The Star Online: Lifestyle: Health
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Health |
| Number of US cancer survivors is on the rise Posted: 28 Mar 2013 08:27 PM PDT The number of Americans who have survived cancer is on the rise and is expected to reach 18 million people in the next decade, according to a report released Wednesday. That would be a 30 percent increase over the latest figures in January 2012, which showed 13.7 million people in the United States had survived some form of cancer, according to the American Association for Cancer Research. The forecasted increase is mainly due to the aging population, with two thirds of cancer survivors expected to be 65 or older by 2020, said the study. The trend represents a new challenge for the health care industry and for longer-living survivors, who may face other health woes over time. "How to ensure that these patients lead not only long lives, but healthy and productive lives, will be a vital challenge to all of us," said Julia Rowland, director of the Office of Cancer Survivorship at the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The AACR's report shows that women with breast cancer account for 22 percent of survivors, while men with prostate cancer make up 20 percent. However, those with lung cancer make up a slim three percent of all US survivors. "For patients with prostate cancer, we have a nearly 100 percent five-year survival rate, and breast cancer has made tremendous strides as well, with five-year survival rising from 75 percent in 1975 to almost 89 percent in 2012," said Rowland. "However, we clearly need to have better diagnostic tools and better treatments for lung cancer." A report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released in January showed that fewer people were dying from cancer in the United States, continuing a trend that began in the early 1990s. The CDC study found that from 2000 to 2009, cancer death rates decreased by 1.8 percent per year among men and by 1.4 percent per year among women. Cancer kills more than 1,500 people a day in the United States -- a total of 301,820 men and 275,370 women in 2012, according to the latest estimates by the American Cancer Society. About 1.6 million Americans are diagnosed with cancer every year. |
| 'Holy grail' foot-and-mouth vaccine developed Posted: 28 Mar 2013 08:24 PM PDT British scientists have developed a "holy grail" vaccine for foot-and-mouth disease that is safer and more resilient than current vaccines, according to an article published in journal PLOS pathogens Wednesday. At the moment, animals are given a small dose of live infectious virus to stimulate the body's immune system into producing antibodies that recognise and destroy the pathogen whenever it appears in the bloodstream. Now scientists believe they can produce an entirely synthetic vaccine thanks to atomic analysis of the virus using Britain's particle accelerator, the Diamond Light Source, near Oxford in southern England. Using the data, a team of scientists from Oxford and Reading Universities and the Pirbright Institute were able to reconstruct the outside structure of the virus, which triggers the production of antibodies. The hollow shell contains no pathogenic RNA -- the genetic material viruses use to replicate themselves -- so there is no chance of accidental infection during vaccination. The scientists were also able to tweak the structure to make it stronger. Pre-clinical trials found it to be stable at temperatures up to 56C (132 Fahrenheit) for at least two hours. "What we have achieved here is close to the holy grail of foot-and-mouth vaccines," said Dave Stuart, Life Sciences Director at Diamond, and MRC Professor of Structural Biology at the University of Oxford. "Unlike traditional vaccines, there is no chance that the empty-shell vaccine could revert to an infectious form." The technology should also be transferable to other viruses from the same family, such as poliovirus and hand-foot-and-mouth disease, a human virus endemic in South-East Asia, he added. Foot-and-mouth is endemic livestock in in central Africa, parts of the Middle East and Asia. - AFPRelaxnews |
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