Free Republic

The findings led to an early halt of a small study comparing Niaspan and Zetia, two compounds commonly used along with statins to reduce heart attack risk ORLANDO, Fla. — Adding a pharmaceutical form of the B vitamin niacin — but not the drug ezetimibe — to a cholesterol-lowering statin drug appears to reduce artery plaque buildup in patients with coronary artery disease, according to much-anticipated results announced at a press conference November 15. The results were from a study that was relatively small — only 208 patients — but provided a head-to-head comparison of niacin and ezetimibe, known by...

SAN FRANCISCO — Only 21% of Massachusetts women older than age 40 years were not in mammographic screening programs. Yet unscreened women accounted for 75% of the breast cancer deaths in an analysis of data on 6,997 invasive breast cancers diagnosed in 1990-1999 and followed through 2007. “The most effective method for women to avoid death from breast cancer is to have regular mammographic screening,” Dr. Blake Cady said at a breast cancer symposium sponsored by the American Society of Clinical Oncology, where he presented the data. Extrapolation from the study's results suggests that for the projected 192,370 women nationwide...

Controversy over the benefits of screening for breast cancer and prostate cancer hit the headlines and the blogosphere when the New York Times reported that the American Cancer Society is planning to temper its proscreening message for breast and prostate cancers, and a prominent representative of the society denied it on his blog. By the end of the day, the society's chief medical officer, Dr. Otis W. Brawley, posted a firm statement that the ACS stands by its screening guidelines. “The bottom line is that mammography has helped avert deaths from breast cancer, and we can make more progress against...

Tufts University researchers have identified a gene-diet interaction that appears to influence body weight and have replicated their findings in three independent studies. Men and women carrying the CC genotype demonstrated higher body mass index (BMI) scores and a higher incidence of obesity, but only if they consumed a diet high in saturated fat. These associations were seen in the apolipoprotein A-II gene (APOA2) promoter. "We believe this is the first time a gene-diet interaction influencing BMI and obesity has been replicated in as many as three independent study populations," says corresponding and senior author Jose Ordovas, PhD, director of...

More than a decade after Congress directed the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to carry out assessments of endocrine disrupting chemicals, the agency has announced the first set of compounds to be screened under its Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program (EDSP). Endocrine disruptors are chemicals that can affect hormones produced by the endocrine system, which regulate growth, metabolism and reproduction.The EPA has requested that manufacturers screen seven compounds under this  first round, including atrazine - a widely used herbicide that may be associated with birth defects, low birth weight and menstrual problems. Although banned in Europe, atrazine remains prevalent in the US, with...

Enlarge ImageHigh anxiety. Rats "addicted" to sugary food spent less time on the open parts of this maze. Credit: Pietro Cottone If you're constantly starting new diets, then breaking them, you may have more in common with a drug addict than you know. A new study suggests that yo-yo dieters experience the same stressful pangs of withdrawal when they go on a diet that addicts experience when they go cold turkey. The idea that bad food can be addictive is not new. But previous studies have tended to focus on the positive reinforcement side of the equation--for example, the...

Move over, red wine. Make room for chocolate milk. A new study suggests that regular consumption of skim milk with flavonoid-rich cocoa may reduce inflammation, potentially slowing or preventing development of atherosclerosis. Researchers noted, however, that the effect was not as pronounced as that seen with red wine. Scientists in Barcelona, Spain, recruited 47 volunteers ages 55 and older who were at risk for heart disease. Half were given 20-gram sachets of soluble cocoa powder to drink with skim milk twice a day, while the rest drank plain skim milk. After one month, the groups were switched. Blood tests found...

Many strokes cannot be explained by known risk factors like high blood pressure and smoking, and scientists have speculated that infection could play a role. A new study is linking cumulative exposure to five common pathogens with an increased risk for stroke. The infections in order of significance are Chlamydia pneumoniae, Helicobacter pylori, cytomegalovirus and herpes simplex viruses 1 and 2, according to the study, published online on Nov. 9 in The Archives of Neurology. “Each of these common pathogens may persist after an acute infection and contribute to perpetuating a state of chronic low-level infection,” said the paper’s lead...

Scientists from Germany and Israel have caught a fleeting glimpse of carbonic acid, the simple yet elusive molecule that plays a key role in nature, from regulating the pH of blood to mediating crucial events in the global carbon cycle. And it appears that the acid is not as weak as the textbooks would have us believe.Carbonic acid, the hydrated form of carbon dioxide, is an important molecule that is involved in buffering biological fluids such as blood and is a key intermediate in the exchange of carbon dioxide between the atmosphere and the oceans. However, it is so short-lived in solution...

Forty Years' War Many Americans do not think twice about taking medicines to prevent heart disease and stroke. But cancer is different. Much of what Americans do in the name of warding off cancer has not been shown to matter, and some things are actually harmful. Yet the few medicines proved to deter cancer are widely ignored. Take prostate cancer, the second-most commonly diagnosed cancer in the United States, surpassed only by easily treated skin cancers. More than 192,000 cases of it will be diagnosed this year, and more than 27,000 men will die from it. And, it turns out,...

AP Science Writer Male factory workers in China who got very high doses of a chemical that's been widely used in hard plastic bottles had high rates of sexual problems, researchers reported Wednesday. Heavy exposure to BPA, or bisphenol A, on the job was linked to impotence and lower sexual desire and satisfaction, according to the study, which adds to concerns about BPA's effects on most consumers. The men in the study experienced BPA levels about 50 times higher than those faced by typical American men, said researcher Dr. De-Kun Li. "We don't know" whether more typical doses have similar...

Induced pluripotent stem cells could be a boon for regenerative medicine.REUTERS/Junying Yu/University of Wisconsin-Madison Given the right conditions, any adult cell can be coaxed into becoming stem-cell like, according to a team of researchers based in the United States. The team, led by Rudolf Jaenisch of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were also able to speed up the process, cutting the time required for cells to become stem-cell like by around half. The results are good news for those battling to work out the complex biology of these cells, know as induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells...

A treatment based on HIV finds first success in humans.Researchers have halted a fatal brain disease by delivering a therapeutic gene to the stem cells that mature into blood cells. The gene was transferred using a virus derived from HIV, a technique that researchers have pursued for more than a decade but has not been successful in humans until now. Together with his colleagues, paediatric neurologist Patrick Aubourg at INSERM — France's main biomedical research agency — and at the Saint-Vincent de Paul Hospital in Paris, developed the system to treat X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), a neurodegenerative disease that affects young...

With new studies showing the sun vitamin may slow come cancers, some physicians are eager to add it to treatment programs Responding to research indicating that vitamin D may slow the progression of breast, colon and other common cancers, some doctors have begun adding the supplement to their tool kit of cancer therapies alongside more conventional treatments such as radiation, surgery and chemotherapy. While not all physicians are convinced the evidence is strong enough to warrant taking an extra dollop of the sunshine vitamin, those recommending the course say popping the pills is a simple health strategy that has few,...

Scientists from the UK are waging war on hospital 'superbugs' with a highly effective antimicrobial organo-silver coatingToby Jenkins and colleagues at the University of Bath have used a plasma to create a simple means to deposit a silver maleimide complex onto three-dimensional objects. An added benefit is that it can be done at room temperature so can be used on plastic and fabric, such as catheters and dressings too. 'Our system is, to the best of our knowledge, the only one to use plasma to deposit an organo-silver film,' says Jenkins. And as only a small amount of the silver monomer...

Myriad of Compounds Intended to Stop the Progression of Metabolic Diseases Moves Through the PipelineThe competition to develop new therapeutics targeting metabolic disease is heating up. Here’s why: the latest estimates from the American Diabetes Association state that there are nearly 24 million Americans with diabetes. In addition, approximately 32% of American adults are medically obese. Many companies have honed in on this large and growing market, and several of them presented their latest findings at IQPC’s “Groundbreaking Advances and Key Opinions in Metabolic Diseases Drug Discovery and Development� held recently in San Francisco. “When we founded the company, we...

Tumor-Specific Antigens Could Positively Impact Diagnosis, Imaging, and TherapyThe medical literature abounds with examples of the benefits of early cancer detection. Cure rates are always dramatically higher before the tumor has spread and while surgery is still an option. For example in cervical cancer, detection at the earliest stages of the disease is associated with a 99% five-year survival rate. Similarly encouraging statistics may be found for cancers of the breast, ovaries, colon, skin, and other sites. Cancer detected through physical examination or medical imaging is usually too advanced for hope of a cure, which has led to an explosion...

High rates of premature birth are the main reason the United States has higher infant mortality than do many other rich countries, government researchers reported Tuesday in their first detailed analysis of a longstanding problem. In Sweden, for instance, 6.3 percent of births were premature, compared with 12.4 percent in the United States in 2005, the latest year for which international rankings are available. Infant mortality also... --snip-- Dr. Fleischman said the smallest, earliest and most fragile babies were often born to poor and minority women who lacked health care and social support. The highest rates of infant mortality occur...

I don’t often write about alternative remedies for serious medical conditions. Most have little more than anecdotal support, and few have been found effective in well-designed clinical trials. Such trials randomly assign patients to one of two or more treatments and, wherever possible, assess the results without telling either the patients or evaluators who received which treatment. Now, however, in describing an alternative treatment for asthma that does not yet have top clinical ratings in this country (although it is taught in Russian medical schools and covered by insurance in Australia), I am going beyond my usually stringent research criteria...

Concern over the H1N1 swine flu has inundated the airwaves and the newspapers since active swine flu was first identified in Mexico in April. And though the panic has waned slightly in recent weeks because this variant of the flu is not living down to its deadly predictions (in fact, it’s not even as deadly as the seasonal flu), for many people, if not most people, perception trumps facts and statistics, and so there have been mass mobilizations to combat the contagion.  The campaign has included classes to convince people to avoid unnecessary contact with others; a huge expenditure to...

Death from the flu is often heartrending for those who have to watch: the victim, having been weakened from the flu virus, contracts pneumonia from bacteria or viruses that have taken hold in the lungs, and he or she struggles for every breath.  The victim’s breathing is often raspy, and it is abnormally fast, like the panting of a worn-out dog. As the victim’s body fights the lung infection, the lungs fill with pus and other fluids, cutting off the flow of oxygen and causing the victim to turn colors — from shades of gray to a bluish purple. The...

The European Commission is speeding up approval of the import and processing of two genetically modified (GM) maize varieties in the European Union to prevent disruption of the oleochemical supply chain.Over 200,000 tonnes of soya bean from the US are currently stranded in EU ports after minute traces of unauthorised GM maize were found in a number of trans-Atlantic shipments. The stranded soya would have been used to make a wide range of products, including cosmetics and toiletries, plastics, resins in coatings and printing inks and lubricants. 'There's serious concern among oleochemical producers about future supplies of some raw materials,' says Klaus...

The U.S. Air Force has hired Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems to study the possibility of integrating additional Missile Defense Agency (MDA) sensors into the U.S. Space Surveillance Network that tracks orbiting satellites, a Raytheon official said Oct. 28. The Tewksbury, Mass.-based company was awarded a $3 million contract from Air Force Space Command for a program called the Enterprise Sensing Prototype Architecture for Space Situational Awareness (ESP-SSA), Joe Chapa, Raytheon’s technical director for national theater security programs, said in an interview. The Air Force’s Space Surveillance Network employs a host of optical telescopes and radars around the world. The telescopes...

THE emergence of the H1N1 swine flu has added urgency to what has become an annual ritual for millions of Americans: getting a flu shot. The good news is that scientists have developed a vaccine against the H1N1 virus. But it is taking much longer than expected to produce the hundreds of millions of doses the government had planned to distribute. And it is still too soon to know how effective the vaccine will be in preventing swine flu. In all likelihood, we’d have a better H1N1 vaccine — and more of it — if in our preparations we had...

Aerosols' complicated influence on our climate just got more threatening: they could make methane a more potent greenhouse gas than previously realized, say climate modellers.Drew Shindell, at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, and colleagues ran a range of computerized models to show that methane's global warming potential is greater when combined with aerosols — atmospheric particles such as dust, sea salt, sulphates and black carbon. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol assume methane to be, tonne-for-tonne, 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming the planet. But the...

Patients taking statin drugs were almost 50 percent less likely to die from flu, researchers reported on Thursday in a study providing more evidence the cholesterol-lowering drugs help the body cope with infection. The findings are compelling enough to justify doing controlled studies in which some patients are given the drugs deliberately and some are not, said Meredith Vandermeer of the Oregon Public Health Division, who helped lead the study. "Our preliminary study shows these cholesterol-lowering medications called statins are associated with a decrease in mortality," Vandermeer told a news conference at a meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of...

Long-standing 'canary in the coal mine' role questioned.Frogs aren't always the first to suffer from pollution.Digital Vision The health of amphibians is commonly used to give a rough assessment of pollution levels in an area, but an analysis of more than 20,000 toxicity studies now suggests that these creatures are relatively resilient and not well suited to the task.The finding could have a significant effect on the way that the environment is assessed. Conventional wisdom suggests that if an amphibian population is thriving, the area is probably clear of pollutants. But the survey shows that other species, such as shelled...

Many parents worry about a possible link between autism and mercury exposure. But most research dismisses those fears as groundless, and a new study says autistic children actually have lower blood levels of mercury than children who are developing normally. Mercury levels were closely related to fish intake, the study found, and children with autism and related disorders tend to be picky eaters who avoid fish. After researchers adjusted for the lower fish consumption of autistic children, they found no differences between their mercury levels and those in other children. Irva Hertz-Picciotto, a professor of public health sciences at the...

Drugs that alleviate severe mental disorders can also result in troubling metabolic changes. Many young children and adolescents taking drugs for severe psychiatric problems gain substantial weight and, in some cases, show increased levels of LDL cholesterol and triglycerides in their blood, researchers report in the Oct. 28 Journal of the American Medical Association. Although the data from this study need to be replicated over a longer time frame, the findings nonetheless raise worrisome questions about anti-psychotic drugs that often benefit children who have schizophrenia, autism, tics, severe bipolar disorder or aggressive behavior. “We are between a rock and a...

Supplements of the sunshine vitamin may improve insulin resistance and sensitivity, both of which are risk factors for diabetes, says a new study from New Zealand. Insulin resistance, whereby insufficient insulin is released to produce a normal glucose response from fat, muscle and liver cells, was significantly lower in women following high-dose vitamin D supplementation, according to results of a randomised, controlled, double-blind trial published in the British Journal of Nutrition. The optimal effects were observed when blood vitamin D levels were in the range 80 to 119 nanomoles per litre, said the researchers, “providing further evidence for an increase...

Enlarge ImageCancer fighter. The naked mole rat isn't much to look at, but it has an effective way of combating cancer. Credit: Trisha M. Shears With its wrinkled skin and bucked teeth, the naked mole rat isn't going to win any beauty contests. But the burrowing, desert rodent is exceptional in another way: It doesn't get cancer. The naked mole rat's cells hate to be crowded, it turns out, so they stop growing before they can form tumors. The details could someday lead to a new strategy for treating cancer in people. In search of clues to aging, cell...

Harper: Controversal Drug Will Do Little To Reduce Cervical Cancer Rates Dr. Diane Harper, lead researcher in the development of two human papilloma virus vaccines, Gardasil and Cervarix, said the controversial drugs will do little to reduce cervical cancer rates and, even though they’re being recommended for girls as young as nine, there have been no efficacy trials in children under the age of 15. Dr. Harper, director of the Gynecologic Cancer Prevention Research Group at the University of Missouri, made these remarks during an address at the 4th International Public Conference on Vaccination which took place in Reston, Virginia...

The sponsors of the largest ever HIV vaccine trial yesterday hailed a "historic" moment as they formally announced the trial's results at an international AIDS vaccine meeting in Paris. The results received rapturous applause from an audience of more than 1,000 HIV researchers. But some scientists are much more sceptical of the findings, arguing that the response of the HIV research community, long deprived of any good news from vaccine trials, is based more on hope than on rigorous science.The US$119-million phase III trial, sponsored by the health ministry of Thailand and the US Army, started in Thailand in 2003....

Frogs are suffering from a fatal fungal infection.Vance T. Vredenburg/SFSU A fungal infection that is killing amphibians around the world acts by disrupting the flow of electrolytes across their skin, ultimately causing heart failure. The discovery is helping to raise hopes that a treatment for the infection could one day be given to amphibians in the wild.Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, a kind of chytrid fungus that causes the skin disease chytridiomycosis in amphibians, was likely spread around the world by the South African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) in the 1930s and 1940s, when the frog was widely used as a pregnancy test....

Exposure to the H1N1 pandemic flu virus could protect people from H5N1 bird flu, the Emerging Health Threats Forum has reported. Research suggests that previous infection with the pandemic influenza virus strain could provide some immunity against the H5N1 virus. Experts speculate that this could protect against severe illness from bird flu. The H5N1 strain, kept under watch for its pandemic potential, has so far proved lethal in 60% of people infected with it. Kristien Van Reeth and colleagues at Ghent University infected pigs with a closely related “predecessor” to the current pandemic strain of the flu virus. Four weeks...

Red-eye flights, all-night study sessions, and extra-inning playoff games all deprive us of sleep and can leave us forgetful the next day. Now scientists have discovered that lost sleep disrupts a specific molecule in the brain's memory circuitry, possibly leading to treatments for tired brains. Neuroscientists studying rodents and humans have found that sleep deprivation interrupts the storage of episodic memories: information about who, what, when, and where. To lay down these memories, neurons in our brains form new connections with other neurons or strengthen old ones. This rewiring process, which occurs over a period of hours, requires a rat's...

The American Cancer Society, which has long been a staunch defender of most cancer screening, is now saying that the benefits of detecting many cancers, especially breast and prostate, have been overstated. It is quietly working on a message, to put on its Web site early next year, to emphasize that screening for breast and prostate cancer and certain other cancers can come with a real risk of overtreating many small cancers while missing cancers that are deadly... --snip-- The new analysis — by Dr. Laura Esserman, a professor of surgery and radiology at the University of California, San Francisco,...

Protein splits carbon dioxide to give fizz its flavor The light, sparkly fizz of champagne owes its taste to the tongue’s sense of sour. New studies in mice reveal how the tongue tastes carbonation, solving an old puzzle of why some mountain climbers get the “champagne blues.” Tasting fizz begins with a special protein that’s tethered to sour-sensing taste cells on the tongue, researchers report in the Oct. 16 Science. This protein, the enzyme carbonic anhydrase 4, splits carbon dioxide into bicarbonate ions and free protons, which stimulate the sour-sensing cells. Scientists have long thought that the taste of carbonated...

Enlarge ImageBoom! After being hit with laser beams, a small plastic pellet (sunlike object) emits x-rays, some of which bombard a pellet of silicon (blue and purple). Credit: Adapted from S. Fujioka et al., Nature Physics, Advance Online Publication A team of researchers has created conditions analogous to those found outside of a black hole by blasting a plastic pellet with high-energy laser beams. The advance should sharpen insights into the behavior of matter and energy in extreme conditions. Astronomers can't observe black holes directly because their immense gravity won't let light escape. Instead, they have focused on what...

Role of a crucial protein helps answer why the cell’s transportation hub looks like a stack of pancakes Researchers have pinpointed a protein that keeps the trains running through the cell’s Grand Central station. The protein works in tandem with other molecules to pull membrane packets off the surface of a cell’s Golgi apparatus, giving the crucial organelle its distinctive flattened shape. “It’s a nice simple mechanism for how the shape of something is a consequence of its function,” says Seth Field of the University of California, San Diego and a coauthor of the study, which appears in the Oct....

Enlarge ImageDouble trouble. Brain neurons (green) with a faulty potassium channel. An EEG and an ECG show that epileptic seizures (top) often coincide with heart arrhythmias (bottom) in mice. Credit: A. Goldman et al., Science Translational Medicine Two medical problems caused by misfiring electrical signals, epilepsy and heart arrhythmia, probably have a common molecular cause, scientists report. The research points to treatments that could lower the chances of young people dying of seizures. The scientists, at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, were studying mice that had a mutation in the KCNQ gene, which builds potassium ion channels...

Mini-hole made of metamaterials ensnares microwave light.The artificial 'black hole' sucks up microwaves.Q. Cheng and T. J. Cui Physicists have created a black hole for light that can fit in your coat pocket. Their device, which measures just 22 centimetres across, can suck up microwave light and convert it into heat. The hole is the latest clever device to use 'metamaterials', specially engineered materials that can bend light in unusual ways. Previously, scientists have used such metamaterials to build 'invisibility carpets' and super-clear lenses. This latest black hole was made by Qiang Chen and Tie Jun Cui of Southeast University...

A startling case in Japan has confirmed that pregnant women with cancer can pass the disease to their fetuses. These transmissions, normally blocked by the placenta, are rare, so the work likely won't change how doctors screen or care for pregnant women. But scientists say the case could help illuminate how cancer foils the body's immune system. In early 2007, a 28-year-old Japanese woman gave birth to a girl. Thirty-six days later, the mother was hospitalized with vaginal bleeding, which became uncontrollable. Doctors diagnosed leukemia, and she soon died. The baby developed normally until age 11 months, when a huge...

In the past 5 years, no material has excited more interest from condensed matter physicists than graphene, a sheet of carbon only one atom thick. Electrons zing through the stuff in an unusual way, and they flow so easily that graphene could someday replace silicon and other semiconductors as the material of choice for microchips. Now, a team of physicists has taken a key step in fulfilling graphene's promise as a hotbed of exotic physics by showing that the electrons within it can team up to behave like particles with a fraction of the electron's charge. The effect is called...

Are chemicals in our environment masculinizing girls and feminizing boys? A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that this is the case, and one of the latest studies has linked exposure to a substance known as bisphenol A, or BPA, with aggressive behavior in girls. Liz Szabo reports on the research in USA Today, writing, “In the study of 249 pregnant women, the first to examine the effects of BPA on children's behavior, researchers found that girls ... were more likely to be aggressive if their mothers had high levels of BPA — an estrogen-like chemical used in many consumer...

A diagnostic compound that allows researchers to look into the brains of Alzheimer's patients will be used for the first time to gauge the effects of an experimental therapy for the disease. Called florbetaben, the diagnostic could also provide important insights into the role of beta amyloid, a protein that accumulates into plaques in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease and has been shown to be toxic to nerve cells. The compound is an 18F-radiolabelled tracer that binds specifically to deposits of beta amyloid, and can be measured using positron emission tomography (PET), a nuclear imaging technique which produces a three-dimensional image of...

Multiple-session early psychological interventions are no better at reducing posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms than no intervention at all and might even increase symptoms in some individuals, a review of 11 randomized controlled studies shows. “There was no evidence that a multiple session intervention aimed at everyone following a traumatic event was effective. There was a trend that just failed to reach significance for no intervention to result in less self-reported PTSD symptoms at 3 to 6-month follow-up than a multiple session intervention,” wrote Neil P. Roberts, D.Clin.Psy., of the Traumatic Stress Service at Cardiff and Vale National Health Services (Wales),...

Barcelona — Four widely prescribed oral sulfonylurea drugs are associated with significantly increased risk of all-cause mortality compared with metformin in type 2 diabetic patients having a history of MI, according to a comprehensive Danish national cohort study. The study included all Danish adults with a prior MI who started on oral glucose-lowering monotherapy during 1997-2006. The conclusion: Glimepiride, glyburide, glipizide, and tolbutamide were associated with 33%-43% higher mortality risk than was metformin, Dr. Tina Ken Schramm said at the annual congress of the European Society of Cardiology. In contrast, single-agent gliclazide and repaglinide had all-cause mortality risks similar to...

As U.S. health care providers await delivery of the first doses of vaccine against pandemic influenza A(H1N1), researchers are finding that some patients with the infection shed live virus a few days longer than commonly occurs with seasonal flu, according to a Canadian study with 100 patients. The public health implications of the finding aren't clear, Dr. Gaston De Serres said during a press briefing at the annual meeting of the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. The results show that it's not enough to isolate people infected with pandemic H1N1 flu for just a couple of days after...

To the Editor: The Naval Health Research Center serves as the Navy hub for the Department of Defense's Global Emerging Infections Surveillance and Response System (GEIS), in which it monitors influenza-like illness among recruit trainees of all military services, military dependents, and crew members of large Navy ships (population, >1000). The center works in collaboration with the Border Infectious Disease Surveillance Project of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which monitors populations located on the border between California and Mexico. The first two human cases of novel swine-origin influenza A (H1N1) virus (S-OIV), known as swine flu, in...