LONDON (Reuters) – Scientists have for the first time succeeded in taking skin cells from patients with heart failure and transforming them into healthy, beating heart tissue that could one day be used to treat the condition.

The researchers, based in Haifa, Israel, said there were still many years of testing and refining ahead. But the results meant they might eventually be able to reprogram patients’ cells to repair their own damaged hearts.

“We have shown that it’s possible to take skin cells from an elderly patient with advanced heart failure and end up with his own beating cells in a laboratory dish that are healthy and young – the equivalent to the stage of his heart cells when he was just born,” said Lior Gepstein from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, who led the work.

The researchers, whose study was published in the European Heart Journal on Wednesday, said clinical trials of the technique could begin within 10 years.

Heart failure is a debilitating condition in which the heart is unable to pump enough blood around the body. It has become more prevalent in recent decades as advances medical science mean many more people survive heart attacks.

At the moment, people with severe heart failure have to rely on mechanical devices or hope for a transplant.

Researchers have been studying stem cells from various sources for more than a decade, hoping to capitalize on their ability to transform into a wide variety of other kinds of cell to treat a range of health conditions.

LONDON, May 22 (Reuters) – The United States sees drug abuse as a public health problem as much as a crime issue and is seeking to learn from countries in Europe and elsewhere about how to treat addiction as a disease, Barack Obama’s drugs policy chief said on Tuesday.

Gil Kerlikowske, the U.S. president’s director of national drug control policy, said the United States is taking a more balanced approach to substance abusers rather than fighting a “war on drugs” centred mainly on law enforcement.

Speaking to reporters during a visit to London, Kerlikowske, a former police chief, said major advances in medical science had shown that drug abuse disorders are chronic diseases of the brain that can be effectively prevented and treated.

He said the international community should recognise this and work together on programmes to prevent and treat abusers, help addicts recover, and explore reforms to criminal justice systems to stop the revolving door of drug use, criminal behaviour, jail, release, and re-arrest.

“It’s very clear we can’t arrest our way out of this problem,” he said. “The availability of quality treatment and the engagement of the public health sector and primary care physicians in drug issues is very critical.”

While officials say overall illicit drug use in the United States has dropped substantially over the past 30 years, there are upwards of 20 million Americans who could benefit from treatment and recovery programmes, Kerlikowske said. Currently, only around 4 million of these get the kind of help they need.

Prescription drug abuse has become a serious concern in the United States in recent years and was the second-biggest factor behind accidental deaths in 2007.

LONDON (Reuters)- When Malaysian cyclist Azizulhasni Awang opted to postpone his Ramadan fast until after the London Games, the decision was all about going for Olympic gold.

Anything that might jeopardize the chance of a medal for the 24-year-old at his second Olympics had to be dealt with sensibly, he says. And going without food and drink between sunrise and sunset every day for four weeks is just too risky.

“We need to train, we need food, fluids, water,” he told Reuters during a training session at a velodrome in Melbourne with team mate Fatehah Mustapa, who will become the first Malaysian woman cyclist to ride at an Olympics.

“We’ve trained really, really hard … to strive for the gold medal, so we’re not going to waste it. This Olympics is really important for me and Fatehah. You think we’re going to sacrifice that?”

The coincidence of Ramadan this year with the London Olympics, which starts on July 27, a week into the month-long Muslim fast, has thrown up a dilemma for the estimated 3,000 Muslim athletes expected to compete.

The Ramadan fast is a time when Muslims are required to abstain from food and drink during daylight hours. Athletes are allowed to defer their fasts until a later date, but many Muslim sportsmen and women from cultures or countries where not fasting is frowned upon may well honor the holy month.

MUSCLE POWER, SPIRITUAL STRENGTH

LONDON, May 22 (Reuters)- When Malaysian cyclist Azizulhasni Awang opted to postpone his Ramadan fast until after the London Games, the decision was all about going for Olympic gold.

Anything that might jeopardise the chance of a medal for the 24-year-old at his second Olympics had to be dealt with sensibly, he says. And going without food and drink between sunrise and sunset every day for four weeks is just too risky.

“We need to train, we need food, fluids, water,” he told Reuters during a training session at a velodrome in Melbourne with team mate Fatehah Mustapa, who will become the first Malaysian woman cyclist to ride at an Olympics.

“We’ve trained really, really hard … to strive for the gold medal, so we’re not going to waste it. This Olympics is really important for me and Fatehah. You think we’re going to sacrifice that?”

The coincidence of Ramadan this year with the London Olympics, which starts on July 27, a week into the month-long Muslim fast, has thrown up a dilemma for the estimated 3,000 Muslim athletes expected to compete.

The Ramadan fast is a time when Muslims are required to abstain from food and drink during daylight hours. Athletes are allowed to defer their fasts until a later date, but many Muslim sportsmen and women from cultures or countries where not fasting is frowned upon may well honour the holy month.

MUSCLE POWER, SPIRITUAL STRENGTH

LONDON (Reuters) – Low-quality and fake anti-malarial drugs flooding into markets in Asia and Africa are driving drug resistance and threatening gains made in the fight against the disease in the past decade, according to a study by global health experts.

The study found around 36 percent of anti-malarial drugs analyzed in southeast Asia were fake, while a third of samples in sub-Saharan Africa failed chemical testing because they contained either too much or not enough active ingredient.

The researchers said the problem might be even bigger.

The emergence of resistance to artemisinin drugs – currently the most effective treatment for malaria – along the Thailand-Cambodia border – has already been documented.

“Despite a dramatic rise in reports of poor-quality anti- malarial drugs over the past decade, the issue is much greater than it seems,” Gaurvika Nayyar, of the Fogarty International Center at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, wrote in a study in the Lancet Infectious Diseases journal.

“Most cases are probably unreported, reported to the wrong agencies, or kept confidential by pharmaceutical companies.”

More than 3 billion people worldwide are at risk of malaria, a mosquito-borne parasitic disease which kills around 650,000 people a year, most of them babies and children in Africa.

LONDON, May 18 (Reuters) – An experimental cancer drug developed by Britain’s GlaxoSmithKline may add vital months to the lives of melanoma patients whose disease has spread to their brains, according to data from an early-stage trial published on Friday.

Results of Phase I trial published in The Lancet medical journal showed substantial shrinking of tumours in patients treated with the drug, dabrafenib, and showed promise against secondary melanoma tumours, or metastases, in the brain.

Dabrafenib blocks the activity of a cancer-causing mutated form of a gene known as BRAF, which is found in about half of melanoma cases.

Results released on Wednesday from a separate trial looking at dabrafenib in combination with another GSK drug, trametinib, were also positive.

Researchers said the results of the dabrafenib-only trial, although early-stage, represented an important step forward in the treatment of this deadly cancer.

Melanoma is diagnosed in nearly 160,000 people worldwide each year. It can spread quickly to internal organs and average survival is six to nine months.

Georgina Long of the Melanoma Institute Australia and Westmead Hospital in Sydney, and Gerald Falchook from the University of Texas in the United States, treated 184 patients with dabrafenib in a Phase I trial — the earliest step of the drug development process in humans.

LONDON, May 17 (Reuters) – Scientists have mapped the complete genetic codes of 21 breast cancers and created a catalogue of the mutations that accumulate in breast cells, raising hopes that the disease may be able to be spotted earlier and treated more effectively in future.

The research, the first of its kind, untangles the genetic history of how cancer evolves, allowing scientists to identify mutational patterns that fuel the growth of breast tumours, and start to work out the processes behind them.

“These findings have implications for our understanding of how breast cancers develop over the decades before diagnosis in adults and might help to find possible targets for improved diagnosis or therapeutic intervention in the future,” said Mike Stratton, who led the research team.

Breast cancer kills more than 450,000 women a year worldwide and is the most common cancer among women, accounting for 16 percent of all cases, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

A study last year by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in the United States found that global breast cancer cases have more than doubled in just three decades, from 641,000 cases in 1980 to 1.6 million cases in 2010 – a pace that far exceeds global population growth.

“This is the first time we’ve been able to delve fully into breast cancer genomes in such a thorough way,” said Peter Campbell, head of cancer genetics and genomics at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, where the studies were led.

The work had given scientists “a full panoramic view of the cancer genome” and helped them identify “mutational patterns rather than individual mutations in specific genes”, he added.

LONDON (Reuters) – Health data released on Wednesday provided the clearest evidence to date of the spread of chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease from developed nations to poorer regions such as Africa, as lifestyles and diets there change.

The United Nations data showed one in three adults worldwide has raised blood pressure – the cause of around half of all deaths from stroke and heart disease – and the condition affects almost half the adult population in some countries in Africa.

In its annual report on global health, the Geneva-based World Health Organisation (WHO) also said one in 10 adults worldwide has diabetes, an illness that costs billions of dollars to treat and puts sufferers at risk of heart disease, kidney failure and blindness.

While the average global prevalence of diabetes is around 10 percent, the report said, up to a third of the population in some Pacific Island countries have the condition.

Chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease and cancer are often thought of as illnesses which primarily affect people in wealthy nations, where high fat diets, alcohol consumption and smoking are major health risks.

But the WHO says almost 80 percent of deaths from such diseases now occur in low- and middle-income countries.

In Africa, rising smoking rates, a shift towards Western- style diets and less exercise mean chronic or so-called non-communicable diseases are rising rapidly and are expected to surpass other diseases as the most common killers by 2020.

LONDON (Reuters) – Malaria-carrying mosquitoes in Africa and India are becoming resistant to insecticides, putting millions of lives at greater risk and threatening eradication efforts, health experts said on Tuesday.

While existing prevention measures such as mosquito nets treated with insecticide and indoor spraying are still effective, experts said tight surveillance and rapid response strategies were needed to prevent more resistance developing.

Despite decades of efforts to beat it with insecticides, bednets and combination drugs, malaria still kills more than 650,000 people a year, most of them babies and young children in sub-Saharan Africa.

Because the disease is spread by Anopheles mosquitoes, insecticides are a vital part of controlling it.

Publishing a plan to help countries tackle the threat, the World Health Organisation’s global malaria programme said resistance had been detected in 64 countries.

“We think we’re ahead of the curve. The tools we have today work extremely well in almost all settings, so we don’t want people throwing their hands up in the air and saying this is a catastrophe,” Robert Newman, the programme’s director, told Reuters.

“But we have identified resistance, it is a problem out there, and we need to take urgent and concerted action to make sure we maintain the effectiveness of the tools.”