New Seal Flu Could Pose Threat to Humans

HealthDay – 1 hr 50 mins ago TUESDAY, July 31 (HealthDay News) -- A new influenza strain found in New England harbor seals could potentially threaten people as well as wildlife, new research suggests.

Scientists cautioned that viruses like the newly discovered seal flu must be monitored in order to predict new strains and prevent a pandemic flu emerging from animals.

The report was published online July 31 in mBio.

"There is a concern that we have a new mammalian-transmissible virus to which humans haven't been exposed yet. It's a combination we haven't seen in disease before," report editor Dr. Anne Moscona, professor of pediatrics and of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, said in a journal news release.

Another expert agreed that the flu strain could someday pose a threat to people.

"Infections that threaten wildlife and human lives remind us how our health is intermingled on this dynamic planet," said Dr. Bruce Hirsch, attending physician in infectious diseases at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y. He said that while transmission via direct contact between humans and harbor seals is unlikely, the virus could find other ways to get to people.

"A dangerous virus infecting mammals increases the risk to us -- not by direct infection -- but by evolutionary development of even more riskier strains," Hirsch explained. For example, he said, the strain might pass from seals to birds, expand its presence in the environment and mutate in ways that make it easily passed to or between humans.

Scientists from several organizations, including Columbia University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, co-wrote the new report. They said that flu viruses found in mammals, such as the H1N1 "swine flu" that emerged in 2009, can put people's health at risk. The new seal flu, they warned, presents a similar threat to humans.

The researchers analyzed the DNA of a virus linked to the death of 162 harbor seals in 2011 off the coasts of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine. Five autopsies revealed that the seals died from infection with a type of flu known as H3N8.

The report pointed out that the seal flu is very similar to a flu strain found in North American birds since 2002. The virus, the researchers noted, adapted to living in mammals. It also has mutations that are known to make viruses easier to spread and more dangerous. They added the seal flu, which is able to target a protein found in the human respiratory tract, may have the potential to move between species.

The researchers warned that pandemic flu can originate in unexpected ways, so preparation is essential.

"Flu could emerge from anywhere and our readiness has to be much better than we previously realized. We need to be very nimble in our ability to identify and understand the potential risks posed by new viruses emerging from unexpected sources," said Moscona. "It's important to realize that viruses can emerge through routes that we haven't considered. We need to be alert to those risks and ready to act on them."

Still, viral strains typically must undergo several key mutations to become the source of a human pandemic, Hirsch said.

"Each time the flu virus infects a cell, it is a roll of the dice," he said. "There are eight separate segments of genes inside the virus -- simple viral versions of chromosomes -- which recombine at random, producing unique viruses. Cells can be infected with multiple viruses, so a dangerous gene from a bird can get mixed in with a gene that makes it easy to infect humans."

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides more information on the spread of flu viruses from animals to people.

View the Original article

Dogs May Mourn as Deeply as Humans Do

HealthDay – Fri, Jul 6, 2012 FRIDAY, July 6 (HealthDay News) -- Jon Tumilson's dog, Hawkeye, was an important part of his life.

And, as it turns out, Tumilson was an important part of Hawkeye's life.

After the Navy SEAL was killed in Afghanistan last summer, more than a thousand friends and family attended the funeral in Rockford, Iowa, including his "son" Hawkeye, a black Labrador retriever who, with a heavy sigh, lay down in front of Tumilson's flag-draped casket. There, the loyal dog stayed for the entire service.

Hawkeye's reaction to his owner's death generated a lot of buzz online and in the media. But it's not unusual, according to pet experts, for some dogs to mourn the loss of a favorite person or animal housemate.

Grief is one of the basic emotions dogs experience, just like people, said Dr. Sophia Yin, a San Francisco-based veterinarian and applied animal behaviorist. Dogs also feel fear, happiness, sadness, anger, as well as possessiveness.

Dogs who mourn may show similar signs to when they're separated for long periods of time from the individual they're bonded to, she said. Of those signs, depression is the most common, in which dogs usually sleep more than normal, move slower, eat less and don't play as much.

The beginnings of such a strong inter-species bond between humans and dogs dates back some 15,000 years, when early man and the ancestor of today's dog roamed the Earth together.

Today, after thousands of years of friendship, there's a great deal of attunement between humans and dogs, not only in terms of comprehension of each other's gestures and body language but also emotionally, said Barbara King, a professor of anthropology at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va.

It's not just evolutionary logic, or reading peer-reviewed science literature that's convinced King that dogs (as well as cats) feel deep grief. Interviews with astute pet owners for her upcoming book, How Animals Grieve, and the power of observation, has also led her to this conclusion.

Case in point: a grainy video posted on YouTube that captured the image of a scruffy terrier running onto a busy highway in Chile to rescue another dog, hit moments earlier, by a car. As vehicles whiz by the terrier, he instinctively wraps his paws around the injured dog, dragging him off the road to safety.

"When you look at that sort of example, again, you see that these dogs are thinking and feeling creatures, and that sets the stage for grief," she said.

Through her research, King has found that in households with two dogs who've lived together for a number of years, some owners report that when one dog dies, the other gets depressed. Skeptics might point to a change in daily routine as the cause of depression or, perhaps, because the owner is upset and grieving. But King feels differently.

"The surviving dog is searching around the house for a lost companion -- looking in favorite places, going to places that they spent with their friend, very pointed actions that tell you the dog is missing his friend," she said.

In an effort to understand what dogs are thinking, researchers at Emory University in Atlanta are conducting brain scans of dogs using functional MRI (fMRI).

Gregory Berns, director of the Emory Center for Neuropolicy and lead researcher on the project, hopes their work will reveal secrets of the dog-human relationship, from the dog's perspective.

Even with high-tech tools, though, determining whether canines experience grief would be tough, he admitted, because he believes it's unknown how grief looks in the human brain. If it were known, however, Berns said researchers could then look for this emotion in the dog but it would require showing pictures, perhaps movies, of the deceased human or canine.

"It would be fascinating to figure out," said Berns, who normally uses fMRI technology to study how the human mind works. "If I were to speculate, I would guess that, like people, some dogs mourn and others don't."

King agrees. After all, she said, dogs possess unique personalities and react differently, even in the same situation. Whether a dog grieves hinges on a dynamic mix of life experiences, added King, including how they were raised and what their people or animal housemates were like.

If a pet mopes around the house after the death of a canine or human companion, Yin suggests the best thing owners can do is to get their dog's mind off the loss by engaging their pet in fun activities such as a game of fetch, brisk walks and play dates with other pets. "The activity depends on what the dog historically likes," she said.

Don't expect a quick fix. It may take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months, pet experts believe, before a dog's spirits begin to lift.

More information

For more on canine behavior, visit the American Veterinary Medical Association.

View the Original article

Bonobo Genome Sheds Light on Their Links to Chimps, Humans

HealthDay – 4 mins 26 secs ago WEDNESDAY, June 13 (HealthDay News) -- Scientists who have completed the genome of the bonobo say their research will provide insights into the species' evolutionary relationships with other great apes and with humans.

The bonobo is the last of the great apes to have its genome sequenced. Other great apes include the chimpanzee, orangutan and gorilla.

Bonobos and chimpanzees are the closest living relatives of humans. But in contrast to the more aggressive chimpanzees, bonobos are known for their peaceful, playful behavior.

The bonobo genome was sequenced from a female named Ulindi who lives at the Leipzig zoo in Germany. The results show that bonobos and chimpanzees differ genetically by about 0.4 percent, while both bonobos and chimpanzees differ from humans by about 1.3 percent.

The study, by Kay Prufer and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, is published in the June 13 online edition of the journal Nature.

Bonobo and chimpanzee territories in central Africa are separated only by the Congo River. It's been theorized that the formation of the river separated the ancestors of chimpanzees and bonobos, leading to distinct species. This hypothesis is supported by a comparison of the bonobo and chimpanzee genomes, which shows an apparent clean split and no subsequent interbreeding.

While the average genomes of bonobos and chimpanzees are equally distant from the human genome, humans are closer to bonobos in some regions and closer to chimpanzees in others.

Further research will determine whether these genome regions influence the behavioral differences and similarities between humans, chimpanzees and bonobos, the study authors said.

More information

The Great Ape Trust has more about bonobos.

View the Original article

Humans Can Sniff Out Old Age in Others, Study Shows

HealthDay – 4 hrs ago WEDNESDAY, May 30 (HealthDay News) -- How old do you think you smell? A new study suggests that humans possess the ability to judge whether a person has reached their senior years just by sniffing their body odor.

People in the study correctly gauged whether the former wearer of an underarm pad was elderly or not just by sniffing it. And for the record, most didn't think "old-people smell" was off-putting at all.

The finding "shows that there's yet another signal hidden in the body odor that we are somehow able to extract and make use of," said study co-author Johan Lundstrom, an assistant professor at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, in Philadelphia.

As for the notion that "old-people smell" doesn't leave people as disgusted as you might expect, Lundstrom said the odor's power -- or lack thereof -- appears to have a lot to do with whether the elderly are actually physically present. "Lacking a context, the negativity of the body odors disappear," he said.

The study authors launched their research as part of an effort to better understand the chemical signals that people detect in body odor. Previous research had suggested that we can pick up signs of sickness in other people's body odor and even get a sense of whether someone is related to us, Lundstrom said.

Animals appear to be able to detect age through body odor, he said, although it's not clear why it might matter to them. One theory is that the signal could let other animals know that an animal is older and thus more likely to produce offspring because it's managed to stay alive so long, he said.

In the new study, 56 people -- 20 young (20 to 30 years old), 20 middle-aged (45 to 55), and 16 elderly (75 to 95) -- wore clean T-shirts and underarm pads while sleeping. The pads soaked up a sample of each individual's body odor.

The researchers then asked 41 young people to smell the resulting odors -- from pads kept in glass jars -- and try to tell them apart.

Participants were generally able to discriminate between the age groups, but they weren't much better at it than chance, Lundstrom said. However, they were able to do a better job of grouping together body odors from older people and identifying them as coming from the elderly.

"The old-age body odor sticks out," Lundstrom said, but it didn't do so in a negative way. In fact, the subjects tended to think the old age body odors were more pleasant and less intense than those of other age groups.

One factor might explain that: Older men smell more like women, possibly because they've lost testosterone, Lundstrom said.

He also noted that the people who provided their body odor for the study were healthy. That means the older people did not suffer from problems that can occur among seniors that might affect their body odors, such as incontinence.

The "popular prejudice" against the odor of the elderly probably reflects people's distaste for odors in geriatric wards and nursing homes, noted one expert, Tim Jacob, a professor of biosciences at Cardiff University, in England, who studies smell and is familiar with the new study's findings.

"This is obviously an unfair association," he said. "But if people know where the smell originates

View the Original article