Health | WPN World People News

The government of Bangladesh and the World Bank on February 19, launched a cash benefits program for 600,000 of the country’s poorest mothers and pregnant women in exchange for their participation in activities to improve their children's nutrition and cognitive development. The World Bank has committed $300 million for the program, which will benefit over one million children.

A new World Bank report says better planning and policies are critical to managing the rising costs while sustaining improvements to Timor-Leste’s health system.

New clues to Nodding syndrome - NIH scientists discovered leiomodin-1 (green) inside human brain cells. This study suggests that Nodding syndrome may be an autoimmune disease.

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health have found that the presence of the protein alpha-4 beta-7 integrin on the surface of HIV and its monkey equivalent — simian immunodeficiency virus, or SIV — may help explain why an antibody protected monkeys from SIV in previous experiments.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) declared the end of the yellow fever outbreak in that country, on February 14, following a similar announcement in Angola on 23 December 2016, bringing an end to the outbreak in both countries after no new confirmed cases were reported from both countries for the past six months.

“Bench-to-bedside” describes research that has progressed from basic science in animal models that has led to therapies used in patients. Now, a study in the journal Brain describes what could be considered a direct “aquarium-to-bedside” approach, taking a drug discovered in a genetic zebrafish model of epilepsy and testing it, with promising results, in a small number of children with the disease.

Analyzing a hair sample may help with the diagnosis of Cushing Syndrome, a rare and potentially fatal disorder in which the body overproduces the stress hormone cortisol, according to researchers at the National Institutes of Health.

In a study of mice and monkeys, National Institutes of Health funded researchers showed that they could prevent and reverse some of the brain injury caused by the toxic form of a protein called tau. The results, published in Science Translational Medicine, suggest that the study of compounds, called tau antisense oligonucleotides, that are genetically engineered to block a cell’s assembly line production of tau, might be pursued as an effective treatment for a variety of disorders.

New guidance from the World Health Organization (WHO), launched ahead of World Cancer Day (4 February), aims to improve the chances of survival for people living with cancer by ensuring that health services can focus on diagnosing and treating the disease earlier.