“This New Group Wants to Stop Pandemics Before They Start” plus 2 more Health

“This New Group Wants to Stop Pandemics Before They Start” plus 2 more Health – TIME

This New Group Wants to Stop Pandemics Before They Start
Obamacare Is More Popular Than Ever, Poll Finds
Sitting Too Much Ages You By 8 Years

This New Group Wants to Stop Pandemics Before They Start

Posted: 19 Jan 2017 08:31 AM PST

Global epidemics tend to follow an unfortunate pattern: An emerging disease—like Zika or Ebola—infects thousands of people, but vaccines and drugs are not developed fast enough to be of any real benefit. This week, a global group called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) launched with significant funding and the aim to develop vaccines for known infectious disease threats. The goal is to have vaccines ready before an epidemic starts.

CEPI was announced Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with initial funding of $460 million from the governments of Germany, Japan and Norway, as well as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust. The group hopes to shorten the amount of time it takes to develop new vaccines for emerging diseases by embracing innovative vaccine technology and funding labs that are able to respond quickly to outbreaks.

The group is first targeting the MERS-CoV, Lassa and Nipah viruses. All three have the potential to cause large outbreaks, and the goal is to have two potential vaccines for each of these viruses ready before an epidemic hits. The group may also provide support for research on strains of the Ebola, Marburg and Zika viruses.

CEPI says it has raised nearly half of the $1 billion the group needs for the first five years. With the initial investment, the group is now asking for proposals from pharmaceutical companies or researchers for vaccine development. CEPI aims to meet its full investment goal by the end of 2017, and hopes more governments and organizations will consider partaking.

“Ebola and Zika showed that the world is tragically unprepared to detect local outbreaks and respond quickly enough to prevent them from becoming global pandemics,” said Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in a statement about the launch. “Without investments in research and development, we will remain unequipped when we face the next threat.”

Obamacare Is More Popular Than Ever, Poll Finds

Posted: 19 Jan 2017 05:30 AM PST

More Americans hold positive views about Obamacare than hold negative views for the first time since the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, according to a new poll from CNN/ORC.

The results found that 49% of people polled favored the law—slightly more than the 47% who opposed it. The responses show people may not have known what they got until it was (almost) gone, because every previous poll has seen more people oppose the law, CNN reports. It was the first time in at least 18 polls since March 2010 that people favored the healthcare law, according to CNN.

Obamacare’s newfound popularity is coupled with how 82% of respondents believe it is at least somewhat likely that President-elect Donald Trump’s administration will repeal and replace the healthcare law, the poll found.

Although the portion of uninsured Americans has reached an all-time low under Obamacare, more people polled felt it has been a failure (37%) than a success (23%). The largest portion of respondents, 38%, said it was still too soon to tell.

CNN/ORC International conducted the poll of 1,000 people over the phone between Jan. 12 and Jan. 17, and it has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

[CNN]

Sitting Too Much Ages You By 8 Years

Posted: 18 Jan 2017 12:00 PM PST

Sitting too much during the day has been linked to a host of diseases, from obesity to heart problems and diabetes, as well as early death. It’s not hard to understand why: being inactive can contribute to weight gain, which in turn is a risk factor for heart attack, stroke, hypertension and unhealthy blood sugar levels.

On top of everything else, sitting has detrimental effects on cells at the biological level, according to a new report published in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

In the new study, scientists led by Aladdin Shadyab, a post-doctoral fellow in family medicine and public health at the University of California San Diego, traced sitting’s impact on the chromosomes. They took blood samples from nearly 1,500 older women enrolled in the Women’s Health Initiative, a long-term study of chronic diseases in post-menopausal women, and focused on the telomeres: the tips of the tightly packed DNA in every cell. Previous studies have found that as cells divide and age, they lose bits of the telomeres, so the length of this region can be a marker for how old a cell (and indirectly the person the cells belong to) is. The researchers compared telomere length to how much the women exercised, to see if physical activity affected aging.

Earlier studies have also looked at telomere length and exercise. But they relied on asking people to report on their activity levels, a process that’s often inaccurate. Shadyab instead relied on more objective recordings of physical activity from accelerometers that the women wore for one week. Initially, he did not find any relationship between telomere length and physical activity levels. But when he focused on the women who did not meet the recommended 30 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity daily, he began to see some interesting trends.

Among women who didn’t get the daily half hour of exercise, those who spent more time sedentary (about 10 hours or more) had shorter telomeres than those who spent less time sitting everyday. The amount of shortening added up to about eight years of aging, the scientists estimated—meaning that inactive women who spent more time sitting were about eight years older, on average, than those who were inactive but spent less time sedentary.

Women who got the recommended amount of daily exercise showed no association between how much time they spent sitting and their telomere length, suggesting that physical activity might counteract the shortening that occurs with aging.

“Our results suggest that the combination of being sedentary and not engaging in enough physical activity to prevent the telomeres from shortening leads to the shorter telomere length,” says Shadyab. “Women who did not meet the physical activity guideline and were sedentary for at least 10 hours a day were biologically older; their cells are aging faster than those of women who were less sedentary.”

Exactly how much physical activity is needed to negate the aging effects of sitting on the cells isn’t clear yet. But Shadyab’s study shows that sedentary behavior has potentially aging effects on the cells, and exercise may be one way to combat that aging process.

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