cells do best — differentiate into multiple cell types. To the researchers’ surprise, these glowing cells generated not only sweat glands, but also hair follicles when placed in the skin of a mouse without GFP. The study has been published in journal Public Library of Science One (PLOS ONE). (ANI)
Women’s chronic pain more complex
Experts have claimed that women’s chronic pain is more complex and harder to treat than chronic pain in men.
This means gender-specific drugs and treatment methods are needed, according to leading Australian neuroscientist Dr Mark Hutchinson from the school of medical sciences at the University of Adelaide.
Although his work is on laboratory rodents at this stage, he said that these studies certainly show that women’s experience of pain is more severe, News.com.au reported.
Dr Hutchinson, who will present his finding at a Faculty of Pain Medicine (FPM) meeting in Sydney, said that there are fundamental differences in the experience. The focus of his work is to understand why acute pain turns to longer-term pain in some people and why this is more prevalent in women than in men. His laboratory work has established for the first time that the brain’s immune cells, known as glial cells, contribute to differences in pain between the sexes. He said that understanding female chronic pain is profoundly important to treatment methods. There are already some drugs for inflammatory bowel disease which work only on women. (ANI)
‘Washing hands can make you optimistic’
Washing your hands after you have failed at something can make you optimistic, a new study has found. Washing our hands influences how we think, judge and decide, according to researchers who examined how physical cleansing affects people after failure. They found that test subjects who washed their hands after a task were more optimistic than those who did not wash their hands, but it hampered their future performance in the same task domain. For the experiment, Dr Kai Kaspar from the University of Cologne in Germany, took 98 subjects in three groups. In the first part of the experiment, participants from two groups had to solve an impossible task. Both the group who after failing washed their hands as well as the one that did not wash their hands were optimistic that they would do better the second time. The optimism of the group who washed their hands was, however, much greater. In contrast to the usual finding that higher optimism results in better performance, the opposite was the case here: the subjects who did not wash their hands did considerably better than the group who washed their hands. Instead, the performance of those who had washed their hands was on the level if the third group who had not experienced failure and only taken part in the second test run. According to Kaspar, it can be concluded from the results that while physical cleansing after failure may eliminate negative feelings, it reduces the motivation to try harder in a new test situation to restore one’s own perception of competence. The findings of the study were published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. (PTI)