Publisher Health

Microplastic pollution of waterways has become a huge concern, with the tiny pieces of plastic entering food webs and potentially having harmful effects on animals and people. In addition, microplastics can act as breeding grounds for antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Now, researchers reporting in Environmental Science & Technology have analyzed antibiotic-resistance genes (ARGs) on five types of microplastics at different locations along the Beilun River in China, finding much higher abundances in urban than rural regions.
In rivers, major sources of microplastics include textile fibers from laundering, water bottle fragments, and films from bags and wrappers. Also prevalent in rivers are antibiotic-resistant bacteria and ARGs, introduced through wastewater discharge and urban or agricultural runoff. Microplastics can act as a favorable surface for bacteria to colonize and grow into biofilms, where they can spread ARGs among themselves. Li Cui and colleagues wanted to examine the prevalence and diversity of ARGs on microplastics in the Beilun River, which flows from mountainous rural areas through Chinese and Vietnamese cities before entering the Beibu Gulf.
The researchers immersed samples of five kinds of microplastics in the Beilun River at 14 sites with different urbanization levels. After 30 days, they collected the microplastics and used high-throughput quantitative polymerase chain reaction to analyze almost all types of ARGs and the mobile genetic elements that help spread them among bacteria. The detected ARGs conferred resistance to almost all major classes of antibiotics used in humans and animals. The abundance of these genes and genetic elements increased by about 1,000 times from rural to urban areas. In addition, the diversity of ARGs increased. Of the five types of plastics, polypropylene had the highest abundance of ARGs and the greatest risk of spreading the genes, possibly because of its larger surface area and ability to release dissolved organic matter. These results indicate that urbanization introduces many new ARGs into rivers from sources such as sewage, the researchers say.
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Materials provided by American Chemical Society. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Former England rugby union captain Mike Tindall has been reunited with his father, who has Parkinson’s disease, after six months apart during the pandemic.Philip Tindall was diagnosed with the condition in 2003, the same year his son won the Rugby World Cup.

People who start to exercise before or during middle age typically save from $824 to $1,874 annually on health care costs after retirement.Becoming more physically active today might help us avoid thousands of dollars in health care costs later, according to a new study of exercise and Medicare claims. It finds that people who start to exercise before or during middle age typically save anywhere from $824 to $1,874 annually on health care costs after retirement, and the earlier they start their workouts, the greater those savings can be.The study involved mostly well educated white men and women and has other limitations, but the findings highlight how significantly exercise might benefit people’s bank accounts, as well as their bodies.By now, we know that we should move. Physical activity is associated with longer life spans and lower risks for a host of serious conditions, including Type 2 diabetes, depression, cancer, arthritis, obesity and dementia. But disheartening studies show that, despite these allures, nearly half of American adults rarely, if ever, exercise.This pervasive physical torpor has personal and societal costs. A 2015 study estimated that inactivity drives at least $117 billion in annual health care spending in the United States, representing about 11 percent of the total.Whether and to what extent getting up and moving might drop our share of that $117 billion, though, especially as we age, has been less clear. Past research suggests that physically active older people spend less on health care than other retired people, thanks in large part to needing fewer doctor visits and medications.But those and similar studies focused on exercise habits at one point, typically when people were middle-aged or already elderly, and do not tell us what happens to health care costs if we change our habits over time. They also cannot pinpoint any optimal age, if there is one, to begin or ramp up a workout routine for the sake of our long-term finances and health.So, for the new study, which was published in February in BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine, researchers at the National Cancer Institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other institutions decided to look for links between people’s activities at various ages and their health care costs, years later.The researchers began by turning to the handy NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study, a large-scale database of information about more than 500,000 older Americans, most of them white, who belong to the AARP. These study volunteers had agreed to fill out extensive forms about their lives and health.Among these was a lengthy questionnaire asking how many hours each week participants had spent exercising or playing sports at multiple points throughout their lives. Many of the study participants also agreed to allow scientists to access their Medicare claims after they joined the insurance program, in order to track health care expenses.Now, the National Cancer Institute scientists pulled records for 21,750 of the volunteers and began grouping them by workouts, noting changes over the decades. Did these men and women start exercising more or less often during their 20s, as young adults? Did they take up or abandon workouts in middle age? Or were they consistently active — or the reverse — throughout their lives?Then, the researchers compared these groups and at least a year’s worth of their eventual Medicare claims. And they found notable disparities.Those men and women who reported exercising moderately throughout their adult lives, walking or otherwise being in motion for a few hours most weeks, saved an average of $1,350 annually — or about 16 percent — on health care expenses after reaching age 65 compared to sedentary people.Interestingly, a different group, who said they had changed their routines, ramping up how often they exercised during their 20s, gained even greater monetary bang from their exercise, saving an average of $1,874 annually on health care after age 65. Even if some of these exercisers then let their increased routines slide during middle age, reducing how often they worked out in their 40s and 50s, they still spent about $860 less on health care later than people who almost never exercised.These data intimate that being active when we are young might have especially potent and lingering impacts on our health care costs as we age.But even waiting until middle age to become active proved beneficial in this study. People who increased how often they exercised after age 40 later spent, on average, $824 less annually on health care than their inactive peers.In other words, “it’s never too late to start” exercising, says Diarmuid Coughlan, a research associate at Newcastle University in England, who, as a research fellow at the National Cancer Institute, led the new study.Of course, this study was observational and can show only that being active is associated with lower health care costs, not whether exercising causes expenses to change. It also relied on people remembering and honestly reporting their pasts, which can be tricky.Still, “this is fairly solid data,” given the size of the group and extent of the questionnaires, says Charles Matthews, a cancer epidemiologist at the National Cancer Institute, who oversaw the new study. The findings “reaffirm the value of physical activity,” he concluded, whatever our age.

SharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingimage copyrightOxford UniversityExactly a year on from the discovery that a cheap steroid drug prevented Covid deaths, researchers say they have found another life-saving therapy. It is expensive – a potent intravenous infusion of antibodies to neutralise the virus, rather than dampen the body’s inflammatory response to it. Results from the Recovery trial suggest it could help one in three of those in hospital with severe Covid. For every 100 patients treated, experts calculate, it would save six lives. Ground-breaking treatmentBut only those who have not already made any antibodies of their own to fight the virus should be given the treatment, which costs between £1,000 and £2,000.Kimberley Featherstone, 37, who received the treatment during the trial, said: “I feel very lucky that the trial was up and running by the time I was taken to hospital with Covid-19 and I was able to receive this ground-breaking treatment. “I’m happy that by participating I played a part in finding out this treatment is successful.”The monoclonal antibody treatment, made by Regenoron, binds to the virus to stop it infecting cells and replicating. In the trial, which included nearly 10,000 UK hospital patients, it significantly reduced the:risk of deathlength of hospital stay, by four days on averagelikelihood of needing a ventilator to breathe Joint chief investigator Sir Martin Landray said: “Giving them this combination of two antibodies by an intravenous infusion then actually reduces their chances of dying by a fifth.”What we found is now here we can use an antiviral treatment, in this case these antibodies, in patients who have got a one in three chance of dying untreated and we can reduce that risk for them.”Great uncertaintyThe treatment was given in addition to the anti-inflammatory steroid drug dexamethasone, which itself cuts death risk by up to a third for the sickest Covid patients.Sir Peter Horby, the other chief investigator, said there had been great uncertainty about whether antibody therapies were the right approach, when some other studies had found no benefit. Using blood plasma from recovered patients – which contains antibodies that should recognise and fight the virus – has not proved effective as a Covid therapy, for example. But the antibody treatment used in the Recovery trial contains large doses of two specific antibodies, made in the lab, that are good at latching on to the pandemic virus. Sir Peter said: “It is wonderful to learn that even in advanced Covid-19 disease, targeting the virus can reduce mortality in patients who have failed to mount an antibody response of their own.LOOK-UP TOOL: How many cases in your area?SYMPTOMS: What are they and how to guard against them?YOUR QUESTIONS: We answer your queriesGLOBAL SPREAD: How many worldwide cases are there?TREATMENTS: What progress are we making to help people?Related Internet LinksRecovery TrialThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

The Delta variant of Covid-19, first identified in India, has changed how the virus is spreading, and the measures governments have to take to stop it. It has also changed the symptoms with a headache, sore throat and runny nose now the most commonly reported.The BBC’s Ros Atkins explains.Producer: Rebecca Hartmann

Hippopotamus aren’t the first thing that come to mind when considering epidemiology and disease ecology. And yet these amphibious megafauna offered UC Santa Barbara ecologist Keenan Stears a window into the progression of an anthrax outbreak that struck Ruaha National Park, Tanzania, in the dry season of 2017.
Through surveys and GPS monitoring, Stears and his colleagues, Wendy Turner, Doug McCauley and Melissa Schmitt, revealed that reduced dry-season flows in the Great Ruaha River indirectly spread the disease by affecting hippo movement. The results, which appear in the journal Ecosphere, present a unique perspective on disease ecology and illustrate how anthropogenic changes can impact wildlife and human health.
The ecology of wildlife disease was far out of mind during the dry season in 2016, when Stears and his team outfitted 10 male hippos with GPS collars. The researchers sought to track the animals’ movements to better understand their behavior and ecology, especially in light of reduced flows along many of Africa’s major rivers. The resulting study was the first to track hippo movement and land use, and finally uncovered some of the basic facts about hippos’ spatial ecology.
Then the anthrax came.
“This wasn’t something I actually set out to study,” said Stears, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology. “You can’t plan for an outbreak to occur; it just happens.”
Stears was in the field from 2016 to 2017 conducting hippo counts and maintaining equipment. The GPS tracking collars had been on the animals for about a year, roughly as long as they’re supposed to last before dropping off. Noticing one of the collars hadn’t moved for a couple of days, he figured it had fallen off. It appeared to be in a nearby pool, so Stears hiked out to retrieve it. “I turned around a bend in the river, and there was a hippo pool with about six or so hippo carcasses,” he recalled. Stears had stumbled upon an anthrax outbreak.

In a study published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers say they believe that, for the first time, there is evidence to show that three doses of vaccine increase antibody levels against SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes COVID 19 — more than the standard two-dose regimen for people who have received solid organ transplants.
“Our findings suggest clinical trials are warranted to determine if transplant recipients should receive COVID-19 vaccine booster doses as standard clinical practice, similar to what is currently done with hepatitis B and influenza vaccinations for this population,” says study lead author William Werbel, M.D., an infectious diseases research fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
People who receive solid organ transplants (such as hearts, lungs and kidneys) often must take drugs to suppress their immune systems and prevent rejection. Such regimens may interfere with a transplant recipient’s ability to make antibodies to foreign substances, including the protective ones produced in response to vaccines.
In the first of two previous studies, the researchers showed that only 17% of the participating transplant recipients produced sufficient antibodies after one dose. Then, in the second study, they found the level improved to 54% after the second shot. In both cases, even those transplant recipients with antibodies had levels well below what has been typically seen in people with healthy immune systems.
In their latest study, the researchers evaluated 30 organ transplant recipients who received a third dose of one of three vaccines — Johnson & Johnson/Jansen, Moderna or Pfizer/BioNTech — between March 20 and May 10, 2021. They had previously received two doses of either the Moderna or Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. The median age of the study participants was 57, 17 were women and one identified as non-white. No study participant reported an illness prior to vaccination or a positive test for SARS-CoV-2. All were taking multiple immunosuppressive medications to prevent rejection of their transplanted organs.
“Our findings revealed that a third of the participants who had negative antibody levels and all who had low positive levels before the booster increased their immune response after a third vaccine dose,” says study senior author Dorry Segev, M.D., Ph.D., the Marjory K. and Thomas Pozefsky Professor of Surgery and Epidemiology and director of the Epidemiology Research Group in Organ Transplantation at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
A week after receiving their third vaccine dose, 23 study participants completed a questionnaire about adverse effects. Reactions were generally mild or moderate, with one participant reporting severe arm pain and another a severe headache. No participant reported fever or an allergic reaction. There was one case of mild organ rejection during the study.
“These reactions seem acceptable, considering the benefits that vaccines can confer,” says Segev.
Werbel and Segev note that this study only examined antibody levels, and that future research is needed to see if the increased immune response after a third vaccine dose is associated with lower SARS-CoV-2 infection rates.
“Although the third vaccine dose appears to raise the immune response of transplant recipients to higher levels than after one or two doses, these people may still be at greater risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection than the general population who have been vaccinated,” says Werbel. “Therefore, we recommend that transplant recipients and other immunocompromised people continue to wear masks, maintain physical distancing and practice other COVID-19 safety measures.”
In addition to Werbel and Segev, the Johns Hopkins Medicine research team includes Brian Boyarsky, Michael Ou, Allan Massie, Aaron Tobian and Jacqueline Garonzik-Wang.
The study was supported by a donation from the Ben-Dov family; grants F32DK124941 and K23DK115908 from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases; grant K24AI144954 from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; and grant gSAN-201C0WW from the Transplantation and Immunology Research Network of the American Society of Transplantation.
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Materials provided by Johns Hopkins Medicine. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

A new therapy prompts immune defense cells to swallow misshapen proteins, amyloid beta plaques and tau tangles, whose buildup is known to kill nearby brain cells as part of Alzheimer’s disease, a new study shows.
Led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the investigation showed that elderly monkeys had up to 59 percent fewer plaque deposits in their brains after treatment with CpG oligodeoxynucleotides (CpG ODN), compared with untreated animals. These amyloid beta plaques are protein fragments that clump together and clog the junctions between nerve cells (neurons).
Brains of treated animals also had a drop in levels of toxic tau. This nerve fiber protein can destroy neighboring tissue when disease-related changes to its chemical structure causes it to catch on other cells.
“Our findings illustrate that this therapy is an effective way of manipulating the immune system to slow neurodegeneration,” says Akash Patel, MS, an assistant research scientist in the Center for Cognitive Neurology at NYU Langone Health.
The investigators say the treatment led to cognitive benefits as well. When presented with a series of puzzles, elderly monkeys given the drug performed similarly to young adult animals and much better than those in their age group that had remained untreated. The treated monkeys also learned new puzzle-solving skills faster than their untreated peers.
According to researchers, past treatment efforts targeting the immune system failed because the drugs overstimulated the system, causing dangerous levels of inflammation which can kill brain cells.

Many cosmetics sold in the United States and Canada likely contain high levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a potentially toxic class of chemicals linked to a number of serious health conditions, according to new research from the University of Notre Dame.
Scientists tested more than 200 cosmetics including concealers, foundations, eye and eyebrow products and various lip products. According to the study, 56 percent of foundations and eye products, 48 percent of lip products and 47 percent of mascaras tested were found to contain high levels of fluorine, which is an indicator of PFAS use in the product. The study was recently published in the journal of Environmental Science and Technology Letters.
“These results are particularly concerning when you consider the risk of exposure to the consumer combined with the size and scale of a multibillion-dollar industry that provides these products to millions of consumers daily,” Graham Peaslee, professor of physics at Notre Dame and principal investigator of the study, said. “There’s the individual risk — these are products that are applied around the eyes and mouth with the potential for absorption through the skin or at the tear duct, as well as possible inhalation or ingestion. PFAS is a persistent chemical — when it gets into the bloodstream, it stays there and accumulates. There’s also the additional risk of environmental contamination associated with the manufacture and disposal of these products, which could affect many more people.”
Previously found in nonstick cookware, treated fabrics, fast food wrappers and, most recently, the personal protective equipment used by firefighters across the country, PFAS are known as “forever chemicals,” because the chemical compounds don’t naturally degrade — which means they end up contaminating groundwater for decades after their release into the environment. Use of PFAS in foam fire suppressants has been linked to contaminated drinking water systems, prompting the Department of Defense to switch to environmentally safer alternatives, for example.
Studies have linked certain PFAS to kidney cancer, testicular cancer, hypertension, thyroid disease, low birth weight and immunotoxicity in children.
Peaslee and the research team tested products purchased at retail locations in the United States as well as products purchased online in Canada. The study found high levels of fluorine in liquid lipsticks, waterproof mascaras and foundations often advertised as “long-lasting” and “wear-resistant.” Peaslee said this not entirely surprising, given PFAS are often used for their water resistance and film-forming properties.
What is more concerning is that 29 products with high fluorine concentrations were tested further and found to contain between four and 13 specific PFAS, only one of these items tested listed PFAS as an ingredient on the product label.
“This is a red flag,” Peaslee said. “Our measurements indicate widespread use of PFAS in these products — but it’s important to note that the full extent of use of fluorinated chemicals in cosmetics is hard to estimate due to lack of strict labeling requirements in both countries.”
Peaslee’s novel method of detecting PFAS in a wide variety of materials has helped reduce the use of “forever chemicals” in consumer and industrial products.
Following a study from his lab in 2017, fast food chains that discovered their wrappers contained PFAS switched to alternative options. Peaslee continues to receive samples of firefighter turnout gear from fire departments around the world to test for PFAS, and his research has spurred conversations within the firefighter community to eliminate use of “forever chemicals” in various articles of personal protective equipment.
Co-authors of the study include graduate student and lead author Heather D. Whitehead; Emi Eastman, Megan Green, Meghanne Tighe, John T. Wilkinson and Sean McGuinness at Notre Dame; Marta Venier and Yan Wu at Indiana University; Miriam Diamond, Anna Shalin and Heather Schwartz-Narbonne at the University of Toronto; Shannon Urbanik at Hope College; Tom Bruton and Arlene Blum at the Green Science Policy Institute; and Zhanyun Wang at ETH Zurich.
Environment and Climate Change Canada and the Great Lakes Protection Initiative of the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada partly funded the study.
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Materials provided by University of Notre Dame. Original written by Jessica Sieff. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

A team of scientists at the Keck School of Medicine of USC has created what could be a key building block for assembling a synthetic kidney. In a new study in Nature Communications, Zhongwei Li and his colleagues describe how they can generate rudimentary kidney structures, known as organoids, that resemble the collecting duct system that helps maintain the body’s fluid and pH balance by concentrating and transporting urine.
“Our progress in creating new types of kidney organoids provides powerful tools for not only understanding development and disease, but also finding new treatments and regenerative approaches for patients,” said Li, the study’s corresponding author and an assistant professor of medicine, and of stem cell biology and regenerative medicine.
Creating the building blocks
The first authors of the study, PhD student Zipeng Zeng and postdoc Biao Huang, and the team started with a population of what are known as ureteric bud progenitor cells, or UPCs, that play an important role in early kidney development. Using first mouse and then human UPCs, the scientists were able to develop cocktails of molecules that encourage the cells to form organoids resembling uretic buds — the branching tubes that eventually give rise to the collecting duct system. The scientists also succeeded in finding a different cocktail to induce human stem cells to develop into ureteric bud organoids.
An additional molecular cocktail pushed ureteric bud organoids — grown from either mouse UPCs or human stem cells — to reliably develop into even more mature and complex collecting duct organoids.
The human and mouse ureteric bud organoids can also be genetically engineered to harbor mutations that cause disease in patients, providing better models for understanding kidney problems, as well as for screening potential therapeutic drugs. As one example, the scientists knocked out a gene to create an organoid model of congenital anomalies of the kidney and urinary tract, known as CAKUT.
In addition to serving as models of disease, ureteric bud organoids could also prove to be an essential ingredient in the recipe for a synthetic kidney. To explore this possibility, the scientists combined mouse ureteric bud organoids with a second population of mouse cells: the progenitor cells that form nephrons, which are the filtering units of the kidney. After inserting the tip of a lab-grown ureteric bud into a clump of NPCs, the team observed the growth of an extensive network of branching tubes reminiscent of a collecting duct system, fused with rudimentary nephrons.
“Our engineered mouse kidney established a connection between nephron and collecting duct — an essential milestone towards building a functional organ in the future,” said Li.
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Materials provided by Keck School of Medicine of USC. Original written by Cristy Lytal. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.