Sunbeds ranked alongside cigarettes as cancer risk

Skin cancer cases overall have more than doubled in the last decade, with 70,000 Britons diagnosed each year. Photo: GETTY

Sunbeds have been categorised as "carcinogenic to humans" by the World Health Organistation, putting them on the same level as cigarettes as a major cause of cancer

The move also ranks them alongside alcohol and asbestos.

Previously the use of sunbeds and sunlamps had been classififed as "probably carcinogenic", placing them in the second group of the most dangerous products in terms of cancer risk.

But a meeting of 20 scientists at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, the WHO's leading source for information about the disease, decided to upgrade the risk of sunbeds and the ultraviolet radiation (UV) they emit after reviewing recent studies.

Writing in The Lancet Oncology, Dr Fatiha El Ghissassi and colleagues said: "The use of UV-emitting tanning devices is widespread in many developed countries, especially among young women.

"A comprehensive meta-analysis concluded that the risk of skin melanoma is increased by 75 per cent when use of tanning devices starts before 30 years of age.

"Additionally, several case control studies provide consistent evidence of a positive association between the use of UV-emitting tanning devices and ocular melanoma (skin cancer of the eyelid).

"Therefore, the Working Group raised the classification of the use of UV-emitting tanning devices to Group 1, -'carcinogenic to humans'."

The move follows research earlier this year that found the deadliest form of skin cancer, malignant melanoma, has become the most commonly diagnosed cancer among British women in their 20s.

The Cancer Research UK figures from 2005 - the latest available - show that 338 women aged between 20 and 29 were diagnosed with melanoma, compared with 298 for cervical cancer.

Cases of melanoma have increased by a third since 2003, when there were 220 cases, compared with 270 for cervical cancer.

Skin cancer cases overall have more than doubled in the last decade, with 70,000 Britons diagnosed each year.

Nina Goad, of the British Association of Dermatologists, said: "It is high time that steps were taken to regulate the industry, to prevent children using sunbeds, and to ensure that sunbeds are subject to health warnings like other known carcinogens.

"At the moment, many salons are free to advertise somewhat spurious health 'benefits' of using sunbeds, but offer no advice on health risks. Hopefully, categorising sunbeds as a known carcinogen will prompt the government to introduce compulsory health warnings on tanning beds."

Kathy Banks, chief executive of the Sunbed Association, the industry body, said there is no proven link between the "responsible use of sunbeds and skin cancer" and said most users are aware of the risks of too much UV radiation and plan their sessions accordingly.

S. Africa Stops Funding for AIDS Vaccine

Clinical Trial to Continue with Money from U.S.

Dr. Danielle Crida, left, demonstrates Monday how a new AIDS vaccine is administrated on a trial subject, Wanda Mbele, at the Emavundleni Centre in the Crossroads township on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa. The leading scientist of the first AIDS vaccine created in a developing country says South Africa's government has stopped funding even as the country launches clinical trials. (AP Photo/Schalk van Zuydam)

(AP) South Africa has stopped funding research on an AIDS vaccine, a leading scientist said Monday, even as a major vaccine trial on humans began in the country ravaged by the world's worst AIDS epidemic.

Anna-Lise Williamson, an AIDS researcher at the University of Cape Town, told The Associated Press that the clinical vaccine trial that began Monday would continue with U.S. money. But she said South Africa's Department of Science and Technology had stopped funding her research this year and the utility Eskom's contract for funding ended last year and was not renewed.

Even though South Africa's science minister appeared at a ceremony launching the vaccine trial with Williamson and lauded her research, neither he nor Eskom immediately returned calls seeking comment about funding.

At the ceremony, one of 36 healthy volunteers was injected Monday before officials and journalists in Cape Town's Crossroads shantytown. The event was also attended by American health officials who gave technical help and manufactured the vaccine at the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

"For vaccine development presently, the South African AIDS Vaccine initiative has no money," Williamson said. "If we do not continue working on this, we will never have a vaccine... it's incredibly important that we keep working."

The South African vaccine, developed at the University of Cape Town, targets the specific HIV strain that has ravaged South Africa.

During nearly 10 years of government denial and neglect, South Africa developed a staggering AIDS crisis. Around 5.2 million South Africans were living with HIV last year - the highest number of any country in the world. Young women are hardest hit, with one-third of those aged 20-to-34 infected with the virus.

AIDS vaccine researchers have met so many disappointments some activists are questioning the wisdom of continuing such expensive investments, saying the money might be better spent on prevention and education.

A new report says HIV vaccine research funding worldwide decreased for the first time since 2000, with investments of almost $1.2 billion in 2008, down 10 percent from 2007.

South Africa was also the site of the biggest setback to AIDS vaccine research, when the most promising vaccine ever, produced by Merck & Co. and tested here in 2007, found that people who got the vaccine were more likely to contract HIV than those who did not.

South African scientists working on the latest vaccine had to overcome deep skepticism from their political leaders, who had shocked the world with their unscientific pronouncements about the disease. Williamson said South Africa, at the heart of the epidemic, must press ahead with trials to test the safety of the vaccine.

"We have got the biggest ARV (anti-retroviral) rollout in the world and still hundreds of people are dying every day and getting infected everyday," she said.

Williamson's vaccine also is being tested at a trial of 12 volunteers in Boston that began earlier this year, said Anthony Mbewu, president of South Africa's government-supported Medical Research Council that shepherded the project.

"It is being very well tolerated, no adverse events, so it is going very well," Williamson said Monday.

The trial started in the U.S., partly to allay any criticism that the United States was collaborating in an AIDS vaccine that would use Africans as guinea pigs.

The government decided it was important to develop a vaccine specifically for the HIV subtype C strain that is prevalent in southern Africa "and to ensure that once developed, it would be available at an affordable price," Mbewu said.

Some 250 scientists and technicians worked on the latest vaccine project.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and a leading AIDS researcher, said the South African scientists received more money from his institute's research fund than any others in the world except the U.S. The U.S. had paid to produce the vaccine.

He called it "the most important AIDS research partnership in the world."

But he warned "There are extraordinary challenges ahead," referring to the years of testing needed now that South Africa has reached the clinical trial stage.

At an international AIDS conference in Cape Town, Vice President Kgalema Motlanthe emphasized Sunday night that the clinical trials were being held "under strict ethical rules."

Mbewu said the crisis in South Africa more than justifies the expenditure on AIDS research. AIDS strikes men and women alike in Africa, where the epidemic is fueled by the many people who have sex with several people at the same time.

In the 1990s, South Africa's then-President Thabo Mbeki denied the link between HIV and AIDS, and his health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, mistrusted conventional anti-AIDS drugs and made the country a laughing stock trying to promote beets and lemon as AIDS remedies.

Williamson, a virologist, said the scientists had to fight constant controversy, including international organizations that tried to stop the state utility Eskom from funding the project. Eskom gave "huge amounts" regardless, she said.

"International organizations told Eskom that this was a terrible waste of money, that putting money into South African scientists was like backing the cart horse when they need to be backing the race horse," she said.

Even her research director told her she was wasting her time.

"Most of them just made us more determined to prove them wrong," Williamson said.

Alzheimer's early signs revealed by brain scans, memory tests

Normal levels of glucose metabolism in a PET scan (left), indicated in yellow and red. The levels of glucose metabolism in the brain are decreased in patients with mild cognitive impairment (middle) and with Alzheimer's disease (right). (Cindee Madison and Susan Landau/UC Berkeley)

Brain scans and memory tests may work as an early warning system for Alzheimer's disease, researchers said Tuesday.

At an Alzheimer's Association annual meeting in Vienna, Austria, researchers presented their findings on diagnosing the disease in its earliest stages, among people with mild cognitive impairment — a precursor to the disease that slowly leads to memory impairment, behavioural changes and dementia.

"Not all people with mild cognitive impairment go on to develop Alzheimer's, so it would be extremely useful to be able to identify those who are at greater risk of converting using a clinical test or biological measurement," the lead author of one study, Susan Landau, a post-doctoral fellow at University of California, Berkeley, said in a release.

Landau and her colleagues studied 85 people with mild cognitive impairment. People who did poorly on recall tests and showed less glucose in their brains during PET scans were 15 times more likely to progress to Alzheimer's within two years.

Researchers are trying to determine whether treating people with drugs before severe symptoms appear will be more effective.

"The idea is if there could be biological markers identified that tracked what was going on in the brain, this would give you a better idea of whether a drug was having a biological effect," Neil Buckholtz, who heads the U.S. National Institute on Aging's Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, or ADNI, said in a telephone interview with Reuters.

A biomarker is a substance or characteristic that can be objectively measured and evaluated as an indicator of normal body function, disease or the body's response to therapy. For example, high blood pressure is a biomarker indicating risk of cardiovascular disease.

Landau's team also looked at other measurements that showed promise as biological markers for the disease, such as hippocampus volume, but it was the combination of PET and memory recall that were the most consistent predictors.

Aiming to preserve memory

Another study by Irish researchers of 345 people with mild cognitive impairment found three memory tests plus MRI measurements of brain volume in the left hippocampus, which is linked to memory, also helped predict disease progression.

It's widely believed that changes in the brain in Alzheimer's disease, such as amyloid plaques and tangles, begin many years before symptoms are seen, said Dr. Ronald Petersen, chair or the Alzheimer's Association Medical & Scientific Advisory Council.

"It is critical to identify affected individuals while they are still relatively cognitively healthy so that future therapies can preserve healthy memory and thinking function," Petersen said. "And, in order to develop those new therapies, we need to identify 'at risk' individuals now in order to steer them to clinical trials."

A third study, presented at the meeting by Dr. Allen Roses of Duke University in North Carolina, suggested a gene called TOMM40 predicted the age of Alzheimer's disease within a five- to seven-year window among people over the age of 60.

"It now looks fairly clear that there are two major genes — APOE4 and TOMM40 — and together they account for an estimated 85-90 per cent of the genetic effect," Roses said in a release.

The Duke team, and others, are planning a five-year study of the genes along with drug trials to assess prevention or delay in the onset of Alzheimer's disease.

Alzheimer's is the most common form of dementia and affects one in 20 Canadians over 65 — about 290,000 people.

Former Cambodian king beats cancer for third time

AFP/File – File photo shows former Cambodian King Norodom Sihanouk (right) alongside Queen Norodom Monineath Sihanouk …

PHNOM PENH (AFP) – Cambodia's former king Norodom Sihanouk has been successfully treated for a third bout of cancer, according to a handwritten royal letter posted on his website.
The 86-year-old, who left for Beijing in July last year to receive medical treatment for other illnesses, thanked his "most eminent" and "devoted" Chinese doctors who have been treating him there.
"Indeed, the terrific result of their (incomparable) care is here: my third cancer (B-cell lymphoma) has completely disappeared," Sihanouk said in the letter dated Monday.
The former monarch announced the discovery of the new cancer in late December.
Sihanouk was first diagnosed with B-cell lymphoma, a cancer affecting blood cells crucial to the immune system, in 1993. The cancer began in his prostate and recurred in 2005 in his stomach.
Sihanouk has suffered from a number of other ailments including diabetes and hypertension.
One of Asia's longest-serving monarchs, Sihanouk abruptly quit the throne in October 2004 in favor of his elder son, Norodom Sihamoni, citing old age and health problems.
Despite abdicating, Sihanouk remains a prominent figure in Cambodia and often uses messages on his website to comment on matters of state.

WHO declares swine flu pandemic

The Director General of the World Health Organization, Margaret Chan, has formally declared that the swine flu outbreak is now a global pandemic; the first global flu epidemic in 41 years.

In a statement, the WHO says it decided to raise the pandemic alert level from phase five to six, meaning the swine flu virus is spreading in at least two regions of the world.
The move does not necessarily mean the virus is causing more severe illness or more deaths.
So what does the declaration mean?
Dr Christopher Fraser from Imperial College London is on the World Health Organisation Pandemic Influenza Task Force.

Zimbabwe: '100,000 hit by cholera'

The Red Cross is seeking $3.4m to prevent the disease from spreading further [Reuters]

Cholera is expected to infect its 100,000th victim in Zimbabwe this week in the worst outbreak of the disease in Africa for 15 years, the Red Cross has said.
Although the disease, which has claimed 4,276 lives, is slowing, it remains a serious threat, the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) said on Tuesday.
"We stand now within days of 100,000 cases," Matthew Cochrane, an IFRC spokesman, said, a figure that was "unimaginable" just a few months ago.
He said that a cholera outbreak 15 years ago in what was then Zaire killed 12,000 people, typically refugees in camps fleeing the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide.
Cochrane said that Zimbabwe's case was notable as it was so deadly and had not emerged during any conflict.
Aid call
Poor water and sewage systems that led to the outbreak also remained neglected, an IFRC report warned on Tuesday.
"Communities across the country are still without access to potable water and basic sanitation," it said.
"The threat of cholera remains very real."
The IFRC said that although infection and death rates have dropped sharply during the past two months, the epidemic could continue for a long time.
The Red Cross has asked for $3.5m from the international community to build toilets, drill bore holes and repair existing water sources.
The request came despite only 45 per cent of the $9mn it sought last year, at the peak of the waterborne disease's spread, being obtained.
The epidemic's outbreak has been aggravated by economic breakdown and political turmoil in Zimbabwe throughout most of in 2008.
A power-sharing government - formed in February - is aiming to raise billions of dollars from Western donors to help the country and has initiated a 100-day plan for political reform.

Plenty of flu caution as Mexico returns to work

MEXICO CITY - In gleaming office towers and gritty markets, Mexicans returned to work Wednesday after a five-day swine flu shutdown, and dozens returned to a heroes' welcome from "humiliating" quarantines in China. But Mexico's death toll rose, feeding fears of more infections now that crowds are gathering again.

Some say authorities are overreacting in quarantining people suspected of having been exposed to swine flu. But for others, memories of the 2003 SARS

Diego Azubel / EPA
Some Mexicans are being quarantined at this Beijing hotel. The measure came after a Mexican who flew through China to Hong Kong was found to have swine flu

Some say authorities are overreacting in quarantining people suspected of having been exposed to swine flu. But for others, memories of the 2003 SARS crisis are still fresh.
By Barbara Demick May 5, 2009
Reporting from Beijing -- As she approached the immigration counter at Beijing's international airport at 7 a.m. Sunday, bleary-eyed after flying all night from Bali, Lucia Rocio heard the agitated whispering of the Chinese officials.Mexican passport. Mexican passport.
Rocio was pulled out of line and taken to a small room where she was given a mask and a thermometer, which she dared not put in her mouth because it appeared to be unsterilized. After some negotiations, Rocio, who lives in Beijing and speaks some Chinese, convinced the authorities that she was not ill and in fact hadn't been back to Mexico in three years."It was scary. It caused us all much stress," said Rocio, 40, who was traveling with her husband and two children, French citizens, who were not tested.Despite the lack of a single confirmed case of swine flu in mainland China -- and just one in Hong Kong -- the country is experiencing an epidemic of panic.
Chastened by the 2003 crisis of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, known as SARS, the Chinese are taking no chances. Authorities in China and Hong Kong have enacted strict, some say draconian, measures to isolate people who might have been exposed to swine flu since the first cases were reported in Mexico weeks ago.Hundreds of people have been quarantined here, among them 70 Mexican citizens.The Mexican government has offered to fly home free of charge all Mexican citizens living in China. The flight to Mexico City today is scheduled to make stops in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities to pick up passengers.China also organized an airlift to bring its citizens home from Mexico, but the flight Monday was canceled without explanation.Mexican President Felipe Calderon in a TV interview Sunday night took a thinly disguised shot at China -- without mentioning it by name -- noting that Mexico had been open in its handling of the flu outbreak, unlike nations that concealed information during previous health crises.He urged the world to show respect for Mexicans and said discriminatory practices by some nations stemmed from "ignorance and misinformation."But the quarantine appears to be popular with the Chinese public, with fresh memories of 2003 when they were singled out for quarantines."China learned its lessons from SARS. The government knows it has to do everything as early as possible to keep the disease out of China. Later, the costs could be enormous," said Peng Zongchao, an expert in crisis management at Qinghua University in Beijing.The panic revolves largely around an Aeromexico flight with 189 passengers and crew that arrived Thursday in Shanghai from Mexico City. A 25-year-old Mexican passenger later flew on to Hong Kong, where he fell ill and was diagnosed with swine flu.Chinese authorities have cast a wide net across the country for the other passengers, people they later met, taxi drivers, hotel guests -- just about anybody within several degrees of separation who might have been exposed.In the predawn hours Saturday morning, a Mexican family with three children, ages 6, 7 and 8, who had flown in on the Shanghai flight for a vacation, were awakened in their hotel rooms in Beijing and ordered by authorities to a quarantine hospital. They were then transferred to a shabby hotel near the Beijing airport, guarded by soldiers.Even Mexico's ambassador to China, Jorge Guajardo, was not permitted to see the family and five other Mexican citizens inside the hotel.On Monday, an embassy official was stationed outside the gates in a van, talking by mobile telephone to those inside."We've brought them pizza, toys, DVDs," said the embassy official, who asked not to be quoted by name. "But they're getting a little bit desperate. There's nothing to do in there."Mexicans are not the only tourists under quarantine. A Spanish couple on vacation in China were forced into quarantine in Nanjing over the weekend because they had shared an apartment with a passenger on the Shanghai flight

"At first they were scared. They couldn't understand why there were people in white spacesuits taking them away in an ambulance," said a source at the Spanish Embassy. "The first place they were taken was so dirty they couldn't use the bathroom. But we complained and since then they've been moved and treated very well."The Hong Kong hotel, where the 25-year-old man fell ill with swine flu, has been quarantined since Friday with 300 guests, mainly Asian businessmen, stuck inside.
"When I came down to the lobby, and saw the hotel surrounded by police cars and people with masks in the lobby, I thought this had to be a joke," said Kevin Ireland, a 45-year-old businessman from New Delhi, who was staying down the hall from the man who fell sick. "It's a little over the top, but considering what Hong Kong went through with SARS, we are trying to be understanding."The more lethal SARS crisis began in 2003 in China's Guangdong province and caused nearly 1,000 deaths around the world and untold economic damage in Asia with travel halted and businesses closed for much of the epidemic.The swine flu virus, recently renamed H1N1, is especially threatening to China because of the link -- however tenuous -- to pigs. China, home to nearly half of the world's pig population, is believed to have lobbied the World Health Organization to change the name from swine flu. "Blindly blaming the outbreak of the flu on pigs and killing them in large numbers will undermine human ethics in science," the official New China News Agency editorialized. But critics are beginning to warn that there could be more danger in overreaction.
"This is not SARS -- it's the flu," said Lo Wing Lok, a Hong Kong-based physician and politician. "The reaction in Hong Kong and the mainland has to do with officials trying to protect their jobs, not in protecting the public or the economy. Who is going to come to Hong Kong if they get locked up in quarantine every time somebody gets the flu?"Besides the man who fell ill in Hong Kong, there has been only one other confirmed case of swine flu in Asia. In South Korea, a 51-year-old nun who recently arrived from Mexico was diagnosed with the illness.The panic, however, is clearly spreading fast. The fear is evident in the return of the face masks that were the iconic accessories during the 2003 SARS outbreak. Nervous Chinese have canceled vacations not only to Mexico, but to the United States."I guess customers saw on TV that people in the U.S. are wearing masks which reminds them of SARS," said Zhang Jun, a travel agent in Xian, China. "They are scared." Even China's few Mexican restaurants are empty."All of us staff are from Sichuan province. None of us have ever been to Mexico," said Kong Juan, a 21-year-old waitress at Pete's Tex-Mex in Beijing. "But the customers are worried about hygiene."barbara.demick@latimes.comTimes staff writers Don Lee in Shanghai and Ken Ellingwood in Mexico City and Nicole Liu and Eliot Gao of The Times' Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.

Schools shut by swine flu can open, U.S. officials say

A number of schools across the USA are planning to reopen today after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidance saying there is no need to close if they have students with H1N1 influenza, also called swine flu.
The new advice, unveiled Tuesday by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, comes as more than 700 schools in 24 states and the District of Columbia remained closed because of concerns of spreading illness. The closed schools enroll a combined 468,000 students. Last week's advice from the CDC, that schools close for up to two weeks if they had infected students, was superseded by new information about the mildness of the virus and the fact that in areas where it's in schools, it's also in communities, so closing schools doesn't affect its spread, Sebelius says.
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The CDC is still asking students and teachers who are diagnosed with the flu to stay at home for seven days so they don't transmit the virus.
News of the revised guidelines came as state officials said a Texas woman who died this week was infected with H1N1. She is the first U.S. resident whose death has been linked to the virus.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: United States Texas Canada Houston Mexico Spain England San Antonio World Health Organization Swine flu Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Kathleen Sebelius Independent washington, d.c. United States Department of State United States Department of Health and Human Services Universal City Queens Cameron County
The woman was in her 30s and lived near the Mexican border, although there is no indication she had traveled to Mexico recently, says Doug McBride of the Texas Department of State Health Services. She had underlying health conditions, McBride says.
A boy from Mexico City who was visiting Houston died there last week but was believed to have caught the flu in Mexico.
Twenty-one countries have reported 1,490 cases of H1N1, the World Health Organization says. Mexico has the largest number, with 822 cases and 29 deaths. The USA is next with 403 confirmed cases in 38 states, the CDC says.
Now that the CDC has revised its advice on school closures, most will be able to get back into business quickly, says Daniel Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. "The bigger problem may be … schools that made the commitment that they were going to be closed 14 days. (There's) the possibility that some of the teachers may have scattered."
In Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City Independent School District near San Antonio, officials late Tuesday were working to reopen their 13 schools, all of which have been closed since April 27.
Spokeswoman Rebecca Villarreal said officials were still getting in touch with employees and students: "We're just trying to round them up."
She said they were still trying to get all the bus drivers to run morning routes and ensure that there's enough food to feed returning students. "There are a lot of challenges. It's a lot easier to close the schools than to reopen them."

Swine flu may be 'drastic' in some countries - IMF

Israeli doctor Michael Averbukh poses for the media at the entrance to the first aid room at Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv April 30, 2009. REUTERS/Baz Ratner

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The economic impact from the swine flu outbreak could be "quite drastic" in some countries, the International Monetary Fund's chief economist said on Thursday.Addressing the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard said it was clear that tourism volumes will be affected.He indicated it was too early to say for sure what the impact of the outbreak will be on the global economy, which is already in a deep recession."Is it something that is potentially of the scale of the current crisis we have? The information that we have at this stage is it is a relatively minor (economic ) event," Blanchard added.Mexico urged people to stay home for a five-day partial shutdown of the economy and its central bank warned the outbreak could deepen the nation's recession, hurting an economy that has already shrunk by as much as 8 percent from the previous year in the first quarter.Meanwhile, global markets were taking the flu news in their stride.The new flu virus has killed up to 176 people in Mexico and infections have been reported in the United States, Latin America and Europe.If the outbreak becomes severe, however, triggering a clampdown on trade, the cost to the global economy could climb into the trillions of dollars, previous World Bank studies have estimated.The studies also showed that the severity of a pandemic depends on infection and fatality rates, duration and how prepares families and businesses are.Economic disruptions could come from high absenteeism, as people may be asked to stay at home, or may choose to do so to care for sick relatives or for fear of being exposed.