China cracks down
on sex-drug web sites
BEIJING,
Jan 9: China is shutting down about 200 Web
sites for carrying illegal sex-drug
advertisements, state media said today, the
latest in a string of measures to clean up the
Internet.
About 6,000 Web
sites have been found carrying illegal, sexually
suggestive adverts involving sex-related drugs or
health supplements, said the People's Daily, the
Communist Party's newspaper.
Some 199 would be
closed and 130 ''rectified'', the newspaper said.
It did not say what would happen to the rest.
China has launched
several campaigns to clean up online material and
step up control of the Internet ahead of this
year's Beijing Olympics, widely seen as a
coming-out party for the rising political and
economic power.
Last week, top
publishing officials slapped restrictions on
internet Web sites that allow users to upload
video and audio, and asked all producers to check
their inventory for risque material with threats
of fines and other punishments.
''Some audio-video
products, in the name of 'sexual health' and 'sex
education', but without any scientific content,
use colourful pictures or text containing
seductive words to lure customers,'' a recently
released Government statement said. (AGENCIES)
Lipitor doesn't
improve bone health after menopause....
NEW
YORK, Jan 9: When administered at doses that
lower lipid levels, atorvastatin, sold in the US
under the trade name Lipitor, appears to have no
effect on bone mineral density or bone metabolism
in postmenopausal women, according to
researchers.
The results of
previous laboratory and clinical studies have
suggested the commonly prescribed class of
cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins ''may
have very favorable effects on the skeleton,''
senior investigator Dr Michael R. McClung told
Reuters Health. ''This study demonstrates clearly
that statins do not have effects on bone
in the clinical
setting.''
McClung, of the
Oregon Osteoporosis Center, Portland, and
colleagues studied 626 postmenopausal women with
high levels of LDL cholesterol, the ''bad''
cholesterol. The women were randomly assigned to
treatment with one of four doses of atorvastatin
daily or to placebo (sugar pill), the researchers
report in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology
and Metabolism.
At 52 weeks, all
of the active treatment groups showed significant
reductions in LDL cholesterol compared with
levels at the beginning of the study and compared
with placebo. The treatment was also well
tolerated.
However, the
researchers found no evidence that atorvastatin
treatment had any significant effects on bone
mass or markers of bone mass.
Co-author Dr.
Henry G. Bone of the Michigan Bone and Mineral
Clinic, Detroit, told Reuters Health that ''our
study pretty well eliminates the likelihood that
conventional therapy with such agents would have
a clinically significant beneficial or harmful
effect on bone metabolism.''
(AGENCIES)
New approach
needed to save coral reefs:Study......
LONDON,
Jan 9: A growing human population is
pushing coral reefs in the Caribbean to breaking
point and saving them will require a new,
larger-scale approach, researchers said.
Coral reefs have
long been under threat but pinpointing whether
overfishing, climate change or development is the
main culprit has proved both contentious and
difficult, said Camilo Mora yesterday, a marine
biologist at Dalhousie University in Canada.
In their study,
researchers monitored coral reefs in 322 sites
across 13 countries throughout the Caribbean and
analyzed databases on fishing, sedimentation and
population growth.
The team, which
also looked at agricultural land use,
temperature, hurricanes, coral disease and
richness of the reefs, determined that coastal
development was most harmful.
''The study showed
clearly that the number of people living in close
proximity to coral reefs is the main driver of
mortality of corals,'' the researchers said in
the study, which was published in the Proceedings
of the Royal Society.
More people means
more of everything that damages coral reefs,
including fishing, sewage, coastal construction
and human activities that contribute to warming
oceans.
Coral reefs,
delicate undersea structures resembling rocky
gardens that are made by tiny animals called
coral polyps, are important nurseries and
shelters for fish and other sea life.
They are also
considered valuable protection for coastlines
from high seas, a critical source of food for
millions of people, important for tourism and a
potential storehouse of medicines for cancer and
other diseases.
But researchers
and environmental groups have warned that coral
reefs worldwide could be destroyed unless
Governments urgently change how they manage the
marine ecosystem.
''This new study
moves from the traditional localized study of
threats to a region-wide scale,'' Mora and
colleagues wrote.
The coral reef is
critical to the Caribbean economy, generating 4
billion dollar each year in trade for the fishing
and tourism industries, as well as jobs for
Government workers responsible for monitoring the
reefs, Mora said. (AGENCIES)
Girls who feel
unpopular more likely to get fat....
NEW
YORK, Jan 9: Adolescent girls who rank themselves
at the bottom of the social totem pole are more
likely to gain weight over time than their peers
with a more positive view of their social
standing, new research shows.
Based on these
findings, programs aiming to prevent overweight
and obesity in teen girls should focus on helping
them feel better about themselves, as well as
improving their eating and exercise habits, study
co-author Adina R Lemeshow said .
In the study,
conducted while Lemeshow was a graduate student
at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston,
the researchers followed 4,446 girls aged 12 to
18 for 2 years. All were asked to rank their
social standing on a 10-point ''ladder,'' with
the bottom being ''people who no one respects and
no one wants to hang around with'' and ''people
in your school with the most respect and the
highest standing'' at the top.
The average
self-ranking was 7.7, while just 4 percent of the
girls ranked themselves at 4 or below. After
adjusting for several factors that could
influence both social status and weight gain,
such as body mass index (BMI) at the study's
outset, household income, and self-esteem, the
researchers found that the girls who considered
themselves to have the lowest social status were
69 percent more likely to have a 2-point increase
in BMI over the following 2 years.
This is equivalent
to gaining about 11 pounds more than expected,
Lemeshow, who now works for the New York City
Department of Mental Health and Hygiene, said in
an interview.
''For girls, it
could be useful to have programs that focus on
personal skills or how to face social problems
and challenges'' when seeking to prevent obesity,
she said.
In an editorial
accompanying the study, Drs Clea McNeely and
Robert Crosnoe of Johns Hopkins University point
out that low social, political and economic
status are known to be fundamental causes of
disease.
The current study
findings suggest that self-perceived, subjective
social status can also lead to illness, they
note. But interventions designed to address
obesity in the context of social status must be
designed carefully, they add.
''Grouping
together multiple at-risk youth to deliver some
behavioral intervention can make things worse by
creating a new peer culture organized around the
very behaviors that the intervention was trying
to change.''
McNeely and
Crosnoe call for a better understanding of how
teens influence one another's health behavior to
ensure that such interventions are effective.
(AGENCIES)
China rings out
year of fluorescent green pigs .....
BEIJING,
Jan 9: A fluorescent green Chinese pig has
given birth to two piglets which share their
mother's transgenic characteristic after she
mated with an ordinary pig, state media said.
The mother sow is
one of the three fluorescent green pigs
successfully bred by a research team in December
2006 after they injected fluorescent green
protein into pig embryos.
''The mouths,
trotters and tongues of the two piglets glow
green under ultraviolet light, which indicates
the technology to breed transgenic pigs via cell
nuclear transfer is mature,'' Liu Zhonghua, a
professor at Northeast Agricultural University in
Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang province, was
quoted as saying.
She produced 11
piglets on Monday but so far only two of them had
inherited the fluorescent feature.
''This technology
promises to breed excellent transgenic pigs and
even raise special pigs to provide organs for
human transplant operations in the future,'' Liu
was quoted as saying.
Chinese scientists
bred the pigs using somatic cell nuclear transfer
technology following similar successes in the
United States, South Korea and Japan.
China celebrates
the start of the Year of the Rat in February,
drawing a close to the Year of the Pig.Diting by
Sanjeev Miglani) (AGENCIES)
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