'Population bomb' forecast proves wrong
NEW YORK, Aug. 30 (UPI) -- Doomsday predictions the globe's population would soar to catastrophic levels are proving highly inaccurate, the New York Times reported Monday.
In 1968, Stanford University Professor Paul Ehrlich created a scare with his book "The Population Bomb," warning of the consequences of too many people.
But ever since that year, when the U.N. Population Division predicted the world population, now 6.3 billion, would grow to at least 12 billion by 2050, the agency has regularly revised its estimates downward. Now it expects population to level off at 9 billion.
The slowdown is attributed to declining birth rates and improved public health measures that have reduced mortality rates.
"On a farm, children help with the pigs or chickens," said Joseph Chamie, director of the U.N. Population Division. Nearly half the world's people live in cities now, he said, "and when you move to a city, children are not as helpful."
Barring war, famine, epidemic or disaster, a country needs a birthrate of 2.1 children per woman to hold steady. As late as 1970, the world's median fertility level was 5.4 births per woman, but in 2000, it was 2.9, the report said.
Call renewed for AIDS vaccine
LAUSANNE, Switzerland, Aug. 30 (UPI) -- At least $12 billion is needed over the next decade to maintain momentum in developing an AIDS vaccine, scientists at a Swiss conference were told Monday.
"Due to an alarming increase in the number of HIV infections, whereby it is anticipated that an additional 45 million new infections will occur by 2010, there is an urgent need for a preventive vaccine to end the HIV pandemic both in the developing and in the developed world," Dr. Giuseppe Pantaleo said in his inaugural address at the AIDS Vaccine '04 conference in Lausanne.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases called for loosening research secrecy.
"Clearly, HIV vaccine development must be accelerated, and researchers around the world must move toward a new paradigm in which planning and coordination, sharing of data and reagents, and collaboration are paramount," Fauci said.
Some 800 scientists and researchers are attending the conference, run by the Lausanne University Hospital and EuroVacc, a Swiss foundation whose mission is to develop a vaccine against HIV and other infectious diseases.
Drug in trials to curb eating and smoking
MUNICH, Germany, Aug. 30 (UPI) -- A pill to help both overeaters and smokers is in clinical trials and could be available within two years, The Telegraph reported Monday.
The results of a year-long study were released at the European Society of Cardiology meeting in Munich Sunday and show 40 to 45 percent of overweight people in one trial lost 10 percent of their weight.
The drug, rimonabant, works on a system in the brain involved in motivation and the control of appetite as well as the urge to smoke. The endocannabinoid brain region was discovered as a result of studying why marijuana smokers develop acute appetites.
The results from the European study of 1,500 people found those on a 20 milligram dose lost 14.5 pounds in a year, those on 5 milligrams lost 7.5 pounds and those on a placebo lost 4.5 pounds. All the people in the trial followed a diet reducing their calories by 600 a day and were advised to exercise.
Across the world, 13,000 people are involved in seven rimonabant trials which are looking at its effect on weight, smoking and diabetes.
Stem cell tourists chasing miracle cures
NEW YORK, Aug. 30 (UPI) -- An increasing number of U.S. residents are traveling to foreign clinics for alternative treatments using their own stem cells.
While such treatment is largely unavailable and still in experimental and research phases in the United States, sites in Argentina, Mexico, Portugal, China and the Caribbean offer to extract patients' stem cells and regrow them into whatever is missing or amiss, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
For example, people suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease can pay more than $100,000 to the Regina Mater clinic in Buenos Aires for stem cell therapy. People with spinal cord injuries are going to Chaoyang Hospital in Beijing for help. Doctors there transplant nerve cells from human fetuses into the spinal cords of customers who can pay their $20,000 fee.
The growing stream of stem cell tourists is driven by constant media chatter about the purported unlimited potential of stem cell therapies, observers said.
Stephen Barrett, a retired psychiatrist who tracks scientific frauds on his Web site, Quackwatch.org, isn't surprised that people already are offering miracle stem cell cures.
"It's a general characteristic that quackery stands in the shadow of science," he told the newspaper.
