Authorities in the US have shut down what seems to be an illegal biological lab in California. Hidden inside a warehouse, the lab held nearly 1000 lab mice, around 800 unidentified chemicals, refrigerators and freezers, thousands of vials of biohazardous materials such as blood, incubators, and at least 20 infectious agents, including SARS-CoV-2, HIV, and a herpes virus. The lab’s owners claim they were developing COVID testing kits.
NBC News affiliate KSEE of Fresno reported that the authorities first cottoned on to the lab when a local official noticed an illegal hosepipe connection, prompting a warrant to search the building, which was only supposed to be used for storage.
Officials first inspected the warehouse in Reedley City, Fresno County on March 3, court documents reveal. It was only on March 16 when local health officials conducted their own inspection – and they were shocked to discover the true nature of the warehouse’s contents and operations.
Reedley City Manager Nicole Zieba told KSEE, “This is an unusual situation. I’ve been in government for 25 years. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“Certain rooms of the warehouse were found to contain several vessels of liquid and various apparatus,” court documents read. “Fresno County Public Health staff also observed blood, tissue and other bodily fluid samples and serums; and thousands of vials of unlabeled fluids and suspected biological material.”
Chemicals and equipment were also haphazardly stored with furniture. They also discovered nearly a thousand mice; more than 175 were already dead and 773 were euthanised.
The tenant was found Prestige BioTech, which was not licensed for business in California. The company president was identified as Xiuquin Yao, whom officials questioned via email. Prestige BioTech had moved assets from a now-defunct medical technology company which had owed it money.
Prestige Biotech is accused of not having the proper permits and disposal plans for the equipment and substances, and would not explain the laboratory activity at the warehouse.
“I’ve never seen this in my 26-year career with the County of Fresno,” said Assistant Director of the Fresno County Department of Public Health Joe Prado.
“Through their statements that they were doing some testing on laboratory mice that would help them support, developing the COVID test kits that they had on-site,” Prado said.
Zieba also commented that this was only part of the investigation. “Some of our federal partners still have active investigations going. I can only speak to the building side of it,” Zieba said.
Further attempts to contact Yao for comment have been unsuccessful.
An analysis of seven international research studies found that, even in adults without hypertension, blood pressure (BP) readings may climb more steeply over the years as the number of daily alcoholic drinks rise. The findings, published in the journal Hypertension, also found no beneficial effects to a low level of alcohol intake.
Pooling seven international research studies, this analysis confirms for the first time a continuous increase in blood pressure measures in both participants with low and high alcohol intake. Even low levels of alcohol consumption were associated with detectable increases in blood pressure levels that may lead to a higher risk of cardiovascular events.
“We found no beneficial effects in adults who drank a low level of alcohol compared to those who did not drink alcohol,” said senior study author Marco Vinceti, MD, PhD, a professor of epidemiology and public health at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia University and an adjunct professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health. “We were somewhat surprised to see that consuming an already-low level of alcohol was also linked to higher blood pressure changes over time compared to no consumption – although far less than the blood pressure increase seen in heavy drinkers.”
“Our analysis was based on grams of alcohol consumed and not just on the number of drinks to avoid the bias that might arise from the different amount of alcohol contained in ‘standard drinks’ across countries and/or types of beverages,” said study co-author Tommaso Filippini, MD, PhD, an associate professor of epidemiology and public health in the Medical School of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy, and affiliate researcher at the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health.
Researchers reviewed the health data for all participants across the seven studies for more than five years. They compared adults who drank alcohol regularly with non-drinkers and found:
Systolic BP rose 1.25mmHg in people who consumed an average of 12 grams of alcohol per day, rising to 4.9mmHg in people consuming an average of 48 grams of alcohol per day.
Diastolic BP rose 1.14mmHg in people consuming an average of 12 grams of alcohol per day, rising to 3.1mmHg in people consuming an average of 48 grams of alcohol per day. These associations were seen in males but not in females. Diastolic blood pressure measures the force against artery walls between heartbeats and is not as strong a predictor of heart disease risk in comparison to systolic.
“Alcohol is certainly not the sole driver of increases in blood pressure; however, our findings confirm it contributes in a meaningful way. Limiting alcohol intake is advised, and avoiding it is even better,” Vinceti said.
Although none of the participants had high blood pressure when they enrolled in the studies, their blood pressure measurements at the beginning did have an impact on the alcohol findings.
”We found participants with higher starting blood pressure readings, had a stronger link between alcohol intake and blood pressure changes over time. This suggests that people with a trend towards increased (although still not ‘high’) blood pressure may benefit the most from low to no alcohol consumption,” said study co-author Paul K. Whelton, MD, MSc, at Tulane University’s School of Public Health.
Study details and background:
Researchers analysed data from seven, large, observational studies involving 19 548 adults (65% men), ranging in age from 20 to their early 70s at the start of the studies.
The studies were conducted in the United States, Korea and Japan, and published between 1997 and 2021. None of the participants had previously been diagnosed with high blood pressure or other cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, liver disease, alcoholism or binge drinking.
Usual alcoholic beverage intake was recorded at the beginning of each study and the researchers translated this information into a usual number of grams of alcohol consumed daily. The researchers used a new statistical technique that allowed them to combine results from several studies and plot a curve showing the impact of any amount of alcohol typically consumed on changes in blood pressure over time.
Other co-authors and authors’ disclosures are listed in the manuscript.
A new review paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine suggests that scrambler therapy, a noninvasive pain treatment, can yield significant relief for 80–90% of patients with chronic pain, and it may be more effective than another noninvasive therapy: transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS).
Scrambler therapy administers electrical stimulation through the skin via electrodes placed in areas of the body above and below where chronic pain is felt. The goal is to capture the nerve endings and replace signals from the area experiencing pain with signals coming from adjacent areas experiencing no pain, thereby ‘scrambling’ the pain signals sent to the brain, explains the study’s primary author, Thomas Smith, MD, a professor of oncology and medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
All chronic pain and almost all nerve and neuropathic pain result from two things: pain impulses coming from damaged nerves that send a constant barrage up to pain centers in the brain, and the failure of inhibitory cells to block those impulses and prevent them from becoming chronic, says Smith, who also is the director of palliative medicine for Johns Hopkins Medicine.
Constantly hitting the reset button on pain
“If you can block the ascending pain impulses and enhance the inhibitory system, you can potentially reset the brain so it doesn’t feel chronic pain nearly as badly,” Smith says. “It’s like pressing Control-Alt-Delete about a billion times.”
Many patients “get really substantial relief that can often be permanent,” he says. They receive from three to 12 half-hour sessions.
As a physician who treats chronic pain, Smith says, “Scrambler therapy is the most exciting development I have seen in years – it’s effective, it’s noninvasive, it reduces opioid use substantially and it can be permanent.”
Vaccination protects against severe COVID but not against infection. Researchers in Sweden now show that protection against infection with the new omicron variants is linked to mucosal IgA antibodies, which are not induced by vaccination. These are the findings of two studies recently published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, and The Lancet Microbe, and could explain the limited protection by currently available vaccines against infection.
Researchers from Karolinska Institut and Danderyd Hospital conducted the COMMUNITY study, which enrolled 2149 healthcare workers in the spring of 2020. Study participants and their immune responses against SARS-CoV-2 have continuously been monitored through regular blood and airway samplings complemented with PCR screenings.
A subset of 447 participants were enrolled in a weekly PCR screening study detecting SARS-CoV-2 infections in the autumn of 2022. Mucosal IgA in nasal samples and serum IgG were determined at enrolment. The results, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, revealed a 50% risk reduction for infection with the newer Omicron variants if detectable mucosal IgA at baseline.
Stronger protection with higher antibody levels
Protection against infection increased with increasing mucosal IgA levels, with a 25% risk reduction for every 2-fold increase. Moreover, mucosal IgA had a higher cross-binding capacity to other SARS-CoV-2 variants as compared to serum IgG, and there was no association between high serum IgG levels and protection against infection.
“While there was a clear link between serum IgG and protection against infection with previous SARS-CoV-2 variants, our findings now question the use of serum IgG levels as a correlate to protection against infection with recent Omicron variants” says Ulrika Marking, PhD student at the Department of Clinical Sciences at Karolinska Institutet and Danderyd Hospital, and first author.
Limited vaccine protection
Another sub study, initiated in fall of 2023 and recently published in The Lancet Microbe, investigated mucosal antibody responses to a fourth mRNA booster dose. Mucosal IgA in nasal samples and serum IgG in blood were analysed from 24 participants before and at repeated time points after the booster dose.
While serum IgG levels increased as expected, the fourth vaccine dose did not affect mucosal IgA levels.
“Currently available intramuscular vaccines continue to protect against severe disease and death, but their ability to protect against infection with the new omicron variants is limited” says Oscar Bladh, PhD student and first author.
“The findings from these two studies underscore the need for the development of novel vaccine platforms capable of inducing robust mucosal immune responses protecting against respiratory viral infections”, says Charlotte Thålin, associate professor at the Department of Clinical Sciences at Karolinska Institutet and Danderyd Hospital, and principal investigator of the COMMUNITY study.
“Although the primary aim of vaccination is to protect against severe disease and death, it is also crucial to prevent infection and viral transmission of respiratory viral families with high epidemic or pandemic potential”.
The COMMUNITY study continues with regular samplings from blood and mucosa, monitoring immune responses after repeated SARS-CoV-2 infections and vaccinations.
The draft regulations were gazetted in January and consumers had until 21 July to comment. These regulations, among other things, propose the mandatory use of new and bolder warning labels on unhealthy food which include items high in salt, sugar, saturated fats and items containing artificial sweeteners.
Community Media Trust (CMT) is a not-for-profit company, mainly focused on health and human rights and has partnered with the Healthy Living Alliance (HEALA), a coalition of organisations focused on nutrition.
In February, CMT and HEALA staged a flash mob as part of the “Less Sugar, More Life” campaign in Cape Town ahead of the Finance Minister’s Budget Speech, advocating for an increase in the sugary drinks tax. They were disappointed by the announcement that the tax would be frozen for two years.
Following a massive media campaign on the draft regulations, CMT and HEALA successfully collected thousands of submissions.
CMT’s co-director Lucilla Blankenberg said the warning labels had been tested with audiences and researchers. If you’re a diabetic shopping for food and there was a clear warning label saying, ‘high in sugar’, the consumer won’t have to spend time trying to work it out because the message is simple.
The proposed warning labels are black and white triangles and would clearly indicate when food is high in sugar, salt and fat or contains artificial sweeteners.
“The reason the food industry is fighting back is because if food has a warning label, it cannot be marketed directly to children. Which means cartoons and animation that will attract children cannot be used to market a food item that has a warning label. If a pack has a warning label they can’t make any health claims whatsoever,” said Blankenberg.
“We won’t see the results immediately, but it will happen over time, especially for the children. With warning labels, it will be easier for parents to avoid buying certain food,” said Blankenberg.
HEALA’s communications manager Zukiswa Zimela said conversations proposing front of pack warning labels started in 2016.
Zimela said research for the campaign was initially done by the University of Western Cape to determine which foods qualify to have front of pack warning labels. She said the research gave more insight into what consumers thought of the current information on packaging as well as what the new warnings should look like.
“We started the campaign in May and went to eight provinces, mainly to educate and inform communities about the importance of front of pack warning labels and the food they were eating,” said Zimela. She said they found that many consumers agreed that they did not understand the nutritional information on food packaging.
She said the food industry had used scare tactics like saying warning labels would cause job losses which was “completely untrue”.
“This is not something new, warning labels have been done in other countries like Chile, Mexico, Peru and Columbia and there has been no evidence that jobs have been lost because of it. This is just undermining the government’s plan to get people to eat better.”
Zimela said HEALA will be monitoring the responses to the regulations. “Should the regulations be implemented, we need to make sure that they are not watered down or seen as useless.”
Sugar industry warns against “demonising sugar”
The South African Sugar Association (SASA) told GroundUp it had also submitted comments on the draft regulations, and that the front of pack warning labelling system was of particular concern to the industry.
SASA executive director, Trix Trikam, said: “The objective of this system is to encourage the reduction of energy/calorie intake, saturated fat and salt to prevent obesity and non-communicable diseases.
“It is well known and there is evidence that sugar is not the sole contributor of kilojoules to the diet and should therefore not be singled out in a regrettable out-of-context manner,” he said.
He said the warning labels should not be done in a sensationalist or alarmist manner “which seeks to demonise sugar” because that would have “a significant adverse impact on the sugar industry”.
Trikman suggested that the warning labels should instead reflect the calories in a food product. “SASA is also not convinced that the perceived cut-off values for sugar is evidence-based. A possible solution to that would be to use the perceived cut-off values based on percentage of energy value and not the amount of sugar per volume of product,” said Trikam.
“The draft regulations make it mandatory for a warning symbol to be placed on the front of pack labels for foods that exceed a perceived cut-off value for sugar. In order to avoid the warning symbol for sugar, food manufacturers will seek to find ways of removing sugar from their products. This will lead to a decrease in the demand for sugar and will ultimately negatively impact the livelihoods of those dependent on the sugar industry in the deeply rural areas of KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga.”
Trikam said SASA is concerned about the obesity rates in South Africa but added that the solutions should be evidence-based.
Disclosure: GroundUp was once a project of, and still has a close relationship with, Community Media Trust.
