Health

Published 11 April 2017

WASHINGTON DC, USA, Monday April 10, 2017 – With projections putting the regional cost of the ongoing spread of the Zika virus at billions of dollars, the news that we are one step closer to a vaccine against the mosquito-borne disease is timely.

On Friday, Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), said that the DNA vaccine candidate developed by scientists at NIAID’s Vaccine Research Center has been successful in both animal trials and the first human trial.

Following this success, the agency, which is part of the US National Institutes of Health, has moved into the next stage of testing.

Volunteers have been signing up at clinics across the Americas to participate in the tests which are being carried out at 11 sites including those in Puerto Rico, Brazil, Mexico and Miami.

This leg of the trial will involve 90 healthy adults divided into groups who will get different doses of the vaccine.

The next step, starting mid-year, will see researchers conducting a randomized control trial in 2,400 adults and adolescents who have not been infected with the virus but who live in areas where it has been detected.

The vaccine will not be tested in pregnant women, but it will be tested in women of child-bearing age. Some of the volunteers will be given a placebo.

The vaccine could be moved to the next phase by the end of the year if all goes according to plan.

The US$100 million trial is fully funded through this phase, but it is not yet clear whether funding is available for the next phase.

The Trump administration has proposed an 18 percent cut to the institutes’ budget, but it is not known what would be lost if the cuts get through Congress unchanged.

Fauci insisted that the third phase of the trial is “a very high priority for us, and we will keep this as one of our higher priorities.”

Noting that Zika will probably not go away any time soon, Fauci said that one of his goals is to develop a vaccine to keep children safe so when people of that generation have children of their own, they will not pass the virus along during pregnancy.

There is evidence of mosquito-transmitted Zika in at least 84 countries, meaning there are thousands of foetuses at risk for birth defects if their mothers become infected.

Birth defects linked to the virus include microcephaly, in which the head and brain don’t develop properly; vision and hearing defects; and learning disabilities.

People of any age who are infected with Zika can experience heart problems. The viral infection can also trigger Guillain-Barré, a disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks nerves, leading to potential paralysis and even death.

Scientists around the world are racing to create viable versions of a Zika vaccine.

Read more: http://www.caribbean360.com/zika-virus/promising-zika-vaccine-moves-next-phase-human-trials#ixzz4dyAhsRAs

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Published 10 April 2017

Yay
It’s spring in California: the birds are chirping, the flowers are blooming, and my sinuses are so swollen they might just pop right out of my face.
I’m one of the 36 million or so Americans lucky enough to suffer from seasonal allergies. And experts tell me that I might suffer from this eye-itching, sinus-pounding misery even more in the future. Warming global temperatures may lead to longer blooming seasons, and rising CO2 levels could help weeds and trees grow more, and faster. That could mean more allergy-causing pollen, according to a growing crop of studies. This is especially bad news for people with allergic asthma, who can suffer from life-threatening attacks.
Seasonal allergies, also known as hay fever, are about sex — plant sex, that is. To reproduce, many (but not all) plants need to transfer pollen from the male plant onto a female flower. Some rely on pollinators like bees for this. “But some plants want to do it on the cheap, and they have the wind pollinate,” Lewis Ziska, a plant biologist with the US Department of Agriculture, tells The Verge. The problem is that wind pollination is not very efficient, Ziska says. So, some plants like ragweed have to pump out a billion-odd grains of pollen to ensure that a few land on a female flower.
In the spring, trees are the plants getting busy. In the summer, it’s grasses and weeds. In the fall, ragweed. For seasonal allergy sufferers like me, all this pollen stimulates the immune system, which recognizes innocuous pollen proteins as dangerous invaders. That makes immune cells pump out molecules that cause itchiness and swelling, like histamine — the molecule blocked by over-the-counter allergy medications like Benadryl. The result is itchy eyes, runny noses, a scratchy throat, and, in severe cases, constricted airways.
There are a couple of different ways that a changing climate could worsen allergies. Plants absorb carbon dioxide to make fuel via photosynthesis, so the idea is that more CO2 in the air means more food for the plants. That could lead to more plant growth — and more pollen. (Obviously, there are many other effects of climate change that are massively damaging to plants, like wildfires or extreme weather events.)
Rising CO2 levels are also causing global temperatures to rise, especially at higher latitudes, Charles Schmidt reports for Environmental Health Perspectives. This appears to be lengthening the growing season — allowing plants to make more pollen for longer periods of time.
All this could affect ragweed, a flowering plant that’s a main cause of hay fever. Scientists found that ragweed grown in the lab flowers more and produces more pollen when carbon dioxide levels go up. These results were observed out of the lab, too, in a little microcosm of global warming known as a city. There’s about 30 percent more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of downtown Baltimore than in nearby rural areas — and it’s about 3 degrees warmer, too. Ragweed grown in the downtown Baltimore plot thrived, growing bigger and puffing out larger plumes of pollen than its country counterpart.
Across the pond, in Europe, scientists led by Michelle Epstein at the University of Vienna also modeled ragweed’s expanding range and increasing pollen production. They calculate that by 2060, the number of Europeans suffering from ragweed-induced hay fever could double to 77 million.

Since it’s spring, ragweed isn’t the plant that’s making me miserable right now: trees are. And the picture is a little more complicated for trees. Depending on the species and the location, warmer spring temperatures can make a tree flower earlier or later, less or more. In some regions, like Denmark and Switzerland, pollen counts for certain species do seem to be rising along with spring temperatures. Oak and birch trees appear to be flowering earlier. And pine trees grown in an experimental site with higher CO2 levels released more pollen than trees grown under normal conditions. Birch trees grown in warmer temperatures also appear to produce more of a specific protein that’s especially allergenic. That means that these trees aren’t just producing pollen longer — they’re producing more potent pollen, too.
Still, nothing is set in stone. Ziska and his colleague Paul Beggs in Australia note in a 2012 review paper that there’s a lot left to learn about how warming temperatures and climbing carbon dioxide emissions will change trees’ pollination practices. One thing’s for sure: as temperatures continue to break records worldwide, I’m going to keep stocking up on antihistamines — just in case the apocalypse hits and the Benadryl, Allegra, and Claritin factories all go out of service.

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