Lifeboat Foundation

Nanosafety researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health have developed a new intervention to fight infectious disease by more effectively disinfecting the air around us, our food, our hands, and whatever else harbors the microbes that make us sick.

They used a nano-enabled platform developed at the center to create and deliver tiny, aerosolized water nonodroplets containing non-toxic, nature-inspired disinfectants wherever desired.

ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng – Inactivation of Hand Hygiene-Related Pathogens Using Engineered Water Nanostructures.

Every year, Americans spend something like $35 billion on vitamins, minerals, botanicals and various other substances that are touted as health-giving but mostly do nothing at all. Nothing at all!

Could the entire category really just be a rip-off? I turned to the National Institutes of Health. I spoke with Carol Haggans, a scientific and health communications consultant with the Office of Dietary Supplements, about vitamins and minerals, and to Craig Hopp, deputy director of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, about botanical and other kinds of supplements.

UNEARTHED | The list of those that have well-established benefits is short.

Continue reading “Most dietary supplements don’t do anything. Why do we spend $35 billion a year on them?” »

Rather than each country formulating their own brain projects independently, the project argues, it’s high time for the world to come together and share their findings, resources, and expertise across borders. By uniting efforts, the IBI can help shape the future of neuroscience research at a global scale—for promoting brain and mental health, for stimulating international collaboration, for ethical neuroscience practices, and for crafting future generations of scientists.

“It takes a world to understand the brain,” said Caroline Montojo of the Kavli Foundation, which offered support to the project. “When we have the best brains and the best minds working together, sharing information and research that could benefit us all.”

The initiative, at the time of writing, includes Japan’s Brain/Minds, Australian Brain Alliance, the EU’s Human Brain Project (HBP), Canadian Brain Research Strategy, the US’ BRAIN Initiative (BRAINI), the Korea Brain Initiative, and the China Brain Project.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and health officials continue to grapple with the coronavirus outbreak that has killed at least 81 people in China and sickened 2,800 worldwide. And back in 2018, Billionaire Bill Gates gave a warning that the world wasn’t prepared for pandemics, which should “concern us all.”

Speaking at an event hosted by Massachusetts Medical Society and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on April 27, 2018, Gates said he believed “the world needs to prepare for pandemics in the same serious way it prepares for war.”

“This preparation includes staging simulations, war games and preparedness exercises so that we can better understand how diseases will spread and how to deal with responses such as quarantine and communications to minimize panic,” Gates said.

A Kenya Airways passenger who arrived from Guangzhou with flu-like symptoms has been quarantined at the Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH) over fears of the coronavirus.

A statement from Kenya Airways confirmed that the Kenyan passenger had travelled to Nairobi from Guangzhou on Tuesday.

Continue reading “KQ passenger from Guangzhou quarantined over fears of coronavirus” »

SHANGHAI—Hundreds of Americans were preparing to fly out of Wuhan, bound for California, as fears grew at the epicenter of China’s health crisis. But more U.S. citizens aren’t leaving, having failed to secure a seat on the single U.S.-bound flight—or decided to ride out the emergency where they are.

A State Department evacuation flight promised relief for a segment of Wuhan’s roughly 1,000 Americans, as a lockdown triggered by a coronavirus outbreak turned the focus to the dangers of contagion and a long quarantine in China’s…

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A new study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis suggests that bone marrow — or blood stem cells — from healthy donors can harbor extremely rare mutations that can cause health problems for the cancer patients who receive them.

A stem cell transplant — also called a bone marrow transplant — is a common treatment for blood cancers, such as acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Such treatment can cure blood cancers but also can lead to life-threatening complications, including heart problems and graft-versus-host disease, in which new immune cells from the donor attack a patient’s healthy tissues.

A new study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis suggests that extremely rare, harmful genetic mutations present in healthy donors’ stem cells — though not causing health problems in the donors — may be passed on to cancer patients receiving stem cell transplants. The intense chemo- and radiation therapy prior to transplant and the immunosuppression given after allow cells with these rare mutations the opportunity to quickly replicate, potentially creating health problems for the patients who receive them, suggests the research, published Jan. 15 in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Continue reading “Mutations in donors’ stem cells may cause problems for cancer patients” »

Analyses of the viral genome are already providing clues to the origins of the outbreak and even possible ways to treat the infection, a need that is becoming more urgent by the day: Early on Saturday in China, health officials reported 15 new fatalities in a single day, bringing the death toll to 41. There are now nearly 1,100 confirmed cases there.

Reading the genome (which is made of RNA, not DNA) also allows researchers to monitor how 2019-nCoV is changing and provides a roadmap for developing a diagnostic test and a vaccine.

“The genetics can tell us the true timing of the first cases” and whether they occurred earlier than officials realized, said molecular biologist Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research, an expert on viral genomes. “It can also tell us how the outbreak started — from a single event of a virus jumping from an infected animal to a person or from a lot of animals being infected. And the genetics can tell us what’s sustaining the outbreak — new introductions from animals or human-to-human transmission.”

The Pennsylvania-based biotechnology company said early Thursday that it was awarded a grant of up to $9 million by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) to develop a vaccine for the new strain of coronavirus, 2019-nCoV, which originated in Wuhan, China, and has killed no less than 17 people.

Kim said after the DNA sequence of the new coronavirus strain was made publicly available on Jan. 11, Inovio was able to design and construct a potential vaccine in “a matter of hours,” and the animal-testing process has already begun.

As the coronavirus out of China spreads and gets deadlierof health care companies that announce plans to take part in finding a vaccine, or identifying patients with the new strain, have rallied sharply in very active trading.

Continue reading “Inovio’s stock soars after receiving grant to develop coronavirus vaccine” »