HIV Hides Out in Bone Marrow Cells
The virus that causes AIDS can hide in the bone marrow, avoiding drugs and later awakening to cause illness, according to new research that could point the way toward better treatments for the disease.

Finding that hide-out is a first step, but years of research lie ahead.

Dr. Kathleen Collins of the University of Michigan and her colleagues report in this week’s edition of the journal Nature Medicine that the HIV virus can infect long-lived bone marrow cells that eventually convert into blood cells.

The virus is dormant in the bone marrow cells, she said, but when those progenitor cells develop into blood cells, it can be reactivated and cause renewed infection. The virus kills the new blood cells and then moves on to infect other cells, said.

“If we’re ever going to be able to find a way to get rid of the cells, the first step is to understand” where a latent infection can continue, Collins said.

This is a good news. If you got diabetes, you know what I am talking about: diabetes is the most common and yet almost incurable desease. Once you got diabetes, you’ll keep it for the rest of your life. As mentioned, this finding is a step forward, not the final result. But it’s really a good step forward. I wish I could see in my lifetime that the diabetes can be cured totally.
Scientists in Cambridge have shown that an “artificial pancreas” can be used to regulate blood sugar in children with Type 1 diabetes.

A trial found that combining a “real time” sensor measuring glucose levels with a pump that delivers insulin can boost overnight blood sugar control.

The Lancet study showed the device significantly cut the risk of blood sugar levels dropping dangerously low.

Experts said the results were an important “step forward”.

Type 1 diabetes is a chronic, life threatening condition, in which the pancreas does not produce insulin – the hormone that regulates blood sugar levels.

If it’s legalized, Egypt will be the first Muslim countries which legalizes organ trade.
Soheila, an Egyptian village housewife, traded her kidney for $2,185 to pay off debt — the best option the desperate mother of three could find to keep food on the family table.

The 32-year-old from the fertile Nile Delta region is one of many people caught up in a thriving trade for illegal organs in Egypt, where there is no legal path to transplants.

Donation is allowed in practice only in very limited circumstances. But conservative Egypt, one of the world’s biggest organ trade hubs, is now working on legislation to legalize transplants from brain dead donors and hopes the new law will cut back on demand for illicit organs.

Do newborn babies have accents? Yes. Babies are found to cry in their mother’s tongue, reports scientists
Only days after birth, babies have a bawl with language. Newborn babies cry in melodic patterns that they have heard in adults’ conversations—even while in the womb, say medical anthropologist Kathleen Wermke of the University of Würzburg in Germany, and her colleagues.

By 2 to 5 days of age, infants’ cries bear the tuneful signature of their parents’ native tongue, a sign that language learning has already commenced, the researchers report in a paper published online November 5 in Current Biology.

The question is how about a baby with parents of different mother-tongues, such as from Javanese mother and Madurese father (like me)?

Do you like talking for hours on your cellphone? Luckily, I don’t. That’s the answer if you ask me. I am not a a good mobile-phone-talker. Whenever someone talks to me through hand-phone or HP (ha-pe) as popularly known in Indonesia for more than one minute, I always give a hint to him to stop further conversation. Not because it causes brain tumors, as the latest finding reports. Just don’t like it.
LONG-term mobile phone users could face a higher risk of developing cancer in later life, according to a decade-long study.

The report, to be published later this year, has reportedly found that heavy mobile use is linked to brain tumours.

A single injection in a patient’s eye brings ‘astounding’ results. The findings may offer hope for those with macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa, via WSJ
A small but provocative study showed that a form of gene therapy significantly improved the vision of patients left legally blind by a rare genetic eye disease. The benefit was especially striking among children.

Researchers said the findings amount to an important advance toward medicine’s ambitious but generally unrealized dream of replacing disease-causing mutant or missing genes with normal DNA to treat and cure debilitating illnesses.

Gene therapy fixes color blindness in monkeys
A simple injection of cells has cured monkeys of color-blindness—giving a green light to future research into improving human vision with gene therapy, a new study says.

Calling the procedure his gene therapy “dream,” researcher Jay Neitz said that “ultimately this could be a tool that could cure all sorts of eye diseases.”

It’s too early to say that the technique can help color-blind people who can’t see red or green, but study co-author Neitz is confident.