Presidential Advisory Group Issues Warnings, Recommendations on H1N1 Flu

The 2009 H1N1 influenza virus poses a "serious health threat" not because it is more deadly, but because "it is likely to infect more people than usual, [which] could mean that doctors' offices and hospitals may get filled to capacity," notes a report released in August by the U.S. President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). The report offers a series of recommendations, including policy adjustments that can reduce economic and other incentives that might encourage people to risk infecting others. "This virus has pulled us all together in common cause," says PCAST cochair Eric Lander, who is also President and Director of the Broad Institute of Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. "Agencies across the government will need to make many key decisions in the face of uncertainty about when and how the virus will play out. As we did in the spring, we can hope for the best, but we must prepare for the worst."

Members of Congress Urge Further Study before Relocating Ag Pathogen Lab

Citing a July report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Representatives Bart Stupak and John Dingell, both Democrats from Michigan, are recommending an independent safety assessment before the Department of Homeland Defense (DHS) builds its National Bio- and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) in Kansas or elsewhere on the U.S. mainland. The proposed facility, which is intended to replace containment labs on Plum Island that were run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), is to be used for research on pathogens, including the virus responsible for foot-and-mouth disease (FMD). DHS "gave inadequate consideration to the risks of transferring foot-and-mouth and other highly-contagious diseases to the mainland," Stupak says. "Moving contagious animal research to the heart of America's livestock industry remains a foolish tempting of fate." FMD is "the most highly infectious animal disease known," according to the GAO report, GAO-09-747, "Biological Research: Observations on DHS's Analyses Concerning Whether FMD Research Can Be Done as Safely on the Mainland as on Plum Island."

Recent Malaria Findings Include Evidence of Artemesinin Resistance

Here are some recent highlights from research on malaria:
● The parasite responsible for malaria, Plasmodium falciparum, shows reduced susceptibility to artesunate, the first-line artemesinin-based combination therapy that is being used in western Cambodia, as compared with northwestern Thailand, according to Arjen Dondorp at the Faculty of Tropical Medicine, Mahidol University, Bangkok, Thailand, and collaborators there and at other institutions, including in Cambodia, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Resistance is characterized by slow parasite clearance in vivo without corresponding reductions in conventional in vitro susceptibility testing, they report in the July 30 New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

● Volunteers inoculated with radiation-attenuated P. falciparum sporozoites by means of more than 1,000 infective mosquito bites were "protected against a malaria challenge" and experienced "no serious adverse events," according to Robert Sauerwein at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and his collaborators there and in France and Singapore. Their findings also are published in the July 30 NEJM.

● Malaria apparently jumped from chimpanzees to humans via mosquitoes, a conclusion based on analysis of eight new isolates of P. reichenowi from wild and wild-born captive chimpanzees in Cameroon and Ivory Coast, according to Francisco Ayala at the University of California, Irvine, and his collaborators. All extant P. falciparum populations originated from P. reichenowi, likely by a single host transfer as early as 2-3 million years ago or as recently as 10,000 years ago, according to their report in the online August 3 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers Report Microbiome Changes Could Explain Some Diseases

A global change in the esophageal microbiome might give rise to gastroesophageal reflux diseases (GERD), according to Zhiheng Pei at the New York University Langone Medical Center in New York, N.Y., and his collaborators. They find high concentrations of Streptococcus in the esophagus of healthy patients, but an altered microbiome dominated by gram-negative bacteria in patients with esophagitis and Barrett's esophagus. "If changes in the bacterial population do indeed cause reflux, it may be possible to design new therapies with antibiotics, probiotic bacteria, or prebiotics," he says. Details appear in the August 1 Gastroenterology. Meanwhile, increases in interleukin-17- based cellular signaling appears to cause severe inflammation that can lead to colon cancer when enterotoxigenic Bacteroides fragilis bacteria (ETBF) colonize the gastrointestinal tract of mice, according to Cynthia Sears at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Md., and her collaborators. Blocking that signaling prevents ETBFinduced inflammation and tumor formation, they report in the August Nature Medicine.