Virus infections-it’s a zoo in there!

Take a look at Nature this week: the article ‘The battle within’ by Melinda Wenner gives an intriguing insight into the interactions taking place between viruses in the body. She highlights the interaction between HIV and two other viruses, human herpesvirus-6 and GB-virus-C. Infection with the first hastens HIV disease and infection with the second…
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Did the dinosaurs die of malaria?

The other week I heard about a recently published book (‘What bugged the dinosaurs? Insects, Disease and Death in the Cretaceous‘, by George and Roberta Poinar) which argues that disease-transmitting insects played an important role in the extinction of the dinosaurs. I have ordered a copy of the book so it can be indexed in…
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Of cows and sweet potatoes

The sweet potato Ipomoea batatas has been used throughout the world as a food source for hundreds of years. Byproducts used as animal feed as a result of sweet potato processing include cannery wastes and sweet potatoes culled during the packing process due to damage, off size or oversupply. The Veterinary Record [1,2] and the…
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Northern Circumpolar Soil calendar 2008

Supporting the International Polar Year, March 2007 to March 2009 (two years are needed to cover all the seasons in northern and southern hemispheres), the European Union have published a rather smart 2008 calendar on Northern Cirumpolar Soils (9MB pdf).Each month is dedicated to a different soil type, for example January covers Cryosols (from the…
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The Nutrition Delusion

Sorry to harp back to Gary Taubes’ Diet Delusion again. I make no pretence at having read the book, just Taubes’ own ‘teaser’ in New Scientist last week. Rather than be ‘teased’ by the ‘comment & analysis’ piece, I have been left somewhat annoyed. To accuse the nutrition profession of creating ‘a field of clinical…
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Joined up science

Usually, when the urge to blog comes over me, I can wait until the urge goes away and bothers someone else, or until enough time has passed to make the reason for the blog obsolete. On this occasion, however, the urge hasn’t gone away and I hope you’ll forgive me for alerting your attention to…
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Omega-3 fatty acids – what have we learned?

Animal studies have suggested that a specific fatty acid, docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), plays a role in the development of cognitive abilities. So will taking extra DHA as a child make you cleverer?
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The new HIV or just an outbreak of boils?

An aggressive and drug resistant version of the hospital superbug MRSA is spreading through the gay community in San Francisco. The infection rate is doubled in areas with a high gay population compared to the whole of the city. A study in Annals of Internal Medicine raised the alarm but some newspapers were way over…
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Cryptosporidium and Giardia in drinking water: not just a problem for industrialised countries

Dr. Lucy Robertson, a speaker at the 8th Central American and Caribbean Congress on Parasitology and Tropical Medicine 2007, points out that as countries strive to improve their standards of public health, we should find it intolerable to accept the transmission of these infections via drinking water anywhere.   Of the parasitic infections with a…
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Biofuel – the burning issues

It is still an open question whether biofuel can meet a significant proportion of the world’s energy needs, say John Fike and co-authors in a paper in CAB Reviews
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