Lifeboat Foundation

Tom is a writer in London with a Master’s degree in Journalism whose editorial work covers anything from health and the environment to technology and archaeology.

The World Health Organization confirmed an outbreak of the virus in Equatorial Guinea and Tanzania earlier this year. Authorities first issued a warning for Equatorial Guinea in February following a series of deaths in early January. The Ministry of Health of Tanzania then announced its own outbreak in late March.

There have been 14 confirmed cases in Equatorial Guinea since the epidemic began, with 10 of those patients dying, according to the CDC An outbreak among a group of fisherman in Tanzania produced eight confirmed cases of the viral fever, five of which were fatal, the CDC said.

The CDC on Thursday warned doctors to watch for possible imported cases and patients exhibiting symptoms that include fever, fatigue, and blood-strained vomit and diarrhea. There have not been any reported cases of Marburg virus thus far in the US and the CDC said the risk of imported cases is relatively low.

Who can assess and diagnose cardiac function best after reading an echocardiogram: artificial intelligence (AI) or a sonographer?

Antibiotic resistance is a major public health threat, ranked as one of the top 10 by the World Health Organization. Every year, in the United States alone, nearly 3 million people are infected by drug-resistant bacteria and fungi, resulting in the death of around 35,000. While antibiotics are crucial in treating infections, overuse has led to the development of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria. These infections pose a significant challenge to treatment.

Now, Professor John E. Moses of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) has developed a new weapon to combat drug-resistant superbugs – an innovative antibiotic that has the ability to shape-shift by rearranging its atoms.

Moses came up with the idea of shape-shifting antibiotics while observing tanks in military training exercises. With rotating turrets and nimble movements, the tanks could respond quickly to possible threats.

“The eyes are the windows to the soul.” It’s an ancient saying, and it illustrates what we know intuitively to be true — you can understand so much about a person by looking them deep in the eye. But how? And can we use this fact to understand disease?

One company is making big strides in this direction. Israel’s NeuraLight, which just won the Health and Medtech Innovation award at SXSW, was founded to bring science and AI to understanding the brain through the eyes.

A focal disease for NeuraLight is ALS, which is currently diagnosed through a subjective survey of about a dozen questions, followed by tests such as an EEG and MRI.

Continue reading “How AI Can Look Into Your Eyes And Diagnose A Devastating Brain Disease” »

Lifestyle behaviors such as eating well and exercising can be significant factors in one’s overall health. But the risk of developing cancer is predominantly at the whim of an individual’s genetics.

Our bodies are constantly making copies of our genes to produce new cells. However, there are occasional mistakes in those copies, a phenomenon geneticists call mutation. In some cases, these mistakes can alter proteins, fuse genes and change how much a gene gets copied, ultimately impacting a person’s risk of developing cancer. Scientists can better understand the impact of mutations by developing predictive models for tumor activity.

Christopher Plaisier, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University, is developing a software tool called OncoMerge that uses genetic data to improve cancer modeling technology.

The molecules in our bodies are in constant communication. Some of these molecules provide a biochemical fingerprint that could indicate how a wound is healing, whether or not a cancer treatment is working or that a virus has invaded the body. If we could sense these signals in real time with high sensitivity, then we might be able to recognize health problems faster and even monitor disease as it progresses.

Now Northwestern University researchers have developed a new technology that makes it easier to eavesdrop on our body’s inner conversations.

While the body’s chemical signals are incredibly faint—making them difficult to detect and analyze—the researchers have developed a new method that boosts signals by more than 1,000 times. Transistors, the building block of electronics, can boost weak signals to provide an amplified output. The new approach makes signals easier to detect without complex and bulky electronics.

Researchers at Boston University, U.S. report that the flow of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain is linked to waking brain activity. Led by Stephanie Williams, and publishing in the open access journal PLOS Biology on March 30, the study demonstrates that manipulating blood flow in the brain with visual stimulation induces complementary fluid flow. The findings could impact treatment for conditions like Alzheimer’s disease, which have been associated with declines in cerebrospinal fluid flow.

Just as our kidneys help remove toxic waste from our bodies, cerebrospinal fluid helps remove toxins from the brain, particularly while we sleep. Reduced flow of cerebrospinal fluid is known to be related to declines in brain health, such as occur in Alzheimer’s disease. Based on evidence from sleep studies, the researchers hypothesized that brain activity while awake could also affect the flow of cerebrospinal fluid. They tested this hypothesis by simultaneously recording human brain activity via fMRI and the speed of cerebrospinal fluid flow while people were shown a checkered pattern that turned on and off.

Researchers first confirmed that the checkered pattern induced brain activity; blood oxygenation recorded by fMRI increased when the pattern was visible and decreased when it was turned off. Next, they found that the flow of cerebrospinal fluid negatively mirrored the blood signal, increasing when the checkered pattern was off. Further tests showed that changing how long the pattern was visible affected blood and fluid in a predictable way, and that the blood-cerebrospinal fluid link could not be accounted for by only breathing or heart rate rhythms.

The expanded availability of opioid use disorder-related telehealth services and medications during the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with a lowered likelihood of fatal drug overdose among Medicare beneficiaries, according to a new study.

“The results of this study add to the growing research documenting the benefits of expanding the use of telehealth services for people with opioid use disorder, as well as the need to improve retention and access to medication treatment for opioid use disorder,” said lead author Christopher M. Jones, PharmD, DrPH, director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “The findings from this collaborative study also highlight the importance of working across agencies to identify successful strategies to address and get ahead of the constantly evolving overdose crisis.”

Published today in JAMA Psychiatry, this study is a collaborative research effort led by researchers at the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, a part of CDC; the Office of the Administrator and the Center for Clinical Standards and Quality, both part of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS); and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a part of the National Institutes of Health.