Category: Body & Mind

Australia has a policy that restricts the use of antibiotics used for food animals, and as a result people in Australia are healthier according to a new study.

“An Australian solution to the drug resistance problem has been to prohibit the use of certain antibiotics, called fluoroquinolones, in food animals such as poultry. Such a policy puts Australia in a relatively unique position, since its animal and food production levels are comparable to those of other industrialized nations, but it has avoided using the antibiotics that have been standard in the other countries’ food animal production.”

Hopefully other countries will catch on to this to help people live healthier lives.

For a long time researchers have been unable to discover what exactly causes asthma. Researchers at Harvard have found that “killer cells” are responsible for asthma, which is contrary to the popular theory that “helper cells” exasperate the development of asthma.

Finding the primary cell that causes asthma can lead to much more effective treatments.

A safer and relatively inexpensive drug has been used to reduce breast cancer in women, a drug that was originally meant to treat osteoporosis. The drug is raloxifene and according to the study reduced breast cancer in women by 50 percent!

“That’s a success rate as good as the rate for the cancer drug tamoxifen.
But patients taking raloxifene had fewer of the serious illnesses linked to tamoxifen, including cancer of the uterus and blood clots.”

The Washington Post is reporting on a group of 12 volunteers has just started on the first human trial of an HIV vaccine. The trial is being conducted at four American universities.

The vaccine is administered in stages over the course of about 2 months. The recipient is exposed to fragments of HIV DNA, followed by a modified poxvirus which is meant to boost the immune system.

In this first stage trial, researchers will be checking to see if the vaccine is safe to be administered at low doses. If the trial is successful, it will move onto a larger trial, and eventually the researchers will test to see if the vaccine actually prevents AIDS from developing.

In animal trials involving rhesus macaques, the vaccine protected 22 of 23 animals.