Winn Dixie

Winn-Dixie Stores Inc. have recalled 14.5-ounce cans of Italian Breen Beans because they might contain whole, in-shell peanuts.

A man expecting to find only green beans in a can of Winn-Dixie Brand Italian Green Beans was surprised this week to find a whole, in-shell peanut mixed in with the vegetables.

The discovery sparked a flurry of activity at the Florida-based grocery chain, which quickly issued a recall for 14.5-ounce cans of the beans with a best-buy date of September 2014.

“We are conducting a thorough investigation to determine the cause of the peanut contamination in order to prevent a similar incident from happening in the future,” Mary Kellmanson, Winn-Dixie Stores Inc.'s group vice president of marketing,  said in a statement.

The manufacturer that produces green beans for Winn-Dixie also cans boiled peanuts using some of the same machinery, spokesman Eric Barnes said.

The mix-up is particularly concerning to people with peanut allergies, who could suffer serious, even fatal reactions to peanut-tainted beans.

So far, however, no one has reported illness, placing this recall in the category of industrial food mistakes that don’t appear to result in tragedy. In a year that saw sickness and deaths from foods including whole cantaloupe, ground turkey and sprout seeds, there were some simply odd recalls as well.

Take the goof-up that occurred in mid-November, when Diamond Crystal Brands Inc. of Savannah, Ga., issued a recall of 12-ounce GFS canisters that were supposed to be filled with sugar, but were actually filled with non-dairy coffee creamer.

Or the mistake that led to the recall of 875 pounds of center-cut steaks made by Chef’s Requested Foods Inc. of Oklahoma City. Retailers expected 10-ounce, bacon-wrapped prime steaks, but actually received -- turkey filets. The official reason for the recall was undeclared allergens of wheat and soy, not grumbling over missing out on a good dinner.

Other notable mix-ups this year included a recall in February of 15,760 pounds of frozen chicken and steak fajitas manufactured by Phil’s Fresh Foods Inc. of Boulder, Colo. The 7-ounce cartons of fire-grilled fajitas were pulled back because some steak packs might have included chicken and some chicken packs included steak.

Such mistakes may seem minor, especially compared with the massive bulk of food products that are packaged correctly. But Kantha Shelke, a food scientist and spokeswoman for the Institute of Food Technologists, said they reveal potentially lax production or training protocols and could lead to serious problems for consumers.

“The food business is a really serious business. What you are making is going into people’s bodies,” she said. “No mistake is a small mistake.”

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Who is the first to say "I love you"? Surprise, surprise, it's the guys.

By Emily Sohn
Discovery

For many relationships, there is a single moment that marks a major turning point toward either a future of togetherness or one that splits into separate roads. And that moment usually involves three little words: "I love you."

In books and movies, this simple sentence may seem full of mystery and romance. But a new study suggests that science and evolution may help explain who, in the real world, declares love first and how each partner feels when he or she hears it. Many of the results defy stereotypes.

Even though most people think that women are the romantics in a relationship, for example, men most often say "I love you" first. And most people are happier to hear those words after having sex with their partners than before -- except, that is, for playboys on the prowl for short-term hookups, who prefer to hear it beforehand.

To explain their results, the researchers invoke a time when sex inevitably meant the possibility of pregnancy. It would make sense, in that context, for women to be more cautious about expressing love and more skeptical of declarations about a man's feelings for them.

If those instincts persist in the modern age of birth control, the findings may also offer advice for singles navigating today’s dating scene.

"If somebody is saying 'I love you' before sex happens, it probably does pay to be a little more skeptical about it," said Josh Ackerman, a social psychologist at the MIT Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, Mass.

"There are all of these underlying factors that go into this kind of thing that we think is very amorphous and can't be quantified, which is love," he added. "In fact, there are these very specific forces on the willingness to say love and how you feel when people say 'I love you.'"

Social psychologists have long known that men tend to express love first in relationships, even though public perception is just the opposite, and the new project started by confirming those assumptions.

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In surveys of 45 people who walked by a street corner, Ackerman and colleagues found that 65 percent of people believed that women usually said, "I love you" first in relationships, while 85 percent believed that women were the first to develop serious feelings.

But two subsequent studies, in which people who ranged in age from their mid-20s to their 60s reflected on their current or most recent relationships, showed that men actually declare love first about 70 percent of time.

In a series of three follow-up studies, people responded to questions about how happy it made them to hear declarations of love. Some imagined being in a fictional new relationship. Others had actually just been told "I love you" for the first time in a relationship in the prior week. Their answers revealed a range of nuances.

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If the couple had not yet had sex, for instance, men generally were happier to hear the three little words than women were, the researchers reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

After sex, women in particular feel a boost of happiness, Ackerman said, supporting the theory that women tend to prioritize a relationship after pregnancy is possible. Men who were generally interested in long-term relationships were also happier to hear that women loved them after sex than before.

"If someone says 'I love you' after sex, it's a better indicator of how they are actually feeling," Ackerman said. "There is no ambiguity that they are trying to get something else out of it."

The biggest outliers were men who tend to go for short-term flings. For them, happiness dipped upon hearing that the women they had just slept with loved them. Being told they were loved before sex, however, made them truly pleased.

The results suggest that evolutionary impulses may drive people to play dating games, even when their emotions feel genuine on the inside, said Douglas Kenrick, a social psychologist at Arizona State University in Tempe.

"A lot of the ways that evolution influences us don't ever enter the level of consciousness," Kenrick said. "People won't say they like chocolate because it had benefits for our ancestors. They just say they like it. We do what feels right, whether or not people are consciously playing the game."

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Many seniors are actually just as mentally agile as younger people, they just focus on accuracy rather than speed when making a decision, new research says.

Seniors may be just as mentally agile as younger people. The reason their thinking appears sluggish is they mull things over longer, a new study shows.

Researchers have found that when people aged 60 and older are asked to make quick decisions, they respond as slowly as young children. And both groups react much more slowly than young adults, according to the study published in Child Development.

The slow response times in children are the sign of brains that are still maturing, said Roger Ratcliff, a study co-author and professor of behavioral and social sciences at Ohio State University. But the apparent sluggish thinking in the elderly may simply be the result of seniors emphasizing accuracy over speed when they deliberate.

The new research could have important repercussions for seniors worried that their thinking has become too slow to allow them to continue driving safely or performing other tasks that occasionally require quick reaction times. 

Ratcliff and his colleagues have been studying the impact of aging on mental agility for the last decade. In their new study, they looked at how seniors and other adults compare to children.

They ran several experiments designed to rate mental ability and agility across all ages. In one, for example, more than 300 study volunteers watched as a group of asterisks flashed up on a computer screen. The number of asterisks ranged anywhere from 31 to 70. The volunteers were told to quickly decide whether they’d been shown a small number (31 to 50) or a large number (51 to 70) of the star shaped marks.

When the researchers looked over the responses they found that response times and accuracy both improved with age, up to a point. Accuracy remained good even among older volunteers, but response times in general suffered as people got older.

Of course, in some cases, early dementia or the effects of medication may be the cause of slowing mental agility, but in healthy seniors, slow reaction times among the elderly can often be improved, Ratcliff said. In another set of experiments, he and his colleagues coached older volunteers to obsess less about accuracy and to focus more on speed.  In the end, his seniors were able to react just as quickly as college students.

Ratcliff suspects that other age related deficits, such as declining memories, make seniors less sure of themselves and that makes them want to deliberate longer so they won’t make mistakes.

“Older people don’t want to make errors, so what they do is adopt a more conservative decision criteria and that slows them down,” he explained.

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By Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience

In science, it's not enough to think something is so. Researchers must show that what  we believe to be true is in fact true, proven through statistically significant and reproducible results. Questioning assumptions is, after all, what science is about.

Nonetheless, some studies really take the cake in the "duh" department, discovering  things that were already obvious. Here are findings from this year that should come as little surprise.

1. Unsafe sex is more likely after drinking

Drinking too much alcohol can impair decision-making. And a study out this year drove this point home: Canadian researchers, reporting results that will be published in January in the journal Addiction, said they ran 12 studies looking at the link between blood alcohol and the likelihood of agreeing to use a condom during sexual intercourse. The more alcohol in a person's system (yes, the drunker they were), the more likely they were to throw caution to the wind and ditch safe sex. Specifically, for every 0.1-milligram-per-milliliter increase in study participants' blood alcohol levels, there was a 5 percent increased likelihood of having unprotected sex.

2. Men appear confident by suppressing fear, pain and empathy

When mixed martial arts fighters need to show off masculine strength and confidence, they suppress fear, empathy, pain and shame.

Yeah, not too shocking: that tamping down those emotions might make someone seem more formidable. But the research, published in December in the journal Social Psychology Quarterly, was aimed at understanding how men manage their emotions and expectations of manhood.

"Managing emotional manhood, whether it occurs in a locker room or board room, at home or the Oval Office, likely plays a key role in maintaining unequal social arrangements," study author Christian Vaccaro of Indiana University of Pennsylvania said in a statement.

3. Smoking pot and driving isn't safe

Who knew, getting behind the wheel while high could be trouble? According to a study published in October in the journal Epidemiologic Reviews, marijuana use increases the risk of car crashes. People who took to the road within three hours of smoking pot, as well as those who tested positive for the drug, were more than twice as likely as other drivers to be involved in a car crash. And that risk increased for those who smoked more frequently and those showing a higher level of the drug in their urine.

4. Pigs love mud

Turns out pigs aren't just putting on a show when they haul butt around their muddy quarters, diving into the muck. They actually like it. While mud baths keep pigs cool, a review of research reported in 2011 found wallowing may also be a swine sign of well-being. While the review found the strongest reason noted in the past studies for wallowing was to keep cool, the pigs kept it up through winter months.

5. Fashion magazines glorify youth

Surprise, surprise: Fashion mags portray women over 40 sparingly, if at all. Young celebrities and models dominate the pages of these publications, even ones targeted at older age groups. For example, researchers reported in April in the Journal of Aging Studies, that 22 percent of the reader base of Essence is older than 50, but only 9 percent of the women in its pages were even older than 40. Vogue featured only one woman over 40 on its covers in 2010: Halle Berry (then 43).

6. People with generous partners have happy marriages

In the realm of unsurprising marriage advice, researchers found this year that generous marriages are happy marriages. Couples with spouses who offer back rubs and other seemingly selfless acts are happier with their relationships than people who report low amounts of generosity in their marriages, according to researchers with the National Marriage Project.

Half of women and nearly half (46 percent) of men who reported above-average generosity in their marriages described themselves as "very happy" with their relationships. In comparison, only 14 percent of people with low levels of generosity in their marriages said the same.

7. Parents don't think their kids are doing drugs

Smoking pot and drinking? Not my daughter! Parents are in denial about their own children's bad habits, according to poll data released in September by the University of Michigan's C.S. Mott Children's Hospital. That study found that while most parents believe at least 60 percent of 10th-graders drink alcohol, only 10 percent thought their own teen did. 

8. People aren't doing anything in particular on the Internet

Anyone who has ever gone down an Internet black hole, only to emerge hours (and dozens of Wikipedia articles) later, will be less than shocked at the revelation that online is the place to go for mindless entertainment. According to a Pew Research report released in December, 53 percent of people ages 18 to 29 get online at least once on any given day just to pass the time. Using the Internet to goof off isn't limited just to the young, either: Fifty-eight percent of all adults said they sometimes get on the Internet for no reason other than casual entertainment.

9. Restricting driver's licenses decreases teen fatalities

Graduated licenses, which allow teens more freedom behind the wheel as they gain driving experience, save lives. Researchers at the Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE) reported in November that fatal automobile crash rates among 16- and 17-year-olds fell 8 percent to 14 percent in states that enacted graduated-licensing laws. Restrictions such as limits on the number of passengers a teen can ferry around and rules against night driving decreased fatal crashes by 13 percent and 9 percent, respectively. Practice (and a little more maturity) makes perfect, it seems.

10. Most shoppers ignore nutrition labels

Calories, cholesterol, sugar … yawn. A study published in October found that grocery shoppers pay little attention to the information on nutrition labels. Even shoppers who say they "almost always" read nutrition information aren't likely to take in much information in a real-world shopping environment, the research found. Using an eye-tracking device on study volunteers, researchers found that only about 1 percent looked at information about total fat, trans fat, sugar and serving size on nearly all labels, even though between 20 percent and 31 percent of people said they looked at each of those categories when they shopped. Anything low on the label is particularly unlikely to get attention. The study found that the average consumer doesn't make it past the fifth line.

11. Presidents outlive their contemporaries

U.S. presidents tend to live as long or longer than their contemporaries, according to research published Dec. 7 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Sure, being chief executive is stressful (and eight have died in office, four by assassination), but it turns out the top job in the country comes with perks: great medical care, for example. Presidents also tend to be well-off and well-educated, according to lead researcher S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Unsurprisingly, money and knowledge tend to buy health and longevity.

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When asked to rate their own health, women, on average, consistently report being in worse health than men do, and a new study from researchers in Spain says this is because women have a higher rate of chronic diseases — contradicting a previous theory that women's lower self-rated health is simply a reporting bias.

"In general practice, there has been this idea that women over-report health problems, or are more likely to say they are ill or pay attention to their symptoms than men," said first author of the study Davide Malmusi, of the Public Health Agency of Barcelona. "We wanted to test whether their differences in self-reported health could in fact be explained by the difference in the prevalence of chronic conditions."

The new findings were published Dec. 16 in the European Journal of Public Health.

Self-reporting health

Malmusi and colleagues across Spain gathered data from Spain's 2006 National Health Survey, which included data from face-to-face interviews with more than 29,000 people on their health. About half of the study participants were between the ages of 16 and 44; the other half was older.

The survey included the question, "Over the last 12 months, would you say your overall health has been very good, good, fair, poor, or very poor?" as well as a question on whether health problems had limited people's activities over the previous six months.

Of the women interviewed, 38.8 percent rated their health as poor or very poor, and 25.7 percent reported chronic limitation of activity. Of the men in the study, only 27 percent had poor self-rated health, and 19.3 percent reported chronic limitation of activity.

But when the researchers matched up the number of chronic conditions each person had with his or her health rating, the gender difference disappeared. Having a higher number of chronic conditions correlated with poorer self-rated health to the same degree in both genders. 

For men and women with the same conditions, or the same number of conditions, women were no more likely to claim poorer health.

"There's been a longstanding debate about whether women's self-reported health is a reporting bias or not," said sociologist Ellen Annandale of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, who was uninvolved in the new work. "Some researchers argue that women might over-report health problems, and men might under-report. This study supports wider research that women's poorer self-reported health reflects underlying chronic health problems."

The root of chronic health problems

What the new study doesn't answer, Annandale said, is why women have a higher rate of chronic health problems. The data did reveal that women's higher rate of chronic problems can be most strongly attributed to five chronic disorders: arthritis, mental disorders, neck pain, headaches and back pain. But further research will be needed to explain why.

Malmusi said it is likely a mix of biological and social factors.

"Gender influences that way that people are treated and diagnosed in health systems," Annandale said. "It influences the kind of health conditions that men and women suffer from, the way people relate to their own bodies, and what kind of access to health care they have."

Understanding gender differences in health can help scientists and doctors find ways to better treat patients, she said.

 "Women generally live longer than men, but in many countries that gap in life expectancy has been decreasing over time. One of the reasons for that is thought to be that men's health is improving, but women's is not."

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The industrial plant that houses the Triad Group of Hartland, Wis., is for sale for $14.2 million, real estate listings show. The company was closed after problems with contamination and sterility in medical wipes and other products.

Federal health officials have given a green light for a first step toward reopening for a Wisconsin business shut down after making and distributing contaminated medical wipes blamed for illnesses and deaths nationwide.

Food and Drug Administration officials on Wednesday said they’ve approved a so-called “reconditioning plan” submitted by H&P Industries and the Triad Group of Hartland, Wis. The plan, required under terms of a June court order, stipulates how the sister firms will be allowed to rework more than $6 million of seized medical supplies so that they’re safe for use -- or destroy products that can’t be repaired.

But the public won’t be allowed to know exactly how the firms intend to fix the problems with products distributed to hospitals, clinics, stores and homes in the U.S. and around the world, the FDA has ruled.

The agency has denied an msnbc.com public records request for copies of two reconditioning plans submitted by the firms. In a letter, officials said release of the documents would disclose trade secrets and confidential commercial information and could interfere with law enforcement proceedings.

The approval of the reconditioning proposal comes a year this month after the death of a 2-year-old Houston boy, Harrison Kothari, from an infection caused by the same bacterium detected in alcohol prep wipes made and distributed by H&P Industries and the Triad Group.  At least 11 deaths, including Harry’s, have been tied to alcohol prep wipes, including those made by the Wisconsin firms, FDA records show.

The plan approval also comes nearly a year since those firms launched a global recall of tens of millions of wipes, swabs and other products at the FDA’s urging because of potential contamination with Bacillus cereus bacteria and other organisms.

For Shanoop and Sandra Kothari, parents of the Houston toddler, it makes a difficult anniversary even tougher.

“You’ve got something hanging over you that’s not anything but a constant reminder of the loss,” said Jim Perdue, the Texas lawyer representing the Kotharis in a lawsuit filed in February.

Harrison Kothari, 2, died Dec. 1, 2010, after contracting a meningitis infection caused by Bacillus cereus. His parents blame tainted Triad wipes for the death.

H&P Industries officials and lawyers did not respond to msnbc.com requests for comment about the company’s future plans. Nor would they comment on industrial real estate listings that show that the firm’s 285,000-square-foot plant at 700 W. North Shore Drive in Hartland is for sale for $14.2 million. A representative for The Dickman Company Inc. on Wednesday said the site was an active listing.

The FDA has a mixed record with enforcing good practices at the Wisconsin medical supply plant and other manufacturers of medical wipes. Records obtained by msnbc.com showed officials failed to issue warning letters or demand other sanctions despite documented problems with sterilization and contamination dating back to 2009, and nearly a decade earlier. When officials finally did investigate, they demanded seizure of more than $6 million in H&P Industries products and, later, the plant closure.

H&P Industries was only the first medical supply firm to recall potentially tainted products this year. In September, Professional Disposables International Inc., or PDI, of Orangeburg, N.Y. voluntarily recalled all lots of five different kinds of non-sterile alcohol prep padsbecause of potential contamination with Bacillus cereus.

In April, Rockline Industries of Springdale, Ark., recalled nearly a million units of baby wipes, including brands sent to Walmart and Winn Dixie Stores because of potential contamination with Enterobacter gergoviae, a bacterium that can cause serious infections in babies and people with compromised immune systems. As first reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Rockline Industries had similar trouble with contamination dating back to 2006, but the FDA took no enforcement action.

The FDA’s crackdown on H&P Industries and the Triad Group came only after msnbc.com reports sparked the interest of Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., and Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who demanded explanations from the FDA after residents of their states said they were sickened by bacterial contamination from alcohol prep wipes, swabs and other products recalled by the Wisconsin firms. 

Under terms of the consent decree agreed to by H&P Industries and the FDA, the reconditioning plans are supposed to describe specific steps for correcting bacterial contamination and other violations.

The family-owned firms, run by brothers David R. Haertle and Eric C. Haertle and their sister, Donna L. Petroff, were shuttered in June after world-wide recalls of alcohol wipes and swabs and povidone iodine products found to be potentially contaminated with dangerous bacteria, including Bacillus cereus.

The consent decree lays out specific steps the company must follow in order to resume operations, including revamped quality assurance steps and new management to oversee it.  If the firms fail to comply, the company and its individual officers can face steep fines and other sanctions. But it doesn’t reveal how the company plans to meet those demands.

The firms face at least 10 lawsuits in several states filed by families who claim contaminated alcohol pads led to serious infections and, in at least three cases, deaths. The Kotharis were the first to seek legal action.

Other alleged deaths include a  69-year-old Alabama woman, Ruby Hutcheson, who died in August days before she was scheduled to give a deposition in her suit against H&P Industries. The family of a 66-year-old Illinois man, Garry Rockett, also claimed in a July lawsuit that he died in 2009 after being treated for cancer using contaminated Triad wipes.

The latest lawsuit was filed in November by a 57-year-old Washington, D.C., multiple sclerosis patient who said he developed a Bacillus cereus infection after using tainted wipes made by H&P Industries and the Triad Group and supplied by Bayer Healthcare Pharmaceuticals. William Preston West Jr. is seeking $10 million in compensatory and punitive damages; his wife, Carolyn B. Gleason, is seeking $1 million.

See msnbc.com full series: Tracking Tainted Wipes

Older people with high levels of omega-3 fatty acids and vitamins B, C, D, and E in their blood do better on cognitive tests than those with lower levels, according to a new study.

On the other hand, trans fats were found to hurt cognition.

Together, the omega-3s, vitamins, and trans fat levels, as measured by a recently developed blood test, accounted for over 70 percent of the variation in the scores of cognitive tests taken by the study subjects, the researchers reported.

The results show how physicians may be able to help individual patients reach personal dietary goals to help their brain health in their later years, said study author Gene Bowman, an assistant professor of neurology at Oregon Health and Science University.

The study, involving 104 people who were 87 years old on average, was a follow-up to research that indicated that taking blood measurements solves the problem that occurs when people, filling out study questionnaires, inaccurately remember what they've eaten.

"This is a study where we were looking to figure out better ways to study the role of diet and nutrition on healthy brain aging, so we've used blood measures to reflect dietary patterns rather than have people report what they're eating," Bowman said.

The study is published online today (Dec. 28) in the journal Neurology.

Brain food

The study suggests some diet patterns should be avoided to help people stay sharper as they get older. " Trans fats are known to be bad for cardiovascular health, so it's not too much of stretch to think that they're bad for the brain," Bowman said. "It turns out trans fat was actually our most consistent finding in the study."

In addition to the reduced cognitive ability, the researchers found that trans fat consumption correlated with more shrinkage of the brain. 

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"One main thing we can draw from this is it looks like trans fats are a big no-no for brain health," Bowman said.

Researchers not involved in the study said the findings show promise for a new avenue of research, as well as confirming current ideas on maintaining a healthy brain with age.

"I think it's timely in that we have other studies showing a connection between, for example, overweight or obesity and dementia risk," said Dr. Gary Small, director of the UCLA Longevity Center and co-author of "The Alzheimer's Prevention Program" (Workman Publishing, 2011). "You can see there is clearly a connection between what we eat and how well we think as we age."

If confirmed, the findings of the study could allow doctors to determine whether patients with low levels of nutrients should add certain foods to their diet to protect against cognitive decline, Small said.

Improving cognition, preventing dementia

While the study would not change clinical practice in the short term because it still needs confirmation, Small said, it does provide more evidence that food choices can help the brain as we age.

"There are components of a brain-healthy diet that research points to, including omega-3-rich fish and nuts like walnuts, antioxidant fruits and vegetables, whole grains and avoiding processed foods and dairy products and meats rich in omega-6 fats," Small said. "If you look at some of the nutrients measured in this study, it certainly is consistent with what we know about a healthy brain diet."

Bowman said researchers plan to continue to follow their study subjects to look for  changes not only in their thinking abilities, but also in motor functions, such as walking.

While the study is promising, said Christy Tangney, a nutrition researcher at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, further work is needed for the new biomarkers the researchers measured to be seen as an effective research tool.

While blood markers may overcome the problem of recall on diet surveys, they are not perfect, said Tangney, who wrote an editorial published in the journal with the study.

"I think people think that just because they take a biochemical marker, there's no problem with those," she said.

Tangney said she has sent tubes of her own blood to different labs for tests of nutrient markers and found the results differ enough that a doctor could give different medical advice based on them.

What's needed, said Tangney, is to determine whether these markers correspond with good dietary patterns over the long term, or whether they simply indicate that someone has eaten well over the past few days.

Also, she noted, most of the people in the study were white and well-educated, and so future studies also need to examine a more diverse population.

Following patients long-term also could also clear up some of the other potential problems with the current study, another researchers said.

"The default assumption is that diet is affecting brain aging, but it could also be the case that brain aging is affecting diet," said Rhoda Au, a dementia and aging researcher at Boston University.

Au said that there is also some indication that a very low body weight can hurt  cognition, the result of weight loss and lack of nutrition.

But one of the important findings was that it seemed to be foods in combination, rather than individual vitamins, that were helping brain power, and so recommendations for the future would likely focus on foods rather than vitamin supplements.

"The take-home message from this study is the concept of a balanced diet, rather than a single source of nutrients," Au said.

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Karen Rowan
MyHealthNewsDaily

For women with advanced cases of ovarian cancer, the drug Avastin adds about four months to the time it takes for the cancer to worsen, according to a new report.

Patients treated with Avastin in addition to chemotherapy had about 14 months before their advanced ovarian cancer progressed, compared to about 10 months for those in the study who were  treated with chemotherapy and a placebo.

An early analysis of the trial's results was presented in June 2010 at the meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology; the complete report from the trial appeared Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

This was the third clinical trial to show that adding Avastin to standard chemotherapy treatments extends the time before ovarian cancers progress, said Dr. Carol Aghajanian, chief of gynecologic medical oncology service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

"This is good news for women with ovarian cancer," said Aghajanian, who was not involved in the new study.

However, women treated with Avastin did not live any longer than other women in the study, according to the report.

The European Commission approved Avastin as a treatment for ovarian cancer this month, but it is unclear whether the drug will be approved to treat this cancer in the United States, Aghajanian said. The Food and Drug Administration will be looking at the data.

The drug, made by pharmaceutical company Genentech, is designed to inhibit the growth of blood vessels that feed a tumor. It is currently approved to treat certain types of colon, lung, kidney and brain cancers, while the FDA recently disallowed its use for breast cancer.

Preventing cancer from worsening
The new report is based on 1,873 ovarian cancer patients who had been assigned at random to three groups. One received chemotherapy treatments along with a placebo; one received Avastin (generically known as bevacizumab) along with chemotherapy at the start of their treatment, then received only chemotherapy for the rest of their treatment; the third group received Avastin along with chemotherapy for the entirety of their treatment. The patients did not know which treatment they were receiving; neither did the doctors treating them.

The researchers measured the blood levels of a marker called CA-125 to determine whether the patients' cancers were progressing. CA-125 levels are a very early marker of worsening cancer, Aghajanian said. Levels of CA-125 begin to rise before a growing cancer is visible on a CT scan.

"They used a very conservative method of measuring progression, so we can be certain that it's meaningful," Aghajanian said.

Whether Avastin could extend patients' lives is a tricky question to try to answer with studies, Aghajanian said. At the end of this trial, for example, the patients and their doctors were told whether they had received Avastin or the placebo treatment, and it was entirely possible that those who had been on the placebo then received Avastin, she explained. Such a crossover in treatments after a study's conclusion would make it difficult to later determine whether patients who received a drug during a trial lived longer. 

Avastin and breast cancer
There are important differences between the studies of Avastin as a treatment for breast cancer and the studies of its use for ovarian cancer, Aghajanian said.

In November the FDA revoked its approval of Avastin to treat breast cancer because studies showed that breast cancer patients treated with it did not live any longer, and faced significant risks of severe side effects such as small holes developing in the intestines. The drug had been cleared by the FDA in February 2008 under an "accelerated approval" process based on promising early studies, allowing Avastin to be used for breast cancer patients while Genentech did further research.

"There was not a consistent benefit seen in the breast cancer studies," Aghajanian said. By contrast, three studies of the drug's use in ovarian cancer showed a consistent benefit.

The safety of the drug as seen in the new study "was reassuring," Aghajanian said, as was the finding that patients taking the drug reported no difference in their quality of life from patients receiving the placebo.

The rate of patients who developed gastrointestinal perforations was twice as high among those who received Avastin as among those who received a placebo, but the rate was still under 3 percent.

Elevated blood pressure was seen in more patients who received Avastin throughout the study than in those who received the drug only at the beginning or not at all.

• 3 Lifestyle Choices Lower Breast Cancer Risk, Regardless of Family History
• FAQ: The FDA and Avastin
• 7 Side Effects of Cancer Treatment, and How to Cope with Them

Slideshow: Funeral and reaction to the death of Kim Jong Il

KCNA / EPA

News of the North Korean leader's death sparks tears from his followers and concerns around the world as power is handed over to his successor.

Launch slideshow

The images of North Koreans frantically weeping and wailing during Wednesday's funeral procession for Kim Jong Il may seem forced and fabricated to Americans who viewed the former leader as a dangerous despot.

But experts say that the scenes we’re seeing on TV aren’t necesarily out of the ordinary or over the top for North Koreans in grief. And they may even be the honest expressions of a nation not knowing how to go on once their cult-like leader dies.

“This is a society that is organized around a mass cult-like devotion to the leader,” said Mike Chinoy, a senior fellow at the U.S. China Institute at the University of Southern California and author of “Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis.” “When you have the death of a figure that you spent your whole life worshipping you’re going to feel fear and uncertainty and anxiety about what will happen next.”

You can get a window on the people’s mind-set by listening to the words of the song that was often heard in the streets of North Korea and always played when Kim Jong-Il appeared in public, said Chinoy.

“It was called the ‘Song of General Kim Jong Il,” Chinoy said. “It’s a really catchy tune and you would hear it like 10 times a day. When he appeared in public, they would always play the lines: ‘Without you there is no country. Without you there is no us.’

“If that’s what you’ve been taught – or brainwashed – to believe your whole life and suddenly you are without that leader, you’re going to think, ‘What are we going to do now?’”

But it’s also possible some may be feigning distress since it’s expected – and they may fear retribution if they don’t, some say.

When Kim Il Sung, the father of Kim Jong Il, died in 1994, some were punished for not seeming grief stricken enough, defectors from North Korea told Barbara Demick of the Los Angeles Times.

Still, many mourning Kim Jong Il are likely showing the standard signs of grief in Korea, Chinoy said.

“If you’ve ever been to a traditional Korean funeral in South Korea, you’d have seen tremendous weeping and wailing,” Chinoy said. “They are an emotional people who wear their emotions on their sleeves.”

More from Vitals:

How Kim Jong Un's looks may help him rule

Chicken jerky treats sicken 353 dogs, owners report

Sometimes science delves into taboo subjects — and turns up interesting results. This year was no exception, with researchers delving into such blush-worthy topics as premature orgasms, sex toys and even bestiality. Here are 10 of the stories that reddened our cheeks in 2011.

1. Premature orgasm isn't just for men

It's not just men who struggle with finishing too early in the sack. According to research published in the journal Sexologies in October, premature orgasm may be more common than expected in women. In a preliminary survey of Portuguese women, researchers at the Hospital Magalhães Lemos in Porto, Portugal, found that 14 percent had frequent and distressing early orgasms during sex. The women couldn't control their orgasms and often found that they were uncomfortable continuing with sex afterwards, leaving their partners in the lurch. According to the researchers, more research is needed to find out if female premature orgasm, like male premature ejaculation, should be an official sexual dysfunction.

2. Americans love vibrators

 This may or may not come as a surprise, but Americans are apparently quite approving of sex toys, at least for women. A national survey this year found that about half of respondents agreed with statements such as "a vibrator is a healthy part of many women's sex lives." In comparison, fewer than 10 percent of respondents agreed with negative views, including the belief that vibrators are intimidating to a woman's partner.

An earlier analysis by the same researchers found that 53 percent of women and 45 percent of men had used vibrators in their lifetimes. Furthermore, vibrator use was correlated with sexual satisfaction.

3. Meditation can be sexy

Another way women can get more out of sex: meditation. According to research released in November, women trained in "mindfulness meditation" became more aware of their bodies' responses to sexy stimuli such as erotic photographs. This meditation, which teaches people to stay in the present, seems to silence the chatter of anxious and insecure thoughts that plague some women during sex, the researchers reported in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine. We'll never look at a yoga class the same way again.

4. Early humans were sexual experimenters

The news that humans and Neanderthals probably got busy with one another first broke in 2010. But 2011 has brought a succession of new research to enlighten us on just how friendly our early hominid ancestors got. In July, for example, researchers reported new DNA evidence that a particular Neanderthal gene fragment is present in 9 percent of humans across the globe, except in Africa. That means that the sexual tryst or trysts that led to this gene mixing would have happened soon after humans began to migrate out of Africa.

And in Asia between 23,000-and-45,000-years ago, humans got cozy with Denisovans, a mysterious human ancestor that forked off from the Neanderthal branch of the family tree.

On the other hand, all this cross-species intimacy may have been its own birth control. Research released in September found that human-Neanderthal interbreeding likely only led to offspring less than 2 percent of the time.

5. Teens think oral sex is less risky

Despite growing evidence that oral sex increases the risk of some head and neck cancers, teens think of it as a less-risky sex act than vaginal or anal intercourse, according to research presented in February at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Close to 14 percent of teens surveyed said they didn't think oral sex came with any health risks. In fact, because of the transmission of the human papilloma virus (HPV), having more oral-sex partners is associated with higher risks of mouth and throat cancers.

6. Vaccines don't cause teen sex

On the subject of teen sex, it turns out that vaccinating adolescents for HPV won't encourage them to dive into promiscuity. In research released this December and to appear in the January issue of the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, the Centers for Disease Control and Statistics reported that teen women who get the HPV vaccine are no more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior than unvaccinated women. 

In fact, girls who had the HPV vaccine were actually more likely to use condoms when they had sex than girls who didn't, likely because they were more knowledgeable about sexually transmitted diseases, the researchers reported. Apparently, the HPV vaccine is one thing we don't need to blush about.

7. College students: More talk than action

In September, researchers uncovered a truth that might deflate the egos of college students a little bit. Although students believe that casual sex, or hook-ups, are common on campus, there's a lot more talk than action going on in dorm rooms.

Researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln queried students on how often they and their peers hooked up with other students. They found that perceptions rarely matched reality. For example, 90 percent of students thought that at-least-two hookups were "typical" for a college career. In fact, only 37 percent of people had that many. Inflating the number of notches on your bedpost never gets old, it seems.

8. Squid swim around covered in sperm

Animals generally are less uptight about sex than humans, rarely demanding trivial comforts like, say, privacy. But the deep-sea squid Octopoteuthis deletron takes casual sex to a new level. These squid live in the dark waters off the coast of California, and they rarely run into other squid of their species. When they do, researchers reported in the journal Biology Letters, the squid don't take the time to find out whether they've met a male or a female: They just ejaculate sperm packets onto their new acquaintance and jet out of there. Embarrassingly for the targeted squid, but useful for researchers trying to track mating attempts, the sperm packets stay stuck to the squid's bodies, signaling a recent amorous run-in.

9. There's poop on the coffee table

To veer away from sex for just a moment: 2011 brought us some very, very bad news about single men's coffee tables. According to microbiology researchers, bachelor pads harbor 15 times the amount of bacteria as the homes of bachelorettes. And some of those bacteria are the ones found in feces.

In fact, those fecal coliforms showed up on seven-out-of-every-10 coffee tables in single-guy homes sampled by researchers. The culprit is likely men putting their feet up on the table while wearing shoes, the researchers reported.

Single women shouldn't get too smug: fecal coliforms show up in their homes, too, just in lower concentrations than in the homes of single men. Other fecal coliform hot spots include the TV remote, nightstands and doorknobs.

10. Bestiality and penile cancer

If you took the first nine entries in this countdown in stride, prepare to cringe at least a little at number 10: According to research published in November in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, having sex with animals is linked with penile cancer.

Researchers managed to uncover this connection by studying 492 men from rural Brazil. They found that a whopping 35 percent reported sex with animals in their lifetimes. Men with penile cancer were more likely to have had sex with animals, the researchers found. They speculate that penile injuries plus foreign secretion from distantly related species may introduce microorganisms that cause cancer, much as the human papilloma virus does. Now if you'll excuse us, we're off to bleach our brains!

• 11 Biggest Science Stories of 2011
• Top 10 Wacky Animal Stories of 2011
• 10 Surprising Sex Statistics

FeaturePics stock

Imported chicken jerky treats from China are being blamed for at least 353 reports of illnesses in dogs, federal Food and Drug Administration officials say.

Reports of illnesses in dogs given chicken jerky treats have spiked dramatically following a new government warning about pet snacks made in China.

The federal Food and Drug Administration has logged at least 353 reports this year of illnesses tied to imported chicken jerky products, also sold as chicken tenders, chicken strips or chicken treats, a spokeswoman said.

That’s up from 70 reports of illnesses -- and some deaths --  received in 2011 before the Center for Veterinary Medicine issued an updated warning on Nov. 18.  

Dog owners and veterinarians are reporting that animals have been stricken with a range of symptoms within hours or days of eating chicken jerky, including serious problems such as kidney failure and Fanconi syndrome, a condition marked by low blood sugar.

Though the illnesses appear tied to chicken jerky products manufactured in China, the source of the problem remains a mystery, said Siobhan DeLancey, an FDA spokeswoman.

Despite extensive chemical and microbiological testing, the agency has not identified problems with a specific contaminant -- or a specific brand or type of treat.

“[We are] still digging through the reports to see if we can discern a common thread that’s more specific than just chicken jerky,” DeLancey said.

The latest warning was the agency’s third alert about chicken jerky treats, with previous cautions issued in 2007 and 2008. In 2007, 156 reports of dog illnesses tied to chicken jerky were logged, but the number fell sharply, to just 41 in 2008, according to FDA records.

Because the agency has not identified any particular products as the culprit, no recalls have been issued.

In the meantime, FDA officials are warning pet owners to avoid chicken jerky treats imported from China. They’re also urging owners to seek medical care if dogs develop symptoms including decreased appetite, decreased activity, vomiting, diarrhea, bloody diarrhea, increased water consumption and increased urination. Stop feeding the treats to the animal and seek veterinary care, especially if symptoms are severe, or persist for more than a day, officials say.

Consumers can report suspicious illnesses to the FDA’s Pet Food Complaint site. 

Related stories:
Chicken jerky treats linked to mystery illnesses, deaths in dogs

Halloween hazard: Xylitol-tainted treats could kill your dog

Mark J. Terrill / AP

Rapper Heavy D died at age 44 from a deep vein thrombosis, said a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Coroner's office. Shortly before his death, he'd taken a long flight from England to the U.S.

Heavy D’s name highlights one of the risk factors for the pulmonary embolism that killed him: obesity.

The 44-year-old rapper, whose real name was Dwight Arrington Myers, collapsed outside his Beverly Hills home Nov. 8 and died later at a hospital. He had recently flown from England to Los Angeles, which, combined with his weight and a pre-existing heart condition, caused deep leg vein thrombosis, said Craig Harvey, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office. A blood clot, or thrombus becomes especially dangerous when a piece of it breaks off and travels to the lung, as it did in Myers' case.

It’s been known since the early 1950s that air travel was linked to blood clots. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, research has shown that long-distance travel longer than four hours, compared to not traveling at all, doubled the risk, which remained elevated for two months after the trip.

One study of nearly 9,000 employees of several international companies and organizations found that the absolute risk of a blood clot was one per 4,656 flights more than four hours long, according to the CDC. Other risk factors include recent major surgery, oral contraceptives, pregnancy and cancer.

“The clots that kill you are big,” says Dr. Jody Henson, an emergency medicine physician at Scott & White Hospital in Round Rock, Texas. “Typically, if it was big enough, you’d feel some pain in your legs or some swelling in your calf muscles.”

Of course, Henson notes, obese passengers might not notice swelling in their legs. But, like pregnant women, they’re at a greater risk for clots because blood doesn’t return as quickly from their legs to their heart.

To minimize the risk of a potentially lethal blood clot when taking a long trip, whether by plane, train or automobile, Henson says, get up and move around periodically, or at least wiggle your legs back and forth. Staying hydrated—skip the alcoholic beverages—helps too, according to the CDC.

And when you’re making your flight reservation, you might want to ask for an aisle seat. A 2008 Dutch study of recent air travelers found double the risk of a blood clot in those who had a window seat, particularly if they were obese. That’s probably because they were more cramped, the researchers speculated.

One of the predictable consequences of science’s rapidly growing knowledge of genetics is that the knowledge can be put to use to kill, harm or terrorize. Controlling dangerous knowledge is not easy and rarely foolproof—just look at the history of successful spying to get the secrets to make nuclear weapons or crack secret codes. The ability to make a new nasty class of biological weapons that could be used against us raises two important questions — should scientists try to make dangerous microbes and, if they do, who should they tell about their work?

Recently, scientists working for the U.S. government made a deadly flu virus, H5N1, even more contagious by making it airborne. In its natural form, H5N1 kills more than half the people it infects, but almost never spreads from person to person. The new modified strain changes that. Last week, there was a kerfuffle when government advisers asked the details be kept secret and not published in scientific journals to keep the information from falling into the wrong hands.

The scientists who tweaked the H5N1 virus say their work was necessary because they had to see if it was possible for the virus to mutate – and if it was, so that countries could take more dramatic steps to eradicate it, reported the New York Times.

But others say it should never have been created in the first place, it’s too dangerous and could get out of the lab and into the population.

So should scientists even be studying or making nasty microbial critters? The answer is yes. The only way to anticipate and respond to changes in nature that convert a relatively harmless strain of flu to a pandemic killer or to figure out ways to deal with horrors like flesh eating bacteria is to create and study them.

The second question becomes the key one—who should have access to this knowledge?

We need to do all we can to keep dangerous information out of the hands of both the bad and the irresponsible guys. This means not publishing the full formula for lethal microbes. It also means keeping an eye on where biological samples are shipped, who is invited to study at key laboratories and teaching ethical responsibility over and over again to budding scientists. It also means issuing government guidelines that journals, publishers, website managers and meeting organizers can follow to restrict what is made public that is obviously dangerous.

Poll: Should scientists create deadly viruses?

Some will sneer and say censorship has absolutely no place in science. But given the ways in which patents and trade secrets shape who has access to findings and data, that view is simply naïve. Others will say once the government starts dictating who can know what, the slope gets very slippery. But, the government should not make the rules — scientists, in consultation with other experts, should.

Some say no restrictions will work—information always gets out in the end. But we don't have to make the end easy to reach.  The dangerous uses of genetic knowledge should be kept as restricted as we can make them.

Art Caplan, Ph.D., is the director for the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.  Follow him on Twitter @ArthurCaplan.

Read more by Art Caplan:

Bioethicist: Plan B trumps good science with bad policy

Breakthrough of the year? AIDS discovery could put virus on the run

Russel A. Daniels / AP

Medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles led to a drop in crime, according to a report by the RAND Corporation. Except they didn't. After flaws in the data were exposed, RAND retracted its finding.

By Christopher Wanjek
LiveScience Bad Medicine columnist

Bad science papers can have lasting effects. Consider the 1998 paper in the journal the Lancet that linked autism to the MMR vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella. That paper was fully retracted in 2010 upon evidence that senior author Andrew Wakefield had manipulated data and breached several proper ethical codes of conduct.

Nevertheless the erroneous paper continues to undermine public confidence in vaccines. After the Lancet article, MMR vaccination rates dipped sharply and haven't fully rebounded. This decline in the MMR vaccine has been tied to a rise in measles cases resulting in permanent injury and death.

Each year hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific articles are retracted. Most involve no blatant malfeasance; the authors themselves often detect errors and retract the paper. Some retractions, however, as documented on the blog Retraction Watch, entail plagiarism, false authorship or cooked data.

No journal is safe from retractions, from the mighty "single-word-title" journals such as Nature, Science and Cell, to the myriad minor, esoteric ones.

Yet as astronomer Carl Sagan once said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Below are five science results retracted in 2011, pulled permanently off the books in part for falling far short of meeting the Sagan standard.

#5: Los Angeles marijuana dispensaries lead to drop in crime.

Keep smoking. The RAND Corporation retracted its own report in October after realizing its sloppy data collection.

Crime data compiled from neighborhoods with these highly contentious medical marijuana dispensaries supposedly revealed slightly lower crime rates. The authors attributed this decline not to marijuana itself but rather the presence of security cameras and guards in and around the dispensaries, having a positive effect on the neighborhood. [ The History of 8 Hallucinogens ]

The L.A. city attorney's office was incensed with the report, having argued the opposite — that the dispensaries breed crime. The city's lawyers soon found critical flaws in RAND's data collection, largely stemming from RAND's reliance on data from CrimeReports.com, which did not include data from the L.A. Police Department. RAND blamed itself for the error, not CrimeReports.com, which had made no claims of having a complete set of data, and, in fact, didn't even know about the study.

#4: Butterfly meets worm, falls in love, and has caterpillars.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published a fantastic claim in 2009 by zoologist Donald Williamson, which was delightfully reported in the science news media. Williamson claimed that ancestors of modern butterflies mistakenly fertilized their eggs with sperm from velvet worms. The result was the necessity for the caterpillar stage of the butterfly life cycle.

The PNAS paper got a few laughs among evolutionary scientists, but it hasn't yet been retracted. Williamson's follow-up 2011 paper in the journal Symbiosis, however, has been retracted.

Researchers Michael Hart and Richard Grosberg at the University of Texas, Austin, systematically refuted all of Williamson's claims in the pages of PNAS by the end of 2009. They based their arguments entirely on well-known concepts of both basic evolution and the genetics of modern worms and butterflies. When Symbiosis published its butterfly-meets-worm article in January 2011, Hart raised questions with the editor. As of November the paper is no longer available.

#3: Treat appendicitis with antibiotics, not surgery.

The Journal of Gastrointestinal Surgery published an article in 2009 by Indian researchers titled "Conservative management of acute appendicitis." The gist was that antibiotics might be a safe alternative to an appendectomy, the surgical removal of the appendix.

Well, maybe not. The journal retracted the paper in October. Italian surgeons had raised a red flag with the study in a lengthy letter published in 2010 in the same journal, politely citing a multitude of problems with the study's methodology. The Indian researchers responded a month later with their own two-paragraph letter defending the methodology and calling for a larger study to establish the superiority of antibiotic treatment over surgery.

There's no word whether that larger study is pending, but the journal's editors retracted the original article for reasons of alleged plagiarism, stating that "significant portions of the article were published earlier" by other researchers in 2000 and 1995.

#2: Litter breeds crime and discrimination.

It sounded so reasonable: Graffiti and litter in urban settings can trigger changes in the brain that can lead to crime, hatred and discrimination. Alas, the senior author of this April 2011 paper in Science, Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel, might have fabricated much of the data.

The journal Science retracted the paper in November upon realization that Stapel, a media darling whose name frequented the New York Times, may have faked data in at least 30 papers, according to a report from Stapel's university, Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Stapel has since been suspended from Tilburg pending further investigation.

The objective reader must now question other pet theories from Stapel. These include his "findings" that beauty-advertising works because it makes women feel worse about themselves, and that conservative politics leads to hypocrisy.

#1: Chronic fatigue syndrome is caused by a virus.

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a disorder of unknown origin. Some researchers, in fact, consider this a psychological disorder largely confined to wealthier countries, affecting women more than men.

Then came a study published in Science in October 2009 by researchers from the Whittemore Peterson Institute in Reno, Nevada. The researchers associated CFS with something called xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV), which they said they found in blood samples of patients with CFS.

CFS advocates were elated. At last there was proof that their disease was real, they said. Retrovirus experts, on the other hand, were skeptical. Maybe the blood samples were contaminated. It turns out that the paper is likely wrong. No other lab could reproduce the results.

Science issued an "Editorial Expression of Concern" in July after the authors themselves refused to retract their paper. The Science editorial states bluntly that the study purported "to show that … XMRV was present in the blood of 67 percent of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome compared with 3.7 percent of healthy controls. Since then, at least 10 studies conducted by other investigators and published elsewhere have reported a failure to detect XMRV in independent populations of CFS patients."

The authors finally issued a partial retraction in September, removing data now known to be from contaminated samples. Science followed with a full retraction on Dec. 23. Meanwhile, in a disturbing twist, senior author Judy Mikovits was fired from the Whittemore Peterson Institute in September and arrested in California in November over charges for possession of stolen property and unlawful taking of computer data, equipment and supplies. Science is investigating whether the data were manipulated.

Following the history of this paper is enough to make you fatigued.

Christopher Wanjek is the author of the books "Bad Medicine " and " Food At Work." His column, Bad Medicine, appears regularly on LiveScience.

• 11 Biggest Science Stories of 2011
• 10 Science Discoveries to Be Thankful for
• Top 10 Controversial Psychiatric Disorders

 Read more Vitals. It's good for you!

How Kim Jon Un's looks may help him rule
Eau de DNA: Do genes determine our perfume preference?
Breakthrough of the year? AIDS discovery could put virus on the run

AP file

The strong resemblance of Kim Jong Un (right) to his popular grandfather Kim Il Sung (left) may be subliminally creating warm feelings among his followers.

Photographs show he has his grandfather’s double chin and dark eyebrows, and his haircut supposedly is a throwback to the older man’s style in the 1940s. Some reports speculate that Kim Jong Un has even undergone plastic surgery to make him look more like his popular grandfather, North Korea founder Kim Il Sung, and less like his father, Kim Jong Il, who was not as well-liked.

Whether the resemblance to his grandfather has been inherited and/or surgically enhanced, it sure can’t hurt Kim Jong-Un, his late father’s handpicked successor to lead North Korea, psychologist Robert Bornstein says.  He'll likely benefit from the experience many of us have had of feeling warmly toward a person we’ve just met  simply because they resemble someone we like.

“We tend to prefer things that seem familiar over the things that seem unfamiliar, all other things being equal,” says Bornstein, a psychology professor at Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y. “People will prefer a familiar-looking face over one that is less familiar.”

Psychologists call this phenomenon “the mere-exposure effect,” as in the mere exposure to someone or something leads to liking him or it. “It’s actually very powerful,” says Bornstein, who’s been studying the mere-exposure effect ever since he wrote his dissertation on it in the 1980s.

There are 300 to 400 studies in the scientific literature about the phenomenon, mostly having to do with visual and auditory--“things like voices, accents, the cadence of a person’s voice”--characteristics. “If it rings a bell, then we do have this initial reflexive response to it,” Bornstein says.

In other words, when it comes to North Korea dictators, like grandfather, like grandson.

But can familiarity breed contempt as well as warm fuzzies? Maybe, Bornstein says, although there haven’t been nearly as many studies of that question. But some research suggests that if you meet someone who reminds you of, say, a hated boss, “you have sort of a negative gut reaction to them,” Bornstein says, “and it can be hard to overcome, partly because gut reactions are so powerful.”

Have you had a rush of affection for a stranger just because they look like someone you care about? Tell us on Facebook.

By Sarah C.P. Williams
MyHealthNewsDaily

A perfume that one person loves may be repulsive to another. The difference is in our genes, a new study suggests.

Scientists asked people to rate their preference for the scents commonly found in perfumes, and then tested for variations in the participants' genes. As it turns out, which version of a gene someone had was correlated with which smells they liked best.

"It's really hard for many people to find that perfect perfume for themselves," said August Hammerli, first author of the paper and a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich. “Many people judge in terms of packaging and marketing and not what smells they like. Our idea was to bring biology into this question and ask: Can we determine what perfume scents a person would like based on their genotype?”

The new study was published online Dec. 6 in the International Journal of Cosmetic Science. 

What Smells Good?

Previous research has found that a set of genes called MHC genes (short for major histocompatibility complex) is related to whether someone is sexually attracted to someone else's scent. People are most likely to be attracted to the scent of someone who has different MHC genes than they do. Evolutionary biologists think that for primates in the wild, this helps ensure that animals closely related to each other don't mate.

Hämmerli and his colleagues hypothesized that our MHC genes may also dictate our preferences for other smells. One previous study suggested that there was a correlation, but didn’t flesh the idea out.  Hämmerli's team recruited 116 study participants — both male and female — and asked them to smell 10 different scents, including cedar, rose, cinnamon and moss. They repeated the tests with different concentrations of the scents and in different settings.

Some smells were clear winners and losers — the highest rated was tolu, a scent that comes from a South American balsam tree and resembles vanilla. The lowest rated was vetiver, which originates from a grass in India and is said to have a "woody" or "earthy" scent. But for each scent, the strength of the participants' preferences varied depending on each person's particular set of MHC genes .

"It would still be difficult to create a perfect perfume for someone based on this limited information," Hämmerli said. "But the more scents and people you study, the more patterns start to emerge."

Hämmerli said the scents that people prefer may be those that best advertise their own natural body odors to potential mates, enhancing the connection between MHC and attraction to others. But that theory has yet to be tested.

Buying Perfumes for Others

"These findings fit very well into what has been found,” said Claus Wedekind, of the University of Laussane in Switzerland. Wedekind was one of the first scientists to discover the link between MHC genes and mate preferences, with the notorious "sweaty T-shirt study" in which women rated their preference for the smells of T-shirts worn by different men.  

"We first tested this idea in the early 1990s in humans," Wedekind said. "We found that body odor preferences are indeed linked to immune genes. One could then speculate that other odor preferences are also influenced by these genes."

Because MHC genes are most often linked to people's attraction to others, biologist Leslie Knapp at the University of Cambridge said the new study could be expanded to test whether the perfume preferences hold true when the perfumes are worn by others, as opposed to sprayed on one's own body.

"In this study they're focusing on self as opposed to focusing on others," Knapp said. "When they talk about wanting to choose a fragrance, my idea is why aren't you thinking about what fragrances you'd be buying for your partner? If someone likes a fragrance, they should want their partner to smell like that."

But this line of research still has the potential to reveal how MHC genes control scent preferences, and why.  "A lot of people are interested in this because they still don’t understand it, and there's a lot more for us to learn," Knapp said. ”What is it that makes people prefer different smells, and what is it that makes different people smell different?"

Pass it on:  Your genes may determine what perfume scents you prefer—it’s thought to be linked to the smells you find attractive in people of the opposite sex. 

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By Jennifer Welsh
LiveScience

Most adults suffer from childhood amnesia, unable to remember infancy or toddlerhood. That's what scientists thought. But a new study indicates that even six years after the fact, a small percentage of tots as young as 2 can recall a unique event.

"We are interested in looking at young children's memory because of what it can tell us about memory in general," study researcher Fiona Jack, of the University of Otago, in New Zealand, told LiveScience. "Most of us can't recall anything about infancy, it's only at about 3- or 4-years of age we can start to remember."

There are plenty of anecdotal cases of very early memories, but hard evidence of unperturbed long-held early childhood memories are hard to come by — most memories from infancy are big life events, ones that would be discussed in detail long after the fact. These long-after-the-fact discussions probably strengthened and warped the natural memory.

"There will be some people who claim to remember things from 8- or 12-months old," Jack said. "It's really difficult to know for any given person if that is a genuine memory, or is it partly due to reconstruction through the stories your parents have told and pictures of the event."

The researchers devised a "magical" contraption to catch the attention of children in their study, called the Magic Shrinking Box. The kids put a toy in the top, cranked a lever and a mini version of the toy popped out at the bottom, with an accompaniment of sounds and lights. The researchers trained 46 of their 27-to-51-month-old participants for two days in a row, showing them how to use the machine.

On the third day the kids were asked about the box, how to use it, if they remembered it. This day-three interview was repeated six years later, when the kids were around 10 to 12. Before mentioning the words "Magic Shrinking Box" the researchers first showed the kids a medal they received after participating, asking if they remembered why they got it. Their parents were also interviewed at that time.

Only about a fifth of the children were able to recall the Magic Shrinking Box six years after playing with it, but interestingly this wasn't stratified by age, the researchers said. Even two of the youngest kids, who were under 3-years-old at the time they were engaged with the machine, were able to remember. Half of the adults remembered the game and how it worked. 

The researchers then looked to see if any personality characteristics stood out amongst those kids who did remember. They looked at things like language skills and their general memory abilities. The researchers didn't find any indications that any particular personality trait impacted which kids remembered.

What they did see from the parent interviews was that kids who remembered had spent lots of time, from days to weeks, talking about the box after the researchers left. One even awaited the researchers' return with a vigil by the front door. This indicates that talking about the event shortly after it occurred may have helped to preserve it in the children's memories.

We did find that on average, children who remembered the events six years later talked about it more when it happened," Jack told LiveScience. "Actively engaging in conversation could have helped memory development in general and about this particular event."

The study was published Dec. 22 in the journal Child Development.

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A clinical trial involving AIDS this year is rightly being called by Science magazine the most important scientific breakthrough of the year.

When the study on the benefits of antiretroviral therapy ran last August in the New England Journal of Medicine, it did not really get the attention it deserved, possibly because news headlines are too often drawn to human failure, evil and the miserable.  However, researchers convincingly showed that people who take antiretrovirals  -- medicine that weakens the HIV virus -- not only benefit from treatment but are far less likely to sexually infect their non-HIV positive wife or partner. 

How much less? Try 95 percent!

Myron Cohen of the University of North Carolina's School of Medicine, and an international team of colleagues, started looking at the impact of medicine on disease transmission back in 2007. They studied more than 1,700 heterosexual couples from nine different countries: Brazil, India, Thailand, the United States, Botswana, Kenya, Malawi, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Each couple included one partner with an HIV infection, one not.

They found that AIDS medicine reduced the amount of virus in an infected person’s body -- not news there. But the meds reduced the amount of virus in the infected person to the point where giving it to others through sexual activity was greatly diminished.

So, at last, after taking a terrible toll on us for decades, we now know how to get the HIV virus on the run. Get anti-retroviral medications to all 7.6 million people who need them, continue aggressive efforts to promote the use of condoms and the avoidance of risky sexual and injection drug behavior, give out clean needles to addicts and we can have our revenge on the virus that causes AIDS.

Art Caplan, Ph.D., is the director for the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.  Follow him on Twitter @ArthurCaplan. 

Read more columns by Art Caplan:

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A provocative new study released this week suggests as many as 14,000 Americans may have died as a result of exposure to radioactive particles blown here from Japan after the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown in March. But even though the report is gaining some attention, experts say there is no scientific basis for its claims. 

The study, published in the International Journal of Health Services, was based on mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and compared death rates before and after the cloud of radioactive air rising out of the crippled reactor hit U.S. shores.

Joseph Mangano, the lead author of the new report, says the number of deaths in the spring of 2011 was 4.46 percent higher than in the previous spring and the most likely cause was the higher levels of radiation.

Mangano also found an increase of 2.34 percent in the winter of 2011 compared to the previous year, but he called that increase “standard,” as opposed to the beginning of a trend. Mangano said he couldn’t prove that the higher than expected death rate was due to radiation, but he said he believed it was the leading contender. He was unable to point to any studies showing how low levels of radiation in the U.S. would cause death.

While U.S. deaths did rise in 2011, radiation doesn't make sense as the cause, experts say.

“There’s nothing in the radiation health effects research to substantiate those claims,” said Bernadette Burden, a spokesperson for the CDC.

Radiation expert Andrew Maidment said that the levels of radiation that blew over the U.S. were too low to have caused any deaths – especially in such a short period of time following the disaster. 

“For acute radiation sickness you would need much higher levels of radioactivity,” said Maidment, an associate professor of radiology and chief of the physics section in the department of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania. “The levels they are talking about we see naturally occurring across the country.”

What Maidment means is that normal radiation levels vary from region to region around the nation. And though the levels rose in certain areas as a result of the cloud of particles coming from the reactor, those levels still weren’t the highest measured around the U.S. so, they’re still within the norm for the U.S.

Cancers typically associated with lower levels of radiation take years to develop, Maidment explained. “With leukemia, you’re talking about five to seven years,” he said. “And there’s a 10 to 20 year delay for solid tumors. I know of no mechanism that could get you instantaneous mortality from radiation at lower levels.”

Dr. Robert L. Brent agreed. “The exposure of the USA population was extremely small and could not account for any acute lethal effects of radiation,” said Brent, a member of the National Counsel for Radiation Protection and distinguished professor of pediatrics, radiology and pathology at the Jefferson Medical College and the Dupont Hospital for Children.

"The authors indicated that SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) was increased according to the mortality figures the authors obtained from the CDC," said Brent. "To infer that SIDS can be produced by low or high exposures to protracted radiation is naïve. That is not even a remote possibility."

So, how can you explain the rise in U.S. deaths following the reactor disaster?

There’s something called biological variability, Brent said. “For example, if you look at reports from the CDC on birth defects, you might find in a particular month a single case of Down Syndrome. The next month there might be seven. That’s biological variability.”

You can’t assume that a bump in the death rate was caused by a particular factor just because the timing was right, Brent said. “It has to be biologically plausible before you think about linking the two.”

Some associations are just the result of chance, experts said.

Maidment said it’s always possible that the events in Japan made some people in the U.S. very worried. “One thing we do know is that stress correlates with mortality,” he added. “It might be interesting to see if there was an increase in mortality after other highly stressful events, such as 9/11.”

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Deadly shoulder massager relaxes, strangles

Tiny listeria survivor comes home for Christmas

Maggots speedier than surgeons at wound cleaning

The ShoulderFlex massager was recalled this summer following the death of one woman, but it is still available for sale at some online sites.

If you think you’ve found the perfect gift for Grandma, and it happens to be a ShoulderFlex massager, buy her something else quick. It turns out to be a device that can lull users into a relaxed state -- and then strangle them.

The Food and Drug Administration issued an alert on Wednesday warning that hair and necklaces can get caught in the massager and cause strangulation. One person has died and another nearly did, according to the FDA.

Dr. Michelle Ferrari-Gegerson, a 37-year-old Florida woman, was found dead by her husband last Christmas Eve after her leather necklace got tangled in the device, reported the Miami Herald.

“The ShoulderFlex Massager poses serious risks,” said Steve Silverman, director of the Office of Compliance in the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, in a statement. “Consumers should stop using this device, health care providers should not recommend it to their patients and businesses should stop distributing and selling the device.”

The device was recalled in August, but the manufacturer, King International, went out of business and the FDA discovered that it didn’t properly alert stores that sell the massager. A quick Internet search reveals that the product is still available at several online web sites.

The FDA is so concerned about the device that it recommends not just throwing it away, but dismantling it before you do so that no one else could ever use it. “The massage fingers should be removed and disposed of separately from the device,” according to the alert. “The power supply should be disposed of separately, as well.”

Jonathan Adams for msnbc.com

Newborn Kendall Paciorek is fed by her big sister, Madison, 4, on her first day home from the hospital. Kendall was born prematurely when her mother contracted listeria after eating contaminated cantaloupe. Kendall has little energy for feeding, so when she refuses a bottle, she must be fed through a stomach tube.

Three months after she was born, Kendall Paciorek is finally home, just in time for Christmas.

The premature girl from Fishers, Ind., is one of the tiniest victims of last summer’s deadly listeria outbreak in cantaloupe, which sickened 146 people, including 30 who died.

Kendall spent the first several weeks of her life in an incubator, fighting off an infection contracted when her mother ate tainted melon traced to Jensen Farms of Holly, Colo.

She’s strong enough now to sleep in her own crib in the house where big sister Madison, 4, loves to color pictures of Santa.

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared the outbreak over this month, and the rest of the world seems poised to move on.

But for Kendall and her family, the impact of the foodborne illness caused by a summer snack is just beginning.

“Right now they don’t know what’s going to happen to her in the long term,” said Michelle Wakley-Paciorek, Kendall’s 41-year-old mother. “We were told she could have mental and or physical delays.”

Kendall was one of three newborns diagnosed with listeria infections in the outbreak that largely affected the elderly, according to the CDC. Four pregnant women became ill; one had a miscarriage.

For now, there’s no sign of serious trouble, other than the feeding tube that runs into Kendall’s stomach because the baby has had difficulty eating.

Jonathan Adams for msnbc.com

Dad Dave Paciorek, sister Madison and mom Michelle Wakley-Paciorek are grateful to bring baby Kendall home from the hospital in time for Christmas.

With help, she’s gained weight, now topping 7 pounds, up from 3 pounds, 11 ounces when she arrived suddenly on Sept. 21.

That was a week after the federal Food and Drug Administration announced a voluntary recall of the entire crop of fresh, whole cantaloupe from Jensen Farms.

But for Kendall and her mom, it was already too late.  

“We’re thinking I ate cantaloupe sometime in the first three to four weeks of August,” Wakley recalled. “I ate it probably multiple times. You try to eat better because you’re pregnant.”

Wakley never became violently ill. Instead, she suffered headaches, muscle aches, fever and chills for several weeks before she started having contractions during a pedicure.

“I couldn’t even believe I was in labor,” said Wakley, who was rushed to an emergency department and given drugs to halt delivery.  

Despite the effort, Kendall was born hours later, but so small and sick that doctors feared for her life.

Blood tests later revealed that both mother and baby were infected with listeria later traced to the tainted Colorado cantaloupe.

The months since then have been a blur of hospital rooms, doctors’ visits and worried conversations about Kendall’s future.

“You almost panic because they tell you about all kinds of learning disabilities and other problems,” she said. “It’s been like an emotional roller-coaster.”

It’s not clear whether Wakley can continue working, or whether she’ll need to quit her job to care for Kendall and her sister full-time. Her husband, Dave Paciorek, 41, is a senior manager at Federal Express.

The family has hired Seattle food safety lawyer Bill Marler, to represent them in a private lawsuit to make sure their daughter gets any care she needs. Marler said he has about 45 clients with cases tied to the Jensen Farms outbreak, including families of 10 of the people who died.

So far, Kendall Paciorek is the youngest victim he represents, Marler said. "I think there are probably dozens of those cases out there," he added.

Food and Drug Administration inspectors found that the outbreak was traced to dirty equipment, faulty sanitation and bad storage practices at the Colorado farm.

That’s especially galling to Michelle Wakley, who said she’s gotten over the “why me?” phase of shock about her daughter’s illness. Even as she prepares to celebrate Christmas with Kendall at home, she finds it hard to hide her frustration that simple sanitation could have saved her family such heartache.

“It’s reckless. It’s something that could have been prevented,” Wakley said. “No one should have to go through this.”

Related stories:

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Consumers couldn't have washed away cantaloupe contamination

By Rachael Rettner
MyHealthNewsDaily

The idea of putting maggots into open flesh may sound repulsive, but such a therapy might be a quick way to clean wounds, a new study from France suggests.

Men in the study, all of whom had wounds that wouldn't heal, were randomly assigned to have dead and unhealthy tissue removed from their lacerations by either standard surgical therapy or maggots (that eat dead tissue).

After about a week, men who received the maggot therapy had less dead tissue in their wounds than men who underwent surgery, the researchers said.

However, after two weeks, the immature insects had lost their advantage: Both groups had about an equal amount of dead tissue in their wounds. And in the end, the maggots did not help the wounds heal faster.

Although the effects of maggot therapy were not dramatic, it may be useful in certain cases, such as in patients with diabetes, whose wounds need rapid control, the researchers said. But continuing the maggot therapy beyond one week is not of benefit, they said.

Medical use of maggots was approved in 2004 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. However, only a small minority of patients with unhealing wounds receive the treatment, said Dr. Robert Kirsner, a dermatologist at the University of Miami School of Medicine, who was not involved in the new study.

The study included about 100 men with wounds on their lower limbs. About half received maggot therapy and half received surgical treatment. For the maggot therapy, sterile maggots were placed in a small pouch that was placed on top of the wound. The therapy was applied twice a week for two weeks.

Neither the patients nor the doctor evaluating the wounds knew which therapy a patient received (patients wore a blindfold when their bandages were changed.)

After eight days, the percentage of dead tissue in the wounds of patients who received the maggot therapy was 54.5 percent, compared with 66.5 percent in patients who received surgery. But after 15 days and 30 days, the amount of dead tissue in the wounds was about the same for both groups.

The number of patients who reported feeling a crawling sensation in their wound, and the number reporting pain, was also about the same in both groups, according to the study, which was conducted by researchers at the University Hospital Center of Caen , in France.

Maggots secrete an enzyme that dissolves dead tissue but leaves healthy tissue alone, Kirsner said.

Although there are few risks to the treatment, "there is a gross factor to it," Kirsner said. "Patients have to be very psychologically strong," he said.

Another group of patients that may benefit from the therapy are those who cannot undergo surgery, for instance, if they cannot receive anesthesia, Kirsner said.

Future research should determine whether the effects of maggot therapy can be improved using more maggots, and whether an increase in the number of critters would be painful, the researchers said.

The study is published online in the journal Archives of Dermatology.

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Those baby changing stations found in public bathrooms often look a little suspect when it comes to cleanliness. But of all the things you might imagine would be mucking up the surface, probably cocaine didn’t cross your mind.

But that’s exactly what was found on 92 out of 100 nappy changing stations tested at shopping centers, hospitals, police stations and churches (!) in the UK, reported The Daily Telegraph.  A team of journalists from Real Radio conducted the investigation as part of the Cocaine Unwrapped series.

One former addict, going by the name Kerry, told the Real Radio journalists she “was taking cocaine in my dinner times in the toilets [and] I was coming back off my head.”

Last month, the UK was named the cocaine capital of Europe, with nearly 5 percent of residents saying they’ve tried it at least once, according to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction.

While the study was done in the UK, it does give us pause when you think about what exactly happens on pull-down tables that are so convenient for changing a baby or, apparently, snorting a line.

We don’t know about you, but we plan on giving it an extra wipe down next time we use one.

Do you use diaper changing tables in public restrooms? What are your tips for protecting your baby?