Scientists find 6,200 year old parasite egg in ancient skeleton

ISLAMABAD: In a skeleton more than 6,200 years old scientists have found the earliest known evidence of infection with a parasitic worm that now afflicts more than 200 million people worldwide, Fox News reported.

Archaeologists discovered a parasite egg near the pelvis of a child skeleton in northern Syria and say it dates back to a time when ancient societies first used irrigation systems to grow crops. Scientists suspect the new farming technique meant people were spending a lot of time wading in warm water ideal conditions for the parasites to jump into humans.

That may have triggered outbreaks of the water borne flatworm disease known as schistosomiasis. The invention of irrigation was a major technological breakthrough (but) it had unintended consequences said Gil Stein a professor of Near Eastern archaeology at the University of Chicago one of the report s authors.

Stein said there was evidence of wheat and barley farming in the town where the skeletons were found and that irrigation might have also spurred outbreaks of other diseases like malaria by creating pools of stagnant water for mosquitoes to breed. Other experts agreed it was likely that irrigation spread parasitic diseases beginning in ancient times.

Egypt along the Nile was a hotspot for generations because people were crammed into the flood plain and there were probably a lot of people who had low level (flatworm) infections for their entire lives said Quentin Bickle a parasite expert at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

People would have known there was something weird going on but they wouldn’t have known what to do about it.

Scientists find compound to fight virus behind SARS, MERS

GENEVA: An international team of scientists say they have identified a compound that can fight coronaviruses, responsible for the SARS and MERS outbreaks, which currently have no cure.

Coronaviruses affect the upper and lower respiratory tracts in humans. They are the reason for up to a third of common colds. A more severe strain of the virus, thought to have come from bats, triggered the global SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) epidemic in 2002, which killed nearly 800 people.

The Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) is a new strain discovered in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and thought to have originated in camels. More deadly but less contagious, it has so far killed 193 people out of 636 confirmed cases.

Now, a team of scientists led by Edward Trybala from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and Volker Thiel from the University of Bern, have discovered a compound called K22, which appears to block the ability of the virus to spread in humans.

"This finding is important in light of the fact that some emerging coronaviruses, such as SARS and MERS... are potential pandemic-causing pathogens," Trybala said in an email to AFP.

In "our work we found a novel strategy to combat these viruses," he added.

The team screened 16,671 different compounds before realising that K22 could combat a weak form of coronavirus that causes mild cold-like symptoms.

They then went on to show that it can fight more serious strains, including SARS and MERS.

- ´Viral factories´ -

In an article for specialist journal "PLOS Pathogens", the scientists explained that the virus reproduces in the cells that line the human respiratory system. The virus takes over the membranes that separate different parts of human cells, reshaping them into a sort of protective armour in order to start its production cycle, and so creating "viral factories," Trybala told AFP.

K22 acts at an early stage in this process, preventing the virus from taking control of the cell membranes and so opening up "new treatment possibilities," he said.

"The results confirm that the use of the membrane of the host cell is a crucial step in the life-cycle of the virus," the researchers wrote.

Their work shows that "the process is highly sensitive and can be influenced by anti-viral medications".

They said the recent SARS epidemic and MERS outbreak mean there should be urgent investment in testing K22 outside the laboratory and developing medicines.

While K22 still has a way to go before it can be tested on humans, Trybala still believes "that identification of this new strategy of combating coronaviruses will aid to develop an effective and safe antiviral drug".

Earlier this month, experts gathered in Geneva by the World Health Organization confirmed that MERS was spreading but had yet to reach the level of global emergency.

Most of the MERS cases and deaths so far have been in Saudi Arabia, but the virus has been imported to more than a dozen other countries. All of those cases have involved people who became ill while in the Middle East.

Iran registered its first death from MERS on Thursday, and has registered six cases of the infection. (AFP)

China search vessels find no clues for missing flight

• 
  AP/CCTV via AP Video In this image taken from video, a member of a Chinese search team uses an instrument to detect electronic pulses while searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, on board the patrol vessel Haixun 01, in the search area in the southern Indian Ocean on Saturday. 
   
• 
  AP A woman ties a message card for passengers aboard the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, at a shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur on Saturday.

After detecting signals possibly from the black box of the missing Malaysian plane, China’s search vessels failed to find any confirmed clues today to conclusively establish that the pings are from the MH370.

Vessels of China’s ministry of transport searching for the missing passenger jet have searched a total of 136,000 square kilometres by midday on Sunday, Zhuo Li, an official with the China Maritime Search and Rescue Center, said.

The centre had mobilised 62 merchant ships for their assistance in the search, he said.

Haixun 01 of the ministry and two Navy vessels continued the underwater search in southern Indian Ocean, three other ships were searching on the water surface. Two other vessels were searching in eastern Indian Ocean, Mr. Zhuo was quoted by official Xinhua news agency as saying.

China pressed 18 vessels, eight helicopters and three fixed-wing aircraft to trace the plane missing since March 8, along with 239 people on board.

Earlier in the day, three separate but fleeting sounds from deep in the Indian Ocean offered new hope in the hunt for the missing Malaysian airliner, as officials rushed to determine whether they were signals from the plane’s black boxes before their beacons fall silent.

The head of the multinational search being conducted off Australia’s west coast confirmed that a Chinese ship had picked up electronic pulsing signals twice in a small patch of the search zone, once on Friday and again on Saturday.

On Sunday, an Australian ship carrying sophisticated deep-sea sound equipment picked up a third signal in a different part of the massive search area.

“This is an important and encouraging lead, but one which I urge you to treat carefully,” retired Australian Air Chief Marshall Angus Houston, who is coordinating the search, told reporters in Perth.

“We have an acoustic event. The job now is to determine the significance of that event. It does not confirm or deny the presence of the aircraft locator on the bottom of the ocean,” Mr. Houston said, referring to each of the three transmissions.

China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported on Saturday that the patrol vessel Haixun 01 on Friday detected a “pulse signal” at 37.5 kilohertz (cycles per second) the same frequency emitted by flight data recorders aboard the missing plane in the southern Indian Ocean.

The British Navy ship HMS Echo, which is fitted with sophisticated sound-locating equipment, is moving to the area where the signals were picked up and will be there in the next day or two, Houston said.

The Australian navy’s Ocean Shield, which is carrying high-tech sound detectors from the U.S. Navy, will also head there, but will first investigate the sound it picked up in its current region, about 300 nautical miles (555 kilometres) away, he said.

Australian air force assets are also being deployed into the Haixun 01’s area to try to confirm or discount the signals’ relevance to the search, Houston said.

In Kuala Lumpur, families of passengers aboard the missing plane attended a prayer service on Sunday that also drew thousands of Malaysian sympathizers.

“This is not a prayer for the dead because we have not found bodies. This is a prayer for blessings and that the plane will be found,” said Liow Tiong Lai, the president of the government coalition party that organized the two-hour session.

Two Chinese women were in tears and hugged by their caregivers after the rally. Many others looked somber, and several wore white T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Pray for MH370”.

Two-thirds of the passengers aboard Flight 370 were Chinese, and a group of relatives has been in Kuala Lumpur for most of the past month to follow the investigation. Mr. Liow said some of them were planning to go home on Sunday.

After weeks of fruitless looking, the multinational search team is racing against time to find the sound-emitting beacons and cockpit voice recorders that could help unravel the mystery of the plane. The beacons in the black boxes emit “pings” so they can be more easily found, but the batteries last for only about a month.

Investigators believe Flight 370 veered way off-course and came down somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean, though they have not been able to explain why it did so.

The crew of the Chinese ship reportedly picked up the signals using a hand-held sonar device called a hydrophone dangled over the side of a small runabout something experts said was technically possible but extremely unlikely.

The equipment aboard the Ocean Shield and the HMS Echo are dragged slowly behind each ship over long distances and are considered far more sophisticated than those the Chinese crew was using.

Footage aired on China’s state-run CCTV showed crew members in the small boat with a device shaped like a large soup can attached to a pole. It was hooked up by cords to electronic equipment in a padded suitcase as they poked the device into the water.

“If the Chinese have discovered this, they have found a new way of finding a needle in a haystack,” said aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas, editor-in-chief of AirlineRatings.com. “Because this is amazing. And if it proves to be correct, it’s an extraordinarily lucky break.”

There are many clicks, buzzes and other sounds in the ocean from animals, but the 37.5 kilohertz pulse was selected for underwater locator beacons because there is nothing else in the sea that would naturally make that sound, said William Waldock, an expert on search and rescue who teaches accident investigation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona.

“They picked that (frequency) so there wouldn’t be false alarms from other things in the ocean,” he said.

But after weeks of false alarms, officials were careful on Sunday not to overplay the development.

“We are hopeful but by no means certain,” Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said of the detection of the signals.

“This is the most difficult search in human history. We need to be very careful about coming to hard and fast conclusions too soon,” Mr. Abbott told reporters during a visit to Japan.

The agency was formally told about the second Chinese detection on Saturday “in absolutely the normal way”, he said.

“China is sharing everything that is relevant to this search. Everything,” Mr. Houston said.

Still, the search agency will be adding a Chinese-speaking liaison officer “to make sure nothing falls through the cracks,” he said.

The signals detected by the Chinese ship were in the southern high priority zone, Mr. Houston said.

Up to 12 military and civilian planes and 13 ships took part in the search on Sunday of three areas totalling about 216,000 square kilometres (83,400 square miles). The areas are about 2,000 kilometres (1,200 miles) northwest of the Australian west coast city of Perth.