The United Nations isn’t letting a good crisis go to waste, having recently endorsed the use of untested, experimental Ebola vaccines being rushed to market as this is typed. Agence France-Presse reports that the vaccines, which are bypassing the normal testing and approval process, should be ready in bulk by early 2015 for use in West Africa.

Two vaccines in particular, one manufactured by British drug giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and the other by U.S.-based NewLink Genetics, are being accelerated through clinical trials, according to World Health Organization (WHO) Assistant Director General Marie-Paule Kieny. If all goes as planned, the jabs will be available to health workers as early as November.

“If everything goes well, we may be able to begin using some of these vaccines in some of the affected countries at the very beginning of next year,” stated Kieny to the media.

10,000 doses of GSK Ebola vaccine to be ready before Christmas

GSK has already initiated human clinical trials on its vaccine in both the U.S. and Great Britain, and trials of NewLink’s variety are set to begin in the U.S. and Germany in the coming weeks, according to Kieny. During these trials, patients will be monitored for adverse events and to see if the shots produce an adequate immune response.

“They have given very promising results in monkeys, but monkeys are not humans,” stressed Kieny, warning that Ebola vaccines have not yet been shown to work. “We could still face a situation where these vaccines would be unsafe in humans or where they would do nothing in terms of protection. So we need to be very prudent.”

The pro-vaccine group Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which was started with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is also on board with the effort. The group pledged in a recent statement to do whatever it can to help speed up the availability of Ebola vaccines determined to be effective.

GSK is already planning to have 10,000 of its vaccines available before years’ end, even though human trials have yet to be completed. NewLink is also preemptively declaring the safety of its Ebola vaccines, having recently donated 800 vials, which represent 1,500 doses, to WHO for distribution in the coming months.

West Africans to be used as guinea pigs in experimental drug trials

Several other drug companies are planning to unveil their own experimental Ebola drugs as well, which they plan to test directly on West Africans in the heat of the crisis. Reuters reports that Mapp Biopharmaceutical, Sarepta and Tekmira will all initiate trials in the affected countries as part of a fast-track approval scheme to get the drugs released as quickly as possible.

“We are starting to discuss with African sites to see which would be the most suitable to test these new drugs and establish as soon as possible which one gives an advantage for survival to patients,” stated Kieny, emphasizing WHO’s support of the effort.

In the meantime, WHO says blood transfusions of human serum taken from Ebola survivors may be helpful in preventing the spread of infection. The treatment was shown to be effective in American physician Richard Sacra, who was given a blood infusion from fellow doctor Kent Brantly. Both men contracted Ebola while working in West Africa.

“This is something where the African population doesn’t have to wait for anybody else to develop it for them,” glowed Kieny about the experimental treatment. “This is why there is a lot of enthusiasm.”

Learn all these details and more at the FREE online Pandemic Preparedness course at www.BioDefense.com

Sources:

http://www.france24.com

http://www.reuters.com

http://www.usatoday.com

The discovery of a new shape of brain cell has neuroscientists scratching their heads over what the function of these neurons might be.
Though neurons come in different shapes and sizes, the basic blueprint consists of a cell body, from which protrudes spindly appendages called dendrites and axons. Dendrites are branchlike structures that receive signals from other nerve cells and deliver them to the cell body. The neuron then processes the signals and zaps along information to the next cell via a long projection called the axon.
At least, that’s how it normally works. The newly discovered cells have a different, and until now, unknown process. In these cells, the signals skip the cell body altogether, instead traveling along an axon that projects directly from one of the dendrites.

“We found that in more than half of the cells, the axon does not emerge from the cell body, but arises from a lower dendrite,” study researcher Christian Thome, a neuroscientist at Heidelberg University and the Bernstein Center Heidelberg-Mannheim, said in a statement. [10 Totally Fascinating Brain Discoveries]
Unexpected finding
The new cells were discovered in the mouse brain. Specifically, they are found in the hippocampus, a deep-brain structure involved in memory and navigation. Humans have the same general brain structure and types of hippocampus cells as mice.
The hippocampus is home to extensively branched neurons called pyramidal cells, so dubbed because of their triangular cell bodies. To map out the connections between these cells, researchers used a fluorescent red protein that stuck to the origin of each axon protruding from a cell.
The team expected the axons to extend from the cell bodies. Instead, they saw that in many cases, the axons emerged from the branching dendrites instead. The base of the hippocampus is divided into areas labeled CA1, CA2, CA3 and CA4. The most common site for strangely shaped cells was in the CA1 region, where about 50 percent of cells had dendrite-originating axons. About 28 percent of cells in the CA3 region were the newly discovered shape.
Exciting input
To find out how these oddly placed axons functioned, the researchers used light pulses to activate a neurotransmitter called glutamate. Neurotransmitters are the chemicals released by nerve cells to transmit messages from cell to cell.
They found that dendrites directly connected to an axon responded strongly to even the smallest influx of neurotransmitter, activating the nerve cell, said study researcher Tony Kelly, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bonn.
“That way, information transmitted by this special dendrite influences the behavior of the nerve cell more than input from any other dendrite,” Kelly said in the statement. The researchers reported their findings Sept. 17 in the journal Neuron.
The question remaining is why these hippocampus cells should need these special bypasses that skip over the cell body. The unique shape seems to make the cells stronger signalers, less prone to having their responses inhibited than neurons that operate on the traditional pathway, the researchers wrote. However, it’s not yet clear which signals use this “privileged” channel and why.

IN medical circles, they call it the Hollywood Heart Attack. You’ve seen it: grimace of agony, clutching of chest, sudden collapse, the whole purple-prose panoply.

For my husband, Harold Lear, a doctor who became a patient just that suddenly, it was the first stop in a five-year medical odyssey, one cardiac crisis after another, ending with the ultimate stop in 1978.

Through all the years that followed, it remained my assumption that the Hollywood Heart Attack was it: the paradigm, the norm, the way heart attacks are supposed to happen.

I was relieved of this assumption two years ago, when I had one of my own.

Mine went like this: altogether well one moment, vaguely unwell the next; fluttery sensation at the sternum, rising into the throat; mild chest pressure; then chills, sudden nausea, vomiting, some diarrhea. No high drama, just a mixed bag of somethings that added up to nothing you could name. Maybe flu, maybe a bad mussel, maybe too much wine, but the chest pressure caused me to say to my second husband, “Could this be a heart attack?” “Of course not,” he said. “It’s a stomach bug.”

Still, that pressure, slight but there, nagged at me. I called my doctor and reported my symptoms. The mention of diarrhea, almost never a presenting symptom in heart attacks, skewed the picture. He said, “It doesn’t sound like your heart. I can’t say a thousand percent that it’s not, but it doesn’t seem necessary to go racing to the emergency room with the way you feel now. Just see it through and come in for an EKG in the morning.”

The pressure eased. I slept, and woke the next morning feeling well. I went for the test mainly because I had said that I would, fully expecting to be told that I was healthy. First the EKG and then the echocardiogram told a different story: a substantial heart attack, “less than massive,” my doctor said, “but more than mild.” We were both stunned.

Suddenly I found myself living in a sequel: same hospital where Hal had worked and died, same coronary unit, same cardiologist, same everything; different husband wheeling me in my wheelchair through the corridors where I had wheeled Hal in his. Ghosts in every corner.

With a stent implanted in an occluded artery, I recovered fast and was cleared to leave in four days, but a bad hospital-acquired infection kept me there four weeks — time enough for a revelatory education about women and hearts.

Surprise No. 1: The biggest killer of American women is not breast cancer, as many people believe. It is heart disease. Should I have been surprised? Of course not. The American Heart Association keeps telling us about our hearts and we keep not listening, possibly because we are so fearful of cancer that we have no fear to spare, as we lie on our beds dutifully palpating ourselves for the lumps that we pray not to find.

Our hearts kill more of us than all kinds of cancer combined.

Surprise No. 2: I learn that Hal’s attack and mine are textbook illustrations of how vivid the gender differences can be. I learn that men more typically have “crushing” pain; women, nausea. That women are likelier to have early warning signs, such as unaccustomed fatigue or insomnia (unaccustomed: That’s the key word here). That we are likelier — this spooked me and kept me, for months, glued to calendars — to die within a year of a heart attack. That our symptoms can be so varied and nuanced that we feel no fear, seek no help, and possibly die — which may be why, although more men have heart attacks, a greater percentage of women die of them.

All these gender distinctions strike me as marvelously curious. I begin, as I did during Hal’s many emergency admissions, interviewing doctors and nurses and keeping a journal.

A nurse practitioner offers a graphic tutorial. Big, broad, a Valkyrie, she plants herself at the foot of my bed, puts one hand beneath her nose, as though in salute, and the other at her pelvis, and says, “In women, from here to here, anything could be a symptom.” Thus encompassing jaw, neck, throat, back, shoulders, chest, arms, diaphragm, abdomen.

“That’s terrifying,” I say.

“It’s just information,” she says. “It’s good to be informed, not terrified.”

The question looms: Why should such differences be?

Answer: Nobody knows for sure.

There are theories. Many. It may be because a woman’s arteries are narrower than a man’s, or because her microvascular system functions less efficiently, or because her heart beats faster (verging, this, on metaphor), or because it takes longer to relax between beats, or…

But if it is not well understood, we do have one good — bad — reason it is not well understood. The reason is gender bias.

Until shockingly recently — in fact, until this millennium — there was minimal research on women’s heart attacks because of widespread belief in the medical community that women did not have heart attacks. (When the American Heart Association introduced its Prudent Diet in the 1950s, it issued a pamphlet titled “The Way to a Man’s Heart.”

Research studies commonly used all-male subjects. Men with abnormal test results were treated far more aggressively than women with the same results. Women reporting the same symptoms as men were at least twice as likely to receive — no surprise here — a psychiatric diagnosis.

In a 1996 national survey of doctors, two-thirds were unaware of gender differences in symptoms and warning signs of heart attacks.

Medicine did not begin cleaning up its act until 2001, when a study from the United States Institute of Medicine analyzed masses of data, confirmed a prevalent gender bias in all areas of medical research, and urged reform. So now there is improvement, though women still make up only 24 percent of all participants in heart-related studies. Just a few days ago, the National Institutes of Health announced that it will distribute $10.1 million in grants for scientists to include more women in clinical trials, which should give us more information.

What we already know is that nearly a half-million women are stricken annually by heart disease. That it is crucial to get help fast. That symptoms may include neck pain, shoulder pain, back pain, belly pain, et al. But what we are still not told is how to know when back pain, that endemic American complaint, is a possible warning sign, and when a cigar is just a cigar?

Here my own doctor supplies a missing nugget of common sense: “Don’t be reporting every little kvetch. Use discretion. But if it is a symptom unlike any you have experienced before, make the call. Get a reality check.”

I think of my Valkyrie: It’s good to be informed, not terrified. It sounds like something cross-stitched on a sampler. In my mind’s eye, it is a sampler, hanging sweetly, safely, on the wall by my bed.

Napping can be great! But sometimes when you wake up after a nap, you feel groggy and almost as if you are more tired now than you were before taking the nap. Why does this happen? According to Dr. Michael Breus “If you take it longer than 30 minutes, you end up in deep sleep. Have you ever taken a nap and felt worse when you woke up? That’s what’s happening — you’re sleeping too long and you’re going into a stage of sleep that’s very difficult to get out of.”

Benefits of naps

So what are the most ideal ways to nap? Napping can be seen as a quick reboot or boost for the brain. Think of when your computer is starting to perform slowly and things aren’t responding up to par, after you shut everything down and do a reboot, things are back up to speed. The brain is quite similar in that, as you nap, even for very short periods of time, benefits can be seen in a number of areas.

Sleep experts suggest  that taking a 10-to-20-minute power nap can give you a quick burst of alterness and mental clarity when you don’t have much time. This can be used throughout the day, late at night, before something important or right before you are trying to beat the final boss of a video game you’ve been playing all night right and you know you need the extra quickness.

When I was interested in trying to maximize my time awake (which I still am, but haven’t tried much lately) I did some research into sleeping cycles and how to minimize the amount of sleep you need while still being able to function well. I ended up choosing a cycle that gave me a core sleep and then several naps throughout the day that lasted about 20 minutes. I found that after the 20 minutes naps, I felt great. Very alert, mental clarity was high and I was ready to go for the next 3 or 4 hours easily.[2]

I found though, that near the beginning of my experiment with cycles, I would start to lose cognitive clarity as I got closer to the end of the day. While this was part of the transition portion of the cycle, I got to feel what its like when the brain just isn’t getting enough deep sleep. According to Dr. Mednick, this is where longer naps of 60 minutes or so are said to be good for increasing that cognitive power again. [1] Mednick also states that the 90-minute nap will likely involve a full cycle of sleep, which aids creativity, emotional and procedural memory, such as learning how to ride a bike. Waking up after REM sleep usually means a minimal amount of sleep inertia.

Naps summarized

A study evaluating the recuperative effects of short and ultra short naps found that napping for 5-10 minutes can create a heightened sense of alertness and increased cognitive ability when comparing to not taking a nap at all.

If you are looking for a quick recharge: nap for 5 – 20 minutes.

If you are looking for deeper sleep rejuvenation: nap for 60 – 90 minutes.

Final tip: When you take your shorter naps, sit up slightly as it will allow you to avoid falling into a deeper sleep. If you dream during these power naps, it could be a sign that you are sleep deprived.