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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  10 JUNE 2014, SCIENCE & ENVIRONMENT

 

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.”