Health | WPN World People News

New measures to overcome challenges in the response to the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) are having a positive impact, although the outbreak remains dangerous and unpredictable, the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping and the World Health Organization (WHO) said after a joint mission to assess the outbreak.

Programs supported by the National Institutes of Health are establishing which genes and genomic variants play a role in human disease, enabling their use in genomic medicine and research. NIH’s Clinical Genome Resource (ClinGen) and ClinVar programs address a major barrier to incorporating genomic medicine into healthcare, which is a lack of evidence about the relationship between gene variants and diseases. A special issue of Human Mutation, which work in concert to advance knowledge connecting human genomic variation to human health.

A novel vaccine designed to protect people from both Lassa fever and rabies showed promise in preclinical testing, according to new research published in Nature Communications. The investigational vaccine, called LASSARAB, was developed and tested by scientists at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia; the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal; the University of California, San Diego; and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health.

A new study from National Institutes of Health scientists and their Thai colleagues shows that a “good” bacterium commonly found in probiotic digestive supplements helps eliminate Staphylococcus aureus, a type of bacteria that can cause serious antibiotic-resistant infections.

Ever wonder why things that normally feel gentle, like putting on soft shirts, are painful after a sunburn? In a study of four patients with a rare genetic disorder, NIH researchers found that PIEZO2, a gene previously shown to control our sense of our bodies in space and gentle touch, may also be responsible for tactile allodynia: the skin’s reaction to injury that makes normally gentle touches feel painful.

The National Institutes of Health is funding three centers that will conduct research on all forms of child abuse and neglect. The Capstone Centers for Child Maltreatment Research promise to identify best practices for prevention and screening, as well as treatment of children affected by abuse.

Sales of JUUL, an e-cigarette shaped like a USB flash drive, grew more than seven-fold from 2016 to 2017, and held the greatest share of the U.S. e-cigarette market by December 2017. The findings, from an analysis of retail sales data from 2013-2017, were released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in JAMA, on October 2.

Traumatic head injury can have widespread effects in the brain, but now scientists can look in real time at how head injury affects thousands of individual cells and genes simultaneously in mice. This approach could lead to precise treatments for traumatic brain injury (TBI). The study, reported in Nature Communications, was supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health.

People with prediabetes or new-onset type 2 diabetes who had gastric banding, a type of bariatric surgery for weight loss, had similar stabilization of their disease to those who took metformin alone, according to a study supported by the National Institutes of Health. These findings, coinciding with a presentation during the European Association for the Study of Diabetes Annual Meeting in Berlin.

New findings suggest that diet is a major contributor for the increased risk of hypertension in black compared to white Americans. The results, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, are part of the Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) study, which looks at the incidence of stroke in approximately 30,000 individuals. The study is funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), a part of the National Institutes of Health.