Healthy Nation

As the elderly reach what’s called the Golden Years of their lives, there are many who are distressed at such times by their inability to move about as they once could. While they’re not necessarily bed ridden or require attentive medical care, they could still seek after agencies that offer services for assisted living.

Assisted living differs from the usual nursing homes as they provide senior adults with more freedom for their choices of activities and it’s one of the many ways that the elderly are given the care to age gracefully. Keeping in mind that it should only assist without having the elderly feel restricted, there are a few pointers to ensure that older ones are given the appropriate service.

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A 3D herpes infection model has been developed – raising hope for development of effective treatments of the viral infection.

Active ingredients and new treatments can be reliably tested with this new model and animal tests could soon be a thing of the past.

“About 90 percent of the world’s population carry it in them all their lives, once infected, and become sick again in stress situations,” Anke Burger-Kentischer of the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology IGB in Stuttgart, said.

The 3D herpes infection model created by Burger-Kentischer together with her team and the cell systems department makes it possible for the first time to integrate the complicated dormant stage of the virus into a model of the skin.

To date the skin models used for drug testing and to detect the virus have been very simple and unable to simulate the dormancy state of the virus.

“We have integrated a neuronal cell line into the certified skin model of the IGB and are able to detect this latency stage for the first time,” Burger-Kentischer said.

Just like in the human nerve cells, the particles of the virus itself cannot be seen; only the presence of its DNA can be proven by means of a PCR (polymerase chain reaction) analysis,” Burger-Kentischer added.

Meat on the grill is as much a part of the Fourth of July as fireworks and American flags. But it is also reputed to increase cancer risk in unsuspecting patriots, thanks in part to chemical compounds formed when meats containing muscle including beef, pork, poultry and fish are cooked at very high temperatures.

The class of chemicals known as heterocyclic amines, or HCAs for short, were first discovered in the 1970s by Japanese scientists, who noted that compounds in the charred parts of cooked fish and meat were capable of damaging cellular and bacterial DNA in test tube experiments.

In studies conducted in the 1980s and 1990s, the compounds more than 10 different HCAs have been identified so far caused tumors in mice, rats and monkeys.

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