Health | WPN World People News

Left: Fruit fly showing location of brain pacemaker cells that express rhodopsin 7. Right: Depiction of rhodopsin 7 molecular structure.

Scientists looked at the brains of hungry fruit flies to investigate cells that regulate protein hunger.

Monthly eye injections of Avastin (bevacizumab) are as effective as the more expensive drug Eylea (aflibercept) for the treatment of central retinal vein occlusion (CRVO), according to a clinical trial funded by the National Eye Institute (NEI), part of the National Institutes of Health. After six monthly injections, treatment with either drug improved visual acuity on average from 20/100 to 20/40.

Managing speed, a new report from WHO, suggests that excessive or inappropriate speed contributes to 1 in 3 road traffic fatalities worldwide. Measures to address speed prevent road traffic deaths and injuries, make populations healthier, and cities more sustainable.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a Health Alert Notice with updated guidance for healthcare professionals to interpret Zika test results for women who live in, or frequently travel (daily or weekly) to areas with a CDC Zika travel notice.

This year WHO will launch a pilot project for prequalifying biosimilar medicines, a step towards making some of the most expensive treatments for cancer more widely available in low- and middle-income countries.

Long assumed to be a mere “relay,” an often-overlooked egg-like structure in the middle of the brain also turns out to play a pivotal role in tuning-up thinking circuity. A trio of studies in mice funded by the National Institutes of Health are revealing that the thalamus sustains the ability to distinguish categories and hold thoughts in mind.

A study of how policies restricting pharmaceutical promotion to physicians affect medication prescribing found that physicians in academic medical centers (AMCs) prescribed fewer of the promoted drugs, and more non-promoted drugs in the same drug classes, following policy changes to restrict marketing activities at those medical centers. The analysis encompassed 16.1 million prescriptions; while the decline observed was modest in terms of percentage, proportionally small changes can represent thousands of prescriptions.

African Americans are more likely to die at early ages from all causes.