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Pneumonic Plague Kills Third Human In Chinese Town
Authorities in China confirmed that a third man has died of pneumonic plague in Ziketan, Qinghai Province, China. The town has been sealed off. The 64-year-old man lived near the other two men who died, officials said.
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Lambda Legal Files Suit Against Assisted-Living Facility For Allegedly Discriminating Against HIV-Positive Resident
Lambda Legal, a group that represents HIV-positive people, on Tuesday filed a law suit against the Fox Ridge assisted-living facility in North Little Rock, Ark., for allegedly evicting a resident because he is HIV-positive, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reports.The Rev. Robert Franke, a retired biology and religion professor who was diagnosed with HIV in 1987, moved into Fox Ridge, which is operated by Parkstone Living Center, in February. The day after he moved into the facility, an unidentified administrator told his daughter, Sara Franke Bowling, that her "superiors" said Franke needed to be discharged from the facility "because of his HIV." Franke disclosed his HIV status on application materials before moving into the facility. The suit alleges that Parkstone violated the Fair Housing Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Arkansas Civil Rights Act and requests a permanent injunction to prevent the facility from denying apartments or services to people living with HIV/AIDS. The suit also seeks compensatory and punitive damages and attorneys" fees and costs. The case was assigned to U.S. District Judge G. Thomas Eisele. The facility declined to comment on the suit. Julie Munsell, a spokesperson for the state Department of Human Services, said Arkansas law allows for people who have been discharged for assisted-living facilities to remain in the facility pending a hearing if the discharge is appealed. Munsell said the department"s Long-Term Care Division received notice that Franke was appealing the discharge but that the appeal was later dismissed without a hearing. According to Munsell, facilities are not permitted to discharge residents based on medical diagnoses but that some facilities have said they do not have the capacity to provide care for certain conditions. Munsell also said that Fox Ridge is "claiming that they did not admit this client so there is no need for a hearing." Scott Schoettes, staff attorney for Lambda"s HIV Project, said that Franke was not seeking medical care from Fox Ridge, although the facility does provide medical services. "He didn"t require any services beyond which they were licensed to provide," Schoettes said. Franke"s eviction is "particularly blatant and egregious, but unfortunately, not all that uncommon," Schoettes said, adding, "This happens all across the country. We want to send a message that this kind of discrimination is not going to be tolerated" (Satter, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 5/13).
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Treatable Hormonal Condition Sometimes Overlooked In Infertility Patients
A condition known as congenital adrenal hyperplasia, or CAH, is easily treatable but frequently overlooked or misdiagnosed, leading to infertility and other "perplexing symptoms," the New York Times reports. CAH is a hormone deficiency that leads to excess production of androgens, which can hinder ovulation in women and cause low sperm count in men. It also can cause short stature, body odor, acne, irregular menstruation and excessive hair growth. The condition can be diagnosed through a blood test and treated with small doses of the steroid dexamethasone, which can reverse symptoms in three months to two-and-one-half years.According to Maria New, a leading authority on CAH and a professor of pediatrics and human genetics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, the disease occurs in one in every 100 people in the general population. It is more common among certain ethnic groups, occurring in one in 27 Ashkenazi Jews and one in 40 Hispanics. Not everyone with the condition has symptoms or needs to be treated. The most severe form of the disease, classic CAH, can result in ambiguous genitalia in girls, while the milder nonclassical form sometimes produce no symptoms, the Times reports.Many fertility clinics do not test for the disease or only test after attempting other treatments. Some obstetricians are unaware of CAH and its effect on fertility, according to Zev Rosenwaks, director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine at New York Presbyterian-Weill Cornell hospital. CAH also can be confused with polycystic ovarian syndrome -- which has some similar symptoms -- or early puberty in younger patients (Tarkan, New York Times, 7/7).
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Viruses More Virulent In A Connected World

That"s one conclusion from a new study that looked at how virulence evolves in parasites. The research examined whether parasites evolve to be more or less aggressive depending on whether they are closely connected to their hosts or scattered among more isolated clusters of hosts. The research was led by Geoff Wild, an NSERC-funded mathematician at the University of Western Ontario, with colleagues from the University of Edinburgh. Their paper was published on Nature"s Web site on May 27. "Our study follows up on some recent findings that suggest that reduced dispersal of parasites across scattered host clusters favours the evolution of parasites with lower virulence - in the case of influenza, for example, a milder, possibly less deadly, case of flu," said Dr. Wild. "Some researchers had contended from this that the parasites were evolving to support the overall fitness of the group," he added. "The argument for adaptation at the group level is that the parasites become more prudent to prevent overexploitation and hence to avoid causing the extinction of the local host population." However, Dr. Wild and his colleagues were not convinced that Darwinian theory - so successful in providing explanations based on the notion that adaptation maximizes individual fitness - was ready for such a major makeover. The researchers decided to move the arguments from words to harder science. Together they developed a formal mathematical model that incorporated variable patch sizes and the host parasite population dynamics. It was then run to determine the underlying evolutionary mechanisms, the results of which were published in the Nature paper. "The model revealed solid reasons why lowered virulence enhanced individual fitness," said Dr. Wild. The researchers used an "inclusive" notion of individual fitness that has been used by biologists in other situations since the 1960"s. This "inclusive" approach recognizes that an individual has a vested interest not only in its own success, but also the success of its relatives (not the group as a whole, per se). "Basically, we replace the notion of self-interest - an idea that underlies much early evolutionary theory - with the notion of self-and-family interest," he said. "The difference between self-and-family interest versus group interests is subtle, but important." "There are several reasons why lowered virulence enhances the success of genetic lineages of parasites," he said. For one thing, he explained, it means lower host-to-host disease transmission. "While the more virulent strain of parasite can move among hosts readily, it does so to the detriment not of the group, but rather certain members of the group (namely individuals of the same strain - its relatives)," said Dr. Wild. "Besides settling an argument over adaptation, we now understand better the importance of dispersal to the evolution of parasites." "The findings also suggest that as human activity makes the world more connected, natural selection will favour more virulent and dangerous parasites." Dr. Wild said the modeling approach the group took makes it possible to expand virulence theory to examine a range of potentially important biological factors. Geoffrey Wild Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council


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