New Technology Just Needs To Swipe a Card For Medical Test

Cards loaded with blood or urine samples can be scanned in minutes

Scientists have designed a sensitive prototype to test dozens of disease simultaneously by scanning a card loaded with microscopic blood, saliva or urine samples.

Unlike lab tests today, results could be available in minutes, not hours to weeks. The prototype works on same principle givant magnetoresistance or GMR that reads data on computer hard drives or listen to tunes on portable digital music players. Read more

AIDS Pandemic Has Been Lurking for 100 Years

The deadly AIDS virus first began spreading among humans at the turn of the 20th century in sub-Saharan Africa, just as modern cities were emerging in the region, a US based research concluded.

A recent publication in the journal Nature has pushed  the origin of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) back by several decades.

Researchers think the growth of cities-and high-risk behaviour associated with urban life may have helped the virus to flourish.

Prior estimates put the origin of HIV at 1930. But Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona in Tucson now believes HIV began infecting humans between 1884 and 1924.

The present research is based on 48-year-old gene fragments dug from a wax-embedded lymph node from woman in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire.

Research from chimpanzee droppings suggests the virus first spread from chimps to humans in southeastern Cameroon. Worobey thinks the disease spread slowly among the local population until one of the infected people went to Kinshasa, where it had more opportunity to spread.

Worobey thinks by the 1960s, several thousand people may have been infected with HIV. By 1981, the rest of the world began to recognize the pandemic, which has now infected 33 million people and killed 25 million.

Disease prevention is one of the most important issues in HIV and the only way we are going to control thispandemic is through prevention.

Source: TOI

Proteins in Saliva Could Detect Oral Cancer

It might lead to a painless new diagnostic test to detect oral cancer. Screening of proteins in human saliva can accurately detect a common type of oral cancer.

The test predicts the mouth cancer in 93 percent of cases. The study has been published in  the Journal Clinical Cancer Research by University of California.

It is among the first of a new set of spit-based a diagnostic tests expected to arise from a protein map of human saliva.

The protein map, published in March, identified all 1,116 unique proteins found in human saliva glands. The latest findings focus on oral squamous cell carcinoma, which affects more than 300,000 people worldwide.

More than 90 percent of cancers that start in the mouth are squamous cell cancers.

The team is developing devices to detect these markers that could be studied in human trials.