Health Highlights: Sept. 30, 2005

WHO Downplays its Own Bird Flu Warnings

The World Health Organization moved Friday to quell fears sparked a day earlier by one of its own spokesmen, who had said 150 million people could die from a predicted bird flu pandemic.

On Thursday, the WHO''s influenza coordinator said that a pandemic involving the lethal strain of bird flu that has ravaged bird flocks in Asia over the past two years could kill that many people if the virus mutated and became more easily spread between humans, the Associated Press reported.

Dr. David Nabarro -- appointed Thursday as U.N. coordinator for avian and human influenza -- had warned that the "range of deaths could be anything between 5 [million] and 150 million." On Friday, WHO spokesman Dick Thompson tried to qualify Nabarro''s statement.

"We''re not going to know how lethal the next pandemic is going to be until the pandemic begins," Thompson said. "You could pick almost any number."

Thompson then repeated a number that WHO considers a "more reasoned" estimated death toll of 7.4 million, the AP reported.

While experts agree that another pandemic is certain, two unknown factors -- the proportion of the public that becomes infected and the percentage that ultimately dies -- will determine how serious it is, the wire service reported.

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More Americans Using Seat Belts

A record 82 percent of the American public has used seat belts during 2005, the U.S. Department of Transportation said Friday.

In a speech before the group Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta credited better police enforcement and a growing awareness of the value of buckling up.

"The fact that safety belts save lives is starting to click with the American people," the Associated Press quoted him as saying.

Mineta said seat belt use, up from 71 percent in 2000, is now saving an estimated 15,700 lives annually, preventing 350,000 serious injuries, and saving $67 billion each year in costs linked to traffic injuries and deaths, the AP said.

Twenty-two states now have primary seat belt laws, in which an officer can stop a motorist who doesn''t wear a safety belt. Most other states have secondary seat belt laws, in which police can issue a seat belt violation only if the motorist is stopped for another infraction, the wire service said.

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Chocolate Could Help Reverse Smokers'' Vessel Damage: Study

Chemicals called flavonols found in chocolate products could reverse some smoking-related damage to blood vessels, new research finds.

German researchers at Heinrich-Heine University studied smokers because their blood vessels tend to respond poorly to blood flow changes, they said in a statement. The flavonols in cocoa appeared to influence how nitric oxide interacted with blood vessels'' inner lining, called the endothelium. Impaired endothelium function is a marker for increased risk of cardiovascular disease, the researchers wrote in the Oct. 4 Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

"These findings support the notion that flavonol-rich foods, including cocoa products, may help to promote cardiovascular health," said study leader Dr. Malte Kelm.

The researchers pointed out that their goal was to identify which ingredients actually promoted cardiovascular health, noting that the cocoa they used had a higher concentration of flavonols than was typically available in commercially sold cocoa drinks.

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Chinese Horseshoe Bat is SARS Carrier

The Chinese horseshoe bat is a healthy carrier for SARS and the hiding place for the virus in nature, say two separate studies published this week.

This information is significant because it could enable scientists to sever the SARS transmission chain and prevent outbreaks of the disease, which has killed 774 people worldwide, The New York Times reported.

Many people in Asia eat bats or use bat feces in traditional medicine to treat kidney problems and asthma.

One team from the University of Hong Kong reported its findings in this week''s issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The other team, which included researchers from Australia, China and the United States, published its study Thursday in the online version of Science.

"It''s pretty pleasant to see two teams that did not know each other reach similar findings," Dr. Lin-Fa Wang, a virologist at the Australian Animal Health Laboratory, told the Times.

The teams collected hundreds of bats from their natural habitat and from Chinese markets. Both studies found that the bats carried viruses from the coronavirus family, which is closely related to the SARS virus.

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Gene May Predict Aggressive Ovarian Cancer

A gene called Rsf-1 that may predict aggressive ovarian cancer has been identified by Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center researchers.

This is the first study to establish a role for a gene in ovarian cancer and may lead to development of a test that can predict at an early stage which patients will develop aggressive cancer. The findings were published in this week''s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We hope new therapies can be tailored to target Rsf-1, in the same way that Herceptin for breast cancer attacks the Her2/neu gene pathway," researcher Tian-Li Wang, assistant professor of gynecology/obstetrics and oncology, said in a prepared statement.

In their study, the researchers found a surge in the number of Rsf-1 gene copies in 13.2 percent (16 of 121) of high grade ovarian cancers. They did not find the same thing in low grade or benign ovarian tumors.

The 16 ovarian cancer patients with this surge in Rsf-1 gene copies lived an average of 29 months compared to 36 months for patients who did not have Rsf-1 amplification.

The Hopkins team said a surge in Rsf-1 may cause changes that promote tumor growth.

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Infection May be Linked to OCD

An immune reaction following an infection may be responsible for some cases of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) in some children, says a U.K. study in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

The study compared 50 children with OCD to 190 children in a control group. Children with OCD were much more likely (42 percent) to have anti-basal ganglia antibodies than the children in the control group (5 percent), BBC News reported.

These antibodies are associated with streptococcal infection.

The study authors, from the Institute of Psychiatry and the Institute of Neurology, said the findings suggested that, "autoimmunity may have a role in the genesis and/or maintenance of some cases of OCD."

"Further examination of this autoimmune subgroup may provide insight into the neurobiology of OCD, and explain whether the antibodies concerned are causing the disease," the researchers wrote.

More research is needed to confirm these findings, they added.

Last Updated: Sept. 30, 2005