Greece"s deepening health crisis a result of continued healthcare budget cuts, says study

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Greece’s health crisis is worsening as a result of continued healthcare budget cuts, says a new study published in the medical journal, The Lancet. Researchers say the harmful effects of austerity are linked to the increasing inability of patients to access the health system, large rises in the incidence of infectious disease, and a deterioration in the overall mental health of Greek people.The authors from the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine find that Greece has had the largest cutbacks to the health sector seen across Europe, as the bailout package capped public expenditure at 6% of GDP. For example, from 2009 to 2011, the public hospital budget was reduced by over 25%. Greece’s public spending on health is now less than any of the other pre-2004 European Union members.Lead author of the study, Alexander Kentikelenis of Cambridge University, said: ‘The data reveals that the Greek welfare state has failed to protect people at the time they needed support the most. A rapidly growing number of Greeks are losing access to healthcare from budget cuts and unemployment.’Senior author Dr David Stuckler from the University of Oxford said: ‘The Greek government -along with their European partners — appears to have been in denial about austerity’s severe impact on health. The cost of austerity is being borne mainly by ordinary Greek citizens, who have been affected by the largest cutbacks to the health sector seen across Europe in modern times. We hope this research will help the Greek government mount an urgently needed response to these escalating human crises.’At a time of increasing health need and falling incomes, Greece’s bailout agreement stipulated shifting the cost of healthcare to patients. The Greek government introduced new charges for visits to outpatient clinics and higher costs for medicines. General health services were also eroded, says the paper. The authors’ analysis of the latest available data from the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions revealed a 47% rise in people who felt they did not receive medically necessary healthcare. …


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Jupiter will be at its highest point in the sky for many years to come

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In just over a week, Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, will be at its highest point in the sky for many years to come. Near their closest to Earth, Jupiter and its moons will appear obvious in the sky, offering fantastic opportunities to view the giant planet through a telescope.”Through binoculars you’ll be able to see that Jupiter is distinctly non-star-like and you should be able to make out the Galilean moons of Jupiter — the four largest moons,” said Dr Chris Arridge, astronomer from University College, London. “These go around Jupiter in a matter of days and so you’ll be able to watch them orbit by looking at the giant planet from one night to the next.”Viewing Jupiter will be a highlight of National Astronomy Week (1-8 March 2014) where UK astronomers and local organisations have teamed up to offer opportunities all over the UK to view the giant planet. Both professional and amateur astronomers as well as organisations have been arranging events and activities in locations all over the country, giving members of the public of all ages, opportunities to get involved.Among the events taking place across the UK, are:1 March — 4.30pm until late — Great Ellingham Recreation Centre, Great Ellingham, Attleborough — All things nocturnal! Night time guided walk, talks, star gazing and moth trapping with the RSPB and Breckland Astronomical Society.5 March — 7.30pm — South Downs Planetarium and Science Centre, Chichester: A unique show in the Planetarium Dome where people will be shown the sights to look for in the night sky during the spring.6 March — 4:30-6:30pm and 7-9pm — Almondell Country Park: Join the Royal Observatory Edinburgh and the Astronomical Society of Edinburgh for a night of comet making demonstrations and Jupiter viewing. Activities will be British Sign Language interpreted.7-9 March — 7-9pm — Ruislip Lido in North West London: Come and view Jupiter, the Moon and other sky wonders courtesy of the West of London Astronomical Society. There’ll be telescopes galore to allow you to gaze at the craters and mountains of the Moon, the belts and satellites of Jupiter and the Orion Nebula and the Pleiades star cluster.1-9 March — 4pm — Life Science Centre in Newcastle: Sit back and enjoy a tour of the night sky in the planetarium, zooming into this planetary giant and investigate two of Jupiter’s moons, Io and Europa: Fire and Ice. The price for this event is included in the admission for the Science Centre.1-8 March — Wimbleball Lake, Exmoor National Park: Wimbleball Astrocamp includes a variety of exciting activities for all the family to enjoy including talks and presentations, workshops, Planetarium, telescopes, stargazing opportunities, plus a BBQ on 1, 7 and 8 March (weather dependent). 8 March — 6.30-pm — Kingsland Primary School, Peebles — Star Party and Planetarium Night including talks on how wild birds navigate using moons and stars, public viewing sessions and meteorite viewing.Dr Tom Johnston, Co-ordinator of the Peebles Astronomy Group in the Scottish borders, said: “National Astronomy Week is a wonderful vehicle through which our new Astronomy Group in Peebles can engage with the public and introduce both young and old alike to the hobby. It will provide an opportunity for many here in The Scottish Borders to experience what will be their first views of our beautiful dark skies through a telescope.”Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by Royal Astronomical Society (RAS). …


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#Alzheimer, #Jupiter, #Language, #London, #National, #Peebles, #Royal, #Science, #Scottish

Managed honeybees linked to new diseases in wild bees, UK study shows

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Diseases that are common in managed honeybee colonies are now widespread in the UK’s wild bumblebees, according to research published in Nature. The study suggests that some diseases are being driven into wild bumblebee populations from managed honeybees.Dr Matthias Frst and Professor Mark Brown from Royal Holloway University of London (who worked in collaboration with Dr Dino McMahon and Professor Robert Paxton at Queen’s University Belfast, and Professor Juliet Osborne working at Rothamsted Research and the University of Exeter) say the research provides vital information for beekeepers across the world to ensure honeybee management supports wild bee populations.Dr Frst, from the School of Biological Sciences at Royal Holloway, said: “Wild and managed bees are in decline at national and global scales. Given their central role in pollinating wildflowers and crops, it is essential that we understand what lies behind these declines. Our results suggest that emerging diseases, spread from managed bees, may be an important cause of wild bee decline.”This research assessed common honeybee diseases to determine if they could pass from honeybees to bumblebees. It showed that deformed wing virus (DWV) and the fungal parasite Nosema ceranae — both of which have major negative impacts on honeybee health — can infect worker bumblebees and, in the case of DWV, reduce their lifespan.Honeybees and bumblebees were then collected from 26 sites across the UK and screened for the presence of the parasites. Both parasites were widespread in bumblebees and honeybees across the UK.Dr Frst explained: “One of the novel aspects of our study is that we show that deformed wing virus, which is one of the main causes of honeybee deaths worldwide, is not only broadly present in bumblebees, but is actually replicating inside them. This means that it is acting as a real disease; they are not just carriers.”The researchers also looked at how the diseases spread and studied genetic similarities between DWV in different pollinator populations. Three factors suggest that honeybees are spreading the parasites into wild bumblebees: honeybees have higher background levels of the virus and the fungus than bumblebees; bumblebee infection is predicted by patterns of honeybee infection; and honeybees and bumblebees at the same sites share genetic strains of DWV.”We have known for a long time that parasites are behind declines in honeybees,” said Professor Brown. “What our data show is that these same pathogens are circulating widely across our wild and managed pollinators. Infected honeybees can leave traces of disease, like a fungal spore or virus particle, on the flowers that they visit and these may then infect wild bees.”While recent studies have provided anecdotal reports of the presence of honeybee parasites in other pollinators, this is the first study to determine the epidemiology of these parasites across the landscape. …


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#Agriculture, #Alternative-Medicine, #Brown, #King, #London, #National, #Nature, #Royalholloway

Discovery may help to explain mystery of "missing" genetic risk, susceptibility to common diseases

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A new study could help to answer an important riddle in our understanding of genetics: why research to look for the genetic causes of common diseases has failed to explain more than a fraction of the heritable risk of developing them.Susceptibility to common diseases is believed to arise through a combination of many common genetic variants that individually slightly increase the risk of disease, plus a smaller number of rare mutations that often carry far greater risk.However, even when their effects are added together, the genetic variants so far linked to common diseases account for only a relatively small proportion of the risk we know is conveyed by genetics through studies of family history.But the major new study, published in the journal PLOS Genetics, shows for the first time in cancer that some common genetic variants could actually be indicators of the presence of much more influential rare mutations that have yet to be found.Scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, led an international consortium made up of more than 25 leading academic institutions on the study, which was funded by the European Union.The research, involving 20,440 men with prostate cancer and 21,469 without the disease, identified a cluster of four common genetic variants on chromosome 17 that appeared to give rise to a small increase in prostate cancer risk, using the standard statistical techniques for this type of study.But the study found an alternative explanation for the risk signal — a small proportion of the men with these common variants were in fact carriers of a rare mutation in the nearby HOXB13 gene, which is known to be linked to prostate cancer. Under this ‘synthetic association’, the number of people carrying a cancer risk variant was much lower than had been assumed, but those people who did inherit a variant had a much higher risk of prostate cancer than had been realised.The discovery shows that the prevailing genetic theory — that common cancers are predominantly caused by the combined action of many common genetic variants, each with only a very small effect — could potentially underestimate the impact of rare, as yet undiscovered mutations.The results are important because they show that there is a need for renewed effort by geneticists to find the causal variants, whether common or rare, behind the many common cancer-associated variants identified in recent years.Identifying any underlying rare mutations with a big effect on disease risk could improve the genetic screening and clinical management of individuals at greater risk of developing cancer, as well as other diseases.Study co-leader Dr Zsofia Kote-Jarai, Senior Staff Scientist at The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), said: “As far as we are aware, this is the first known example of a ‘synthetic association’ in cancer genetics. It was exciting to find evidence for this theory, which predicts that common genetic variants that appear to increase risk of disease by only a modest amount may indeed sometimes be detected purely due to their correlation with a rarer variant which confers a greater risk.”Our study does not imply how widespread this phenomenon may be, but it holds some important lessons for geneticists in cancer, and other common diseases. It demonstrates the importance of identifying the causal genetic changes behind the many common variants that have already been shown to influence risk of disease.”Our study also demonstrates that standard methods to identify potential causal variants when fine-mapping genetic associations with disease may be inadequate to assess the contribution of rare variants. Large sequencing studies may be necessary to answer these questions unequivocally.”Study co-leader Professor Ros Eeles, Professor of Oncogenetics at The Institute of Cancer Research and Honorary Clinical Consultant at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, said: “One important unanswered question in cancer genetics — and in genetics of common disease more generally — is why the genetic mutations we’ve discovered so far each seem to have such a small effect, when studies of families have shown that our genetic make-up has a very large influence on our risk of cancer.”Our study is an important step forward in our understanding of where we might find this ‘missing’ genetic risk in cancer. At least in part, it might lie in rarer mutations which current research tools have struggled to find, because individually each does not affect a large number of people.”


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Mixed genes: Interactive world map of human genetic history reveals likely genetic impacts of historical events

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When individuals from different groups interbreed, their offspring’s DNA becomes a mixture of the DNA from each admixing group. Pieces of this DNA are then passed along through subsequent generations, carrying on all the way to the present day. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, Oxford University and University College London (UCL) have now produced a global map detailing the genetic histories of 95 different populations across the world, spanning the last four millennia.The interactive world map that is accessible via the internet, details the histories of genetic mixing between each of the 95 populations across Europe, Africa, Asia and South America. It shows likely genetic impacts of historical events including European colonialism, the Mongol Empire, the Arab slave trade and European traders near the Silk Road mixing with people in China.The study, published this week in Science, is the first to simultaneously identify, date and characterise genetic mixing between populations. To do this, the researchers developed sophisticated statistical methods to analyse the DNA of 1490 individuals in 95 populations around the world. “DNA really has the power to tell stories and uncover details of humanity’s past,” said Simon Myers of Oxford University’s Department of Statistics and Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, co-senior author of the study. “Because our approach uses only genetic data, it provides information independent from other sources. Many of our genetic observations match historical events, and we also see evidence of previously unrecorded genetic mixing. For example, the DNA of the Tu people in modern China suggests that in around 1200CE, Europeans similar to modern Greeks mixed with an otherwise Chinese-like population. Plausibly, the source of this European-like DNA might be merchants travelling the nearby Silk Road.”The powerful technique, christened ‘Globetrotter’, provides insight into past events such as the genetic legacy of the Mongol Empire. …


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#African, #Agriculture, #Alzheimer, #China, #Dna, #Europe, #Genetic, #Genetics, #Germany, #London, #Result, #Study

Mathematical beauty activates same brain region as great art or music

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People who appreciate the beauty of mathematics activate the same part of their brain when they look at aesthetically pleasing formula as others do when appreciating art or music, suggesting that there is a neurobiological basis to beauty.There are many different sources of beauty — a beautiful face, a picturesque landscape, a great symphony are all examples of beauty derived from sensory experiences. But there are other, highly intellectual sources of beauty. Mathematicians often describe mathematical formulae in emotive terms and the experience of mathematical beauty has often been compared by them to the experience of beauty derived from the greatest art.In a new paper published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to image the brain activity of 15 mathematicians when they viewed mathematical formulae that they had previously rated as beautiful, neutral or ugly.The results showed that the experience of mathematical beauty correlates with activity in the same part of the emotional brain — namely the medial orbito-frontal cortex — as the experience of beauty derived from art or music.Professor Semir Zeki, lead author of the paper from the Wellcome Laboratory of Neurobiology at UCL, said: “To many of us mathematical formulae appear dry and inaccessible but to a mathematician an equation can embody the quintescence of beauty. The beauty of a formula may result from simplicity, symmetry, elegance or the expression of an immutable truth. For Plato, the abstract quality of mathematics expressed the ultimate pinnacle of beauty.”"This makes it interesting to learn whether the experience of beauty derived from such as highly intellectual and abstract source as mathematics correlates with activity in the same part of the emotional brain as that derived from more sensory, perceptually based, sources.”In the study, each subject was given 60 mathematical formulae to review at leisure and rate on a scale of -5 (ugly) to +5 (beautiful) according to how beautiful they experienced them to be. Two weeks later they were asked to re-rate them while in an fMRI scanner.The formulae most consistently rated as beautiful (both before and during the scans) were Leonhard Euler’s identity, the Pythagorean identity and the Cauchy-Riemann equations. Leonhard Euler’s identity links five fundamental mathematical constants with three basic arithmetic operations each occurring once and the beauty of this equation has been likened to that of the soliloquy in Hamlet.Mathematicians judged Srinivasa Ramanujan’s infinite series and Riemann’s functional equation as the ugliest.Professor Zeki said: “We have found that activity in the brain is strongly related to how intense people declare their experience of beauty to — even in this example where the source of beauty is extremely abstract. This answers a critical question in the study of aesthetics, namely whether aesthetic experiences can be quantified.”Professor Zeki added: “We have found that, as with the experience of visual or musical beauty, the activity in the brain is strongly related to how intense people declare their experience of beauty to be — even in this example where the source of beauty is extremely abstract. This answers a critical question in the study of aesthetics, one which has been debated since classical times, namely whether aesthetic experiences can be quantified.”Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by University College London – UCL. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


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#Agriculture, #Alternative-Medicine, #Beauty, #College, #London, #Pregnancy, #Professor, #Professorzeki, #Study, #Ucl