Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Shingles vaccine is associated with reduction in both postherpetic neuralgia and herpes zoster

Apr. 9, 2013 ? Shingles vaccine is associated with reduction in both postherpetic neuralgia and herpes zoster, but uptake in the US is low.

A vaccine to prevent shingles may reduce by half the occurrence of this painful skin and nerve infection in older people (aged over 65 years) and may also reduce the rate of a painful complication of shingles, post-herpetic neuralgia, but has a very low uptake (only 4%) in older adults in the United States, according to a study by UK and US researchers published in this week's PLOS Medicine.

The researchers, led by Sin?ad Langan from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, reached these conclusions by examining the records of 766,330 Medicare beneficiaries* aged 65 years or more between 2007 and 2009.

They found that shingles vaccine uptake was extremely low -- only 3.9% of participants were vaccinated -- but was particularly low among black people (0.3%) and among people with a low income (0.6%).

Over the study period, almost 13,000 participants developed shingles and the vaccine reduced the rate of shingles by 48% (that is, approximately half as many vaccinated individuals developed shingles as those who were not vaccinated). However, the vaccine was less effective in older adults with impaired immune systems. The authors also found that vaccine effectiveness against post-herpetic neuralgia was 59%.

The authors say: "Herpes zoster vaccination was associated with a significant reduction in incident herpes zoster and [post-herpetic neuralgia] in routine clinical use."

They continue: "Despite strong evidence supporting its effectiveness, clinical use remains disappointingly low with particularly low vaccination rates in particular patient groups."

The authors add: " The findings are relevant beyond US medical practice, being of major importance to the many countries, including the UK, that are actively considering introducing the zoster vaccine into routine practice in the near future."

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Public Library of Science.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal Reference:

  1. Sin?ad M. Langan, Liam Smeeth, David J. Margolis, Sara L. Thomas. Herpes Zoster Vaccine Effectiveness against Incident Herpes Zoster and Post-herpetic Neuralgia in an Older US Population: A Cohort Study. PLoS Medicine, 2013; 10 (4): e1001420 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1001420

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/QybIeyvGhYg/130409173504.htm

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Nate Berkus: Engaged to Jeremiah Brent!

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/04/nate-berkus-engaged-to-jeremiah-brent/

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Treasury: Beyonce, Jay-Z Cuba trip licensed

FILE - In this April 4, 2013 file photo, U.S. singer Beyonce and her husband, rapper Jay-Z, are surrounded by bodyguards as they tour Old Havana, Cuba. U.S. Treasury officials on Tuesday, April 9, 2013 said the trip by Beyonce and Jay-Z to Cuba was licensed as an educational exchange. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa, File)

FILE - In this April 4, 2013 file photo, U.S. singer Beyonce and her husband, rapper Jay-Z, are surrounded by bodyguards as they tour Old Havana, Cuba. U.S. Treasury officials on Tuesday, April 9, 2013 said the trip by Beyonce and Jay-Z to Cuba was licensed as an educational exchange. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa, File)

(AP) ? U.S. Treasury officials say the trip by Beyonce (bee-AHN'-say) and Jay-Z to Cuba was licensed as an educational exchange.

Assistant Treasury Secretary Alastair Fitzpayne wrote in a letter Tuesday to congressional representatives that the famous hip-hop couple traveled to Cuba with a group authorized by the Office of Foreign Assets Control to promote people-to-people contact in Cuba.

The letter was released Tuesday by U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (ih-lay-AH'-nah rahs LAY'-tih-nehn).

Ros-Lehtinen and U.S. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (dee-AZ' bah-LART'), both Florida Republicans, had expressed concerns to the Treasury Department about the trip and wanted to know if it was licensed.

Beyonce and Jay-Z marked their fifth wedding anniversary in Havana last week. U.S. citizens are not allowed to travel to Cuba for mere tourism, though they can obtain licenses for academic, religious, journalistic or cultural exchange trips. The so-called people-to-people licenses were reinstated under the Obama administration.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/4e67281c3f754d0696fbfdee0f3f1469/Article_2013-04-09-US-Cuba-Beyonce-Politicians-Upset-/id-650d80d6a8774cb08a6b3ec6642ef55e

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Byrd came oh-so-close, but probably didn't reach North Pole

Apr. 8, 2013 ? When renowned explorer Richard E. Byrd returned from the first-ever flight to the North Pole in 1926, he sparked a controversy that remains today: Did he actually reach the pole?

Studying supercomputer simulations of atmospheric conditions on the day of the flight and double-checking Byrd's navigation techniques, a researcher at The Ohio State University has determined that Byrd indeed neared the Pole, but likely only flew within 80 miles of it before turning back to the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen.

Gerald Newsom, professor emeritus of astronomy at Ohio State, based his results in part on atmospheric simulations from the 20th Century Reanalysis project at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The study appears in a recent issue of the journal Polar Record.

"I worked out that if Byrd did make it, he must have had very unusual wind conditions. But it's clear that he really gave it a valiant try, and he deserves a lot of respect," Newsom said.

At issue is whether Byrd and pilot Floyd Bennett could have made the 1,500-mile round trip from Spitsbergen in only 15 hours and 44 minutes, when some experts were expecting a flight time of around 18 hours.

Byrd claimed that they encountered strong tail winds that sped the plane's progress. Not everyone believed him.

"The flight was incredibly controversial," Newsom explained. "The people defending Byrd were vehement that he was a hero, and the people attacking him said he was one of the world's greatest frauds. The emotion! It was incredibly vitriolic."

Newsom was unaware of the debate, however, until Raimund Goerler, now-retired archivist at Ohio State, discovered a flight journal within a large collection of items given to Ohio State by the Byrd family at the naming of the university's Byrd Polar Research Center. In 1995, Goerler opened a previously overlooked cardboard box labeled "misc." In it, he found a smudged and water-stained book containing hand-written notes from Byrd's 1926 North Pole flight and his historic 1927 trans-Atlantic flight, as well as an earlier expedition to Greenland in 1925.

Goerler looked to Newsom for help interpreting the navigational notes. "Given the strong opinions on both sides from people in the polar research community, we thought an astronomer who had no prior opinion about the flight would have the skills to do an assessment, and the neutrality to do it in an unbiased way," he said.

In fact, Newsom had helped teach celestial navigation during his early days as a graduate student, and still had an interest in the subject. With the help of current Byrd Polar archivist Laura Kissel, he pored over copies of the notebook and other related writings, including the post-flight report by Byrd's sponsors at the National Geographic Society.

Newsom was particularly curious about the solar compass that Byrd used to find his way to and from the pole. The compass was state-of-the-art for its time, with a clockwork mechanism that turned a glass cover to match the movement of the sun around the sky. By peering at a shadow in the sun compass, Byrd gauged whether the plane was heading north.

Among the artifacts in the Byrd Polar Research Center is a copy of the barograph recording made during the flight, showing atmospheric pressure. A small calibration graph was labeled with altitudes for different pressures, allowing Byrd to determine how high the plane flew throughout the flight. Byrd used the altitude to set a device mounted over an opening in the bottom of the plane, and with a stopwatch he timed how long it took for features on the ice below to move in and out of view. The stopwatch reading then gave the plane's ground speed.

Byrd could then calculate the distance traveled, and know when he and Bennett had traveled far enough to reach the pole. He would also be able to tell if a crosswind was nudging the plane off course. And he would have had to repeat the calculations every few minutes for the entire trip north.

The partially open cockpit would have been very loud, Newsom explained, so Byrd wrote messages in the book so Bennett could read his suggested course corrections. For example, there was a note from Byrd to Bennett asking for a three-degree correction to the west, to counter a crosswind.

The problem, Newsom quickly found, is that the notebook didn't contain any calculations of ground speed, only the results of the calculations. "I would have thought he'd have pages and pages of calculations," Newsom said. "Without that, there's no way of knowing for sure, but deep down there's a worry I have -- that he did it all in his head."

Newsom found that the barograph recording and calibration graph were remarkably small. A change of atmospheric pressure of one inch of mercury would equal only one quarter of an inch on the barograph record. "That's tiny," he said. "If Byrd was off by even a tenth of an inch on the barograph recording, then his altitude would be off 18 percent, and that means his ground speed would be off by 18 percent. And he had the same chance for error every time he took a reading throughout the flight."

Changes in the atmosphere at different latitudes meant that Byrd's calibration graph lost accuracy during the duration of the flight. Newsom calculated that this could have led Byrd to believe that he had reached the pole when he was still as much as 78 statute miles away, or caused him to overshoot the pole by as much as 21 statute miles.

As he wrote in the Polar Record paper: "This type of analysis by itself will not resolve any controversy over whether Byrd reached the pole. But it does indicate that he was considerably more likely to have ended up short of his goal than to have exceeded it."

Next, Newsom decided to test whether Byrd could have experienced strong tailwinds as he claimed, and to do that, the astronomer turned to an unbiased resource of his own: NOAA's 20th Century Reanalysis dataset.

Using U.S. Department of Energy supercomputers, NOAA calculated likely atmospheric conditions all over Earth for every six hours between 1870 and 2010. The data used a computer model that calculated 56 plausible scenarios for every six-hour interval, and the results of the 56 model atmospheres were averaged together to arrive at the most likely conditions.

The model winds did not appear consistent with what Byrd said, so Newsom examined each of the 56 scenarios individually, to see if even one of them allowed for strong tailwinds during the trip. They didn't.

"For the most part, he probably had a headwind going north, and a tailwind going south. But there's no evidence of the winds shifting as much as he described. Of course, the models are NOAA's best guesses for what the conditions were that day, not an actual measurement, so Byrd could have had strong tailwinds just like he said. But the simulations suggest that if he did have strong tailwinds that day, he was very lucky."

It's easy to forget, he continued, how difficult and dangerous navigation was before modern altimeters and GPS. Byrd was under a tremendous amount of pressure: he'd overloaded the plane with fuel to make sure he and Bennett wouldn't run out over the Arctic (they would likely have died in that circumstance), but the extra load made the plane hard to control; he had to calculate the plane's location constantly for nearly sixteen hours, in a screaming-loud cockpit while worried about frostbite; and partway through the trip, one of the plane's engines sprang an oil leak and seemed likely to stop working.

"That they returned at all is a major accomplishment, and the fact that they arrived back where they were supposed to -- that shows that Byrd knew how to navigate with his solar compass correctly," Newsom said.

And, since the plane was theoretically high enough to see nearly 90 miles to the horizon, Byrd may not have reached the pole, but even in the worst-case scenario, he almost certainly saw it through his cockpit window.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Ohio State University. The original article was written by Pam Frost Gorder.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal Reference:

  1. G.H. Newsom. Byrd's Arctic flight in the context of model atmospheres. Polar Record, 2012; 49 (01): 62 DOI: 10.1017/S0032247412000058

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/strange_science/~3/LD-EWzV1Qaw/130408142642.htm

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Send In Your Questions For Ask A VC With Index Ventures' Danny Rimer

x_200Ask a VC is back this week with Index Ventures' partner?Danny Rimer.?You can submit questions for Rimer either in the comments or here, and we?ll ask them during the show. Rimer, who is focused on investing in infrastructure software and services, joined Index Ventures in 2002 and helped established the firm's London office.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/-_5RlfHpZZE/

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Does Your Business Need A Social Media Strategy?

Sorry, Readability was unable to parse this page for content.

Source: http://www.hashtags.org/business/management/does-your-business-need-a-social-media-strategy/

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Monday, April 8, 2013

CA-NEWS Summary

In mid-term doldrums, Canada's Conservatives hope to reboot

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Voter fatigue with Canada's ruling Conservatives and signs of stress within the government are putting Prime Minister Stephen Harper under pressure to freshen up his team and policies as the telegenic son of Pierre Trudeau starts snapping at his heels. Even though the election is 30 months away - in October 2015 - the next few months will be a critical time for Harper, given mounting evidence in opinion polls that the Conservatives risk losing power after what would be nearly a decade in office.

China warns against "troublemaking" on Korean peninsula

BEIJING/SEOUL (Reuters) - China warned against "troublemaking" on its doorstep, in an apparent rebuke to North Korea, and the United States said it was postponing a missile test to help calm high tension on the divided Korean peninsula. The North, led by 30-year-old Kim Jong-un, has been issuing vitriolic threats of war against the United States and U.S.-backed South Korea since the United Nations imposed sanctions in response to its third nuclear weapon test in February.

Five die in Christian-Muslim clashes in Egypt

EL KHUSUS, Egypt (Reuters) - Five Egyptians were killed and eight wounded in clashes between Christians and Muslims in a town near Cairo, security sources said on Saturday, in some of the worst sectarian violence in Egypt for months. Christian-Muslim confrontations have increased in Muslim-majority Egypt since the overthrow of former president Hosni Mubarak in 2011 gave freer rein to hardline Islamists repressed under his rule.

Twelve Afghan civilians dead in air strike: Afghan officials

SHIGAL, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Eleven children and a woman were killed by an air strike during a NATO operation targeting Taliban commanders in eastern Afghanistan, officials in the region said Sunday. Civilian deaths have been a long-running source of friction between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his international backers. Karzai has forbidden Afghan troops from calling for air strikes and NATO advise crews not to fire at or bomb in populated areas.

Afghan attacks kill U.S. diplomat, soldiers, others

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - A car bomb blast killed five Americans, including three U.S. soldiers and a young diplomat, on Saturday, while an American civilian died in a separate attack in the east. The diplomat and other Americans were in a convoy of vehicles in Zabul province when the blast occurred, Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement.

Italy's center left divided over nemesis Berlusconi

ROME (Reuters) - Two months after placing first in a vote but falling short of winning power, Italy's main center-left party is still divided over whether to swallow its animosity and consider a government with its scandal-plagued nemesis, Silvio Berlusconi. Italy has been in limbo since a February election gave no bloc enough votes to govern alone. The center left won a majority in the lower house but not in the Senate, and a huge protest vote for the populist 5-Star Movement has split parliament three ways.

Powers and Iran fail to end nuclear deadlock in Almaty

ALMATY (Reuters) - World powers and Iran failed again to end the deadlock in a decade-old dispute over Tehran's nuclear program in talks that ended in Kazakhstan on Saturday, prolonging a standoff that could yet spiral into a new Middle East war. No new talks were scheduled but big power negotiators, who earlier this year were insisting that time was running out, were at pains to say the diplomatic process would continue.

Xi promises peaceful, prosperous China helping neighbors

BOAO, China (Reuters) - China's President Xi Jinping pledged on Sunday that change and peaceful development will power his country's economic rise and sustain growth within its borders and beyond. Stressing that peace was pivotal for the future of the world's second biggest economy, Xi appealed to business and political leaders to use diplomacy and dialogue to resolve disputes and allow wealth to spread and solve problems.

Sri Lanka to probe mass grave with more than 150 dead

COLOMBO (Reuters) - Sri Lanka is setting up a presidential commission to investigate a mass grave with the remains of more than 150 people, an official spokesman said on Sunday. Two reports submitted to a court last week said that the human remains, in the town of Matale 142 km (88 miles) north of the capital, dated back to the period 1986-1989 when Sri Lanka faced a Marxist insurrection.

Maduro plays up his bus-driver roots for Venezuela campaign

CARACAS (Reuters) - Gripping the wheel and grinning at passengers, acting President Nicolas Maduro drives a bus to campaign rallies before an election he hopes will let him steer Venezuela to six more years of hardline socialism. From banners all around him, the image of the man Maduro calls his "father," the late Hugo Chavez, beams beatifically and salutes.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ca-news-summary-013955994.html

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