The following are earlier versions of the news panel that appears on the website Main Page.
2014
June
Maternal Mortality
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WHO - An estimated 289,000 women died in 2013 due to complications in pregnancy and childbirth, down from 523,000 in 1990.
- more than 1 in 4 maternal deaths are caused by pre-existing medical conditions such as diabetes, HIV, malaria and obesity, whose health impacts can all be aggravated by pregnancy.
- A related WHO study of causes of more than 60 000 maternal deaths in 115 countries caused 28% of the deaths.
- similar to the proportion of deaths during pregnancy and childbirth from severe bleeding.
Statistics - Maternal Mortality | WHO Report Page
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May
The World Health Organization says polio has re-emerged as a public health emergency.
- 1988 - virus was endemic in 125 countries, and 350,000 cases were recorded worldwide.
- 2014 - virus is considered endemic in only three countries: Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan (2013 only 417 cases detected). Currently affects 10 countries worldwide.
(More? Polio Virus | WHO - Polio)
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March
- "In high-risk pregnant women, noninvasive prenatal testing with the use of massively parallel sequencing of maternal plasma cell-free DNA (cfDNA testing) accurately detects fetal autosomal aneuploidy. Its performance in low-risk women is unclear. ...In a general obstetrical population, prenatal testing with the use of cfDNA had significantly lower false positive rates and higher positive predictive values for detection of trisomies 21 and 18 than standard screening. (Funded by Illumina; ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT01663350.)."
(More? Trisomy 21 | Trisomy 18 | Prenatal Diagnosis)
Reference: <pubmed>24571752</pubmed>| N Engl J Med.
Older News Articles
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January
News - Stimulus-triggered fate conversion of somatic cells into pluripotency
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- "Here we report a unique cellular reprogramming phenomenon, called stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP), which requires neither nuclear transfer nor the introduction of transcription factors. In STAP, strong external stimuli such as a transient low-pH stressor reprogrammed mammalian somatic cells, resulting in the generation of pluripotent cells." (More? Nature paper | Induced Stem Cells | Stem Cells)
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Is STAP Real?
- RIKEN Panel Finds Misconduct in Reprogrammed Stem Cell Papers Science April 2014
- Japanese research institute has opened an investigation into this groundbreaking stem cell study after concerns were raised about its credibility. The RIKEN investigation follows allegations on blog sites about the use of duplicated images in Obokata’s papers, and numerous failed attempts to replicate her results. Nature
2013
2012 Nobel Prize for Stem Cells
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Stem Cell Signaling
Nobel Prize | Stem Cells
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2012 was awarded jointly to Sir John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka "for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent"
- Yamanaka Factors Are a set of 4 transcription factors when introduced into cells induces stem cell formation. PMID 16904174 | PMID 18035408 | PMID 20535199
- John Gurdon used nuclear transplantation and cloning to show that the nucleus of a differentiated somatic cell retains the totipotency necessary to form a whole organism. 2003 Current Biology Interview PMID 14521852 2009 Interview - "The birth of cloning" PMID 19132124
(More? Yamanaka Factors | Induced Stem Cells | Stem Cells)
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