Call for 'radical action' on drug-resistant malaria

  

Malaria-infected red blood cells

Drug-resistant malaria is spreading in South East Asia, and has now reached the Cambodia-Thailand border, according to a study.

"Radical action" is needed to prevent further spread of malaria parasites resistant to key drugs, say scientists.

The spread could undermine recent gains in malaria control, they report in the New England Journal of Medicine.

'Pea-sized brain hub could shed light on depression'

The habenula may help in risky circumstances such as weighing up whether to go down a dark alley

Scientists say a part of the brain, smaller than a pea, triggers the instinctive feeling that something bad is about to happen.

Australia approves $15.5bn coal and rail project

 

critics fear the mine project will have an indirect impact on the Great Barrier Reef

Australia has approved a $15.5bn (£9bn) coal project, despite concern over its potential environmental impact.

The Carmichael project in Queensland would include one of the world's biggest coal mines and a new railway.

It would be overseen by the Indian mining company Adani, which has already won approval to build a new coal port terminal at Abbott Point in Queensland.

But critics have voiced concern over local water use and possible indirect impact on the Great Barrier Reef.

The decision to approve the Carmichael project, which will dig up and transport about 60m tonnes of coal a year for export, mostly to India, was announced on Monday.

Adani is yet to make a final commitment to the project, which would be biggest coal mine ever proposed for Australia.

Environmental impacts

Situated in the Galilee Basin in the central Queensland region, the Carmichael project would include open cut and underground mines.

Coal would be taken from the new mines by rail to Abbott Point coal port north of Bowen.

There are concerns that the mine, which will require some 12 billion litres of water every year, would drain groundwater supplies in the Galilee Basin.

But Australia's Environment Minister Greg Hunt said the approval had been tied to 36 "strict" conditions focused on conserving groundwater.

Separately, environmentalists are also concerned about extensions to the deepwater port at Abbott Point, where Adani already has approval to build a coal export terminal.

In January, Australian authorities approved the dumping of dredged sediment in the Great Barrier Reef marine park as part of an Abbott Point coal port extension project.

The extension will see Abbott Point become one of the world's biggest coal ports.

The decision was made by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority even though some scientists had urged it not to back the project, saying the sediment could smother or poison coral.

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Violence keeps crews from MH17 crash site

An armed pro-Russian separatist is seen at the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 crash site near the village of Hrabove, in Ukraine's Donetsk region. 

Kiev - Fighting between Kiev forces and pro-Russian separatists on Tuesday prevented international investigators reaching the MH17 crash site in Ukraine for the third day running, the Dutch justice ministry said.

Liberian Doctor Dies of Ebola

A senior doctor working at Liberia's largest hospital has died of Ebola.

The Liberian Health Ministry says Dr. Samuel Brisbane died Saturday at an Ebola treatment center on the outskirts of the capital, Monrovia.

He is the first Liberian doctor to die in an outbreak the World Health Organization says has killed 129 people in the country.

The U.S. based aid group Samaritan's Purse said Saturday an American doctor working in Liberia is also sick.

A spokeswoman for the group says Dr. Kent Brantly is undergoing intensive medical treatment.  She says patients have a better chance of survival if they receive treatment immediately after being infected, which Brantly did.

The World Health Organization says highly contagious Ebola virus has killed at least 672 people in four African countries this year.

In Sierra Leone, health officials say an Ebola patient whose family sparked a nationwide hunt when they forcefully removed her from a treatment center and took her to a traditional healer, died in an ambulance on the way to a hospital.

Health officials say fear and mistrust of health workers in Sierra Leone, where many people have more faith in traditional medicine, are hurting efforts to contain the Ebola outbreak.  

The WHO says the outbreak, the largest ever recorded, has also killed 319 people in Guinea and 224 in Sierra Leone.

Meanwhile, Nigeria has stepped up surveillance at its ports and borders, following the country's first confirmed death from the Ebola virus.

Health officials are monitoring airports, seaports and land borders for people arriving who may show signs of the virus.  Officials confirmed Friday that a man who died after arriving in Lagos on a flight from Liberia had tested positive for Ebola.

Investigators are trying to track down the other passengers who were on the nearly three-hour flight from Monrovia.

There is no cure or vaccine for Ebola, which causes symptoms that include fever, vomiting, diarrhea and bleeding.

Health workers are at serious risk of contracting the disease, which spreads through contact with bodily fluids.

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Six new genetic risk factors for Parkinson’s found

 

Scientists have identified more than two dozen genetic risk factors involved in Parkinson’s disease, including six that had not been previously reported. Unravelling the genetic underpinnings of Parkinson’s is vital to understanding the multiple mechanisms involved in this complex disease, and hopefully, may one day lead to effective therapies,’ said Andrew Singleton, a scientist at the US National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Aging (NIA) and senior author of the study. 

UK to adopt Indian-origin expert’s breast cancer treatment

  

Indian-origin cancer expert Jayant Vaidya (Source: jayantvaidya.org)

A pioneering breast cancer treatment developed by noted Indian-origin expert Jayant Vaidya is to be adopted and offered to patients by Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), providing relief to thousands of patients from gruelling post-operation radiotherapy.

AIDS-Free Generation Will Not Be Achieved Without More Investment in HarmReduction

Abubakar, an injecting drug user since 1989, receives a safe injecting kit at a community center in Nairobi, in a project supported by the International HIV/AIDS Alliance.

In 2010, the United Nations announced that an AIDS-free generation was achievable if we focused on the most disadvantaged communities

Lunar pits could shelter astronauts: NASA

 

Large pits on the lunar surface may hold the key to living on the Moon, according to a new NASA study. (Reuters)

 Large pits on the lunar surface may hold the key to living on the Moon, according to a new NASA study.
These pits could provide astronauts with shelter from the radiation, dust and temperature swings.

Two men 'cleared' of HIV after bone marrow transplants in an Australian first that has sparked hope for eradicating the deadly virus that causes AIDS.

• Two HIV-positive men were treated at Sydney's St Vincent Hospital
• They had bone marrow transplants and their HIV is now undetectable
• Professor David Cooper said these are the first successful cases of HIV being cleared in Australia
• Both patients remain on antiretroviral therapy to prevent HIV coming back. Two men who were HIV-positive appear to be virus-free after bone marrow transplants, marking the first successful cases of HIV being cleared in Australia.
  Both men now register undetectable levels of the virus after treatment in Sydney, according to the University of NSW's Kirby Institute director, Professor David Cooper.
  In a significant breakthrough for researchers, one of the patients cleared the virus without donor marrow containing a rare gene mutation that protects against HIV.
  The human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS, became undetectable in both patients about three years after their transplants, Prof Cooper said.
  The men, who were treated at Sydney's St Vincent's Hospital, in partnership with the Kirby Institute, remain on antiretroviral therapy.
  'We're so pleased that both patients are doing reasonably well years after the treatment for their cancers and remain free of both the original cancer and the HIV virus,' he said.
    
  Professor David Cooper carried out the ground-breaking research at Sydney's St Vincent's Hospital
  The work was presented on Saturday at the Towards an HIV Cure Symposium, which is part of the 20th International AIDS Conference in Melbourne, which opens on Sunday.
  The patients' success echoes that of American man Timothy Ray Brown, the famous Berlin patient, who has shown no signs of virus resurgence since he received a bone marrow transplant from a donor with a rare gene mutation conferring resistance to HIV.
    
  The 20th International AIDS Conference is set to begin in Melbourne on Sunday
  
  This rare gene mutation, called CCR5 delta32, makes stem cells naturally resistant to the virus.
  It is found in less than one per cent of Caucasians, mostly northern Europeans.
  In Boston, two other patients underwent similar bone marrow transplants in 2012 but the transplanted cells did not contain the rare gene mutation.
  In both cases, the virus returned after antiretroviral treatment was stopped.
  The first Sydney patient underwent a bone marrow transplant in 2010 for non-Hodgkin lymphoma. His donor had the mutation.
  However, the second man who underwent a procedure in 2011 for acute myeloid leukaemia was matched with a donor that did not have it.
  Both men no longer showed any trace of the virus after a series of tests, Prof Cooper said.
  'This is another example of where the transplant can drive the amount of virus to levels that we simply cannot detect,' he said.
    
  Timothy Ray Brown, known as the 'Berlin Patient', is currently the only person to have been cured of AIDS.
  'But if we stopped the antiretroviral therapy, there would be a very strong chance that it would come back.
  'We're trying to understand this strong anti-HIV effect and understand where the virus might be hiding.'
  The Sydney cases could lead to new approaches to treating, and ultimately eradicating HIV, he said.
  'Cure research is looking for a way to move forward and my view is that this is a very important clue, that an immune response produced by bone marrow transplantation has such a strong anti-HIV effect,' Prof Cooper said.
  'We're going to use this as a model for cure research and see if we can develop some therapies that mimic what were doing with bone marrow transplantation.'
  The stem cell transplant procedure, however, is not a practical strategy for the majority of HIV patients, and the risk of mortality is up to 10 per cent, Prof Cooper says.
  'For someone with HIV, you certainly would not transplant them when they've got an almost normal lifespan with antiretroviral therapy.'
    
  The men, who were treated at Sydney's St Vincent's Hospital, in partnership with the Kirby Institute, remain on antiretroviral therapy.
  Between two and five HIV positive patients required bone marrow transplants for cancer each year in Australia, he said.
  'It is very difficult to find a match for bone marrow donors.'
  And when a donor and recipient match was found, the chances of then having the one per cent of donors who had the protective gene was going to be very small, he said.
  Prof Cooper said there was a movement in the HIV cure community to try to identify these donors with the mutation and ask them to volunteer for bone marrow transplants for HIV-positive people.

TB rates in children 'much higher than WHO estimates'

Researchers say 15 million children are living in homes with adults who have the disease

More than 650,000 children worldwide develop tuberculosis each year, research in the journal Lancet Global Health suggests.

The figure stands almost 25% higher than current predictions made by the World Health Organization.

Scientists say health officials may be missing an "enormous opportunity" to prevent the disease from spreading.

Malaria parasite 'gets down to the bone'

Mosquito with parasite sucking blood 

Parasites infected with malaria can hide inside the bone marrow and evade the body's defences, research confirms.

The discovery could lead to new drugs or vaccines to block transmission.

The research, published in Science Translational Medicine, fills a "key knowledge gap" in the biology of the disease, say scientists at Harvard.

Carried by mosquitoes, the parasite causes the most severe form of malaria, which leads to more than 500,000 deaths every year globally.

The study found that malaria-infected parasites could bury into bone marrow, where they escaped the immune system and caused disease.

The idea that they hide in the bone marrow while they mature has been around for decades.

But a team led by Prof Matthias Marti, of the Harvard School of Public Health, in Boston, pinpointed exactly where the parasites found sanctuaries in bone marrow by analysing tissue samples from autopsies.

"We have confirmed that the parasites that cause malaria can hide in the bone marrow," he told BBC News.

The discovery was "exciting" because it identified "a key knowledge gap in the biology of the parasite", he added.

The hope is that this may help scientists devise a way to target parasites hiding out in bone marrow with new drugs or vaccines. 

The most recent figures from the World Health Organization suggest malaria killed more than 600,000 people in 2012, with 90% of these deaths occurring in sub-Saharan Africa.

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Nakupa Habari: Cassini’s amazing space odyssey to Saturn Scientis...

Nakupa Habari: Cassini’s amazing space odyssey to Saturn Scientis...: Cassini’s amazing space odyssey to Saturn Scientists says Cassini is helping them undestand how our solar s...

Cassini’s amazing space odyssey to Saturn Scientists says Cassini is helping them undestand how our solar system developed.

Cassini’s amazing space odyssey to Saturn

Scientists says Cassini is helping them undestand how our solar system developed.

I like to call this 'Dressed in Purple,' ” says Essam Marouf, a Cassini radio science team member, of this 2005 image of Saturn's rings, captured by the spacecraft's radio wavelengths

 

Of the astronomically profound discoveries it’s made over a decade of circling, the startling hint this April of a new moon being formed in the rings of Saturn is merely the latest.

Indeed, the spacecraft Cassini — which inserted itself into orbit around the giant gas planet in July, 2004 — has transmitted imagery and sensory data back to Earth that has given us a new understanding of our bejewelled neighbour three doors down.

“It’s one of the most successful (space) missions probably ever,” says University of Toronto astrophysicist Hanno Rein, whose own work has been significantly informed by the tiny craft’s output.

“Fantastic … the stunning images, this is unprecedented. They’re an order of magnitude more exciting than anything we’ve seen before,” Rein says.

Rein is especially intrigued by the natal moon — tentatively named Peggy — that Cassini detected in Saturn’s outermost A Ring this spring.

Because he believes we could be witnessing in the icy satellite’s birth a small-scale version of the planetary formation that created our solar system billions of years ago.

“The kind of theories we develop for Saturn we then apply to other systems like the (ancient) disks (around the sun) in which planets formed,” Rein says.

“But for Saturn, we can observe how it forms in situ. It’s really exciting to see it in action.”

Yet the proto-moon simply joins in the metronomic output of discovery that Cassini has hurled back to Earth since reaching Saturn a decade ago — and during its seven-year, 3.5-billion kilometre journey to get there.

Jesse Rogerson, a PhD candidate in astrophysics at York University, has followed the Cassini project for years and says it’s been revolutionary for our understanding of the sixth planet.

The two NASA Voyager probes that flew past in the early 1980s were able to collect good data on the planet for only a few weeks each, Rogerson says.

“The only way to really learn about it is to have something sit there,” he says. “What Cassini has done for the Saturnian system, it’s like shining a light bulb in a darkened room.”

Speaking from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calf., Cassini project manager Earl Maize says he’ll leave the superlatives to others.

“But … it’s been a wonderful ride,” Maize concedes. “The things that the project has discovered (it’s been) surprise after surprise over the last 10 years.”

Those surprises have fundamentally changed the scientific thinking about Saturn that began when Dutch astronomer Christian Huygens described the rings in 1655.

“In fact I would go even a little bit further and say some of the things Cassini has discovered have changed our view of our own solar system,” adds Linda Spilker, the project’s top scientist.

In particular, two moons in the Saturn system — which thanks in part to Cassini is now known to have at least 53 of them — have provided oceans of material for the craft’s camera’s and probes to explore.

The planet’s largest moon, Titan, which was also discovered by Huygens, has been obscured to astronomers by an orange haze for the 350 years since.

But beneath the fog, the Cassini mission revealed that Titan is among the most Earthlike worlds in the solar system, Spilker says.

The craft, which has made dozens of flybys of the moon, some within 100s of kilometres, also carried and released the European Huygens probe, which parachuted on to Titan’s surface in January, 2005.

Together the twined crafts have shown a moon with liquid methane seas, lakes and rivers and a vibrant, active atmosphere that have shaped its surface in very earthy ways. There’s even an occasional rain.

“We revealed that this really is … very analogous to Earth,” says Maize, who counts the exploration of Titan as the mission’s top achievement so far.

“We have rain, we have lakes, we have rivers, we have weather patterns … it’s absolutely fascinating.”

Continuing flybys will use Cassini’s radar and sensors to further map the moon’s topography, search for seasonal climate changes and attempt to confirm the presence of a huge ocean of water thought to lurk below Titan’s surface.

If Cassini showed Titan to be a topographical and atmospheric mirror of Earth, however, it showed the ice-moon Enceladus to be a tantalizing host for potential life.

Cassini pictures of the moon shocked scientists when they revealed massive geysers of salt water erupting from its southern pole, raising the possibility that Enceladus’ icy surface could be covering vast seas of water below.

With water being a prerequisite of life, tiny Enceladus — just 480 kilometres in diameter — leaped to the head of the solar system’s class of bodies where primitive organisms may one day be found.

“In Esceladus, with its icy jets, and Titan, with its methane lakes and liquid water ocean underneath, we’ve in a sense helped redefine the (solar system’s) habitable zone,” Spilker says.

“It (potential life sites) is no longer just sort of that Goldilocks zone, that place where the Earth orbits where you can have liquid water on the surface.”

In Saturn’s rings themselves, Cassini has revealed a credible analogy for the creation of the solar system’s planets, Spilker says.

Like the shifting clouds of ice, rock and dust that encircled our sun billions of years ago, Saturn’s rings are composed of materials, big and small, that are colliding and melding into larger bodies.

“We saw shadows of large mountain-sized particles that are accreting and accumulating in the rings and giving us ideas about maybe how planets formed in the solar system,” Spilker says.

“It’s just intriguing to think that maybe some of the tiny moons we see just outside the rings might have actually started in the rings themselves.”

It’s this moon-formation process that has most intrigued Rein, who believes that Saturn’s rings represent a current template for the solar system’s beginnings.

“The moons are so small that you can’t actually see the individual moons; there are maybe a few hundred that are maybe a kilometre in size,” he says. “But they create this small disturbance in the rings and because Cassini has such a good resolution you can actually see this perturbance.”

Following these ring disturbances should allow scientist to predict — applying the laws governing gravitational orbits — precisely where new moons will be when Cassini looks for them again, Rein says.

“But it turns out it’s not where (the laws) predicted it would be, it’s moved a bit. And it’s moving because there are strong interactions with the rings in which it’s embedded.”

This is the first time astronomers have seen objects in orbit change their course, Rein says.

And he says the alterations are likely caused by collisions between the tiny moons and even smaller bodies of ice and dirt within the rings. These herky-jerky pathways would be similar to the ones Earth and the other planets took during their formations.

Rein is currently running numerical simulations on the Cassini moonlet data to better understand these interrupted motions so as to better predict what may happen on a planetary scale.

“Really (however) it’s with Cassini just being there long enough to look for and discover these new things … that we’re rewriting the book not only about Saturn but about our solar system as well,” Spilker says.

In its decade at Saturn, the $3.3 billion (U.S.) Cassini mission has logged more than 3.2 billion kilometres in 206 orbits and generated more than 3,000 scientific papers back on Earth.

Some of its greatest orbital hits include:

• The discovery of seven new moons around the planet.
• The recording of a great northern storm that erupted in late 2010 and within months had grown to ring the planet in a swirling band of orange tumult. During the storm, which petered out soon after its head caught up with its tail, Cassini detected the largest temperature rise ever recorded on a planet and elements never seen before in Saturn’s atmosphere.
• The discovery of massive hurricanes at both poles of the planet.
• Photographing a shining Earth and its moon — while thousands of people on this planet waved up during the NASA’s “Earth Waves at Cassini” event — during a trip to the dark side of Saturn in July, 2013.
• The first full recording of the massive, hexagonal jet stream structure circling at Saturn’s northern pole.
• Rein speaks with awe about the ability of Cassini’s Earthbound handlers to position the craft for its orbital observations — manoeuvres that could give the term rocket science new lustre.

“The spacecraft has very little fuel … but they need to make very small changes to the spacecraft orbit with the little fuel they have,” he says. “And they’ve done a remarkable job with that.”

Instead of expending scarce fuel for orbit-altering thruster burns, Rein says, the probe’s remote pilots have plotted out close encounters with Saturn’s moons using their gravitational pull to sling the ship into desired positions above the planet.

“That they can do that is pretty amazing. It’s literally rocket science,” he says.

Its handlers employed similar gravitational strategies in guiding Cassini to its Saturn destination, using the pull of the sun and several of its other planets to manoeuvre and accelerate the craft during a journey of stupefying complexity.

The twined Cassini-Huygens package was launched from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station atop a Titan IVB/Centaur rocket on Oct. 15, 1997.

And while the destination planet is a mere 1.5 billion miles from Earth on average, the craft had to travel more than twice that distance to get there.

The twinned Cassini-Huygens craft made two passes by Venus, where it added to already ample scientific probing of that planet.

It also made an Earth flyby on the way out to slingshot it in the right direction.

“Our biggest gravity assist (however) was Jupiter,” Maize says.

And it was at Jupiter that Cassini worked with the Galileo probe, already in orbit around that giant planet, to achieve a one-two science punch.

“While we were surfing inside and outside of the solar wind and Jupiter’s magnetic field, Galileo was deep inside,” Maize says.

“For the first time we were actually having two spacecrafts make simultaneous measurements of a giant planet’s magnetic field and that was just incredibly exciting.”

It also gave Cassini — named after Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini — a chance to calibrate and test its 12-pack of instruments, two years before its Saturn encounter.

Later, by waking up Cassini’s propulsion system — which would insert it into Saturn’s orbit — at just the right time, the ground crew was able to take the first close-up readings and images of Phoebe, a Kuiper Belt planetoid that had been pulled into a Saturnal orbit.

If its beginnings were eventful, Cassini’s scheduled death a little more than three years hence promises to be breathtaking, Spilker says. The ship will be taken closer and closer to the planet until it’s finally plunged into its gaseous mass.

“Just imagine the great pictures we’re going to get of both the rings and the planet when we’re so close,” she says.

But before that grand finale, Maize says, he is certain of only one thing:

“We’re going to continue to be surprised.”

Ebola outbreak: West African states agree strategy.

workers, like these in Kenema, Sierra Leone, are taking blood samples to screen for the virus

Health ministers from 11 West African countries have adopted a common strategy to fight a deadly Ebola outbreak in the region.

At an emergency meeting in Ghana, ministers promised better collaboration to fight what has become the world's deadliest outbreak to date.

So far, 759 people have been infected with the virus in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone and 467 of them have died.

The two-day meeting was called by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Under the new strategy, the WHO will open a sub-regional control centre in Guinea to co-ordinate technical support.

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India to provide four free vaccines, including rotavirus.

Diarrhoea from rotavirus kills nearly 80,000 children in India every year

India will provide four new vaccines free of cost as part of a programme to reduce child mortality, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said.

They include one for rotavirus, which kills thousands of children a year.

The disease causes dehydration and severe diarrhoea. It spreads via contaminated hands and surfaces, and is common in Asia and Africa.

The move brings to 13 the number of free vaccines provided against life threatening diseases.

"The introduction of four new life-saving vaccines will play a key role in reducing childhood and infant mortality and morbidity in the country," Mr Modi said in a statement.

"Many of these vaccines are already available through private practitioners to those who can afford them. The government will now ensure that the benefits of vaccination reach all sections of society, regardless of social and economic status."

The four new vaccines will combat rotavirus, rubella, polio and Japanese encephalitis.

Diarrhoea caused by rotavirus kills nearly 80,000 children each year and results in up to a million hospital admissions in India, the statement said.

Regular outbreaks of encephalitis also kill hundreds of children every year. 

A new adult vaccine against Japanese encephalitis will now be introduced in the 179 worst-affected districts in nine states.

Though India was declared polio free in March, it will introduce an injectable polio vaccine to "provide long lasting protection to the population against the virus," the statement said.

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Scientists 'develop test for teen binge-drinking risk'.

Scientists claim to have developed a way of predicting which teenagers are likely to binge-drink.

A combination of 40 factors, including brain structure, personality and major life events, were used to produce the test.

It can predict, with 70% accuracy, which 14-year-olds are likely to binge-drink at 16.

But a simpler method would be needed to make the test practical because of the prohibitive costs of brain scans.

Studies have already looked for the differences between binge-drinking teenagers and those choosing a path of sobriety. 

However, they cannot tease out what makes someone more likely to consume copious amounts of alcohol from the changes caused by the drink.

'Bunch of little things'

An international group of scientists have now conducted the largest study of its type to find a way of predicting which teenagers will go on to binge-drink.

They looked at a huge array of variables, including family history, exposure to alcohol, neuroticism, extravagance, conscientiousness and other personality traits, a suite of genes, brain volume, how the brain responds to reward and many more.

Dr Robert Whelan, of University College Dublin, told the BBC: "There is no one really big thing. It's a bunch of little things adding up to give you this prediction.

"There are three main areas: brain activity and brain structure; personality, so seeking out new things to do increases the risk, whereas conscious tends to make you less likely to binge-drink; and then life events, such as a boyfriend or girlfriend, is highly predictive."  

However, he cautioned the test would have limited value in testing one individual as it was not accurate enough.

"It is very broad, but you could identify a group of people - say, take 1,000 kids and find the top 200 at a higher risk - to give them special intervention."

Dr Whelan added that it was important to identify those at risk of binge drinking because studies had shown alcohol has "neurotoxic effects which carry on into adulthood".

However, brain scans cost thousands of pounds per person. A simplified version of the test, focusing on relatively cheap personality and family history factors, is more likely to be used.

Hugh Perry, chairman of the Medical Research Council neurosciences and mental health board, said: "Addiction and substance misuse is a major medical, social and economic problem for the UK.

"The UK government spends more than £15bn annually in meeting the cost of drug-related social and economic harm."

He said further research could "lead to breakthroughs in this field and provide compelling evidence to inform public health policy and lay the groundwork for the design of interventions".

The findings will also be applied to other fields, including drug abuse and smoking.

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