Mississippi organ case prompts review
OXFORD, Miss., Dec. 28 (UPI) -- Health officials who coordinate U.S transplant surgeries say they will examine policies on using donors who have certain neurological disorders.
The review was prompted by a case at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in which two kidney transplant patients contracted a brain infection from an organ donor, The New York Times reported Monday. The center disclosed the situation Dec. 18 after the transplant recipients became critically ill.
"This will be discussed by a collaborative group of experts at a national level" to try to make the system safer, Dr. Shirley Schlessinger, a transplant nephrologist at the center, told the Times.
About 1 percent of transplant recipients have contracted a disease from the organs of deceased donors, said the Network for Organ Sharing, which coordinates transplants in the United States. Transplant recipients are especially vulnerable because medication used to prevent organ rejection suppresses their immune systems.
More than 100,000 people are on waiting lists for transplants, and an estimated 9,000 die each year because so few organs become available, the network said.
Soil studies find antibiotic resistance
NEWCASTLE, England, Dec. 28 (UPI) -- Soil studies show antibiotic resistance in nature is growing despite tighter control over antibiotic use in medicine and agriculture, British scientists said.
Bacterial DNA taken from soil samples collected between 1940 and 2008 in the Netherlands revealed a rise in the level of antibiotic resistant genes, said David Graham, a professor at England's Newcastle University.
Scientists fear a resistant gene in a harmless bacteria could be passed to a disease-causing pathogen, Graham said in this month's issue of the journal Environmental Science and Technology.
"The big question," Graham said, "is that with more stringent European regulations and greater emphasis on conservative antibiotic use in agriculture and medicine, why are antibiotic resistant gene levels still rising?"
Graham said he and his team expect to find similar results when they expand their study to include soil samples from other parts of the world.
Melting glacial ice harms food chain
JUNEAU, Alaska, Dec. 28 (UPI) -- Melting glacial ice in the Gulf of Alaska affects the marine food chain from microbes to the fish that feed on them, scientists said.
The organic matter of the gulf's watersheds is "remarkably" biologically active and is likely to decrease as glacial ice melts and the biomass is not replenished, said Rick Edwards, an aquatic ecologist with the Pacific Northwest Station in Juneau, Alaska.
The organic matter supports life to the highest level of the marine food chain, Edwards and his team wrote in a recent issue of the journal Nature.
Some of the organic matter discharged from the watersheds is almost 4,000 years old, yet more than 66 percent of it is rapidly metabolized by marine microbes into living biomass to support the food chain, said Eran Hood, a researcher from the University of Alaska Southeast.
"We don't currently have much information about how runoff from glaciers may be contributing to productivity in downstream marine ecosystems," Hood said. "This is a particularly critical question given the rate at which glaciers along the Gulf of Alaska are thinning and receding."
Old stars steal fuel from neighbors
MADISON, Wis., Dec. 28 (UPI) -- Ancient bright stars known as "blue stragglers" likely increase their mass by stealing fuel from companion stars, astronomers in Wisconsin said.
"These blue, luminous stars should have used up their hydrogen fuel and flamed out long ago. Yet they are still here," said Robert Mathieu, an astronomer with the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Blue stragglers likely gain mass by crashing into nearby stars, a theory once thought far-fetched by astronomers, Mathieu and his university colleague, Aaron Geller, said in a recent issue of the journal Nature.
Many astronomers now believe binary star systems containing blue stragglers brush against one another on collision-course orbits, said Mathieu and Geller, who based their observations by studying an old star cluster called NGC 188, located 6,000 light years from Earth.
NGC 188, located near Polaris, the North Star, has 21 blue stragglers among its several thousand other stars.
"What blue stragglers are showing us is that life in a star cluster is rarely a lonely existence," Mathieu said.
