Slovakia says finds first cases of H5N1 flu virus
Initial tests in Slovakia showed the H5N1 strain of bird flu in a wild falcon and a grebe, the first two cases of the virus found in the country, Agriculture Minister Zsolt Simon said on Thursday.
The samples will now be tested in EU’s reference laboratory in Weybridge, Britain, for confirmation of the initial results from the Slovak National Reference Laboratory.
“I expect that the samples will be delivered sometime today,” Simon told reporters.
Delayed care fuels asthma-related ER visits
Adults with asthma, even those with mild asthma, who delay seeking care because of cost or lack of insurance, are apt to end up in the emergency room, results of a study suggest.
Increasing ER visits for asthma care, the authors charge, represent “an alarming consequence of the current trends in health care coverage of increasing premiums, individual contributions, deductibles, and co-payments and decreasing numbers of people being insured.”
“If improvements can be made to access to quality asthma care and health care coverage, (ER) visits for asthma should significantly decline,” Dr. Ying-Ying Meng from the University of California in Los Angeles told Reuters Health.
Selective T cell stimulation could help improve treatment of autoimmune disease and cancer
The findings could also be significant for developing new ways to help patients with autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, or juvenile diabetes.
The study, which was published in the February 16 issue of the online journal Science Express, showed that these injections caused a massive selective increase in the immune system’s two main types of T cells.
“Our study shows that different cytokine-antibody complexes such as IL-2/IL-2 mAb could be clinically useful to selectively boost or inhibit the immune response in vivo,” said Onur Boyman, a member of the Scripps Research Department of Immunology and lead author of the study.
Dietary supplements of little use for arthritis
In general, the use of glucosamine and chondroitin has little effect on symptoms of knee arthritis, according to results of a study funded by the National Institutes of Health. Still, these dietary supplements seem safe and patients with moderate to severe pain may experience some relief with them.
“Among alternative caregivers or nutritional supplement providers, (glucosamine and chondroitin) are widely believed to be beneficial,” lead researcher Dr. Daniel O. Clegg told Reuters Health, “and many patients consider that it’s a possibility.”
To determine if the agents are of benefit, Clegg, from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and other members of the Glucosamine/chondroitin Arthritis Intervention Trial (GAIT) group enrolled 1,583 patients with knee pain during the previous 6 months.
