UPI NewsTrack Health and Science News

FDA bans candy, fruit-flavored cigarettes

WASHINGTON, Sept. 22 (UPI) -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says candy and fruit- or clove-flavored cigarettes are now illegal in the United States.

The FDA said the ban, authorized by the new Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, is part of a national effort to reduce smoking -- the leading preventable cause of death in America.

The FDA's ban on candy and fruit-flavored cigarettes, effective Tuesday, highlights the importance of reducing the number of children who start to smoke, and who become addicted to dangerous tobacco products, the federal agency said. The FDA said it is also examining options for regulating both menthol cigarettes and flavored tobacco products other than cigarettes.

"Almost 90 percent of adult smokers start smoking as teenagers," FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said. "These flavored cigarettes are a gateway for many children and young adults to become regular smokers,"

The FDA said studies have shown that 17-year-old smokers are three times as likely to use flavored cigarettes as smokers over the age of 25.

The FDA said any company that continues to make, ship or sell such flavored cigarette products may be subject to enforcement actions.

Cheap test as good as MRI to detect stroke

BALTIMORE, Sept. 22 (UPI) -- A simple, one-minute eye movement exam worked better than magnetic resonance imaging to distinguish new strokes, U.S. researchers said.

Dr. David E. Newman-Toker of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Illinois in Peoria, said people experiencing a stroke have eye-movement alterations that correlate with stroke-damage to various brain areas -- and these are distinct from eye-movement alterations seen with benign ear diseases.

Some patients, for example, can't immediately adjust their eye position if their heads are quickly turned to the side, or they experience jerky eye movements as they try to focus on a doctor's finger when looking to either side.

The findings, published in the journal Stroke, found the quick, extremely low-cost exam caught more strokes than the current gold standard of MRI.

"The idea that a bedside exam could outperform a modern neuroimaging test such as MRI is something that most people had given up for dead, but we've shown it's possible," Newman-Toker says in a statement.

Dizziness is the cause of some 2.6 million U.S. emergency room visits annually and the vast majority of these complaints are caused by benign inner-ear balance problems. But 4 percent are signals of stroke or transient ischemic attack -- a condition that often warns of impending stroke in the coming days or weeks.

Hurricanes up in number, not strength

CLEMSON, S.C., Sept. 22 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists say they've determined hurricanes and tropical storms are increasing in the Atlantic Ocean, but aren't getting stronger as others contend.

Clemson University researchers led by Professor Robert Lund said they studied changes in the tropical cycle record in the North Atlantic between 1851 and 2009.

"This is a hot button in the argument for global warming," said Lund. "Climatologists reporting to the U.S. Senate as recently as this summer testified to the exact opposite of what we find. Many researchers have maintained that warming waters of the Atlantic are increasing the strengths of these storms. We do not see evidence for this at all, however, we do find that the number of storms has recently increased."

Lund, who was joined in the research by Michael Robbins and Colin Gallagher of Clemson and QiQi Lu of Mississippi State University, says the study represents one of the first rigorous statistical assessments of the issue.

"Hopefully such a rigorous assessment will clear up the controversy and the misinformation about what is truly happening with these storms," Lund said.

Their study has been submitted to the Journal of the American Statistical Association.

Antigen could speed HIV vaccine creation

HOUSTON, Sept. 22 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists say they have created the first antigen that induces protective antibodies capable of blocking strains of the human immunodeficiency virus.

Researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center say their new chemically-activated antigen that can block infection of human cells by genetically diverse HIV strains could expedite development of an HIV vaccine. The HIV virus leads to the development of AIDS.

The scientists, led by Professor Sudhir Paul, said the new antigen differs from previously-tested vaccines by virtue of its chemically-activated property that enables close sharing of electrons and produces strong covalent bonding.

The researchers said they used a mouse model to generate the antibodies.

"The complexity of HIV has for long thwarted development of an effective HIV vaccine," said Paul. "Our findings open a new path toward an effective preventative and therapeutic vaccine. The new antigen is a prototype vaccine. This prototype successfully eliminates nature's restrictions on the production of broadly-neutralizing antibodies to HIV by the immune system."

The study is to be reported in the November edition of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.