Dolphins in Cape Codd Beaching Themselves

More than a hundred dolphins have now beached off Cape Cod as mammals continue to get inexplicably stranded on the region's beaches.

Three died on Friday, meaning that of 116 common dolphins that have beached since January 12, 84 have died, though rescuers have managed to save the rest.

This year’s strandings dwarf the average of 37 common dolphin strandings annually over the last 12 years, and no one can explain why the numbers have mysteriously spiked this year.

Scientists have theories, ranging from geography, weather changes or behaviour of their prey.

Mike Booth of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, which is leading rescue efforts, said dolphins remain close off the Cape and more strandings are possible.
Massachusetts lawmakers held a Congressional briefing on the issue Friday and campaigned for federal funding to hep the staff and some 300 trained volunteers, the Cape Cod Times reported.

Friday’s death came after ten dolphins approached Wellfleet, and four beached. Three died and one was rescued.


Although this time of year is known to be 'high season' for dolphin stranding near Cape Cod, IFAW aren't sure why so many dolphins are beaching now.

One theory is that the marine creates get stranded during low tides while hunting for food. When the tide goes out, the dolphins become stranded.

Katie Moore, a Cape Cod dolphin rescue veteran of 15 years told CNN, that this is only the second time she has seen this many dolphins washing ashore.

'Sometimes they come up one at a time, other times we see them 10 at a time,' she said.

IFAW's stranding coordinator B. Sharp said: 'This might be the largest dolphin stranding geographically speaking that we've had.'


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2096617/Rescuers-continue-struggle-rescue-hundreds-dolphins-mysteriously-beaching-Cape-Cod.html#ixzz1klBs7Ukv

Defective Birth Control Being REcalled in U.S

It didn’t take long for the speculation to start: if women unintentionally get pregnant while taking the defective birth control pills that Pfizer recalled this week, could they, would they, sue?

Earlier this week, Pfizer recalled 1 million packages of pills — 14 lots of Lo/Ovral-28 tablets and 14 lots of generic Norgestrel and Ethinyl Estradiol tablets — after uncovering a packaging error that included too many active tablets in some packets and not enough in others. It cautioned women to use alternate contraceptive methods because they were at greater risk of becoming pregnant. In a statement, the company said that the recalled pills don’t pose “any immediate health risks.” That, of course, depends completely upon how you define “health risks.” Assuming you’re taking the pills to avoid having a baby but end up faced with what to do about an unwanted pregnancy, the ensuing stress could arguably count as a mental health risk, at the least. An unanticipated pregnancy is certainly more than just a minor inconvenience.

For most women, it’s likely too early to know if the packaging defect has resulted in unintended pregnancy. But already, bloggers have begun running scenarios.

LawInfo wondered whether product liability lawsuits — which “generally involve a product that was designed defectively or gave an insufficient warning to the consumer who was eventually harmed as a result of the design or warning defect” — might bubble up.

Similar cases have allowed people to sue for things like unwanted pregnancies after botched vasectomies. In the past, there has even been a case in which a woman successfully sued a pharmacist for a pregnancy that resulted from errors in filling the woman’s birth control prescriptions, Cohen said.
The best chance for a case, however, would be for affected women with unwanted pregnancies to band together and bring a class-action lawsuit against Pfizer, said Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania. Such a case could ask for considerably more money than an individual case, and would be more attractive to lawyers, Caplan said.
“I’m sure some enterprising lawyer is already thinking of bringing a class-action lawsuit…against the company,” Cohen said.

It’s unlikely that any settlement would approach the cost of raising a child, which, at $226,920, may in itself be a fairly effective method of birth control.


Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/02/03/pfizer-recall-could-women-who-get-pregnant-from-recalled-birth-control-pills-sue/#ixzz1klB5JMOX

Flesh Eating Disease Spread by sneezing Plagues Britain

Britain is in the grip of a new “flesh-eating bug spread by sneezes and coughs”, according to the front page of today’s Metro. The newspaper says that the bacteria are spreading across Britain, as they can be caught through people coughing and sneezing on crowded trains and buses.
This unsettling news put some of the Behind the Headlines team off grabbing their free copy of the Metro at the station this morning, not because of the fear of catching deadly germs from the paper, but because its report was alarmist and overblown. The basis of this news was a laboratory study that investigated why healthcare-acquired meticillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria rarely cause infections in healthy individuals. The study found that healthcare-acquired MRSA has a high level of antibiotic resistance, but that this property comes at a cost of reduced virulence (being less able to cause infection). Conversely, the study found that the type of MRSA that is usually caught in a community setting is more virulent, but weaker against treatment with antibiotics.
This study has not investigated the transmission, effects or number of cases of community-acquired MRSA in the UK, the discussion of which formed the basis of many news reports on the research. The researchers state that MRSA outside the healthcare system and in the community is a growing concern, but cases are still very rare. This interesting research contributes to our knowledge of MRSA, rather than warning us of an invasion of airborne superbugs.

Where did the story come from?

The study was carried out by researchers from the University of Bath and the University of Nottingham in the UK; University College Dublin in Ireland; and Texas A&M Health Science Centre and the University of Texas in the US. It was funded by the UK Medical Research Council and a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council Studentship. The study was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Infectious Diseases.
This story was widely covered. Most reports were alarmist, concentrating on the supposed emergence of a dangerous, highly infectious new form of community-acquired MRSA. Many newspapers suggested that transmission is easy, that it can lead to a “flesh-eating form of pneumonia”, and that cases are on the increase. These claims seem to be based on the press release for the research rather than the research paper itself. The study was actually laboratory-based research that had investigated why healthcare-acquired MRSA bacteria rarely cause infections in healthy individuals. Although there was some investigation of community-acquired MRSA, the results do not justify the news coverage.

What kind of research was this?

This was a laboratory-based study. It aimed to examine why healthcare-acquired MRSA bacteria rarely cause infections in healthy individuals. Healthcare-acquired, or hospital-acquired, means that the bacteria cause infections that mostly occur in healthcare environments.
The researchers initially covered the nature of MRSA and how it resists certain types of antibiotics. It is already known that MRSA is resistant to the antibiotics meticillin and oxacillin because it has acquired a piece of DNA called a ‘mobile genetic element’. Meticillin is an old antibiotic that is now no longer used and has been replaced by flucloxacillin.
Many staphylococcus aureus bacteria have now also developed resistance to the penicillin group of antibiotics (because they produce enzymes that can make penicillin inactive), but they are usually still susceptible to the antibiotic flucloxacillin. MRSA, however, does not have this susceptibility to flucloxacillin, and is, therefore, harder to treat than most staphylococci bacteria, needing stronger antibiotics still.
One particular genetic element that is key for deciding the properties of MRSA is called the ‘staphylococcal cassette chromosome mec’ (SCCmec). There are several different versions of this cassette, which each provide bacteria with slightly different properties. The researchers state that healthcare-acquired MRSA have type I, II or III SCCmec elements, whereas community-acquired MRSA have type IV and V elements. These different cassettes all contain a gene (mecA) that codes for a protein called PBP2a, located in the cell wall of the bacteria. PBPs (penicillin binding proteins) are a normal part of the cell wall of many bacteria. Many antibiotics work by inactivating PBPs, which cause the bacteria to die. However, the version of PBP encoded by mecA, PBP2a, is less sensitive to antibiotics, allowing the bacteria to survive.

What did the research involve?

The researchers initially determined whether deleting the mecA gene, which encodes the PBP2a cell wall protein, affects the toxicity of MRSA. They then took a healthcare-acquired MRSA strain and a version of this strain that they genetically modified to delete the mecA gene, and performed tests to see how each was able to break up a type of immune cell called a T cell in the laboratory.
The researchers then investigated the ability of the different strains to respond to ‘signalling molecules’, which normally cause the bacteria to activate their production of toxins. The virulence of these strains was confirmed using mouse experiments.
The researchers then compared the production of the PBP2a cell wall protein, T-cell toxicity and the resistance of healthcare-acquired MRSA to antibiotics, compared with community-acquired MRSA.

What were the basic results?

The researchers found that deleting the mecA gene caused the MRSA to become more toxic. This was because the expression of mecA results in cell wall changes that interfere with MRSA’s ability to detect or respond to signals to switch on toxin expression. MRSA with mecA deleted was also more virulent in a mouse model, causing mice to lose weight or die.
The researchers then compared MRSA strains with different SCCmec elements: those with type II elements (typical of healthcare-acquired MRSA) and those with type IV elements (typical of community-acquired MRSA). They found that typical community-acquired MRSAs had lower resistance to the antibiotic oxacillin, were more toxic to the immune system’s T-cells and expressed less PBP2a.

http://www.littlehamptongazette.co.uk/news/health/new_flesh_eating_bug_papers_claim_1_3490095

Fireball Spotted over Texas

Great balls of fire indeed.
Folks from Oklahoma City to Houston reported having seen a fireball shoot across the sky at about 8 p.m. Wednesday, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Astronomers said the fiery display was likely caused by a meteor or some other space matter hurtling through the atmosphere.
Texas observers blogged about the show and described it as a blue-green object trailing sparks.
In central Texas, Little River-Academy Police Chief Troy Hess said he had just pulled over a driver when he managed to capture video of the fireball from his cruiser.
"It kept getting bigger, and the color kept changing," he told the Austin American-Statesman.
No damage was reported from the fireball.
It was not clear whether any of the remnants fell to earth. Meteor sightings are common, with most burning up in the atmosphere and leaving scant debris, according to astronomers.
Anita Cochran, assistant director of the McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas, told the American-Statesman that Wednesday's fireball was most likely small space debris.
"The rare case is when it is something big," she said.
"It looked like a sparkler, almost," Lisa Coleman, who lives outside College Station, Texas, told local TV station KBTX.
"There was just this huge meteor-like rock falling across the sky and I thought, 'Wow, that's really huge to be a shooting star,' but it lasted about 12 to 15 seconds and it had a sparkling, flaring tail," Coleman said.
Texas A&M astronomy professor Nicholas Suntzeff told KBTX the meteor was not as huge as it appeared -- probably only about the size of a fist. He attempted to dispel some other meteor myths.
"If they do hit the earth, they are not hot, they are cold. ... There is the fire around them, but ... the meteor itself remains cold," Suntzeff said. "It almost never produces a fire when it hits the earth."
Suntzeff said the type of meteor that residents spotted, likely a bolide meteor, is both bright and rare -- most people will probably never see one again in their lifetime.
"Usually it's just a fraction of a second; here it was like five seconds or so. Again, I've only seen a few of those in my life. I wish I'd seen it," he said.
Another odd fact about this week's fireball: The sighting occurred on the ninth anniversary of the space shuttle Columbia falling to earth over east Texas.
[For the Record, 1:05 p.m., Feb.3: An earlier version of this post -- and its headline -- referred to the meteor as a meteorite. A meteorite is a portion of a meteor that reaches the Earth intact.]

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/2012/02/meteorite-sighting-oklahoma-texas.html