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SYDNEY, July 15 (Xinhua) -- The world's first drug to increase life expectancy of people with advanced melanoma has been approved for use in Australia, local media reported on Friday.The breakthrough drug Yervoy got approval from the Therapeutics Good Association (TGA) on Friday amid hopes it could add two years to the life of people with the most lethal form of skin cancer but for whom other treatments have failed, the Australian Associated Press (AAP) said.Clearance for the drug's use in Australia follows similar approvals by the U.S. health regulator in March.Yervoy works by attacking and destroying cancer cells.Patients are hooked up to an intravenous drip once every three weeks for a total of four doses.Professor Peter Hersey, consultant immunologist to the Melanoma Institute Australia, said no other drug had improved survival rates like Yervoy."Not all patients respond to it but those who do have a good chance of living longer than they would have otherwise," Hersey told AAP.While it may improve survival rates, Yervoy can produce side effects from diarrhea and vomiting to serious blood infections and kidney failure.The average survival time for people with advanced melanoma is just six months.A global study of 676 people with melanoma found that 45 percent of patients given Yervoy were still alive after one year, according to AAP.More than 20 percent lived at least two years, with a small number managing to survive for six years.A separate study, published in June, which showed similarly improved survival rates for patients with newly diagnosed advanced melanoma, has raised hopes that Yervoy could be made more widely available.Melanoma is the fourth most common cancer in Australia, with 10, 300 people diagnosed each year.

LOS ANGELES, July 18 (Xinhua) -- U.S. scientists have proven that oncogenes can change normal cells into stem-like cells, paving the way to a safer and more practical approach to treating diseases like multiple sclerosis and cancer with stem cell therapy.In a collaborative study, researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC), and the Children's Hospital of Orange County (CHOC) in California and Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center in New York have successfully converted human skin cells into brain cells by suppressing the expression of p53, a protein encoded by a widely studied oncogene. This suggests that p53 mutation helps determine cell fate -- good or bad -- rather than only the outcome of cancer.Oncogenes are generally thought to be genes that, when mutated, change healthy cells into cancerous tumor cells.Study findings were appearing Monday on the website of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)."The reality may be more complicated than people think," said Jiang F. Zhong, Ph.D., assistant professor of pathology at the Keck School. "What is a stem cell gene? What is a cancer gene? It may be the same thing.""When you turn off p53, people think the cell becomes cancerous because we tend to focus on the bad thing," Zhong said. "Actually, the cell becomes more plastic and could do good things, too. Let's say the cell is like a person who loses his job (the restriction of p53). He could become a criminal or he could find another job and have a positive effect on society. What pushes him one way or the other, we don't know because the environment is very complicated."Stem cells can divide and differentiate into different types of cells in the body. In humans, embryonic stem cells differentiate into three families, or germ layers, of cells. The reasons why and how certain stem cells differentiate into particular layers are not clearly understood. However, from those layers, tissues and organs develop. The endoderm, for example, leads to formation of the stomach, colon and lungs, while the mesoderm forms blood, bone and heart tissue. In its study, Zhong's team examined human skin cells, which are related to brain and neural cells from the ectoderm.When p53 was suppressed, the skin cells developed into cells that looked exactly like human embryonic stem cells. But, unlike other man-made stem cells that are "pluripotent" and can become any other cells in the body, these cells differentiated only into cells from the same germ layer, ectoderm."IPSCs (induced pluripotent stem cells) can turn into anything, so they are hard to control," Zhong said. "Our cells are staying within the ectoderm lineage."Zhong said he expects that suppressing other oncogenes in other families of cells would have the same effect, which could have critical significance for stem cell therapy. Future research should focus on determining which genes to manipulate, Zhong said.The study is slated to appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences later this month, according to AAAS.

BUJUMBURA, May 31(Xinhua) -- As the World No Tobacco Day is celebrated on Tuesday, many Burundians feel happy that they have given up smoking thanks to herbal drugs.Evariste Ndikumwami, 55, residing in the Burundian capital Bujumbura, said he had been smoking for 30 years, but gave up smoking in January after taking herbal drugs prescribed by an abbot."I had been smoking since my teenage and I gave up smoking in January (this year) after I took herbal drugs that I got from a Roman Catholic priest from Uganda working at Rugari parish in the province of Muyinga, some 210 km northeast of the Burundian capital Bujumbura," Ndikumwami told Xinhua.Ndikumwami said he used to smoke a pack of 20 cigarettes per day, adding that he had found it hard to give up smoking.He said, "I took the herbal drugs for 15 days. The abbot prescribed me two herbal drugs -- one to be smoked for five days at daytime when I desire to smoke and another one to be applied around the nostrils at night."After the medication period, he never felt the desire for smoking cigarettes, he said."When my friends realized I was no longer smoking, they asked me which drugs I took to give up smoking. I directed them to the abbot who had healed me and they also got cured and stopped smoking," Ndikumwami said.

VIENNA, Sept. 22 (Xinhua) -- Climate change and rising temperature in the long term can lead to water shortages in the Alps region, international experts warned Thursday at the Water-Scarce Final Conference in the Austrian eastern city Graz.The Alpine region originally is rich in water resources due to a large number of glaciers, spring and abundant rainfall either in summer or winter. But global warming may change this situation which has been shown in the past years that the water reserve has reduced gradually due to climate change, warned the experts.Observation data have shown a significant decrease of 25 percent in groundwater recharge in the past 100 years which has also resulted in the reduction of mountain spring.Director of the Provincial Department of Water Resources of Styria Johann Wiedner point out, in 2003, droughts occurred in the eastern part of the Alps, including the state of Styria and water shortages were also found in other regions of the Alps. He said the phenomenon was giving a warning that people "have to do something."To this end, the European Union begun a project called "Alp Water Scarce" three years ago to observe water reserves, air temperature, water temperature and water table in this region and study the relationships among them.Wiedner also admitted that there is no shortage of water at least in the short term and water supply for the local residents is totally insured.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 2 (Xinhua) -- A new study has identified the recent emergence of a multidrug-resistant strain of Salmonella that has a high level resistance to ciprofloxacin, a common treatment for severe Salmonella infections. The study was published on-line Tuesday in The Journal of Infectious Diseases.Francois-Xavier Weill at the Pasteur Institute in France and colleagues studied information from national surveillance systems in France, England and Wales, Denmark, and the United States. The data showed that a multidrug-resistant strain of Salmonella, known as S. Kentucky, infected 489 patients in France, England and Wales, and Denmark between 2000 and 2008. In addition, researchers reported that the first infections were acquired mainly in Egypt between 2002 and 2005, while since 2006 the infections have also been acquired in various parts of Africa and the Middle East. The absence of reported international travel in approximately 10 percent of the patients suggests that infections may have also occurred in Europe through consumption of contaminated imported foods or through secondary contaminations.In this study, multidrug-resistant S. Kentucky was isolated from chickens and turkeys from Ethiopia, Morocco, and Nigeria, suggesting that poultry is an important agent for infection. The common use of fluoroquinolones in chicken and turkey production in Nigeria and Morocco may have contributed to this rapid spread, according to the researchers.This study highlights the importance of public health surveillance in a global food system. The investigators reported that they will continue to monitor this multidrug-resistant strain as well as help strengthen the capacities of national and regional laboratories in the surveillance of Salmonella and other major foodborne pathogens through the World Health Organization Global Foodborne Infections Network.Salmonella infection represents a major public health problem worldwide. An estimated 1.7 million such infections occur in North America each year. More than 1.6 million cases were reported between 1999 and 2008 in 27 European countries. Although most Salmonella infections produce only mild gastroenteritis, elderly and immunocompromised patients are especially at risk for life- threatening infections. These cases are typically treated with antimicrobials called fluoroquinolones, such as ciprofloxacin.

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