Whooping Cough Shots Protect for Only a Few Years: Study
The protection offered by the whooping cough vaccine decreases after about three years, according to a preliminary study.
Researchers looked at children in a California county and found that the risk of developing whooping cough was as much as 20 times higher among those who were given the recommended series of vaccinations three or more years earlier. Those who'd received the vaccine more recently were well protected, the Associated Press reported.
The results were presented Monday at an infectious diseases conference in Chicago.
The findings appear to support school rules requiring students to get the whooping cough vaccination periodically, the AP reported. California had a large increase in whooping cough cases last year and this fall schools in the state turned away thousands of students who weren't up to date on their shots.
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New Technology Improves Early Stage Cancer Surgery: Report
A new technology that makes cancer cells glow can increase the amount of early stage cancer that surgeons can detect and remove from patients.
Cancer cells need folic acid to grow. Purdue University researchers found that adding a glowing dye to folic acid caused cancer cells to light up, CBS News reported.
The technology isn't approved in the United States, but doctors in the Netherlands have performed 20 successful trial surgeries in ovarian cancer patients. The procedure enables the removal of five times more cancer during surgery, according to some doctors.
"We know (that) the more aggressive you are in the surgical removal of the tumor, the better the outcome of the patient will be," said Dr. Gooitzen van Dam, a surgeon with the University of Groningen, CBS News reported.
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Gamers Decipher Enzyme of AIDS-Like Virus
The structure of an enzyme of an HIV-like virus has been deciphered by online gamers playing a video game in which the goal is to unfold chains of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.
Scientists have been trying for a decade to produce an accurate model of a monomeric protease enzyme. The gamers accomplished the feat in just three weeks, Agence France-Presse reported.
The achievement could help efforts to develop new antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV/AIDS patients.
"We wanted to see if human intuition could succeed where automated methods had failed," Firas Khatib, of the University of Washington's biochemistry lab, said in a news release, AFP reported. "The ingenuity of game players is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems."
The study was published Sunday in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.
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