Lessons learned from the H1N1 pandemic

By Scott LaFee, Union-Tribune Staff Writer

Monday, May 3, 2010  

 In early April of last year, a Mexican government worker named Adela María Gutiérrez fell ill. Wracked by fever, aches and lethargy, Gutiérrez thought she was suffering from a very bad cold and acted accordingly, treating herself with aspirin, moist towels and bed rest. A local clinic gave her antibiotics. Nothing worked.

Finally, after a week, Gutiérrez sought help at the General Hospital in the city of Oaxaca. She felt listless and struggled to breathe. Her limbs were blue from a lack of oxygen. A lab test revealed a viral infection, but it was a flu bug doctors had not seen before. They began treatment. Nothing worked. Gutiérrez died on April 13, 2009. She was 39, the first known fatality caused by a new strain of influenza called H1N1.

On the same day Gutiérrez died, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention learned of a similar case involving a 10-year-old boy in San Diego County, also infected with an unidentified respiratory illness. A second case in Imperial County appeared four days later. These were the first known U.S. cases of H1N1.

The boy and girl recovered. More alarming to health authorities was how fast the virus was spreading. Within a week, there would be confirmed H1N1 cases scattered across the United States, Europe and Asia. These would multiply like, well, a virus. On June 11 — just 58 days after Gutiérrez’s death — the World Health Organization declared that H1N1 had reached “pandemic” status. The virus had gone global.

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Is region’s avian diversity at risk?

By Scott LaFee, Union-Tribune Staff Writer

Monday, April 26, 2010 

Of course, winning the title of “birdiest” involves a bit of luck and a lot of field observers, but this region has long enjoyed remarkable and indisputable avian diversity. More than 500 bird species have been sighted and recorded here: natives, migrants and exotics. It’s said no county in the continental United States is home — or at least stopping place — to more kinds of birds.

But that is changing — and mostly for the worse.

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Debris over Europe threatens jet engines

By Thomas Kupper and Scott LaFee, Union-Tribune staff writers 

Friday, April 16, 2010 

A tremendous cloud of volcanic ash drifted from Iceland across Northern Europe on Thursday and brought air travel across much of the continent to a halt.

Visitors were stuck, and Americans planning on trans-Atlantic travel in the next few days scrambled to rework their itineraries or cancel the trips.

At San Diego’s Balboa Travel, marketing director Tina Gilmore said “several hundred” clients were affected by the eruption of a volcano beneath Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull glacier.

More than a hundred of them are already in Europe, with many scrambling to line up hotel rooms for the unexpected extension of their visits.

“We’re working with them to help them out,” Gilmore said. “But a lot of people can’t get out.”

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By Scott LaFee, Union-Tribune Staff Writer

Friday, April 9, 2010 

Nancy Huang and her son, James, were driving on state Route 56 toward their Carmel Valley home on March 31 when they noticed some striking cloud patterns set aglow by the setting sun. They snapped a few photos.

“I told James they looked like earthquake clouds,” said Huang, who remembered reports of such clouds appearing just before a major temblor in Sichuan, China, in 2008. “We talked about being prepared for a quake. We made a bet about what might happen next.”

Virtually everybody in San Diego County, if not Southern California, knows what happened next.

Four days after the Huangs’ cloud sighting, a series of quakes struck south of Mexicali, about 110 miles east of San Diego. The largest measured 7.2 in magnitude.

Hundreds of aftershocks followed and continue to occur. Seven have reached magnitude 5 or greater, including a 5.3 quake yesterday at 9:44 a.m.

So, did Huang and her son see earthquake clouds?

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By Scott LaFee, Union-Tribune Staff Writer 

Friday, April 9, 2010  

 Solid cancer tumors can resist a doctor’s most powerful weapons, hunkering down to prevent drugs from penetrating far into their masses of diseased tissue. The physician can up the dosage, hoping for better results but also risking nastier side effects.

The battle’s dynamics may change soon.

In a study published yesterday in the journal Science, cancer scientists at the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute in La Jolla say they have developed a new method of attack, one that essentially induces tumors to pull medications deep within them. The technique, tested in lab mice, produced significantly better therapeutic results with smaller drug doses and fewer side effects.

“This may be a very important innovation,” said David A. Cheresh, a professor of pathology at the Moores Cancer Center, which is part of the University of California San Diego.

“We have plenty of drugs that work. The problem has always been getting the drugs to the right location,” said Cheresh, who is not involved in the project.

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When it comes to regenerative research, UCSD neuroscientist no dummy

By Scott LaFee, Union-Tribune Staff Writer

Lawrence Goldstein may not be the face of stem cell research, but the professor of cellular and molecular medicine at the University of California San Diego is certainly among its most vocal and staunchest advocates — and a leading researcher in the field.

He helped write Proposition 71, the unprecedented 2004 proposal to create a $3 billion funding organization in California to support stem cell research. The proposition passed with almost 60 percent of the vote. Goldstein’s lab, meanwhile, is using stem cell technologies to investigate a diverse range of human diseases, from cancer to Alzheimer’s.

This month, Goldstein and co-author Meg Schneider, a writer, published “Stem Cells for Dummies.”

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Keeping tabs on biological clocks: UCSD center targets circadian rhythms

By Scott LaFee, Union-Tribune Staff Writer

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

On Sunday, when daylight-saving time takes effect, people will spring forward to turn their alarm clocks ahead one hour. Adjustments to their biological clocks might take a bit longer.

That single hour of lost sleep and the groggy grumpiness that inevitably seems to follow show just how much humans are influenced by cycles of time. These circadian rhythms can be as obvious as night and day or as mysterious as the internal oscillations of a cell.

“The biological clock in humans plays a central role in whether we gain or lose weight, when we fall asleep and wake up, how likely we are to have accidents or how we respond to disease,” said Susan Golden, a biology professor at the University of California San Diego.

Scientists have discovered that biological clocks of all kinds govern the well-being and behavior of remarkably diverse forms of life, from bacteria and plants to mice and men. These rhythms are so ubiquitous and important that UCSD is establishing a new Center for Chronobiology, launching it today with an on-campus symposium that brings together experts from around the nation for two days of talks.

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Temblor in Chile gives California insight

By Scott LaFee, Union-Tribune Staff Writer

Thursday, March 4, 2010

When an earthquake is powerful enough to shift Earth’s axis, even the toughest building codes in the world won’t stand tall.

The Saturday temblor in Chile registered a magnitude of 8.8. It was the world’s fifth-largest quake since 1900, strong enough to tweak the planet’s axis more than 3 inches and speed its spin ever so slightly.

Chile’s stringent building codes appear to have limited the quake’s worst effects to mostly older, seismically susceptible structures. They also may have provided a peek into how California might fare in a massive temblor.

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Facts are often ditched for sake of entertainment

By Scott LaFee, Union-Tribune Staff Writer

Saturday, February 20, 2010

 More than 1,400 science-fiction movies have been made since 1902, “and almost all of them began with a nugget of real science,” said physics professor Sidney Perkowitz. To him, that’s the good news.

The bad news, he said, is what generally happens to the science: It gets irradiated, struck by asteroids, captured by aliens, stomped by dinosaurs, attacked by giant insects and generally reduced to an unintelligible, unrecognizable blob.

Perkowitz, author of “Hollywood Science,” hopes this will change.  He’s not alone.

In 2008, the National Academy of Sciences launched the Science & Entertainment Exchange to connect filmmakers and TV producers with real-world researchers who might help them create plausible, if not precise, cinematic science.

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Despite battles won, the war against malaria rages on — with many casualties

By Scott LaFee, Union-Tribune Staff Writer

Monday, February 22, 2010

Over the years, medical science has claimed victory, however incomplete, over some of the nastiest, deadliest, infectious diseases to afflict mankind. Bubonic plague, for example, once wiped out an estimated quarter of the Earth’s population in a single year — 1400. Treated promptly with modern antibiotics, plague patients now usually recover completely. Smallpox annually killed tens of millions of people until global vaccination programs took effect in the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1979, the viral disease was declared officially eradicated.

But other infectious scourges endure. They persist and resist. And none, it could be argued, is more problematic than malaria, a parasitical disease that continues to kill more than 1 million people each year — primarily children and pregnant women — while infecting another 300 million to 500 million. The World Health Organization estimates a child dies of the disease every 30 seconds.

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