Biology – Page 22

03.15.2013

adults cured of HIV

HIV Medications

A new report in PLoS Pathogens reports that in 14 adults are have been functionally cured of HIV. This comes after a Mississippi baby was miraculously cured of HIV because of early treatment. Early antiretroviral treatment seems to be important in these cases as well. From a summary in The New Scientist:

Asier Sáez-Cirión of the Pasteur Institute’s unit for regulation of retroviral infections in Paris analysed 70 people with HIV who had been treated with antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) between 35 days and 10 weeks after infection – much sooner than people are normally treated.

All of the participants’ drug regimes had been interrupted for one reason or another. For example, some people had made a personal choice to stop taking the drugs, others had been part of a trial of different drug protocols.

Most of the 70 people relapsed when their treatment was interrupted, with the virus rebounding rapidly to pre-treatment levels. But 14 of them – four women and 10 men – were able to stay off of ARVs without relapsing, having taken the drugs for an average of three years.

The 14 adults still have traces of HIV in their blood, but at such low levels that their body can naturally keep it in check without drugs.

The 14 adults are not naturally resistant to HIV infection and are not currently taking any medication to control their HIV.

03.15.2013

is the paleo diet scientific?

The paleo diet recommends eating a diet rich in meats, seafood, vegetables, fruits, and nuts while avoiding refined grains and sugars. The thinking is that the human body is best served on a diet that mimics what hunter-gatherers ate. Laura Miller argues that the diet is not scientific in Salon:

For this reason, generalizations about the typical hunter-gatherer lifestyle are spurious; it doesn’t exist. With respect to what people ate (especially how much meat), the only safe assumption was “whatever they could get,” something that to this day varies greatly depending on where they live. Recently, researchers discovered evidence that people in Europe were grinding and cooking grain (a paleo-diet bugaboo) as far back as 30,000 years ago, even if they weren’t actually cultivating it. “A strong body of evidence,” Zuk writes, “points to many changes in our genome since humans spread across the planet and developed agriculture, making it difficult at best to point to a single way of eating to which we were, and remain, best suited.”…

Furthermore, the fossil record of the Stone Age is so small and necessarily incomplete that its ability to tell us about paleolithic society is severely limited. Consider this: For all we know, the first tools were not stone implements but woven slings designed to allow a mother to carry an infant while foraging; it’s just that stone happens to survive longer than fibers.

03.14.2013

carbon dioxide, the ocean and mussels

Mussels.

Scientific American reports on the plight of mussels. The ocean is becoming more acidic as man-made carbon dioxide emissions continue to increase. This is having a devastating effect on mussels, making them weaker than before. From the article:

The strength of a mussel, the shellfish’s ability to grasp tightly to rocks, docks and ships despite crashing waves or prying fingers, is legendary. Scientists have even studied how mussels, using slender fibers called byssal threads that are simultaneously hard and stretchy, are able to cling so tight in a rough, wet environment, in hopes that humans could mimic that technology to create strong, flexible textiles.

Now, climate change is impairing that ability to cling. Researcher Michael O’Donnell, an ecologist at the University of Washington, has shown that ocean acidification, a process in which absorbing large amounts of carbon dioxide lowers the pH of oceans, is weakening mussels’ byssal threads.

O’Donnell and his colleagues took bay mussels from San Juan Island, in the Puget Sound, and put them in chambers with seawater at different pH levels. They found that the mussel byssal threads grown in acidified conditions with a pH lower than 7.6 were 40 percent weaker than normal. The research was published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

GOLLYGEE!

Category: Biology (page 22 of 63)

adults cured of HIV

is the paleo diet scientific?

carbon dioxide, the ocean and mussels