Scientists say they have developed a highly effective new test for diagnosing prostate cancer, a potentially fatal disease that afflicts almost a million men around the world every year. Researchers say the test could dramatically reduce the number of costly and often unnecessary biopsies and improve patients' chances of survival.
The new prostate test identifies a series of 15 so-called biomarkers, traces of protein and other biological substances coursing through the bloodstream, that stimulate the production of auto antibodies.
Auto antibodies are produced by the body's immune system to fight the cancer and usually appear in the presence of disease.
Researchers from Oxford Gene Technology and its subsidiary, Sense Proteomic Limited in England, developed the biomarker test.
"Auto antibodies can occur many years before the occurrence of any clinical symptoms. So, the use of this type of technology as a sort of mass screening test holds a lot of potential," said said John Anson, Proteomic's vice president at Sense Proteomic.
An estimated 250,000 men die each year around the world from cancer of the prostate, a chestnut-shaped organ that's part of the male reproductive system that produces the secretions that contain sperm.
Currently, the only test for prostate cancer measures levels of a single protein called prostate specific antigen, or PSA, made by the immune system when cancer is present.
But experts say the PSA test is only accurate in detecting prostate cancer half of the time; PSA can be elevated due to other conditions, including a benign enlargement of the gland which is common in older men.
Researchers developed a micro-array, or panel of more than 900 proteins. A preliminary experiment involving 73 blood samples taken from men with prostate cancer and 60 cancer-free men showed the biomarker panel was 90 percent effective in detecting the disease.
Scientists say the next step is to test 1,700 blood samples against the proteins to detect auto-antibodies.
Some of the samples come from men with prostate cancer. The remainder of the samples are taken from men with benign enlargement of the prostate and healthy men.
Anson says scientists hope the test will spot men with aggressive prostate cancer at the earliest stages of the disease so they can be treated early, increasing their chances of survival.
The test also has the potential to identify men with indolent or less aggressive forms of prostate cancer. "Testing for prostate cancer really is to identify those individuals that have the aggressive form of the disease versus those that don't have the disease or the indolent form of the disease. The indolent form of the disease is not necessarily life-threatening," he said.
Researchers also say the microarray test could spare many men with elevated PSAs uncomfortable biopsies in which they have prostate tissue samples removed to look for cancer.
The U.S. and European drug regulatory agencies recently issued rulings that restrict the use of the diabetes drug Avandia, which studies show increase the risk of heart attack and stroke as it controls blood sugar levels.
Avandia was once one of the most popular drugs to treat Type 2 diabetes in the United States. But sales fell sharply in 2007 after a study linked the drug to cardiovascular problems.
Now the European Medicines Agency plans to remove the drug from the market and the U.S Food and Drug Administration in the United States intends to restrict its use only to patients for whom all similar medications have failed.
Dr. Yasser Ousman, an endocrinologist in Fredericksburg, Maryland, prescribes Avandia for some patients in combination with other drugs. "It is quite effective in improving the blood sugar, in normalizing the blood sugar or delaying the occurrence of diabetes in these individuals," he said.
Avandia is marketed in more than 110 countries and the European ruling will affect 30 of them. The new regulations limiting Avandia's use in the United States take effect in the next few months.
Dr. Steven Nissen, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, published the study first linking Avandia to a higher risk of heart attack. And a panel of U.S. experts that evaluated the drug again this year recommended restricted access.
Dr. Nissen says he is happy with the decision to better regulate Avandia, but not with how long it took the Food and Drug Administration to limit the drug's use. "I will sleep better tonight, but I will not sleep until I know that we've have improved how we handle these kinds of problems in the United States. We've got to fix the FDA," he said.
Avandia's Britain-based maker, GlaxoSmithKline, says it continues to believe the drug is an important treatment for patients with Type 2 diabetes. And Dr. Ousman is one of those who is not convinced by Dr. Nissen's research.
"I think when you look at the information and the statistics from the initial study, the initial paper by Dr. Nissen in 2007, the increase in the risks of heart attacks is actually small," Nissen said.
Dr. Ousman argues that Avandia's rival drug Actos, or for that matter many over the counter drugs - aspirin, ibuprofen, acetaminophen or paracetamol - can be toxic if used improperly. "If you look at the large studies, that were published over the last several years, including a large number of patients comparing Avandia to a placebo or other drugs, there was actually no increase in that risk. That risk was based on smaller studies," he said.
The American Diabetes Association supports the Food and Drug Administration's decision not to totally pull Avandia off the market, but consumer advocates call for a ban.
This month, the British oil company BP issued a controversial report on the cause of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico four months ago.
Regardless of who was at fault, the release of an estimated four million barrels of oil had a major environmental impact. But there has been relatively little scientific study of the long-term human health effect of this kind of event.
In a world dependent on petroleum fuels, oil spills seem inevitable. However, Gina Solomon of the University of California San Francisco Medical School says the medical consequences don't get sufficient attention from scientists.
"Of the 35 or so major oil spills that have occurred in recent decades," says Solomon, "there's only some health study from eight of those spills, and most of those are just contemporaneous study."
Meaning there was no long-term study of the health effects.
One exception was a 2002 spill off the coast of Spain, where scientists documented DNA damage among volunteers doing cleanup along the beach.
Crude oil is full of toxic materials, and when oil from a leaking underwater well hits the surface, many of those materials can enter the air near where cleanup workers are breathing.
"The chemicals that evaporate off of the oil are quite toxic," says Solomon. "These are what are called volatile organic compounds that include cancer-causing chemicals like benzine, and chemicals that are linked to neurological effects, such as toluene."
Other chemicals enter the food chain - eaten by fish and seafood harvested for human consumption, but also consumed by smaller sea creatures that are more distant links in the human food chain.
Other threats from the Gulf oil spill include particulate matter generated by burning oil floating on the surface and from the large amount of chemical dispersants used.
Solomon says the BP spill was very disruptive to all three legs of the gulf economy - the oil business, tourism, and fishing - and it came as the region was still recovering from Hurricane Katrina five years ago. So the impact on emotional or psychological health is likely to be significant.
"One of the health effects that was studied after the Exxon Valdez disaster was psychological effects, and there were severe effects that were found even years later in the communities in Alaska affected by that oil spill," says Solomon. "So I think we can expect the same on the Gulf Coast."
The U.S. National Institutes of Health is funding studies of the effects of the Gulf oil spill. Writing in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association, Gina Solomon says that, in the meantime, doctors and nurses in the area should be alert to the possibility that patients might be experiencing symptoms related to the oil spill.
Numerous studies have found a connection between education and the risk of heart disease and stroke. More educated people tend to have fewer heart attacks and other so-called cardiovascular events. But new research finds that the correlation doesn't apply everywhere.
Previous studies have been done almost entirely in richer, industrialized countries. Abhinav Goyal of Emory University in Atlanta wanted to see if that link between heart disease and education applied in low- and middle-income countries.
"So what we found is that there is a relationship between education level and cardiovascular events that differs both in terms of gender and in terms of world region," says Goyal.
The correlation between more education and fewer heart attacks, strokes, and other cardiovascular events was strongest among men in richer countries. The link was weaker among women in rich countries and men in lower- and middle-income countries.
"And then finally, when you looked at women in low- and middle-income countries, there was almost no difference - meaning that, unlike men in high-income countries, it does not appear that education is protective against cardiovascular events in women in low- and middle-income countries," says Goyal.
Educated people in richer countries may be less likely to have cardiovascular disease because they tend to avoid risky behaviors like smoking, or they eat better, or get better medical care. But in lower-income countries in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East - where the people in this study live - many of those women are moving into urban areas, taking sedentary office jobs. They are increasingly being targeted by tobacco companies. And there may be social limits to what women can do.
"Because of some of the social constructs of some of the low- and middle-income countries, women are not as free to have access to the family income," says Goyal, "and their education may not necessarily translate to better employment, and then they may not be in a position always to seek health care and follow-through with those plans."
Goyal's study suggests that it's wrong for physicians and policymakers to assume that just because people get more schooling they will automatically adopt a healthier lifestyle.
Dr. Abhinav Goyal's research appears in the journal Circulation, published by the American Heart Association. [It was based on data from the Reduction of Atherothrombosis for Continued Health (REACH) Registry.
Premature babies face a variety of health risks. Some preemies do just fine, but others face major challenges.
Doctors and nurses who care for these infants don't have any easy way of telling which babies face the biggest risks in their first days and weeks of life.
They want to know, so endangered infants can be transferred to specialty hospitals or get other advanced care.
Stanford University researchers have devised a way of predicting which babies face the biggest challenges. The results are presented as a single number they call the PhysiScore.
Suchi Saria is the graduate student who led the research project. She says the PhysiScore is the result of a complex formula that combines just a few simple measures, such as heart and breathing rates, and other information from the baby's first hours after birth.
"And this is data collected routinely in the ICU [intensive care unit]," says Saria. "There are no special measurements being made. And we're just taking the data that's already being measured and basically utilizing it to compute the score."
Software to compute the score could be integrated into bedside electronic monitors, which could display the PhysiScore at a glance. And Saria says a study of premature infants at one California hospital indicates it's a lot more accurate at predicting future problems than existing measures, such as one called the Apgar score.
"The PhysiScore, using data from the first few hours of life, gets a performance of over 90 percent as compared to Apgar. Apgar gets a performance of 70 percent."
The PhysiScore and the test of its accuracy are described in a paper published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
According to co-author Anna Penn, the PhysiScore concept isn't limited to evaluating premature babies.
"We plan to expand the scope of this work to include multiple other patient scenarios: two patients coming out of surgery might have had both uncomplicated surgical courses, but be at very different risk for complications," says Penn. "And it's the same type of thing that could be integrated in multiple settings."
The authors say the PhysiScore is not just for rich countries. Rural hospitals in developing countries, they say, could use monitors that display the PhysiScore as a tool to know when to move babies from a rural clinic to a better-equipped urban hospital.
At an alternative investment conference in Malaysia the talk is about a change in attitude when it comes to mixing finance with looking after the environment.
Speakers at the conference on alternative investments said Monday that an increasing number of shareholders want assurances that their investments are environmentally friendly. And they want them return a healthy yield.
One of the speakers is Mary Buffett, an author, business woman and investor. Her books include several on the investment techniques of her former father-in-law, Warren Buffett, one of the world's wealthiest individuals.
She says that clean energy and the ability to produce alternative sources of fuel will play an increasingly important role in financial markets. That is particularly so in Asia where large populations in China, India and in Southeast Asia must compete for scarce resources.
"I believe that shareholders, especially younger shareholders, are going to be putting pressure on the companies and the investments that they own to make sure the companies put their feet to the fire and hold them to standards that they previously may not have had from an environmental standpoint," Buffett said.
She says investors today are very aware of the environmental and social costs tied to corporate activity.
She, herself, refuses to buy tobacco stocks. Tobacco use is linked to a number of potentially fatal diseases.
Her sentiments were echoed by another speaker, Michael North, president of Greenstar Corporation, a technology company that focuses on solar power, wireless communications and media development. He says the planet can expect to suffer a number of environmental crises over the next 10 years as the climate warms.
"The pattern is going to be sustained for some time, and those events when they take place, as tragic as they are, they are needed wake-up calls for the investor and for the entrepreneur, for the people building businesses," North said. "They will see opportunities in those crises – the little Warren Buffetts will be going green."
Both Buffett and North say they think the worst of the global financial crisis is over, although the next two years will remain tough, and will be followed by a period of low but steady growth.
A Japanese professor says his former university is trying to suppress his research showing that carbon nanotubes, a material used in everything from skis to cables, may cause cancer.
Put simply, carbon nanotubes are carbon atoms rolled into microscopic tubes. The tiny needle-like cylinders have strong electrical properties and they are often used in transistors or copper wire.
But they look much like asbestos fiber, and former Shinshu University Professor Shozo Koyama says carbon nanotubes pose similar health risks. Asbestos are linked to a number of deadly lung diseases.
Koyama says that his research shows that two types of carbon nanotube fibers may cause cancer. He reached that conclusion after mice he injected with those carbon fibers developed cancer.
Studies done in Europe and the United States also have indicated a similar hazard, although the severity of the risk is still being studied.
Koyama says he unveiled his study a few years ago, but Shinshu University refused to acknowledge the findings.
His lawyer, Jiro Yamane told journalists Monday that is in part because the university has close ties with a company that produces carbon nanotubes.
Yamane says public universities in Japan have become increasingly tied to industry, since the Japanese government passed a law six years ago encouraging them schools to become more financially independent.
Yamane says a tight budget cut government funding, and universities have tried to fill that void by forming close ties with various industries.
The carbon nanotubes in question were developed by another Shinshu University professor.
But that professor and the university dismiss Koyama's findings. Last year, the university cut Koyama's access to his research facilities. A few months ago, the university fired the professor, citing issues with "sexual and power harassment."
Yamane says this points to a dangerous trend in Japan. He says universities are too focused on promoting and nurturing industry at all costs.
Koyama says companies that make carbon nanotubes have a responsibility to stop producing what he says are harmful products.
Scientists have discovered the key to rehabilitating damaged salivary glands, promising relief for head and neck cancer patients whose glands are destroyed by radiation therapy.
Living with non-functioning salivary glands has been a necessary evil for head and neck cancer patients who must undergo lengthy programs of radiation therapy.
The side effect, chronic dry mouth, causes bad breath and problems with taste. People with a rare autoimmune disorder called Sjogren's syndrome also have non-functioning salivary glands.
But researchers now believe it might one day be possible to regenerate the damaged glands by stimulating the growth of nerve tissue in the organs.
The observation that nerve cells play a key role in the proper functioning of salivary glands was made about a hundred years ago in famous experiments by Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov, according to Jason Rock, a biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
"He had these dogs and he would rings a bell and then feed them," he said. "And then eventually they made such a strong association there that they could salivate without having any food present just by hearing this bell. And I think that what he did is actually to cut the nerve and show that they didn't do this. So, it was a very physiological thing where they had to have neuronal input coming into the nerve to stimulate that salivation."
In experiments with mice, Matthew Hoffman, a biologist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and his colleagues found that nerve cells stimulate the growth of salivary glands early in fetal development.
"Really what we discovered was that the nerves that are present around the gland as it is developing are actually influencing the progenitor, or stem cells, as the glands develop. And we could potentially use that in a regenerative complex in the adult," he said.
Just as Pavlov's dogs stopped salivating when their nerves were cut, Hoffman says investigators found fetal salivary glands stopped growing when they removed the surrounding nerves.
Hoffman says teams of researchers from around the world have been investigating stem cell therapy as a way to regenerate salivary glands and restore function, but without much success.
"They're sort of operating a bit in the dark because they don't really know which cells it is they should be trying to maintain or purify," he said. "And so our work has really led us to identify [a] particular sub-population of cells that are in the gland that respond to the nerve and are involved in forming the tissue and likely involved in regenerating the tissue."
Hoffman envisions taking salivary tissue samples from cancer patients before they undergo radiation therapy, isolating and culturing the surrounding nerve tissue and then reintroducing the cells at a later time to begin the process of regeneration.
An article on the role of nerve cells in salivary gland development, and commentary by Duke University Jason Rock, are published in the journal Science.
Actor Michael Douglas has become the international face of throat cancer since he announced he had the disease. The actor says his doctors give him an 80 percent chance of beating the cancer.
Michael Douglas didn't speak to reporters at the premiere of his latest film.
The actor was mute as he posed with other members of the cast. The Academy Award-winning actor is being treated for throat cancer.
More than half a million cases of head and neck cancer are diagnosed each year worldwide. Most are in developing countries. They include cancers of the nose, mouth, throat and larynx or voice box.
Dr. Michael Benninger at the Cleveland Clinic describes the warning signs of throat cancer. "A good rule of thumb is an unexplained hoarseness, particularly in a smoker, that lasts for longer than two to four weeks should be evaluated, so that's a good rule. Painful swallowing that persists should be evaluated," he said.
Symptoms of Throat Cancer
Abnormal (high-pitched) breathing sounds
Cough
Coughing up blood
Difficulty swallowing
Hoarseness that does not get better in 1 - 2 weeks
Neck pain
Sore throat that does not get better in 1 - 2 weeks, even with antibiotics
Swelling or lumps in the neck
Unintentional weight loss
A new study from the National Cancer Institute finds that many head and neck cancers are the direct result of smoking. The study followed almost half a million people for five years. They found that men were more likely to be diagnosed with head and neck cancers than women. Heavy tobacco and alcohol use are the top risk factors.
Dr. Sat Parmar of University Hospital of Birmingham in Britain says heavy drinking and smoking dramatically increases the risk of getting these cancers. "If you smoke and drink heavily, your risk of getting mouth cancer is about 26 times that of a non smoker and a non drinker," he said.
Michael Douglas is getting a combination of chemotherapy and radiation, but treatment can also include surgery.
The latest technique involves robotic surgery. Dr. Tod Huntley likes it because the surgery is performed through the throat without making an outside incision. "It doesn't involve nearly the trauma to the surrounding tissues, and for many select tumors in this area, it allows for complete removal...often without a tracheotomy (a cut or opening is made in the windpipe or trachea) and generally without a feeding tube," he said.
With robotic surgery, patients spend less time in a hospital, have a faster recovery and avoid scarring and facial deformities. To reduce the risk of getting head or neck cancers, doctors the world over advise people to stay away from smoking and heavy drinking.
If you've ever hurt yourself - bumped a leg or arm while walking, maybe - you might have instinctively grabbed the place that hurt, and that seemed to ease the pain. Now, new research on pain and self touch explores why that is.
To study the phenomenon, European researchers used a variation of what's known as the thermal grill illusion. It's a quirk of sensation that if you warm your second and fourth fingers and chill the middle finger, that cold finger will paradoxically feel hot, painfully hot.
That's useful for scientific experiments because the pain is real, but isn't caused by any actual harm.
In this study, people in the experiment put both hands through the thermal grill illusion, then touched the three middle fingers on the two hands together. That produced a big reduction in the sensation of painful heat, which earlier studies predicted.
But researcher Marjolein Kammers of University College London says the pain reduction came only when they touched their own fingers. When they were touched by another person who had also gone through the thermal grill experience, their finger felt just as hot.
And this was interesting, she said, because in terms of low-level feedback to the brain, you get similar touch and thermal feedback. The only difference is, is that it's not self-touch. And that made us realize that it's about integrating both hands into a more coherent representation of the body.
Kammers says pain can result from confusion in what she describes as the brain's representation of the body. She illustrates the concept with the often severe pain amputees report feeling in their missing limb.
The best example of what can happen when the body representation is disturbed is phantom limb pain, where one hypothesis is that the brain needs to be updated with a representation of the body. So the body has lost a limb, but the brain still represents it as being present. And this mismatch can cause pain.
In an interview via Skype, Kammers says if she and her colleagues get a better understanding of the power of self-touch to ease pain, it might become part of pain treatment.
That's the ultimate goal. That would be great if that would be possible.
And Kammers says she does think that may be possible. Her study on the effect of touch, specifically self-touch, on pain, is published in Current Biology.
A new study shows community health workers can effectively and safely treat malaria and pneumonia with just a little bit of extra training.
In many rural areas throughout sub-Saharan Africa, an important primary medical resource is the network of volunteer community health workers. They have limited training — perhaps six weeks — and may dispense some medicines, while referring harder cases to other clinics and hospitals.
When these health workers see children with fever, either malaria and pneumonia could be the cause, so many patients get the wrong treatment.
In this study, conducted in Zambia, some community health workers were trained to use rapid diagnostic tests, which can confirm a malaria case in minutes. The result was a dramatic reduction in the inappropriate use of malaria drugs, says the study's leader, Boston University professor Kojo Yeboah-Antwi.
If you ask community health workers to do a rapid diagnosis test, and based on the results, give treatment for malaria, there is a four times reduction in the use of the expensive malaria drugs, he said in a telephone interview.
Not only does that save money, but it also reduces the risk of the malaria parasite developing resistance to the medicine, which has happened repeatedly with other malaria drugs.
With pneumonia, the problem was not giving the wrong drug, but giving any drug at all. In Zambia and many other countries in the region, community health workers are not allowed to prescribe antibiotics, which means that a child who has pneumonia will have to be referred to the nearest health facility to receive antibiotics. And that is a big challenge for people who are not close to health facilities.
Yeboah-Antwi says officials have been reluctant to allow community health workers to administer antibiotics. But the researcher says his study shows the minimally trained community volunteers did a good job managing and administering the drugs.
Most countries say that the policy is that community health workers should not be giving antibiotics to treat pneumonia at the community level. That policy needs to change!
Kojo Yeboah-Antwi says the success of community health workers in treating malaria and pneumonia in Zambia also suggests a greater role for community-based treatments of other major diseases of children.
His study appears in PloS Medicine, an open access journal published by the Public Library of Science.
Getting a flu shot can help prevent influenza. But now, a large study in Britain indicates that older adults who get an annual flu vaccination are less likely to suffer a heart attack.
The study involved more than 78,000 people, age 40 and older.
"Our research suggests that flu shots are associated with a reduction in relative risk of heart attack in adults by about 19 percent," says Niroshan Siriwardena, a researcher at Britain's University of Lincoln who led the study. . The reduction was even higher - 21 percent - for people who got their vaccination early in the flu season.
The results were mathematically adjusted to reflect the fact that people who are at higher risk for heart attack in the first place are more likely to get a flu shot.
Although Siriwardena is careful to point out that his study is one of associations, not necessarily cause-and-effect, he does offer one possible link between the seemingly unrelated conditions of influenza and heart attack.
"The key theory is that [in] coronary arteries which are narrowed, that influenza causes an inflammatory process, which makes the plaques more liable to rupture," says Siriwardena. "So flu is encouraging plaque rupture and triggering off a heart attack. That's the theory."
For a lot of people, the message of this study is that now there's one more reason to get a flu vaccination. But Siriwardena the scientist has a slightly different analysis.
"The take-home message of this study is really that we need to do further research to look at this link between flu and heart attack to see whether there's a real cause-and-effect here."
For most people around the world, sitting around a hot stove, waiting for a delicious meal is a highlight of the day. But in places without reliable electricity, people are exposed to dangerous levels of smoke that, over time, have devastating consequences.
This week in New York, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the founding of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a public-private partnership set up to encourage the production and use of more efficient stoves.
"As we meet here in New York, women are cooking dinner for their families in homes and villages around the world," Clinton said. "As many as three billion people are gathering around open fires or old and inefficient stoves in small kitchens and poorly ventilated houses."
She also pointed out that inefficient stoves that burn coal, wood or other fuel can produce enormous amounts of airborne toxins that slowly poison entire families.
"The results of daily exposure can be devastating. Pneumonia, the number one killer of children worldwide, chronic respiratory diseases, lung cancer and a range of other health problems are the consequence," said Clinton.
There have been efforts in the past to distribute cleaner, more efficient stoves to communities suffering from respiratory problems. But those attempts largely failed, mainly because cooks can be picky about their stoves, said Leslie Cordes, Senior Director for Partnership Development for the U.N Foundation, which is part of the Global Alliance.
"Often those efforts did not take into account local conditions, local preferences, regional cooking preferences or styles and other very important factors that determine whether the stoves are actually used, "Cordes said. "Somebody who is cooking tortillas in Mexico or Guatemala is not going to find acceptable a stove that has been developed for a Cambodian market that cooks rice."
To solve the problem of regional preferences in stove design, Cordes said the alliance will not be handing out stoves. Rather it will encourage private industry to create inexpensive appliances for the local market.
"What we're trying to do is to help create that thriving market condition for the development and adoption of clean cook stoves," she said. "We're looking at the development of innovative financing schemes for promoting theses stoves and making them more affordable. We're looking at awareness campaigns and consumer outreach."
The goal is to have the safer stoves in 100 million homes by 2020. Cordes said attaining that goal would have a dramatic effect on life expectancies around the world.
"The World Health Organization estimates that half of all deaths from pneumonia in children under five could be prevented with the use of clean stoves. In some areas, some women breathe about the equivalent of two packs of cigarettes a day from that smoke."
Contributors to the alliance include private foundations, the World Health Organization and two United Nations agencies. Several agencies of the U.S government are also taking part in the program as are the governments of Germany, Norway and the Netherlands.
The Clinton Global Initiative has concluded its annual meeting in New York with multi-billion dollar commitments from participants to help address problems of poverty, disease and injustice around the world.
Former President Bill Clinton told the CGI's final plenary session that the organization has garnered more than 1,950 commitments now valued at $63 billion impacting just under 300 million lives in about 170 countries.
Former Microsoft chairman Bill Gates told Mr. Clinton on stage he is worried rich countries may cut back on foreign aid in the aftermath of the global economic crisis.
"The money they spend, let's say, on Millennium Development goals - AIDS, medicines, vaccines, food, those things - will that suffer disproportionately when there's a change?"
CGI's ambitious global agenda seeks, among other things, to help empower women, to prevent human trafficking, to spread knowledge through computer technology, to fight global warming and support public health, including the removal of stigmas in some countries attached to such diseases as cancer.
Poverty of knowledge was mentioned at several CGI forums. Speaking at a news conference on the empowerment of women, Ann Cotton, director of Camfed International, said computers can address the lack of awareness that underpins many social problems.
"Give people technology and they will run with it," she said. "They will be excited by it, it improves their status; it particularly improves the status of girls and women."
The keynote speaker at the final CGI plenary, First Lady Michelle Obama, devoted her entire speech to American military veterans. She called on CGI participants involved in non-governmental humanitarian aid to hire veterans. She said they face serious social problems of their own, including unemployment, noting they leave the military with excellent experience.
"They go on regular humanitarian missions throughout the world, providing everything from food aid to medical care to help with construction," she said.
President Clinton ended the meeting with a discourse on optimism and pessimism by drawing an analogy to physics. He said supercolliders have shown there are more positive particles on a subatomic level than negative ones. He said people owe it to the next generation to make certain positive human forces outweigh the negative ones of violence and squalor.
A healthcare center in Liberia is operating on women affected by devastating cases of fistula and providing them with the skills they need to go back to work after surgery.
Fistula is common in Liberia. It is a gynecological condition usually caused by complications during childbirth, but it can also affect victims of rape, very young mothers, and those who have undergone female circumcision. The consequences of the condition are not only embarrassing, but can be life-threatening.
"Fistula is an abnormal communication between the vagina and the bladder, or between the vagina and the rectum, and this condition will lead to continuous leakage. Usually it is a result of a difficult delivery," explained Obstetric Gynecologist John Mulbah.
At the Liberian Fistula Rehabilitation Center on the outskirts of Monrovia, women from all over the country undergo surgery and learn new skills to equip them for life after fistula.
"We have made a lot of improvements to the fistula program. We started in 2007 and since this time we have operated on over 600 patients," said Angie Tarr, a program assistant at the center.
She says the shame and stigma that surrounds fistula has discouraged women from admitting that they suffer from the condition. Some are even unaware that their illness has a medical name.
"You are so ashamed and then you shy away. You keep yourself away and friends don't come around," added Tarr.
Following surgery, patients - some of whom are as young as 11 years old - go to a rehabilitation center where they are taught basic skills like pastry-making, hairdressing and needlework.
"After the surgery we encourage you to come to the rehab center. You choose for yourself if you want to do pastry or cosmetology, whatever you like," she explained.
One participant, who wished to remain anonymous because of the stigma of fistula, said she is enjoying the classes. "I chose the pastry class because I wanted to learn to bake. I enjoy the class because my teacher teaches well," she said.
All materials are supplied and transport to and from classes is paid for. Women who come from villages outside of Monrovia are escorted home by a representative from the center. Tarr said the rehabilitation center restores self-confidence that is often eroded by the effects of fistula and the damage that the condition causes to marriages and friendships.
Every year, one million women around the world are diagnosed with breast cancer, and almost 200,000 others are told they have ovarian cancer. The decisions for treatment are more difficult when the women carry genetic mutations called BRCA1 and 2, mutations that could also increase a woman's risk for cervical, uterine, pancreatic and other cancers. A recent study shows that women who undergo preventive surgery reduce their risk for breast and ovarian cancers.
Sandra Cohen has never had breast or ovarian cancer, but she had surgery to remove her breasts and ovaries. She made the decision to undergo surgery after her grandmother and mother both died from the same type of cancers.
"It's kind of like you are sitting on a time bomb waiting for cancer to occur," she says, "and it really does a number on you mentally to deal with that every single day."
Doctors have known for years that preventive surgery reduces the risk of ovarian and breast cancer for women like Cohen who carry the BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations.
But a recent study also shows the surgery helps those patients live much longer.
Dr. Susan Domchek at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine co-authored a four-year study of about 2,500 women with the genetic mutations BRCA1 and BRCA2.
"Women who had their ovaries removed had a decrease in the risk of breast cancer, a decrease in the risk of ovarian cancer, and in addition, they were less likely to die of breast cancer," she explains, "less likely to die of ovarian cancer and also had an improvement in their overall survival."
None of the women who had preventive mastectomies developed breast cancer. Seven percent of those who refused the surgery were later diagnosed with the disease.
The rate of breast cancer among women who had ovaries removed was also much lower (one percent) than for those who did not have the surgery (seven percent).
The study also showed that women who had ovarian surgery dramatically reduced their risk of death from ovarian cancer by almost 80 percent and from breast cancer by 56 percent.
"Our conclusion is that removing the ovaries particularly is very beneficial to women with BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations," Dr. Domcheck said.
The researchers concluded that women with a strong family history of breast or ovarian cancers should be encouraged to get genetic testing.
Sandra Cohen was tested, and she has advice for others with a similar history. "Do some research with a genetic counselor. Meet other women who have gone through it. It really will empower you," she says, "and give you the strength to take some action."
The study appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
A new study on the effectiveness of X-ray mammography to screen for breast cancer in women found that mammograms resulted in only a slight, 10-percent decrease in deaths from the disease.
The study involved just over 40,000 Norwegian women, between the ages of 50 and 69, who were part of a breast cancer screening program. In addition to their participation in a breast cancer management program, women underwent screening mammography every two years, between 1996 and 2005.
Their outcomes were compared to women in other countries who were also part of a breast cancer education and management program but did not have mammograms. Researchers found that the group that underwent mammography only had a 10 percent reduced risk of death from breast cancer compared to the women who weren't X-rayed.
Marvin Zelen is with Harvard University School of Public Health in Boston and a co-author of the study:
"Our findings are controversial because most physicians and investigators have felt that the reduction in breast cancer mortality rate would be much larger," said Marvin Zelen. "And we were surprised ourselves."
Zelen says it's unclear why mammograms were not more effective in reducing the death rate from breast cancer over the 10-year period.
"But of course there were advances made in treatment over this period of time which may have been responsible for a reduction in breast cancer mortality, as well as perhaps the population is more sensitized to any anomalies occurring in the breast," he said.
The findings are likely to add fuel to a fire that began last year, when an independent study group in the United States, called the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, recommended against routine mammograms for women beginning at age 40.
Instead, the panel recommended routine screening should begin at age 50, when women are at a significantly higher risk of developing the disease.
The panel's critics argued that encouraging women under 50 to skip routine mammograms could result in many more undetected cases of breast cancer and more unnecessary deaths from the disease.
Zelen acknowledges the Norwegian study might now raise questions in the United States about the benefits of screening for breast cancer in women in their fifties.
But he says the study was not intended solely to evaluate the benefits of mammography alone.
"We're evaluating this program to reduce the mortality in Norway," said Zelen. "So, if a lot of women didn't participant in the program, it would not be a very good program, even though the diagnostic mortality would be very good. In this situation, about 77 percent of women who were given an invitation did participate in the program."
An article on the effectiveness of mammograms in preventing breast cancer deaths in Norway is published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
An international HIV/AIDS advocacy group says the United Nations has failed the women of the Democratic Republic of Congo. AIDS-Free World says it's time for the U.N. to stop passing resolutions on the Congo and take action.
The estimated number of rapes in the DRC since 1996 range anywhere from 200,000 to about 600,000. Recently, during a five-day period in July and August, at least 500 women, children and men were raped and ganged raped by rebels in the eastern part of the country. It happened even though U.N. peacekeeping troops were camped just a few miles away.
AIDS-Free World Co-Director Paula Donovan says despite troops, resources and good intentions, the United Nations offers little or no protection to women.
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"In every single aspect of its work," she says, "the United Nations has failed the women of the Congo. It seems never to reach a top priority and sustain its place at the top of the U.N.'s concerns for any period of time. Something like the recent spate of rapes occurs. It's in the headlights for a couple of days and then it just disappears."
Donovan says plans to deal with the problem are just "sitting on shelves."
"If the U.N. just went back to those shelves and pulled out and dusted off every resolution that it has agreed upon since 1996 – including, importantly, one that was agreed five years ago this week – the responsibility to protect – and act on them, then we could have some hope that the women of the Congo would actually be protected by more than just goodwill and words," she says.
She says despite the deaths of millions of people and the rapes of hundreds of thousands since 1996, the DRC seems easy to forget.
"It's not a strategic country for most of the Western world as far as trade and so forth are concerned. Although the mining operations that are at the core of the problems in the DRC yield all sorts of minerals and other things that the Western world relies upon and wants. It's just very easy to ignore the DRC because war in the DRC poses no immediate threat to the Western world, which holds the power and basically decides where we'll intervene and where we'll turn a blind eye," she says.
She says one way to help drive out and track rebels and militias in the Eastern DRC is to use helicopters.
"Deploy the appropriate number of helicopters. Deploy the numbers that you would send to an earthquake or to a conflict in a wealthier country. Just 14, 15, couple dozen helicopters, would frighten these militias," she says, adding, "They're not organized. They can't really even be called armies, they're so ragtag. And this would be something that I would think almost immediately demonstrate to the militias that now the opposing forces are in charge.
The AIDS-Free World co-director says the sexual violence in the DRC is based on a "foundation of extraordinary discrimination against women."
In recent testimony, the U.N. assistant secretary-general for peacekeeping, Atul Khare, said, "While the primary responsibility for protection of civilians lies with the state, its national army and police force, clearly, we have also failed."
He added, "Our actions were not adequate, resulting in unacceptable brutalization of the population of the villages in the area. We must do better."
The United Nations is instituting more night patrols and random checks on villages. It will also improve communication in areas where there is no mobile phone coverage by installing high frequency radio transmitters.
Rape is frequently used as a weapon of war in the Eastern DRC to terrorize and demoralize populations.
Millennium Development Goals, set by the United Nations 10 years ago, include initiatives to protect the environment, increase development aid, open the global trading and financial system, promote equality for women, and reduce maternal mortality by three-quarters and child mortality by two-thirds. Accomplishing these goals has been the responsibility of more than 180 countries which agreed in 2000, at the original Millennium Development Goals summit, to work with public and private groups to achieve success on behalf of the world's needy.
One of the non-governmental organizations which has been working with world leaders to implement the eight Millennium Development Goals, is the U.S.-based Save the Children. The international independent organization works in 120 countries on all seven continents providing support to more than 60 million children and millions of others, including caregivers, community members, local organizations and government agencies.
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VOA spoke with Michael Klosson, a former U.S. Ambassador and longtime advocate for children, who is now Vice President for Policy and Humanitarian Response for Save the Children.
Full VOA interview with Michael Klosson of Save the Children:
VOA: The Millennium Development Goals, also known and MDGs, are not necessarily known to everyone, but Save the Children, we understand, believes the goals affect everyone.
Michael Klosson:The Millennium Development Goals are an agenda that world leaders put together to guide action when they convened the first Millennium Goals Summit in 2000. They set eight goals that are aimed at helping people in the developing world lift themselves up. They are based on a partnership with 189 governments which have subscribed to them.
It is very important, at the New York summit that we assess progress that has been made and the challenges which we face, and define a way forward to energize people so we can actually achieve the Millennium Development Goals.
VOA: What can the private sector, organizations such as Save the Children, do to make sure the Millennium Development Goals are accomplished?
Michael Klosson: NGOs (non-governmental organizations), such as Save the Children work on the community level in a lot of countries. Improving the survival rates of children is what we are about. We have the kind of knowledge of what will prevent children from getting the diseases in the developing world. We pass this knowledge onto trained community health workers in the countries where we work. That is one of the ways we can help advance the MDGs.
In Bangladesh, for instance, there are community health workers who are usually women in their 20s. They have not been to college, yet they can be trained so they can play a dramatic role in reducing the health care of children.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon says he has a particular interest in Millennium Goals Four and Five which deal specifically with newborns and mothers in need around the world.
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That is where organizations such as Save the Children come into the story. Mary Beth Powers, Chief of Save the Children's Newborn and Child Survival Campaign, attended the U.N. summit. VOA also spoke with her.
VOA: Is Save the Children involved in promoting the goal to launch a new nutrition movement which experts believe could save 2.7 million children a year?
Full VOA interview with Mary Beth Powers of Save the Children:
Mary Beth Powers: Nutrition is critical for newborns and mothers in the first thousand days of a child's life. Breast feeding, of instance, is a critical intervention. If regular breast feeding were done by mothers in all developing countries we could reduce about 13 percent, or more than one million children, who die every year. Breast feeding protects a child against infection, as well as being the best nutrition for a baby.
We are very concerned about the focus on nutrition which is part of Millennium Goal One. We are excited that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others are supporting new initiatives to pay more attention to how countries are performing on nutrition indicators around the world and measure the resulting reduction in child malnutrition.
VOA: Since private groups, such as Save the Children and others have limited resources, so you rely upon health care professionals in country accomplish your goals?
Mary Beth Powers: A big part of Save the Children's campaign for Millennium Goals Four and Five is to train more health workers. We train community members to diagnose and treat the biggest killers of children such as pneumonia and diarrhea.
We also train community midwives in countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan where it is really important to have a woman from the community who is skilled at delivering babies and can recognize complications and seek appropriate care for newborns and mothers. It is really important that ministries of health have enough health workers. We are about four million health workers short around the world.
For more information about the Millennium Development Goals, go to the United Nations website: www.un.org/millenniumgoals.
Dutch and German physicians say a new experimental drug may dramatically reduce brain damage in patients who have suffered a stroke.
Doctors from Maastricht University in the Netherlands and Wurzburg University in Germany say the drug has been very effective in preventing serious brain damage in mice, even when given hours after a stroke, and this gives them hope it can be effective in humans as well. If so, it would be a major new weapon against strokes, which kill nearly 6 million people worldwide every year.
The new drug, developed by the German biotechnology firm Vaspharm, inhibits a specific enzyme that the scientists say is responsible for brain damage in stroke victims.
Most strokes are caused by blood clots or other blockages that cut the flow of blood to the brain. Only one drug, tPA, presently exists to treat ischemic strokes (caused by blood clots); it can dissolve blood clots, but is only effective if administered within three hours of a stroke.
Some information for this report was provided by Reuters.
Dry water made some waves at a recent American Chemical Society meeting in Boston. The substance looks a lot like fine white sand, which isn't surprising since what makes it dry is that each tiny water droplet is covered with water-repelling silica, the stuff of ordinary beach sand.
The coating makes it impossible for the water molecules to recombine and turn back into a liquid. And the fine powder that results can bond chemically with gases and form useful compounds called hydrates. And it's easy to make says University of Liverpool researcher Ben Carter, "by blending silicon and water together at high speeds."
Dry water is nothing new. Patented in 1968, it captured interest early on for its potential in the cosmetics industry. But in recent years Carter and his colleagues have focused on some important new uses for dry water's unique properties, beginning with its ability to bond with methane. They're hopeful that might someday provide a safer way to store methane fuel in natural gas-powered vehicles.
"Methane hydrate was our particular target, as the improved storage and transport of methane as natural gas is a key part of its development as a greener alternative to other fossil fuels," Carter says. "We've gone on to show that the same can be done with CO2, forming a CO2 hydrate, which will store three times as much CO2 in the same time using dry water as you would with bulk water."
Carter says that, because it can absorb such large amounts of carbon dioxide, the dry-water hydrate could prove to be an effective method for reducing climate-changing gases in the atmosphere. Carter says other lab experiments indicate that dry water could be made more recyclable by adding a gelling agent to the water before it is blended. "And this dry gel is more robust and capable of going through multiple cycles of gas uptake and release."
The chemists also see environmental benefits in dry water's use in the manufacture of drugs, foods ingredients and other consumer products.
Lab tests suggest it could greatly speed up the catalytic reactions involved in making these goods, and permit greener, more energy-efficient chemical processing. They also believe the dry water technology shows promise as a way of safely storing and shipping potentially harmful liquids, by transforming them into a dry, stable powder.
Carter and colleagues discussed these and other applications for dry water at a recent meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston.
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton has opened the Clinton Global Initiative, an annual gathering of world leaders, businesspeople, NGOs and philanthropic organizations who seek to improve the lives of people worldwide.
Sixty-seven current or former heads of states, more than 600 business leaders, and about 500 heads of NGOs and philanthropic organizations have gathered in New York to collaborate on ways of helping the poor, cleaning the environment, empowering women and improving health care and education. Speaking at the opening session, former President Clinton said the efforts of participants are not enough.
"Obviously, even though I think you're immensely talented, it cannot be that all of the people we need working in the way we came here to work, are in this room today," Mr. Clinton said. "We need to constantly be thinking about how we can get more people back home to do it."
Mr. Clinton said the Initiative will support ordinary people anywhere who have ideas on how to address the world's problems, including the oppression of women, human trafficking, trash disposal, and youth unemployment.
The CGI will be discussing these and other problems like severe diarrhea caused by unsafe drinking water. Every day, it claims the lives of 4,000 children worldwide. Robert McDonald, the head of Proctor and Gamble, says a $.10 package can clean that water.
"We've had this program for six years, "Children's Safe Drinking Water," with these little pure packets that clean up one liter of water," McDonald explained.
McDonald committed his company to saving one life per hour by increasing distribution of the packets to two-billion every year.
Speaking at a follow-up session, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced a $60 million public-private initiative to prevent exposure to smoke from stoves and cooking fires that cause two million deaths a year - one life every 16 seconds.
Mr. Clinton is asking for commitments, big and small, from companies and ordinary people. He framed the larger CGI agenda, focusing on the empowerment of women and solutions to long-term problems in areas hard-hit hit by natural disasters -- Haiti, Pakistan and the U.S. Gulf Coast.
"There is every reason to believe that the incidence of economically-devastating natural disasters will accelerate around the world with the changing of the climate," he said.
On Thursday, President Barack Obama will introduce First Lady Michelle Obama who will address the final plenary session.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other dignitaries are urging a renewed effort to reduce childhood malnutrition. They met Tuesday in New York City on the sidelines of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals summit for what was billed as a 1,000 Days forum.
Each year, 3.5 million mothers, and children under age five, die as a result of malnutrition. Millions of other children suffer chronic effects of poor early nutrition.
A new effort is underway to save them. < br />At the "1,000 Days" forum, high-level political and private sector officials focused on steps to ensure healthy nutrition for mother and child during the first 1,000 days of life.
"These interventions have the biggest impact when they occur in the first 1,000 days of a child's existence. That begins with pregnancy and continues through a child's second birthday," Clinton said.
She challenged nations to reach benchmarks for improving the health of pregnant women and young children around the world. "Let today be the first of our own one-thousand days. One thousand days of focused, concerted efforts to translate our common knowledge and vision into concrete action and then build momentum."
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon cited the critical role of early proper nutrition in the survival of the world's children. "Undernourished children are more likely to get sick. They cannot concentrate in school and often earn less as adults. They pay the price throughout their lives," he said.
Mr. Ban also said poor women often do not eat enough nutrient-rich foods during their pregnancy, and many are too busy working in fields or markets to properly care for their children.
The United Nations Millennium Development Goals seek to dramatically reduce a range of social ills, including hunger and poverty, by 2015.
The total worldwide costs of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease, rose to more than $600 billion this year, according to a report issued by the World Alzheimer's Association.
The study estimates 35.6 million people were diagnosed worldwide in 2010 with dementia, notably Alzheimer's disease, at a cost of $605 billion in care and treatment for patients, as well as lost productivity of those with the disease and caregivers.
According to the study, 46 percent of people with dementia live in high income countries, almost 40 percent in middle income countries and 14 percent in low income countries.
Experts say the number of Alzheimer's cases will likely double during the next 20 years to 65.7 million in 2030 and to more than 115 million cases in 2050.
President of the Alzheimer's Association Harry Johns says the societal cost of Alzheimer's will skyrocket in the next 40 years, and yet there is relatively little funding for research in the world and the United States, which carries the highest burden.
"Alzheimer's research funding is at $469 million and that is up against that $172 billion it is costing us today for dementia care alone," he said. "And by the middle of the century, if we can not change the course of the disease, the cost of care annually will exceed one trillion dollars, that is cost us one trillion dollars, that is with a "t.'" It will cost us one trillion dollars."
Alzheimer's disease is a progressive neurological disorder caused by the death brain cells that robs people of their memory, thinking and cause erratic behavior. The incurable disease eventually leads to incapacitation and death.
Johns says Alzheimers is usually associated with people in their seventies and eighties. But he says the number of people under age 65 getting diagnosed with the disease is increasing as the population of many countries goes up and some of the economies of lower and middle countries improve.
Johns says it is important for people to get diagnosed early in the course of the illness.
"Diagnosis can mean a difference in their functional lives even though we do not have a treatment today that slows or stops the disease," he said. "Diagnosis can make a difference in their lives because of the drugs that are available, diagnosis is a positive."
Johns encourages anyone interesting in learning about the early signs of Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia to go to the World Alzheimer's Association's website.
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