U.S. expands China health alert amid illness reports

The U.S. State Department on Friday issued an expanded health alert for all of China amid reports some U.S. diplomats based in the country had experienced a mysterious malady that resembles a brain injury and has already affected U.S. personnel in Cuba.

A previous statement in May only mentioned the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou as the location for the health alert, though it was sent to U.S. citizens throughout the country.

The State Department had confirmed earlier that one U.S. employee assigned to the consulate in Guangzhou had “suffered a medical incident”, and that it had deployed a team to screen employees and family members there.

On Wednesday the U.S. government said that it had brought a group of people from that consulate back to the United States for further evaluation of their symptoms, and that it was offering screening to anyone at the U.S. embassy in Beijing or other consulates in China who requested it.

The United States also operates consulates in the mainland Chinese cities of Chengdu, Shanghai, Shenyang and Wuhan.

The location of the health alert was changed to “countrywide” from Guangzhou in the updated statement sent by email.

“The State Department received medical confirmation that a U.S. government employee in China suffered a medical incident consistent with what other U.S. government personnel experienced in Havana, Cuba,” the statement said, reiterating comments made last month by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

It warned of “unexplained physical symptoms or events, auditory or sensory phenomena”, and said symptoms of the ailment included dizziness, headaches, tinnitus, fatigue, cognitive issues, visual problems, ear complaints and hearing loss, as well as difficulty sleeping.

China has said that it thoroughly investigated the initial case reported by the United States and found no reasons or clues to explain it.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said on Thursday that as far as she was aware the Chinese government had not had any formal communication with U.S. officials on any new cases.

China’s state-run Global Times tabloid called the situation at the consulate “very strange”.

“Practically all Chinese people do not believe that this country’s official organizations would carry out such sonic attacks against U.S. diplomats. This does not fit with China’s basic concept and principles of diplomacy, and is inconceivable,” the Global Times said in an editorial.

It also said people found it hard to believe that another foreign country could carry out such an attack in China, escape China’s monitoring, and leave no trace.

Last year, 24 U.S. government employees and family members in Cuba displayed the symptoms, which were similar to those related to concussion and mild traumatic brain injury, according to the State Department.

The illnesses among the American diplomats stationed in Havana heightened tension between the old Cold War foes.

Pompeo released a statement on Tuesday saying the department established a task force last month “to direct a multi-agency response to the unexplained health incidents”.

https://reut.rs/2Jx4jyt

Cost plunges for capturing carbon dioxide from the air

Pulling carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the air and using it to make synthetic fuel seems like the ultimate solution to climate change: Instead of adding ever more CO₂ to the air from fossil fuels, we can simply recycle the same CO₂ molecules over and over. But such technology is expensive—about $600 per ton of CO₂, by one recent estimate. Now, in a new study, scientists say future chemical plants could drop that cost below $100 per ton—which could make synthetic fuels a reality in places such as California that incentivize low-carbon fuels.

Those numbers are “real progress,” says Chris Field, a climate scientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. That’s because the new study bases its numbers on data and costs from a real pilot facility, whereas others have relied on scientists’ best guesses of how CO₂ capture technologies scale up. “These guys actually have something you can measure,” says Stephen Pacala, an ecologist with Princeton University who is chairing a panel on carbon removal technologies for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Until now, the cost of climate change has been all about projections. Climate scientists say countries will need to drop CO₂ emissions to near zero by midcentury and then remove more CO₂than they emit, if the planet is to avoid a catastrophic 2°C warming. Numerous so-called negative emissions technologies exist, including growing perennial plants and trees to make biofuels, and sequestering carbon in soils. One of the most compelling, known as direct air capture (DAC), uses giant banks of fans to blow air through a solution that contains a CO₂-capturing chemical. Once purified, the captured CO₂ can be injected underground or used to make commercial products, such as fuels or plastics. But in 2011, a review panel of the American Physical Society found that DAC would likely cost about $600 per ton of captured CO₂.

That didn’t deter David Keith, a physicist at Harvard University who co-founded a company focused on DAC. In 2015, Carbon Engineering launched its first pilot plant for capturing CO₂ in British Columbia in Canada. After capturing the CO₂ in solution, the plant transfers it into a solid, which when heated releases it in a pure gas stream. The crucial CO₂-capturing chemical is recycled. After 3 years, Keith and his colleagues had collected enough data to calculate the plant’s efficiency—and project the costs of building a commercial scale plant with the same technology. The results: Their technology can capture CO₂ for between $94 and $232 per ton, they report today in Joule.

The company has also built a pilot operation to turn captured CO₂ into a variety of liquid fuels, including gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. A renewable energy–powered electrolyzer first splits water into hydrogen (H₂) and oxygen. The H₂ is then combined with CO₂ to make liquid hydrocarbons using conventional chemical engineering technology. If the CO₂ is captured at the low end of the cost range, the company says can produce its synthetic fuels for about $1 per liter, says Steve Oldham, Carbon Engineering’s CEO.

That’s more expensive than most fuels today, but not by much. And because the process recycles carbon from the air, it would constitute a low-carbon fuel, something that places such as California are increasingly requiring in their fuel mixes, and which command a premium price. That could drive a market for DAC plants that would likely drive costs down further, Oldham says. Still, Field cautions that the technology isn’t a silver bullet for combatting climate change—there’s no way yet to know whether it can scale up quickly enough to alter CO₂ levels in the atmosphere. “There is a long way to go to see whether it will have any large-scale impact.”

https://bit.ly/2kWU4ZB

New flu viruses found in dogs

Influenza poses a perennial threat in part because of its ability to jump from species to species. Birds and pigs have been known to harbor viruses that cross over to humans, and even dogs and cats have carried nonhuman-infecting varieties of influenza. Now, man’s best friend is closer to joining the list of potential vectors, Science News reports. Researchers in southern China found a surprising variety of flu viruses in dogs, including three new variants of influenza A that evolved after being passed on by pigs, researchers reported this week in mBio. The new finding doesn’t mean you’ll have to put a surgical mask on your beagle any time soon, but it does mean scientists are going to be closely monitoring the evolution of canine influenza.

https://bit.ly/2sISfDT

Carbon dioxide reduces belly fat

The first randomized, controlled trial testing carbon dioxide gas injections (carboxytherapy) to reduce belly fat found the new technique eliminates fat around the stomach. However, the changes were modest and did not result in long-term fat reduction, according to the Northwestern Medicine study.

“Carboxytherapy could potentially be a new and effective means of fat reduction,” said lead author Dr. Murad Alam, vice chair of dermatology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a Northwestern Medicine physician. “It still needs to be optimized, though, so it’s long lasting.”

The paper was published this week in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.

The new technique‘s benefits are that it is a “safe, inexpensive gas, and injecting it into fat pockets may be preferred by patients who like natural treatments,” Alam said. “Non-invasive fat reduction has become increasingly sought-after by patients.”

Benefits of a non-invasive approach are diminished downtime, avoidance of scarring and perceived safety.

Current technologies routinely used for non-invasive fat reduction include cryolipolysis, high intensity ultrasound, radiofrequency, chemical adipocytolysis and laser-assisted fat reduction.

Carboxytherapy has been performed primarily outside the U.S., with a few clinical studies suggesting it may provide a lasting improvement in abdominal contours. The way carboxytherapy works is not well understood. It is believed that injection of carbon dioxide causes changes in the microcirculation, and damages fat cells.

No randomized controlled trials for carboxytherapy efficacy and benefit over time have been previously conducted. The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of carboxytherapy for fat reduction in a randomized, controlled trial, and to determine if any observed benefits persisted for six months.

The Northwestern study consisted of 16 adults who were not overweight (body mass of 22 to 29) and were randomized to get weekly carbon dioxide gas injection to one side of their abdomens and a sham treatment on the other side once a week for five weeks. A high-resolution ultrasound detected a reduction in superficial fat after five weeks but not at 28 weeks. The patients’ body weight did not change over the course of the study.

That the difference was not maintained at six months suggests the treatment stimulated a temporary metabolic process that reduced the size of fat cells without inducing cell death, Alam said.

“If carboxytherapy can provide prolonged benefits, it offers patients yet another noninvasive option for fat reduction,” Alam said. “But we don’t feel it’s ready for prime time.”

https://bit.ly/2sPtkOd

Children with autism more likely to suffer from food allergy

A new study from the University of Iowa finds that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are more than twice as likely to suffer from a food allergy than children who do not have ASD.

Wei Bao, assistant professor of epidemiology at the UI College of Public Health and the study’s corresponding author, says the finding adds to a growing body of research that suggests immunological dysfunction as a possible risk factor for the development of ASD.

“It is possible that the immunologic disruptions may have processes beginning early in life, which then influence brain development and social functioning, leading to the development of ASD,” says Bao.

The study is published in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s JAMA Network Open. It analyzed the health information of nearly 200,000 children gathered by the U.S. National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), an annual survey of American households conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The children were between the ages of 3 and 17 and the data were gathered between 1997 and 2016.

The study found that 11.25 percent of children reportedly diagnosed with ASD have a food allergy, significantly higher than the 4.25 percent of children who are not diagnosed with ASD and have a food allergy.

Bao says his study could not determine the causality of this relationship given its observational nature. But previous studies have suggested possible links–increased production of antibodies, immune system overreactions causing impaired brain function, neurodevelopmental abnormalities, and alterations in the gut biome. He says those connections warrant further investigation.

“We don’t know which comes first, food allergy or ASD,” says Bao, adding that another longitudinal follow-up study of children since birth would be needed to establish temporality.

He says previous studies on the association of allergic conditions with ASD have focused mainly on respiratory allergy and skin allergy, and those studies have yielded inconsistent and inconclusive results. The new study found 18.73 percent of children with ASD suffered from respiratory allergies, while 12.08 percent of children without ASD had such allergies; and 16.81 percent of children with ASD had skin allergies, well above the 9.84 percent of children without ASD.

“This indicates there could be a shared mechanism linking different types of allergic conditions to ASD,” says Bao.

Bao says the study is limited in that the NHIS depends on respondents to voluntarily self-report health conditions, so the number of children with ASD or allergies may be misreported by those taking the survey. But he says the large number of respondents and ethnic and gender cross-representation of the survey are major strengths.

Source:

https://uiowa.edu/

https://bit.ly/2JGxbr6

Probing role of glutamate in age-associated cognitive disorders

As people around the world live longer, the prevalence of age-associated cognitive disorders is growing. Alzheimer’s disease (AD), for which advanced age is the most significant risk factor, currently defies all therapeutic efforts. Experts argue that identifying the onset of this progressive disease as early as possible will advance the fight against its devastating effects.

A research team at Wayne State University hopes to give clinicians tools for identifying the early signs of impending disease by measuring subtle deviations in the way the brain modulates its chemistry during the formation of new memories. Their research project, “Task-related modulation of hippocampal glutamate, subfield volumes and associative memory in younger and older adults: a longitudinal ¹H FMRS study,” was recently awarded a two-year, $423,500 grant from the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health.

The study, led by Jeffrey Stanley, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences in Wayne State’s School of Medicine, and by Naftali Raz, Ph.D., professor of psychology in Wayne State’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and director of the Lifespan Cognitive Neuroscience Program in the Institute of Gerontology at Wayne State, will use a noninvasive technique called functional magnetic resonance spectroscopy (fMRS) to characterize memory function based on the modulation of the brain’s most common neurotransmitter, glutamate, in real time, as study participants engage in a memory task.

Stanley and Raz will examine changes in glutamate within the hippocampus -; one of the brain regions that is critical for memory -; during creation of new associations between pictorial stimuli and their location.

“Studying glutamate, sometimes called the brain’s light switch, will help us better understand the brain chemistry behind basic memory processes,” said Raz. “Most of what we know about glutamate changes with age, and its relations to memory comes from animal models and measurements of stationary levels of glutamate in humans. The fMRS technique perfected by Dr. Stanley will allow us to examine age difference and age-related changes over time in task-related glutamate modulation, in intact human participants.”

The research team will acquire a structural MRI of the whole brain, a high-resolution scan of the hippocampal body, and a ¹H fMRS of the hippocampus during formation of associations between common objects and locations in healthy, young and older participants. An important feature of this study is a one-year follow-up that will help gauge the rate of change and individual differences in change over time in a fundamental memory-related brain process, while avoiding potentially misleading conclusions based on cross-sectional comparisons of age groups.

The investigators believe that the results of this study will lay the foundation for intervention aimed at mitigating cognitive decline.

Source:

http://research.wayne.edu/news/wayne-state-researchers-examine-the-role-of-glutamate-in-aging-cognitive-diseases-30932

https://bit.ly/2sPH2Ra

Computerized brain shows how depressive episodes affect memory

It was already known that people who suffer an acute depressive episode are less likely to remember current events, but the new model suggests that older memories are also affected.

During a depressive episode, the brain’s ability to produce new brain cells is reduced. In major depressive disorder, patients can suffer from cognitive impairment so severe that it is sometimes referred to as pseudodementia.

Pseudodementia differs from the classic form of dementia in that the memory recovers once the depressive episode has ended.

Computational neuroscientists Professor Sen Cheng and colleagues investigated this process by developing a computational model that captures the characteristic features of the brain in patients with depression.

As occurs in patients with depression, the model alternated between depressive episodes and periods that were symptom-free.

As reported in the journal Plos One, the model showed that during a depressive episode, the brain formed fewer new brain cells.

Unlike previous simulations, memories were represented as a sequence of neural activity patterns rather than as static neural activity patterns.

“This allows us not only to store events in memory but also their temporal order,” explains Cheng.

The authors report that the model was able to recall memories more accurately if the brain region involved was able to form many new neurones, but if the region formed fewer new neurones, it was more difficult to distinguish similar memories and to recall them separately.

The model also showed that the impact of depressive episodes was stronger than previously thought.

Not only was there a reduced ability to recall current events, but there were also deficits in recalling memories that were collected prior to the depressive episode. The longer the duration of the depressive episode, the further the memory deficits reached back.

So far it was assumed that memory deficits only occur during a depressive episode,” says Cheng. “If our model is right, major depressive disorder could have consequences that are more far reaching. Once remote memories have been damaged, they do not recover, even after the depression has subsided.”

Professor Sen Cheng, Ruhr-Univesität Bochum

Source:

https://www.alphagalileo.org/en-gb/Item-Display/ItemId/164624?returnurl=https://www.alphagalileo.org/en-gb/Item-Display/ItemId/164624

https://bit.ly/2JE7XK9