Imagine taking medicine oblivious to the fact that a food allergy can effect you taking simply medicine.
Certain substances derived from foodstuffs are used as excipients in drugs and vaccines for their pharmaceutical properties. Some of these food-derived excipients contain food proteins either intentionally or unintentionally as contaminants. As such, patients who have IgE antibodies directed against these food proteins are theoretically at risk for allergic reactions when exposed to the food proteins in the medications. However, such reactions are quite rare, usually because the amount of food protein is not present in a large enough quantity to elicit a reaction or because the particular protein is not a common allergen. When the food protein appears as an unintentional contaminant, the amount of protein, if any, that is present might be variable and might elicit reactions only from some lots of medication that happen to contain more of the food protein or illicit reactions only in patients who are exquisitely sensitive or happen to have IgE antibodies directed against a particular epitope in the contaminating protein. In most circumstances these medications should not be routinely withheld from patients who have particular food allergies because the overwhelming majority will tolerate the medications uneventfully. However, if a particular patient has had an apparent allergic reaction to the medication, allergy to the food component should be investigated as a possible cause. Even in this circumstance (ie, an allergic reaction to a medication in a patient allergic to a particular food and the presence of the food protein in the medication), the food protein would still have to be demonstrated to be causal by using appropriate testing because other allergens present in the medication could have been the cause or the medication might be capable of non–IgE-mediated mast cell degranulation.
The immune system is incredibly important, thanks to its role in fighting off dangerous invaders in our bodies. But sometimes it gets it wrong, targeting harmless proteins from things like nuts or dairy products and triggering allergic reactions that ironically can themselves be fatal. Now, researchers from Michigan State University have identified a mechanism that helps keep the immune system in check, potentially paving the way for drugs that could prevent allergic reactions before they start.
Posted in biotech/medical, health
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Smartphones aren’t just for selfies anymore. A novel cell phone imaging algorithm can now analyze assays typically evaluated via spectroscopy, a powerful device used in scientific research. Researchers analyzed more than 10,000 images and found that their method consistently outperformed existing algorithms under a wide range of operating field conditions. This technique reduces the need for bulky equipment and increases the precision of quantitative results.
Accessible, connected, and computationally powerful, smartphones aren’t just for “selfies” anymore. They have emerged as powerful evaluation tools capable of diagnosing medical conditions in point-of-care settings. Smartphones also are a viable solution for health care in the developing world because they allow untrained users to collect and transmit data to medical professionals.
Although smartphone camera technology today offers a wide range of medical applications such as microscopy and cytometric analysis, in practice, cell phone image tests have limitations that severely restrict their utility. Addressing these limitations requires external smartphone hardware to obtain quantitative results – imposing a design tradeoff between accessibility and accuracy.
This HPV cure comes at a time when cervical cancer cases are quickly becoming the leading cause for death among female cancer patients around the world, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said in a statement.
The researchers specialise in early detection and photodynamic therapy to fight HPV and have succeeded in winning the ultimate battle — a 100 percent cure — after twenty years of tweaking the treatment.
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While testing of the probiotic supplements is currently confined to the lab, Peixoto envisions the treatment being administered on wild reefs. The probiotics could be sprayed from a plane, similar to how pesticides are spread over fields, or dropped like little bacterial bombs to target areas more specifically. Peixoto acknowledges the risk of trying to deliberately manipulate microbial ecosystems in the oceans, but believes the probiotics could be a viable long-term solution to coral reefs’ declining health.
When faced with high heat and disease, coral treated with microbial supplements fared better.
Go into your backyard about 20:30 p.m. EST or thereabouts this weekend and you can see the most incredible thing – the Andromeda Galaxy – one of the farthest objects visible to the naked eye. If you know where to look. Locating the ‘other ’ major galaxy in our Local Group is an exercise in stargazing on a grand scale, and the beginning of fall is absolutely the best time to take a look at it.
