Health | WPN World People News

A top World Health Organization official says a new strain of bird flu in China that has already killed 22 people and spread throughout seven provinces and municipalities is one of the most lethal of its kind to date.

The National Institutes of Health marks World Malaria Day 2013, which has the world theme Invest in the Future: Defeat Malaria, by acknowledging the considerable toll the disease continues to exact in many parts of the world.

Activity of a regulator protein called CD33 (green) clogs removal of brain-damaging debris, beta-amyloid protein (red), by support cells, microglia. Left: Microglia of normal control mice (A”) show more CD33 and less beta-amyloid than mice in which CD33 expression is experimentally knocked-out (B”). Right: Little beta-amyloid can be seen in microglia of a mouse line in which CD33 is over-expressed (C”), compared to microglia of mice in which CD33 is experimentally inactivated (D”). Evidence from post-mortem human brains indicates that CD33 is similarly overactive in Alzheimer’s disease, suggesting that a treatment that impedes it might help treat or prevent the disease.

Djibouti and the World Bank signed a US$7.0 million credit agreement for Improving the Health Sector Performance project, designed to improve the coverage and quality of healthcare in Djibouti and reach 300,000 people, mostly women.

For children who have had HIV-1 infection since birth, the combination drug therapies now used to treat HIV appear to protect against the heart damage seen before combination therapies were available, according to researchers in a National Institutes of Health network study.