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Health Industry Officials Offer $2 Trillion Savings Plan To The White House
"Health industry officials delivered a plan to the White House Monday documenting how they"ll attempt to save $2 trillion over a decade through measures like reducing hospitalizations and cutting down on paperwork," the Associated Press reports. "Health insurers, doctors, hospitals, drug-makers and others were under pressure to make good on a pledge they made last month to curb their own costs to help President Barack Obama achieve his health care overhaul goals." Their three big areas of savings: $150 billion to $180 billion would come from more efficient use of health care services, $350 billion to $850 billion from better management of chronic diseases, and $500 billion to $700 billion through administrative improvements such as standardizing claim forms (Werner, 6/1).
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Study Links Drop In Teen Contraception Use To Abstinence-Only Policies, NYT Editorial States
A recent study from Columbia University"s Mailman School of Public Health shows that since 2003, there has been a 10% decrease in contraception use among teenagers, while their level of sexual activity has not changed, a New York Times editorial states. From 1991 to 2003, increased use of contraceptives among teens was a significant factor in declining rates of teenage pregnancy, the editorial says. According to the study"s authors, the decrease in contraception use since 2003 is consistent with recent increases in teen birth rates. According to the editorial, the study"s authors suggest a "link between the shift in use of contraception and one of former President George W. Bush"s great social-policy follies: highly restrictive abstinence-only sex education programs that deny young people information about sexually transmitted diseases, contraceptives and pregnancy." The editorial adds, "To the extent that these programs even mention condoms, typically it is to disparage their effectiveness." In response to "mounting evidence of the program"s danger as a public health strategy," many states have forgone federal abstinence-only funds, the editorial says. As part of his budget proposal, President Obama has called for redirecting some abstinence-only funds and additional money to a new teen pregnancy prevention initiative that stresses comprehensive sex education. The editorial concludes that this "science-based effort to protect the health of young people" and reduce the number of unintended pregnancies "should win support from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle -- and both sides of the abortion divide" (New York Times, 6/18).
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Female Human Embryos Adjust The Balance Of X Chromosomes Before Implantation
Dutch researchers have found the first evidence that a process of inactivating the X chromosome during embryo development and implantation, which was known to occur in mice but unknown in humans, does, in fact, take place in human female embryos prior to implantation in the womb.
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Fungal Toxin Mystery Solved Using Biolog's Phenotype MicroArrayTM Technology

An important breakthrough in fungal toxin biology has been made possible through the use of Biolog"s Phenotype MicroArray technology. This major advance is described in two recent publications from a group at CSIRO in Queensland, Australia. The work by Donald Gardiner and his collaborators has recently been published in online editions of the journals Fungal Genetics and Biology and Microbiology. The fungus Fusarium graminearum is a major pathogen of wheat. It is the causative agent of head blight and results in substantial worldwide crop losses. Central to the infection process, the fungus produces a trichothecene toxin called deoxynivalenol. Although the toxin is produced at high levels during wheat infection, researchers have never been able to induce Fusarium to produce significant levels under laboratory culture conditions. This inability has hampered study of head blight disease and approaches to disease prevention. Now, this decades-old mystery has been solved. The CSIRO researchers used Biolog Phenotype MicroArray plates to culture the fungus simultaneously in hundreds of different micro-scale culture conditions. The set of culture conditions is designed to contain a diverse range of nutritional and stress conditions that a microbial cell might encounter. To facilitate detection, the CSIRO researchers constructed a special strain of the fungus, placing the green fluorescent protein under the genetic control region for the first step in the toxin synthesis pathway. If any culture condition induced synthesis of the toxin gene, the cells in that micro-well would exhibit green fluorescence. In a single experiment, they quickly screened hundreds of conditions and determined that key factors for turning on toxin synthesis are the presence of specific nitrogen compounds (arginine, agmatine, putrescine) as well as low extracellular pH. Even more generally, this work demonstrates the feasibility of using Biolog Phenotype MicroArray technology to study the induction of any microbially produced toxin or secondary metabolite. Toxins, and other secondary metabolites such as bacteriocins and other antibiotic compounds are typically produced under some special culture conditions that are difficult to determine. Biolog"s technology can provide breakthrough discovery in a single experiment. The utility is further demonstrated in a commercial application in a recent publication from Wyeth Research (Maya Singh, Journal of Microbiological Methods 77:102) who found culture conditions for high levels of antibacterial chemical production by fungi. Data from Phenotype MicroArray experiments have also contributed to the realization that intracellular hexose phosphates are chemical signals that turn on production of the toxin listeriolysin O during human infections by the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes (Barry Bochner, FEMS Microbiology Reviews 33:191). Phenotype MicroArray technology, developed with SBIR funding from NIH, is more and more proving to be an important breakthrough technology. It allows scientists to study the growth properties and culture condition responses of bacterial cells, fungal cells, and even human cells. As such it is becoming a core technology for cell assay and many other cellular studies. Biolog


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