Category: Health and Medicine

Urine is a problem. Huge volumes are flushed, with fresh water, into the world’s sewage systems and then enormous volumes of yet more water are used to treat the waste along with solids. However, writing in a forthcoming issue of the Inderscience publication, International Journal of Biotechnology (2008, 10, 45-54), fellow journalists can email me if they want an advance copy of the paper) researchers in China and Russia describe how microbes could be used to convert liquid urine into a phosphorus and nitrogen rich biomass for use as feed, fertilizer and fuel.

Bioengineer Hong Liu of Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics and colleagues Chenliang Yang, Ming Li, and Chengying Yu are working with Gurevich Yu, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Siberian Branch, in Krasnoyarsk, to develop a more environmentally benign and potentially useful method for handling urine.

The researchers point out that the direct discharge of urine into lakes and rivers causes eutrophication because of the high levels of phosphorus and nitrogen. Treating human urine to make it safe to discharge into water is difficult and produces large amounts of waste by-product because urine is a complex mixture of compounds.

The researchers have now turned to the blue-green alga, Spirulina platensis, well-known, but controversial, as a health food supplement with claims of beneficial effects on cholesterol levels and blood pressure. Advocates also point to clinical evidence of benefits in treating malnourishment and anaemia in children with and without HIV, in protecting the heart from the toxic effects of the anticancer drug doxorubicin in chemotherapy, and even in preventing hay fever.

Spirulina platensis, now classified as Arthrospira (Spirulina) platensis (Nordstedt) Gomont does indeed contain several vitamins and minerals in large quantities, has a high protein content, and contains just 5-6% of good quality fat. Previous researchers have shown that this alga can grow on nitrogen-derived from urea (the nitrogen-containing component of urine) to release oxygen and produce solid biomass as it does so.

Liu and colleagues have now optimized the alkalinity of the fermentation mixture of Spirulina platensis to pH 9.5 as well as determined the best urine dilution ratio for most rapid growth. They warmed the brew to between 28 and 30 Celsius and bathed it in red and green light from an array of light-emitting diodes (LEDs). This stimulated metabolic activity. They were able to convert 99.99% of urine samples at the optimum dilution into solid biomass using Spirulina.

“Our future focus will be to make Spirulina platensis consume the nutrient component more quickly and to obtain more biomass,” the researchers say. They add that, “Spirulina platensis can be used as fertilizer, bait, and even a food and health product, is of great economic value.”

There could be a large market for urine-made Spirulina as an agricultural fertilizer or fish bait but perhaps this particular production method will not suit health food advocates. In fact, I’d go so far as to say they really are taking the P.

Yang, C., Li, M., Yu, C., Yu, G., & Liu, H. (2008). Consumption of nitrogen and phosphorus in human urine by Spirulina platensis International Journal of Biotechnology, 10 (1) DOI: 10.1504/IJBT.2008.017987

The British media had a feeding frenzy over artificial food colourings again last week, following pronouncements from the UK’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) urging manufacturers to voluntarily remove six additives from their products. The additives in question were linked in a Southampton University study funded by the FSA and published in The Lancet that linked them to hyperactivity in children.

Ingredients with bright names, such as Sunset yellow (E110), Quinoline yellow (E104), Carmoisine (E122), Allura red (E129), Tartrazine (E102), and Ponceau 4R (E124), are compounds that contain a doubly bonded N=N group sandwiched between two aromatic rings. The shuffling of electrons across the group allows them to absorb specific wavelengths of light and reflect others (depending on the chemistry of those rings) and so they have strong colouration. The FSA points out that these products do not exist in nature and give colour only artificially to a range of foods including tinned mushy peas, tinned strawberries, and fruit juice cordials (orange squash, for instance). Not being natural is not, of course, reason to ban an additive. The bright colouring, cochineal, for example, is entirely natural, but is also an apparent carcinogen.

It is true that the original tests that allowed these compounds to have their “E” safety rating were carried out two decades ago, but the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) announced that the conclusions of The Lancet study were not strong enough nor adequately definitive to warrant a change to the safety labelling.

No parent wants to feed their child, non-nutritious products that could harm their health. But, if that’s the case why are the burger bars and other fast-food joints stuffed full every weekend and why are ready-meals and TV dinners still so enormously popular? More to the point, if parents are really so concerned about the food their children eat, why do we still see supermarket shelves stacked with tins and packets full to the brim with brightly coloured food? It is not as if this latest scare is anything new. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I remember food colourings being talked about repeatedly, tantrums and tartrazine were linked way back when, not just in this one recent paper. We could so easily live without a blush of tinned strawberries and mushy peas that are a whiter shade of pale, surely?

Regardless, of whether these compounds really do cause behavioural problems in children, or whether such problems are due more to social deprivation, hard-pushed single parent families, and poverty is another matter. If as many column inches were set aside for promoting fresh air, exercise, and campaigning for more affordable seasonal fruit and vegetables as there are for every food scare that comes along, we’d all be a lot healthier and the market for artificial foods would simply dry up. Now, where’s whipped cream for my tinned strawberries?

I usually don’t do online, or any other kind, of survey. But, an ad for the Nutriprofile personal nutritional profiling site in the weekend papers caught my eye. It was the accreditation by various academic bodies that caught my eye. Among them, the Universities of Nottingham, Reading, the Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition – London Metropolitan University, and Healthspan a dietary supplements company.

Admittedly, the presence of the commercial entry in the list, raised my suspicions a little, but we’ve all got to earn a living, so I thought I’d give it a go regardless. It was all fairly straightforward asking about my diet and lifestyle, weight and height, the usual things one would expect from a nutritional survey. The results were emailed to me as a link within about 15 hours. The promise was of a “24-page, scientifically validated, report that tells you how to meet your body’s nutritional needs totally and exactly.” I think they mean completely and precisely but let’s not quibble. Apparently, “The value to your future health is immeasurable.” Well, if it’s a measurable how can they measure it…oh yes, I wasn’t going to quibble.

The report, had it been in printed form, would no doubt have been nice and glossy, with lists and charts in red, amber, and green alerting me to various key areas of my diet and health that need fixing. However, various aspects of the nutritional analysis stood out as rather inconsistent right from the start. For instance, those green areas are meant to represent “adequate”. To many people that word has rather negative connotations implying either just enough or barely enough. Now, anyone taking the report seriously would see the green but read “adequate” and either be confused or feel that they had failed the test somehow and need to fix things. Green I would suggest would mean just fine, not merely adequate. There would be no need to get any more of this and no need to have any less of that.

Then there is the issue of the my fruit and veg intake. Well, I do like my veggies, but I am a meat eater too. I do like fruit, but don’t always get around to peeling the requisite number of citrus items or munching through quite enough apples etc to bring me up to my perfect 5 or more. That said, if we have Brussels sprouts for dinner, brocolli, asparagus or indeed almost any other veg, I generally have bigger portions of those. But, given that I got the green tab for every other aspect of my nutrition (with a couple of exceptions, more on that later), which means enough vitamins and minerals, I cannot quite understand why it matters if I don’t always have specifically five fruit and veg portions. More to the point, if I’ve somehow got adequate intake of vitamins and minerals but I’m not eating enough fruit and veg where are the majority coming from in the first place? One of the major issues with such a survey is that they failed to ask how big are my portions? Surely a big stack of fresh garden peas or runner beans, twice as big as someone else’s meagre portion of cauliflower counts for more not less.

Next up are the omega acids. It’s a trendy buzzword with lots of research grants hinging on it. The trouble is, there is only so much oil fish you can eat in a week unless you’re a real big fish fan and don’t mind the mess and household stench of cooking it more often. Not to mention the bioaccumulated pollutants, such as mercury, which they say are a problem with many oily fish and some of the predatory fish. So, I fall down on that score too. (Maybe I am doomed, after all). Incidentally, why is it we are not usually keen to eat land-based predators but are fine with piscine predators such as shark, swordfish etc? Is it a parasite problem perhaps?

Next, I was flashed amber for several mineral values, which raised my hackles too. Apparently, I have a risk of deficiency for copper (I get 1.14 milligrams, but apparently need 1 .2 mg). Hmmmm. I get 95% of an estimated recommended daily amount and they say I’m at risk of deficiency. How can they tell? Maybe I eat something only rarely that covers the deficit but that wasn’t mentioned in the initial survey.

Then there’s selenium. There is actually no definitive allowance for selenium. It is next to impossible to determine a person’s load of this element let alone figure out whether they have enough or not. We don’t yet know what “enough” is when it comes to selenium. Nevertheless the profile tells me I am at a deficiency risk because I only get 62 micrograms whereas I need 72 micrograms. Again, it’s marginal wouldn’t you say?

Other items on the list are shown as green for adequate, yet reading the figures, I would say rather than being adequate I am actually overdosing on them with my current diet. For instance, I’m taking in more than 1.5 g of phosphorus but their chart tells me I only need half a gram.

Similar, with the dreaded sodium, I’m ingesting 2624 mg, according to my inputs. This figure, incidentally, is far too precise a value for an estimate being given with four significant figures. Regardless, I should only have a maximum of 2400mg (two sig figs). So, I’m a pinch above the recommendation, but they never asked me about my blood pressure and that could be a major factor in whether I’m seriously overdosing on sodium or okay.

Finally, I don’t get enough fibre, what my grandmother used to call roughage, apparently. At a reported 13.4 g (I really don’t know where they get those three significant figures from) as opposed to a recommended 18g. I actually eat a huge bowl of porridge oats most working days, have sandwiches made with wholemeal bread at lunchtime, and generally leave the skins on potatoes, eat brown rice etc. But, more to the point, they didn’t ask me what size are my portions. They also have no idea how precisely I estimated my own intake of any given food. So, while such surveys might be fun and quick to do and can provide useful indicators of problem areas in your diet if you are seriously deficient, I think the detailed results should be taken with the proverbial pinch of salt. Or maybe not, if you’ve got high blood pressure.

I’ve posted my personal results as a PDF on the web, if anyone is interested in comparing their results to mine, I’ll email the link, just let me know.

In the good-old days there was no choice, if you were posh you drank wine, if you were not you drank beer. Same goes for the Beatles-Stones debate. The Beatles were the nice clean-living, fun loving beat combo, whereas the Rolling Stones were the scare-your-mom hairies. But, making the choice between beer vs wine, Beatles vs Stones led to a societal bifurcation, it split us down in the middle, in other words.

What are the two tribes of today? Burberry vs Barbour? Twitcher vs Birder? Bling vs Blong? Do those sociopolitical barriers between groups still exist? Here’s a short list of the key life choices you must make to help you decide on which side of the fence you sit, in whose camp you reside, and whether you’re a “Lager Lout” or a “Winebar Winker”. Check through this highly scientific list and then cast your vote in the most important blog poll ever!

Okay, now it’s time to vote on the single most important deciding factor in our sociopoliticoeconomico experiment. Forget Star Wars v Doctor Who. Forget jogging or yoga. Forget even the pr0n-erotica debate. On which side of the fence do you sit? When it comes to Beer or Wine?

Getting the balance right between work and life is difficult, if not impossible, for many people. There are so many pressures on us pushing and pulling from countless directions. Multitasking has become the norm, but the act of juggling career, family, and social life and keeping all aspects circling through the air, never dropping anything, remains an unattainable goal. Perhaps it always was.

Maybe the few who succeed are happy 24/7, get plenty of sleep, have quality time with family and friends, and enjoy and are satisfied fully by their work and then there are the rest of us back here on planet earth with bills to pay, mouths to feed, and things to see and do.

Caroline Gatrell of the Management Learning and Leadership department and Cary Cooper in the Management School at Lancaster University, UK, point out in a recent research paper how work-life balance policies are important in controlling employee stress levels. They discuss the details of a study on work-life balance in the current issue of European Journal of International Management (2008, 2(1), 71-86).

They have investigated just how gender and body affect the way companies handle these policies. Their research shows that, despite advances in equality rules and regulations, there is a serious gap between the social expectations of professionally employed mothers and fathers. Men, they say are generally discouraged from working flexibly, while mothers who work long hours are repeatedly criticised.

Gatrell and Cooper argue that the pressure to organise work-life balance, according to embodied and gendered social norms, is a cause of stress to both fathers and mothers, this is no truer than among those employed at a managerial level. They concede that there is no standard family, never was, so that the problems of work-life balance may differ, depending on the social situation of the group under consideration.

They point out that the stresses and pressures may be very different for lone parents, same-sex relationships, and for workers with no children. Regardless, the lives of married and co-habiting men and women with children remain the focus of social policies on work-life balance, at least in those countries within the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), which includes the Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, UK, US, etc.

They ask, “Why does work-life balance matter to policy makers, and why might it matter to employers?” and explain how the concept of ‘work-life balance’ was originally developed as a result of government policies ‘aimed specifically at addressing the pressures attendant in combining work with family life’, particularly where both parents are in work. These work-life balance policies are usually associated with giving employees opportunities to work flexibly and were initially aimed at working mothers.

Flexibility might be interpreted in different ways by different people, bosses, or employees. “These could include the rearrangement of working times to suit individual needs, job-shares, or the undertaking at home of tasks which would previously have been associated with day-time, bodily presence, in the office,” the researchers explain.

However, “In practice, most employers interpret ‘flexibility’ in terms of giving some employees the opportunity to reduce working hours by working part time or fractionally.” This has ultimately led to a very narrow range of opportunities. “Perhaps employers’ narrow interpretation of flexibility is due, in part, to the possibility that the whole idea of work-life balance poses a problem for employers,” the researchers suggest. It is most likely that in a market-driven economy, employers will want to maximize profits and reduce costs. Inevitably, this would mean re-shaping ‘worker friendly’ polices to their advantage, which could quite possibly be at the expense of those staff for whom the policies were originally intended to help.

“The experiences of employed fathers and mothers is at odds with research which shows that men and women in professional and managerial roles seek to spend more time with families, especially when children are young, and find it stressful if this is hard to achieve. The link between long-hours-cultures, stress and unhealthy behaviour such as poor diet and increased alcohol consumption has been proven conclusively,” argue Gatrell and Cooper. Like I say, who do you work for?

Gatrell, C., & Cooper, C. (2008). Work-life balance: working for whom? European J. of International Management, 2 (1) DOI: 10.1504/EJIM.2008.016929

We probably all know at least one person who swears by their magnetic charm bracelet for preventing travel sickness, reducing arthritic pain or even helping them through situations that induce an attack of social anxiety disorder. These bracelets and other devices (some are in the form of headbands, others pendants, blankets, knee braces, shoe inserts, there’s even one you wear in your pants to improve your sex life) use magnets of a similar strength to those that make shopping lists stick to your refrigerator or let your kids spell out rude words without you realising…

…in other words, they’re not very strong and so probably have absolutely no physiological effect whatsoever. So, this $5billion industry founded in ancient Greek mythology is almost on a par with homeopathy for having no real scientific basis. Or is it?

Serious research, being carried out in a serious university laboratory, with serious financial backing recently hit the headlines with proclamations that a short application of a magnetic field to an inflamed joint could somehow improve blood flow and reduce swelling. Thomas Skalak, chairman of biomedical engineering at the University of Virginia and his colleagues lead the field in the area of microcirculation research, the study of blood flow through the body’s tiniest blood vessels. This status presumably helped them secure $875,000 of US taxpayers’ money from the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Initially, they set out to examine a claim made by the companies that sell “therapeutic” magnets: that these devices somehow increase blood flow. Skalak’s team used magnets of 70 milliTesla (mT) field strength, which is about ten times stronger than a common refrigerator magnet, but still very weak, the magnetic field of an MRI machine, for instance, is up to about 3000 milliTesla (3 T in other words). The researchers measured blood vessel diameter before and after placing the magnets up against lab rats.

They found that the magnets seemingly had a significant effect on blood vessels. Those that had been dilated became narrower and those that were previously constricted widened. Apparently, this implies that the magnetic field could induce vessel relaxation in tissues with constrained blood supply, ultimately increasing blood flow; how the magnet knows which way to stimulate the effect is not known. In a more recent study, the team treated the hind paws of anaesthetized rats with inflammatory agents to simulate tissue injury. Therapeutic magnets were then applied to the swollen paws immediately. The researchers say they say significant reduction in swelling (oedema), although there was no effect if there was any delay between injury and application.

According to Skalak, “The FDA regulates specific claims of medical efficacy, but in general static magnetic fields are viewed as safe.” So, could magnets be used to improve blood flow following muscle injury, say, as many of the headlines surrounding this press release claimed?

Well, what I’d first like to know, is did the researchers use a double-blind control? Did they, for instance, apply non-magnetic objects of equal size, shape and weight and at the same temperature to a second set of inflamed rat hind paws to examine whether those had any effect on blood vessel dilation? Did they have a set of inflamed rats that were not treated at all? How did those groups respond? The research paper on which the press release is based was published online in November 2007 in the American Journal of Physiology and Heart Circulatory Physiology.

Given that one of the major tenets of sports injury treatment is ice and compression could it be that the very act of pressing an object against the inflamed joint simply acted as a compressive heatsink, reducing local temperature of the inflamed region and at the same time temporarily reducing blood flow during the compression?

It’s just a thought, but couldn’t any metallic object of a reasonable size, 10-20 mm would be adequate for a rat paw, act as a cold compress, asks my good friend Stephan Logan. Logan supplies scientific educational equipment, including neodymium rare earth magnets, and points out that these have a field strength of several thousand milliTesla (1.3 T is typical for the standard neo magnet N42) and so has a keen interest in scientific claims made about much weaker magnets, such as those used in the experiments, knowing that a nasty pinch when flesh is trapped between two neo magnets is one of the well-known physiological effects but has nothing to do with mystical field effects

The Virginia press release, and consequently much of the media, claim that since muscle bruising and joint sprains are the most common injuries worldwide, Skalak’s discovery has “significant implications”. He rightly points out that, “If an injury doesn’t swell, it will heal faster – and the person will experience less pain and better mobility.” The extrapolation of the magnetic research to the notion that “magnets could be used in much the same way ice packs and compression are now used for everyday sprains, bumps, and bruises, but with more beneficial results, is not necessarily supported.

Magnets could be used, but where is the evidence that they reduce swelling any more than a conventional cold compress? Indeed, does injecting a rat’s foot with an inflammatory chemical simulate adequately a sprain or strain? The release says, “The ready availability and low cost of this treatment could produce huge gains in worker productivity and quality of life.” That’s a big extrapolation from a small laboratory study to the whole of sports injury medicine. Anyway, if commercialised are these therapeutic magnet ever likely to be as cheap and readily available as a bag of frozen peas? I doubt it.

Just before the Christmas break, right as my annual winter festival cold kicked in and I was up to my neck in end of year deadlines, I posted a link to a press release in my Geeky Bits science extra column. That page is a repository of the less worthy, but hopefully interesting stuff I come across. Occasionally, I see an intriguing headline, give it a click, give the text a quick read through, add the item to the Bits, and thinking nothing more of it, just as one might with a del.icio.us or StumbleUpon post.

However, one regular Sciencebase reader, Churchill Fellow Grace Filby, was somewhat taken aback by my highlighting a timely press release from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (University of London) – and described it as “a load of misguided nonsense”. Unfortunately, there is no online feedback or comments form on that LSHTM press release through which we could open a public debate on its content.

The press release was entitled – “If you don’t want to fall ill this Christmas, then share a festive kiss but don’t shake hands” – not the snappiest of titles but almost certainly one attempting to catch the wave of festive spirit seeing as it was released on December 19. However, both the title and the subheading of the press release (“The fight against all types of infections, from colds and flu to stomach bugs and MRSA, begins at home, with good hand hygiene, says first review of hand hygiene in the community.”) perhaps places too much emphasis on hand hygiene as opposed to the problem of airborne pathogens, believes Filby.

First off, Filby says that the press release “deflects the public’s attention away from a major source of germs which is the air we breathe…handwashing is only a part of it.” She adds that, “It is the germs arriving in the air that need disinfecting or freshening before the germs land on surfaces that could be touched by hands and passed to other people.” Even the British government appears to be acknowledging this to some degree, according to The Times on Christmas Eve in a bulleted item on how air disinfection units can kill MRSA, and C difficile.

The press release states: “But a report just published warns that we may be far more at risk of passing on an infection by shaking someone’s hand than in sharing a kiss.” As far as we can see, the full text of the original 38-page report cited in the release the word kiss or kissing occurs only once. It’s almost as if the press office hoped to catch media attention with the mistletoe and seasonal kissing theme regardless of the science reported in the report itself. Moreover, there is nothing much about handshakes or shaking hands either.

There are several other dubious details about handwashing: “but we believe that this targeted approach to home hygiene…” Is “believe” valid in a heavyweight scientific document of this sort, asks Filby.

The press release concludes that, “Handwashing with soap is probably the single most important thing you can do to protect yourselves and your loved ones from infection this Christmas.” Probably – that’s good, but we also need to deal with airborne germs. Whatever would Florence Nightingale have said? There are plenty of other risk factors out there and ways to reduce the chances of succumbing to winter bugs, such as walks in the fresh air, healthy eating, and more contentiously vitamin C or zinc supplements, although the jury is still out on the benefits of those.

Regardless, the main problem is that the press release ignores the primary source of respiratory infection which occurs from carrier to the next victim before pathogens ever fall onto a surface. In the case of many winter bugs, they spread quickly through sneezes or coughs when people don’t cover their noses and mouths.

Of course, Filby and I could put on our cynical hats at this point and come up with some kind of plausible explanation as to why hand hygiene as opposed to air hygiene is considered important. “Perhaps it is worth noting that funding for research on air hygiene wasn’t forthcoming whereas for hand hygiene there are plenty of interested parties – soap manufacturers, handwash products and water companies,” says Filby.

Hand hygiene is obviously part of the story and in the pre-Xmas rush for headlines one could forgive the LSHTM for highlighting it, but a broader perspective on all-round hygiene education and the promotion of other aspects of hygiene, as opposed to simple hand-wringing in the washroom, would have made more sense.