Cancer to remain incurable even in 100 years

The World Health Organization published the forecast of most common reasons of mortality in 2030. The picture of the possible future was based on the data of present-date causes of death supplemented with certain expectations. There are three most common reasons of mortality nowadays in the world: oncological diseases, ischemic heart disease and stroke.

The WHO believes that the three most common killers will keep and even improve their leading positions during the next coming decades. Strangely enough, cancer will be killing more people despite the development of modern medicine: the people, who would die of other diseases before, would live up to cancerous diseases. Heart attacks and strokes will cause many deaths among elderly people due to scientific achievements in medicine too.

The number of deaths in car accidents will be growing in the future. The technical development of the human civilization has always been ahead of the evolution of culture.

The global death rate may also increase in the event people decide to refuse from vaccinations. There were such outbursts before, for example in 1873-1874 in Stockholm, when many declined vaccination for religious reasons and fell victims to smallpox. The epidemic of smallpox in the Swedish capital ended only as a result of massive vaccination. Outbursts of whooping cough in Britain during the 1970s, measles in Holland, Ireland, Nigeria and the USA during the 2000s occurred for the same reason.

Acute respiratory infections, TB, malaria and child labor death rates will decrease. The forecast of the World Health Organization includes the countries of the golden billion and the third world states, where the above-mentioned death rate is especially high. The decrease of the overall death rate in Africa and South-East Asia will depend on the state of the world economy. If mankind goes through a decade of the economic recession, similar to the Great Depression of 1929-1940, the humanitarian missions in developing states will not be able to expand their activities.

AIDS as a cause of death will be getting more frequent before 2015. The AIDS-related death rate will start to decrease afterwards. Specialists probably pin their hopes on the invention of the anti-AIDS vaccine. No one knows if the vaccine is ever going to become possible due to frequent mutations and changes of the nature of the virus. However, the death rate is possible to decline. Even modern therapy guarantees a considerable level of survival for HIV-positive individuals.

Some other scientists, for example, Bryan Sykes of Oxford University, wrote in his book, “Adam’s Curse”, that men would disappear in the course of the human evolution. The scientist believes that the Y-chromosome, which is responsible for the male sex, will eventually disappear due to numerous defects. Men may become extinct in about 125,000 years, Sykes believes.

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Drug Companies Keep Quiet On Drugs That Don’t Work

Unfavorable results of drug trials are often swept under the rug, according to a new review of FDA drug applications. Nearly a quarter of drug trial outcomes submitted to the FDA by pharmaceutical companies—most of them unfavorable—remained unpublished or only partially published after five years. Published results were often positively skewed from those originally reported to the FDA. “These new findings confirm our previous suspicions that this is happening on a much broader systemic level. It shows that information is unavailable to those who really need it the most — the clinicians and the researchers,” [Science News] says An-Wen Chan of the Mayo Clinic.

Drug companies are required to submit the results of all drug trials to the FDA as part of new drug applications. After approval, these results are supposed to be made public, usually in the form of scientific publications. However, the new review published in PLoS Medicine found disturbing omissions and bias on the road to publication. The new analysis examined 164 trials for 33 new drugs that were approved by the FDA from January of 2001 to December 2002. By June 2007, one quarter of the trials were either published only in a partial form — as an abstract, or part of a pooled publication — or were not published at all [Science News]. Of 43 negative outcomes reported to the FDA, only 20 were later published. Nine percent of all published outcomes were more positive than those originally reported to the FDA.

The mechanisms behind the apparent publication bias is unclear, though it is understood that manufacturers of new drugs rely on publications to market their products, often with billions of dollars on the line. In discussions with investigators on unpublished trials, [the study authors] found no cases where companies prohibited the researchers from publishing. But they did describe two cases in which the investigators said they wanted to publish the results but had not had full cooperation from the sponsors [MedPage News].

“It confirms that this is not an open, transparent process. There is still the opportunity for sponsors of new products to try and tip the scales in their favor,” [Wired Science] said Arthur Levin, director of the Center for Medical Consumers. Since September, federal law requires all clinical trials to be registered in a publicly accessible database, ClinicalTrials.gov, run by the National Institutes of Health. But the law still does not require full disclosure of all outcomes.

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In a Few Years, Men Could Pee in a Cup to Diagnose Prostate Cancer

A simple urine test is being developed that would revolutionize the treatment of prostate cancer by differentiating between the benign and aggressive forms of the disease.

While prostate cancer is one of the most commonly diagnosed cancers in men, the real challenge for treatment tends to lie in measuring the progress of the disease. A person can live a long time with benign prostate cancer, but the aggressive kind of tumor grows much more quickly and requires urgent treatment. The current method for distinguishing between the two can involve several rounds of testing, including an invasive and painful biopsy.

The urine test, which will not be ready for at least another three to five years, would be an easy and inexpensive way to determine which type of cancer is present, researchers report in Nature [subscription required]. Research for the test began when doctors found that men with an aggressive form of prostate cancer carry elevated levels of a particular molecule in their urine [The Guardian].

The researchers pinpointed about 10 molecules–or metabolites–that were more often present in samples taken from patients with advanced cancer. One metabolite in particular, sarcosine, was often found at elevated levels in samples taken from patients with advanced cancer, or cancer that had spread, but not at all in samples taken from healthy tissue. In fact, sarcosine was a better indicator of advancing disease than the traditional marker, a protein called prostate specific antigen [BBC].

The new research has potential implications for treatment of other cancers as well. Scientists believe that cancer cells need the molecule [sarcosine] to spread around the body, so drugs that stop it working could effectively contain cancers and stop them spreading to other organs…. “This is the molecule that the cancer cells use when they want to spread. If it turns out to be involved in metastasis in other cancers, then this discovery will be huge,” said Christopher Beecher, a co-author on the study [The Guardian].

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Eating Meat Destroys You — Eating Meat Destroys the World

Eating meat is destructive to your body, to the earth, and to the entire universe. It’s just that simple, yet so difficult for most of the world to understand. When will we wake up? Hopefully sooner than later. Hopefully…

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Mystery Roar from Faraway Space Detected

Space is typically thought of as a very quiet place. But one team of astronomers has found a strange cosmic noise that booms six times louder than expected.

The roar is from the distant cosmos. Nobody knows what causes it.

Of course, sound waves can't travel in a vacuum (which is what most of space is), or at least they can't very efficiently. But radio waves can.

Radio waves are not sound waves, but they are still electromagnetic waves, situated on the low-frequency end of the light spectrum.

Many objects in the universe, including stars and quasars, emit radio waves. Even our home galaxy, the Milky Way, emits a static hiss (first detected in 1931 by physicist Karl Jansky). Other galaxies also send out a background radio hiss.

But the newly detected signal, described here today at the 213th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, is far louder than astronomers expected.

There is "something new and interesting going on in the universe," said Alan Kogut of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

A team led by Kogut detected the signal with a balloon-borne instrument named ARCADE (Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Diffuse Emission).

In July 2006, the instrument was launched from NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas, and reached an altitude of about 120,000 feet (36,500 meters), where the atmosphere thins into the vacuum of space.

ARCADE's mission was to search the sky for faint signs of heat from the first generation of stars, but instead they heard a roar from the distant reaches of the universe.

"The universe really threw us a curve," Kogut said. "Instead of the faint signal we hoped to find, here was this booming noise six times louder than anyone had predicted."

Detailed analysis of the signal ruled out primordial stars or any known radio sources, including gas in the outermost halo of our own galaxy.

Other radio galaxies also can't account for the noise – there just aren't enough of them.

"You'd have to pack them into the universe like sardines," said study team member Dale Fixsen of the University of Maryland. "There wouldn't be any space left between one galaxy and the next."

The signal is measured to be six times brighter than the combined emission of all known radio sources in the universe.

For now, the origin of the signal remains a mystery.

"We really don't know what it is,"said team member Michael Seiffert of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

And not only has it presented astronomers with a new puzzle, it is obscuring the sought-for signal from the earliest stars. But the cosmic static may itself provide important clues to the development of galaxies when the universe was much younger, less than half its present age. Because the radio waves come from far away, traveling at the speed of light, they therefore represent an earlier time in the universe.

"This is what makes science so exciting," Seiffert said. "You start out on a path to measure something – in this case, the heat from the very first stars – but run into something else entirely, some unexplained."

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