Serial Killer' Immune Cells Put Cancer in Remission

The patient was dying of leukemia. One hundred seventy out of every 200 cells in his bone marrow had a cancer-causing mutation, and his lymph nodes were swelling, a sign the cancer was getting worse. He'd already been on multiple courses of chemotherapy, but his disease showed few signs of improvement. Then, in July 2010, he enrolled in a clinical trial for an experimental treatment, designed to turn his own immune cells against his cancer. Months later, all signs of leukemia had vanished, his physicians report today
Levine and his colleagues designed a new gene that can be inserted into T cells to trick them into attacking cancerous B cells, the cause of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). The new gene encodes a receptor that, on one end, can bind to a molecule that's unique to cancerous B cells. The other end of the receptor sets off a chain reaction when such a B cell is bound, eventually leading the T cell to destroy the cancerous cell. "Essentially, we're converting T cells that would normally recognize other types of cells to be tumor specific," Levine says. ORIGINAL ARTICLE

IIM-A asks AYUSH to follow Chinese medicine example

AHMEDABAD: In a set of recommendations that Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIM-A) has given the ministry of health and family welfare's department of Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy (AYUSH) recently, the latter has been suggested to learn from the Chinese examples. IIM-A recommended AYUSH introduce farming of medicinal herbs and commence mass scientific validation of medicines like the Chinese did.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Blood Donations from Men Who Have Sex with Other Men. Questions and Answers

Men who have had sex with other men are currently deferred as blood donors. To know more Visit; http://t.co/ZBXWDjb

Approval of Complera: emtricitabine/rilpivirine/tenofovir DF fixed dose combination

The FDA has approved a new fixed-dose combination — emtricitabine/rilpivirine/tenofovir DF (FTC/RPV/TDF) — for use in treatment-naive HIV-infected patients.
The treatment, marketed as Complera, is a single pill that should be taken once daily. The pill is contraindicated with some anticonvulsants, antimycobacterials, and proton-pump inhibitors (see the FDA alert for a full list).
Approval for the combination was based, in part, on data from previous phase III studies for rilpivirine, which the FDA approved in May. In his HIV and ID Observations blog, Dr. Paul Sax writes that data comparing rilpivirine with efavirenz demonstrate a trade-off between safety/tolerability (favoring rilpivirine) and efficacy (favoring efavirenz), and he wonders whether "this efficacy difference [will] be reduced now that the single-pill treatment is available — a question now being tested in an open-label clinical trial."
ORIGINAL ARTICLE

TB Rapid Test Performs Well in Children

Overall, the Xpert MTB/RIF assay demonstrated high sensitivity and specificity; in smear-negative cases, a second induced specimen increased sensitivity from 33% to 61%.
The Xpert MTB/RIF, a new molecular test to identify Mycobacterium tuberculosis and rifampin resistance, performs with high sensitivity and specificity in adult populations (JW Infect Dis Apr 27 2011). Might it also work well for children, in whom diagnosis is complicated by low numbers of mycobacteria and difficulty in obtaining good specimens?
Original Article

Study: HIV risks rise with some birth control

ATLANTA — In what's being called the first research of its kind, a study found that HIV-infected women in Africa are more likely to spread the AIDS virus if they use hormone-based birth control.

The women studied were about twice as likely to transmit HIV if they were on the pill or taking a hormone shot like Depo-Provera, compared to those not on the such birth control. The research is the first to look at this question, according to Renee Heffron of the University of Washington, one of the researchers.
Their research also found that uninfected women were about twice as likely to catch AIDS virus from their infected partners if they were on hormonal contraception, compared to those who were not. That finding echoed a phenomenon seen in earlier studies.
The researchers checked to make sure there were no significant differences in condom use, sexual behavior or other factors that would account for the differences.
The research was presented Wednesday at a meeting in Rome of the International AIDS Society.
The researchers said the findings need to be confirmed in follow-up studies, and should not cause women to immediately change birth control practices.
The increased risk of HIV infection also must be balanced against the consequences of unintended pregnancy, which in Africa can include maternal mortality and financial squalor, they explained.
"Contraception is incredibly important to economic and social development of women and children worldwide," said Dr. Jared Baeten, another University of Washington researcher on the study team.
Hormone shots release progestin, which keep a woman's ovaries from releasing eggs and also thins the lining of the uterus. Birth control pills contain progestin or progestin and estrogen and work the same way.
It's not clear exactly how the hormones may help spread the virus, but the theoretical risk has been known from earlier studies. A Kenya study found an increase in HIV-infected cells in cervical tissue after women started using various hormonal contraception.
The new study was done from 2004 to 2010 in seven African countries — Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Botswana, Zambia, Tanzania and South Africa.
It included nearly 2,500 women with HIV whose male partners were not infected. About a third took hormonal contraception at least once. Most of them were on the shots, which are taken once every few months.
The men had a 2.61 percent chance of becoming infected in a year's time if their partner was on hormonal contraception. If not, their chances of infection were 1.51 percent.
The research team also looked at about 1,300 couples in which the men were infected but not the women. About 20 percent of the women were on hormonal contraception, mostly injections.
The study found those women had a 6.6 percent chance of becoming infected in a year, compared to 3.8 percent for woman not on that kind of birth control.

High court warns against use of ‘Dr’ without valid medical degree

CHENNAI: Putting a pause to the tug-of-war between physicians and physiotherapists over the use of the prefix 'Dr,' the Madras High Court has asked the authorities to take action against persons who use the prefix in their prescriptions and advertisements without a valid medical degree.
Passing orders on a writ petition filed by the Indian Medical Association's Quackery Eradication Committee, the first bench comprising Chief Justice HL Gokhale and Justice KK Sasidharan said the IMA must furnish details of people prescribing allopathic medicines and administering allopathic treatment and using the prefix 'Dr' to the authorities.
The IMA wanted the court to consider its two representations to the government, and to initiate criminal prosecution against paramedical technicians, practitioners and physiotherapists who prescribed allopathic medicine and used the prefix 'Doctor (Dr).'

The government pleader assured the court that the authorities would take necessary action in accordance with law.
The state government had passed an order last year that a physiotherapist cannot use the prefix 'Dr' and should not prescribe drugs. However, paramedics and physiotherapists have been maintaining that the use of the prefix 'Dr' is more a matter of courtesy rather than adherence to law.
Referring to a similar petition filed in the court by IMA a few weeks ago, the first bench said that on January 5 the court had asked the petitioner to furnish the names of persons who are practising medicine without any valid licence. The court also asked the authorities to take stringent action such persons on receiving any information.