India to celebrate 64th Independence Day

Today, Sunday, August 15, 2010. India, the world's biggest democracy, celebrates its 64th Independence Day reminding the masses of an end of British rule on August 15, 1947.

Happy Friendship Day

A friend is always happy about your success - even if it surpass his. Your success is also his success becuse he longs to see you happy.

Jay Jay Garvi Gujarat- Golden Jubilee celeberation

It's the 50th birthday celebration of Gujarat state. I called myself a Gujarati. I'm proud of that.

Acne drug may help prevent HIV breakout

Good morning friends. A cheap acne drug that's been used for decades effectively targets infected immune cells in which HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, lies dormant and prevents them from reactivating and replicating, claim Johns Hopkins researchers.

The drug, minocycline, likely will improve on the current treatment regimens of HIV-infected patients if used in combination with a standard drug cocktail known as HAART (Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy), according to research published now online and appearing in print April 15 in The Journal of Infectious Diseas es.

“The powerful advantage to using minocycline is that the virus appears less able to develop drug resistance because minocycline targets cellular pathways not viral proteins,” says Janice Clements, Ph.D., Mary Wallace Stanton Professor of Faculty Affairs, vice dean for faculty, and professor of molecular and comparative pathobiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

“The big challenge clinicians deal with now in this country when treating HIV patients is keeping the virus locked in a dormant state,” Clements adds. “While HAART is really effective in keeping down active replication, minocycline is another arm of defense against the virus.”

Unlike the drugs used in HAART which target the virus, minocycline homes in on, and adjusts T cells, major immune system agents and targets of HIV infection. According to Clements, minocycline reduces the ability of T cells to activate and proliferate, both steps crucial to HIV production and progression toward full blown AIDS.

If taken daily for life, HAART usually can protect people from becoming ill, but it’s not a cure. The HIV virus is kept at a low level but isn’t ever entirely purged; it stays quietly hidden in some immune cells. If a person stops HAART or misses a dose, the virus can reactivate out of those immune cells and begin to spread.

The idea for using minocycline as an adjunct to HAART resulted when the Hopkins team learned of research by others on rheumatoid arthritis patients showing the anti-inflammatory effects of minocycline on T cells. The Hopkins group connected the dots between that study with previous research of their own showing that minocycline treatment had multiple beneficial effects in monkeys infected with SIV, the primate version of HIV. In monkeys treated with minocycline, the virus load in the cerebrospinal fluid, the viral RNA in the brain and the severity of central nervous system disease were significantly decreased. The drug was also shown to affect T cell activation and proliferation.

“Since minocycline reduced T cell activation, you might think it would have impaired the immune systems in the macaques, which are very similar to humans, but we didn’t see any deleterious effect,” says Gregory Szeto, a graduate student in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine working in the Retrovirus Laboratory at Hopkins. “This drug strikes a good balance and is ideal for HIV because it targets very specific aspects of immune activation.” The Times of India

Scabies pill also works against resistant lice

Good morning friends. Scabies pill also works against resistant lice. Ivermectin, a pill prescribed for the skin disease known as scabies, also gets rid of hair lice that are resistant to conventional lotions, a study published on Thursday says.

Lice affects over 100 million people worldwide each year, especially children of primary school age, according to the paper, appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine. The main treatments are diluted forms of an insecticide called permethrin and malathion, but since the 1990s lice have becoming more and more resistant to these chemicals.

That has left parents with little choice other than to be, literally, nit-pickers -- to go through their children's hair with a fine comb to haul out the parasites. Ivermectin is a promising alternative, say French researchers who led the study. They tested it in a trial involving 812 adults and children in 376 households in Britain, France, Ireland and Israel.

Half of the patients were treated with malathion and half with ivermectin, which was administered twice, seven days apart, at a dose of 400 microgrammes per kilo (2.2 pounds). After two weeks, 95.2 per cent of the ivermectin group were lice-free, compared with 85 per cent in the malathion group.

"Ivermectin is more effective than the best anti-lice lotion, but it should be reserved for difficult, resistant cases," said the study's coordinator, Olivier Chosidow of France's National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM). Over-using the drug could make it succumb to resistance, following the same path as the lotions, he said. – The Times of India

High-fat diets raise stroke risk in women, study

Good morning friends. Women should listen to this … High-fat diets raise stroke risk in women, Eating a lot of fat, especially the kind that's in cookies and pastries, can significantly raise the risk of stroke for women over 50, a large new study finds.

The new study is the largest to look at stroke risk in women and across all types of fat.

It showed a clear trend: Those who ate the most fat had a 44 per cent higher risk of the most common type of stroke compared to those who ate the least.

"It's a tremendous increase that is potentially avoidable," said Dr Emil Matarese, stroke chief at St Mary Medical Center in Langhorne, Pennsylvania. "What's bad for the heart is bad for the brain."

He reviewed but did not help conduct the research, which was presented yesterday at an American Stroke Association conference.

It involved 87,230 participants in the Women's Health Initiative , a federally funded study best known for revealing health risks from taking hormone pills for menopause symptoms.

Before menopause, women traditionally have had less risk of stroke than similarly aged men, although this is changing as women increasingly battle obesity and other health problems

After menopause, the risk rises and the gender advantage disappears, said Dr Ka He, a nutrition specialist and senior author of the study from the University of North Carolina.

He and another researcher, Sirin Yaemsiri, wanted to see whether dietary fat affected the odds. – The Times of India

Strokes can happen to children too

Good morning friends. Don’t be relax parents, not only older people acquire stroke. Also children can acquire the disease. Parents should be aware of that. Strokes can happen to children too as we least expected.

Children can have strokes too that can be recurrent, according to pediatric researchers.

Unfortunately, boffins said, the strokes often go unrecognized the first time, and the child does not receive treatment before the recurrence.

Pediatric neurologist Rebecca Ichord, MD, director of the Pediatric Stroke Program at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, reported the study of arterial ischemic stroke in children at the International Stroke Conference 2010 in San Antonio, Texas.

An arterial ischemic stroke results from a blockage or constriction in an artery in or leading to the brain.

To come up with the findings, Ichord and colleagues at Children's Hospital followed 90 children with a median age of about 6 years old, treated for stroke between 2003 and 2009. Twelve patients (13 per cent) had a recurrent stroke during the study period, most of them within a month of the first stroke. In six of the 12 children with recurrent strokes, no one diagnosed the initial stroke until a recurrent stroke occurred.

"Strokes don't occur only in the elderly," said Ichord. "They can also affect children as young as infants. Our findings reinforce how important it is to diagnose stroke in children as quickly as possible so that medical caregivers can provide emergency treatment and take measures to prevent recurrence."

Strokes can arise in children as a complication of other illnesses, such as sickle cell disease, which obstructs blood circulation, or from an undetected heart condition. A whiplash injury to a child's neck may damage an artery and leave it vulnerable to a blood clot that causes a stroke. Signs of a stroke are the same as in adults—a sudden loss of neurologic functions such as vision or speech, unsteady gait, or weakness on one side of the face or in limbs. What is different in children, said Ichord, is that symptoms may be subtle, examination is difficult and children are less able to describe their symptoms.

Emergency treatment for a stroke typically involves assuring adequate breathing and circulation, supplying intravenous fluids and improving blood supply to the brain.

Medications such as aspirin or blood thinners are given to lower the risk of a recurrent stroke. In the aftermath of a stroke, rehabilitation is critical to promote recovery.

"Because a stroke can recur, we need improved awareness of pediatric stroke among primary health care providers, and more research on the best ways to prevent a recurrence after a child suffers a first stroke," added Ichord. – The Times of India