Cost of TB in Europe reported
to be in the billions of euros


Europe is facing a multi-billion-euro time bomb of rising costs to control tuberculosis as drug-resistant forms of the lung disease spread, a pioneering study found.
 
Often thought of as a disease of the past or one restricted to marginalized communities, TB is already inflicting annual direct costs of more than 500 million euros on the region and another 5.3 billion euros in productivity losses.
 
The study, by health economists based in Germany, also suggests the economic burden of TB far outweighs the likely costs of investing in much-needed research to develop more effective medicines and vaccines — something they said governments and the drug industry should do urgently.
 
"We know that new drugs and vaccines are very expensive, but if you take these costs into consideration, then everything is justified," said Roland Diel, a health economics professor at Germany's University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein in Kiel, who led the study.
 
The emergence of strains of that can't be treated with even the most powerful of drugs has turned TB into one of the world's most pressing health problems.
 
According to the World Health Organization, TB infected 8.7 million people worldwide in 2011 and killed 1.4 million. As many as two million people may have drug-resistant strains by 2015, the Geneva-based health agency says.
 
Treating even typical TB is a long process. Patients need to take a cocktail of antibiotics for six months and many fail to complete the treatment. That, alongside overuse and misuse of antibiotics, has fueled the emergence of multidrug-resistant TB  and extensively drug resistant strains.
 
For this study, published online in the European Respiratory Journal today and the first of its kind, researchers used a systematic review of literature and institutional Web sites for the 27 EU member states to summarize data on TB treatment costs in 2011.
 
They split the countries into two groups based on gross domestic product per person.
 
For the old EU 15 countries plus Cyprus, Malta and Slovenia, the average direct cost per case of typical TB was 10,282 euros ($13,600), but was more than 57,200 euros for multidrug-resistant cases and more than 170,700 euros for extensively drug resistant cases. For the remaining EU states, average costs were 3,427 euros for standard treatable TB and around 24,100 euros for drug-resistant cases.
 
The total treatment cost of all TB cases in 2011 was 536,890,315 euros ($712.26 million).
 
While the number of drug-resistant TB cases in Europe is currently only a tiny fraction of the total of around 70,000 cases per year, Diel said that would swiftly change.
 
"It's a time bomb in terms of drug-resistant cases," he said in a telephone interview. "They are just a small fraction right now, but that will increase... so the costs will also rise."
 
Beyond the direct costs, Diel's team also calculated TB's impact in terms of the monetary value of lost productivity.
 
Using disability-adjusted life years  — a measure of disease burden that looks at the number of years lost due to ill-health, disability or early death — they found the total years lost was 103,104 in 2011. In monetary terms, this amounted to more than 5.3 billion euros.
 
Diel said this was the figure that shocked him the most.
 
"People assume that in most parts of Europe, TB doesn't play much of a role in comparison to other diseases. But, in fact, the costs of it are very high," he said. "It's billions, and nobody realized that before."
 
Responding to the findings, Francesco Blasi, president of the European Respiratory Society, said they showed the huge burden of TB on both the economy and on society in Europe.
 
"It is critical that healthcare professionals and policy makers take note," he said in a statement.


Space agency ends effort
to fix space telescope wheels


The U.S. space agency says it is ending its attempts to fix the Kepler space telescope after engineers failed to repair two of the spacecraft's four reaction wheels. One of the wheels broke down in July of last year, while the second malfunctioned this past May.
 
NASA made the announcement Thursday, saying it is looking into whether the instrument can be used in a different capacity.
 
The telescope was launched in 2009 on a search for Earth-size planets in what is known as the habitable zone, the region between a star and planet in which temperatures would permit liquid water and possibly life.
 
But after the two wheels failed, deputy project manager Charles Sobeck said NASA is ending its attempts to restore the spacecraft to full working order. The decision to call off the repair efforts followed a test last week. The wheels are used to precisely point the spacecraft.
 
"We’ve since recovered the spacecraft from safe mode back to its point rest state where we use thrusters in a very fuel-efficient manner to control the spacecraft, keep it power positive, keep the communications link open," he said. "But the results of that show what we expected to see, that the wheels are sufficiently damaged that they cannot sustain spacecraft pointing control for any extended period of time."
 
Kepler has discovered 135 exoplanets and more than 3,500 planet candidates with a wide range of sizes and orbital distances.
 
The Kepler team is now focusing on analyzing the data collected by the spacecraft over the past four years.
 
Although the spacecraft will no longer operate with its unparalleled precision pointing, scientists expect Kepler’s most interesting discoveries are still to come.


Solar panels again going
on a roof at White House


The White House has started installing solar panels on the first family residence as part of an energy retrofit that will improve the efficiency of the building, a White House official said Thursday.
 
President Barack Obama in 2009 directed federal agencies to improve energy efficiency and increase the use of renewable energy, and in late 2010 pledged to put solar panels on the White House.
 
It is not the first time a solar system has been installed on the White House roof. President Jimmy Carter put panels up in 1979, but they were removed in 1986 during roof repairs made under President Ronald Reagan and never replaced.
 
A decade ago, President George W. Bush installed a small solar system on a maintenance shed that serves the White House grounds.
 
The official did not specify the manufacturer of the solar panels, but said they are American-made.


Backers of Syrian president
hack three news Web sites


The Web sites of three major U.S. news outlets have been hacked by supporters of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The Washington Post newspaper, CNN and Time magazine Thursday said hackers were redirecting certain news links to the Web site of the Syrian Electronic Army, a group that supports the Syrian president's regime. The media outlets say they have taken defensive measures and removed the offending module that caused their pages to be redirected.

The Syrian Electronic Army took credit for the attacks in a post on Twitter. Those who were hacked and the group that took credit say access to the sites was gained through hacking a recommendation service called Outbrain, which works closely with the news organizations.

Earlier this week, the Syrian Electronic Army hacked into the Facebook and Twitter accounts of the New York Post.

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The woman in the image most likely was in her late teens or early 20s when her likeness was preserved on this copper plate with finely polished silver in the mid-19th century.



The introduction of the daguerreotype in the 19th century ushered in the era of modern photography. Instead of sitting long hours for an artist to paint a portrait, customers could sit for just a few minutes while their true likeness was captured in what is now known as a photograph. Research scientists at the Smithsonian Institution are teaming up with physicists at Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago to study these earliest known photographs, which are in danger of being lost forever.

Daniel Weinberg, of the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago, has handled many such daguerreotypes, which are popular with collectors and historians alike.

“It was the first time you could go into a studio and have your photograph taken, and you could put it up somewhere and show it off,” he said. “They’re luminous, and they’re almost three dimensional, and you almost want to step into one.”

Weinberg also said daguerreotypes were one of a kind, not meant to be reproduced like current photographs. And although invented by a Frenchman, Louis Daguerre, they changed the American landscape in the mid-1800s.

“America really took off with the daguerreotype, and a vast majority of them were American,” said Weinberg.

“It spread like wildfire in the United States. There were hundreds of thousands of daguerreotypes made over a 20-year time span,” said Ed Vicenzi, research scientist at the Smithsonian Institution.

Many of the most important images now reside at the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, including the one of a mysterious young woman that research scientist Vicenzi whimsically calls “Clara,” although her real name is unknown.

“We don’t know her name, her family, the state she’s from,” he said.

What Vicenzi does know is the image from the past is in danger of being lost in the future unless something is done to stop the breakdown of its microscopic chemical makeup.

“So daguerreotypes are actually made up of a bunch of nanoparticles on the surface that scatter the light, and this is in some ways similar to the way technology devices are made today, so we’re also interested in what did 19th century photographers know about nanotechnology unwittingly,” he said.

Physicist Volker Rose is working with Vicenzi, at Argonne National Laboratory by focusing the intense X-rays of Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source at fragments of the daguerreotype.

“Those objects are almost 200 years old, and they were made at a time when the concept of nanotechnology, even the word at that time, didn’t exist,” he said.

“We can focus those X-rays down to very small spot sizes. This allows us to look very deep into material, but also get a lot of information on a very small length scale,” said Rose.

“The technology that’s available at the Advanced Photon Source will allow me to study the very early stages of degradation of daguerreotype plates. They corrode over time, but we need to learn the chemical mechanisms in order to understand how we can preserve these objects for the future,” said Vicenzi.

Vicenzi hopes his efforts at Argonne will provide the answers historians, preservationists and collectors seek to guide them in saving these images of the past - so future generations can study, understand and appreciate first-hand what life was like in the 19th century.


Small mammal in Andes
identified at last  by scientists


Scientists say they have found a new species of carnivore in the cloud forests of the Andes mountains in South America, the first discovery of its kind in more than 30 years.

The one-kilogram olinguito has big eyes and orange-brown fur, and it resembles both a cat and a cuddly, stuffed toy bear. The tree-dwelling creature shares its family roots with raccoons and kinkajous. 

It turns out that the olinguito was known to people, but misidentified for more than 100 years as the similar, but larger, olingo.  A team of researchers studying olingo specimens in museums noticed a difference in the size and shape of the heads and teeth, leading them on a quest to determine if this was a previously undescribed animal.

A zoologist in Ecuador captured a few seconds of video that showed an olinguito and confirmed its existence.

Humans are encroaching on the olinguitos' habitat in the Andean cloud forests.  The research team estimates that 42 percent of historic olinguito habitat has already been developed.
 
The findings are published in the journal ZooKeys.



Excessive U.S. drinking cost
is put at $220 billion a year


Excessive alcohol drinking costs Americans more than $220 billion a year, or almost $2 a drink. And the biggest costs come from a loss of worker productivity.
 
A new study used data from 2006 in a complicated analysis of different costs associated with excessive drinking. The researchers looked at results from around the United States and found a lot of variation in different parts of the country, but the numbers add up to a very expensive habit.
 
“The economic cost of excessive drinking was about $223.5 billion in 2006, which works out to be about $1.90 per drink, and over $700 per person,” says Robert Brewer, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a government public health agency.

Those alcohol-related costs include health care, the expense of prosecuting drinking-related crimes, and property damage from road accidents, for example. But Brewer says the biggest expense by far relates to lost productivity. People with a drinking problem tend to have lower-paying jobs, they may be absent more frequently and they may be less productive when they are at work.

“In addition to that, a number of people die of alcohol-attributable conditions,” Brewer explained in a telephone interview. “And many of those folks die in the prime of their life. So there’s the personal tragedy there. But there’s also a huge economic cost to somebody dying, for example, in an alcohol-related motor vehicle crash at age 35 which eliminates several decades of the victim’s working life."
 
It should be emphasized that this is a study of the costs of excessive alcohol use, not the occasional beer or a glass of wine with dinner. Most of the costs, Brewer says, stem from binge drinking.
 
Although this was a study of the economic impact of heavy drinking in the United States, Brewer says many other countries have problems with what the World Health Organization calls harmful use of alcohol. The exact dollar impact may be different.
 
“But I think that it is very reasonable to assume that harmful alcohol use is going to result in some of the same consequences in other countries, even if the costs associated with those consequences are different,” said Brewer.

Brewer's research on the economic costs of excessive alcohol use is published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.


Higher mortality in young men
linked to heavy coffee drinking


Nearly 400 million cups of coffee are consumed every day in America. Drinking large amounts of coffee may be bad for under-55s, according to a new study published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

A study of more than 40,000 individuals found a statistically significant 21 percent increased mortality in those drinking more than 28 cups of coffee a week and death from all causes, with a greater than 50 percent increased mortality risk in both men and women younger than 55 years of age. Investigators warn that younger people in particular may need to avoid heavy coffee consumption. No adverse effects were found in heavy coffee drinkers aged over 55.

Drinking coffee has become a normal daily routine for large numbers of people worldwide. According to the latest National Coffee Drinking Study from the National Coffee Association, more than 60 percent of American adults drink coffee every day, consuming on average just over three cups a day.

Coffee has long been suspected to contribute to a variety of chronic health conditions, although earlier studies on coffee consumption in relation to deaths from all causes and deaths from coronary heart disease are limited, and the results are often controversial.

A multicenter research team investigated the effect of coffee consumption on death from all causes and deaths from cardiovascular disease in the Aerobics Center Longitudinal Study cohort, with an average follow-up period of 16 years and a relatively large sample size of over 40,000 men and women.

Between 1979 and 1998, nearly 45,000 individuals aged between 20 and 87 years old participated and returned a medical history questionnaire assessing lifestyle habits (including coffee consumption) and personal and family medical history. The investigators examined a total of 43,727 participants (33,900 men and 9,827 women) in their final analysis.

During the 17-year median follow-up period there were 2,512 deaths (men: 87.5 percent; women: 12.5 percent), 32% of these caused by cardiovascular disease. Those who consumed higher amounts of coffee (both men and women) were more likely to smoke and had lower levels of cardiorespiratory fitness.

All participants were followed from the baseline examination to date of death or until Dec. 31, 2003. Deaths from all causes and deaths from cardiovascular disease were identified through the National Death Index or by accessing death certificates.

Younger men had a trend towards higher mortality even at lower consumption, but this became significant at about 28 cups per week where there was a 56 percent increase in mortality from all causes. Younger women who consumed more than 28 cups of coffee per week also had a greater than two-fold higher risk of all-cause mortality than those who did not drink coffee.

Senior investigator Steven H. Blair of the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, Arnold School of Public Health, University of South Carolina, emphasizes that “Significantly, the results did not demonstrate any association between coffee consumption and all-cause mortality among older men and women. It is also important to note that none of the doses of coffee in either men or women whether younger or older had any significant effects on cardiovascular mortality.”

Coffee is a complex mixture of chemicals consisting of thousands of components. Recent research has found that coffee is one of the major sources of antioxidants in the diet and has potential beneficial effects on inflammation and cognitive function. However, it is also well-known that coffee has potential adverse effects because of caffeine’s potential to stimulate the release of epinephrine, inhibit insulin activity, and increase blood pressure and levels of homocysteine.

“Thus, all of these mechanisms could counterbalance one another. Research also suggests that heavy coffee drinkers may experience additional risk through potential genetic mechanisms or because of confounding through the deleterious effects of other risk factors with which coffee drinking is associated,” say lead authors, Junxiu Liu, Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, and Xuemei Sui, Department of Exercise Science, both at the Arnold School of Public Health. “Therefore, we hypothesize that the positive association between coffee and mortality may be due to the interaction of age and coffee consumption, combined with a component of genetic coffee addiction.”

The investigators suggest that younger people in particular should avoid heavy coffee consumption of more than 28 cups a week or four cups in a typical day. However, they emphasize that further studies are needed in different populations to assess details regarding the effects of long-term coffee consumption and changes in coffee consumption over time on all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality.

“There continues to be considerable debate about the health effects of caffeine, and coffee specifically, with some reports suggesting toxicity and some even suggesting beneficial effects, ” said Carl J. Lavie of the Department of Cardiovascular Diseases, Ochsner Medical Center, New Orleans, and a co-author of this study.