N Nitrogen

Cross-posted from Nature Medicine ' s Spoonful of Medicine blog

Now that the battle against the bulge in the U.S. has reached the grade school level, plenty of efforts have begun to fight childhood obesity and its dangers. They range from educational efforts, such as First Lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move! campaign, to new pediatric surgical programs nationwide. Now two researchers float a legal approach: make severe obesity a crime. 

Lindsey Murtagh of the Harvard School of Public Health and David S. Ludwig of the Children's Hospital in Boston present their case in the July 13 issue of JAMA , The Journal of the American Medical Association . Their commentary, " State Intervention in Life-Threatening Childhood Obesity ," makes the point that kids with a body-mass index in the 99th percentile face serious health threats: 

Every day more than 1,000 infants worldwide are infected with HIV during gestation, delivery or breast-feeding, according to U.N. estimates . But the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) says it will eliminate the transmission of HIV from mothers to their babies in just four years. It's an ambitious goal that the fund is unlikely to meet without major changes, but it's not impossible. [More]

Our diets are unhealthy, that much is clear. Now, an increasing number of scientists and physicians wonder if our propensity for unhealthy, obesity-inducing eating might be tied to the food choices made during our first weeks and months of life. Indeed, the latest research indicates that what we learn to like as infants paves the way for what we eat as adults. If true, we might be able to tackle the obesity epidemic in a new and more promising way, one that starts with the very first spoonful. [More]

The single biggest factor, by far, in reducing the rate of death among children younger than five is greater education for women. In all countries worldwide, whether females increase schooling from 10 years to 11, say, or two years to three, infant mortality declines , according to a recent study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. [More]

BOSTON – The world has seen seven global cholera outbreaks since 1817, and the current one seems to have come to stay. Rising temperatures and a stubbornly persistent, toxic bacteria strain appear to have given the disease the upper hand.

Public health officials are working on vaccines, struggling to improve sanitation in impoverished nations and grasping for ways to predict the outbreaks. One team of researchers has proposed attacking the pandemic using a combination of high- and low-tech: Satellites and sari cloth.

How do you find out why a 1.5-meter-long endangered sea turtle is having epileptic fits? The first step is to find an MRI machine big enough to accommodate her not-so-ladylike girth. [More]

A few weeks ago as I was walking out of a Harris Teeter grocery store in Raleigh, North Carolina, I saw a man face a moment of crisis. You could see it in the acrobatic contortions of his face. He had pulled a cart out of the area where carts congregate, only to find that its handle was sticky with an unidentifiable substance. He paused and looked at the handle, as if to imagine the nature of the offense. Gum? Meat juice? Chewed marshmallows? So many vulgar possibilities. Forlorn, he reached for an antibiotic wipe conveniently placed by the door. He scrubbed his hands VERY diligently and then pushed the cart back for someone else to rediscover [1].

Scenarios like this one are playing out all over America. There is an epidemic of sticky, dirty and otherwise gross handles on shopping carts. But it isn't just carts. Disgusting doorknobs have also been found, as have cryptically damp table-tops in restaurants and even, sad as it is, slimy back rests on the weight machines in gyms! Increasingly, the world seems to be rife with contamination. Fortunately, all of the main companies producing hygiene products have offered a solution--sanitary, antibacterial, antimicrobial, antibiotic, wipes, and soaps to kill anything that dares to creep into our wholesome lives. These salves will cure us of the demons that dare to grow near us.

Scientists may still be debating the role of viruses in chronic fatigue syndrome, but blood banks aren’t taking any chances. Last summer the AABB, a nonprofit that represents blood-collecting organizations, advised people with the disorder, marked by severe fatigue and aches lasting six months or more, to self-defer from blood donation. Last December the American Red Cross went further, banning people who revealed during a predonation interview that they had the syndrome from ever giving blood at its centers.

The cause for this abundance of caution is XMRV (xenotropic murine leukemia virus–related virus), a retro­virus that has been associated with chronic fatigue syndrome. In a highly publicized 2009 study published in Science , XMRV was found in 67 percent of patients and 3.7 percent of healthy controls. But subsequent studies failed to find the virus in people with or without the syndrome, suggesting to some that XMRV may be a laboratory contaminant that skewed the initial trial.

What can be done about global health? It's the question on everyone's minds following Peter Agre's moving talk on malaria 'without borders' earlier in the week and Christian De Duve handing the baton of all the world's challenges to the young researchers in  the last lecture : "Our generation has made a mess of it... the future is in your hands". 

The need is clear: Better diagnostic tools, as discussed in the panel on the  future of biomedicine , will be for people that can afford them. The Economist's science and technology editor Geoffrey Carr starts the concluding panel of the Lindau meeting by setting out the stark reality: "The greatest health needs are in the developing countries".