In the news
GPs and hospital doctors across the country are helping to fuel the rise of superbugs like MRSA and Clostridium difficile by overprescribing antibiotics, reported the Independent, the Telegraph and the Belfast Telegraph. Professor Mark Wilcox (Institute for Molecular and Cellular Biology), an expert on the control of hospital-acquired infections, told a conference on intensive care medicine that overuse of these drugs for coughs and colds had led to increasing resistance.
The Institute for Transport Studies’ driving simulator was featured on the BBC’s Inside Out Yorkshire programme in an item about the risks involved in police pursuits of speeding drivers, particularly through built-up areas. There is potential for driving simulators to be used as a safer alternative to the current method of 100% road-based police training.
Honorary professor in plastic surgery Simon Kay (Section of Medicine, Surgery & Anaesthesia) dismissed as “junk science” claims made by a US company that they had regenerated a man’s fingertip by sprinkling it with a powder made from a pig’s bladder. He told the Guardian and BBC News Online: “If you could regenerate body parts like this, your first port of call would be a serious science journal like Nature because it would be a Nobel prize winning revolution.”
Dr Evan Fraser, a senior lecturer in sustainable development (School of Earth and Environment) spoke to the Times about the ethical repercussions of supermarkets competing to keep prices low despite a looming global food crisis. “Consumer instinct is to want to keep food cheap,” he said. “But usually this is achieved by squeezing producers.”
After years of inaction and denial, the Chinese government has begun addressing the country’s growing HIV problem. “There has been a sort of sexual revolution since the market reforms. People are more open, but in most cases that’s in urban areas among the better educated sections of the population,” senior lecturer Dr Heather Xiaoquan Zhang (East Asian Studies) told the Guardian. “The Confucian tradition means most people still feel embarrassed to openly talk about sex. Their knowledge of risks and vulnerabilities is quite limited.”
A rise in corporate insolvencies will plunge more households into financial difficulty, reported the Yorkshire Evening Post and Radio 4’s Today Programme. Professor Nick Wilson, director of the Credit Management Research Centre (Leeds University Business School), said growth in household debt continues to cause concern and as the economic climate changes, servicing debt will become more problematic for a larger proportion of UK households.
A high-density sensor that is 10 times smaller than existing models, developed by Leeds engineers, can identify multiple proteins in human blood or urine that are key indicators for many diseases, reported Pharmaceutical Technology Europe. “Size is as important as accuracy for these devices,” said Dr Christoph Walti (School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering). “For example, with newborn babies only small amounts of blood can be taken for tests, so any sensor has to be able to detect a large range of proteins with only a small test area to work from.”
Researchers at the University of Leeds have found evidence that certain skin cancers occur in people who have never had acne, reported the Herald and the Yorkshire Post. Microbiologist Dr Anne Eady (Faculty of Biological Sciences) said: “Acne may simply be the price we pay for the optimum performance of a natural defence mechanism. If acne is eliminated, we may begin to pay a much higher price as the incidence of certain cancers starts to rise.”
Cognitive neuropsychologist Dr Chris Moulin (Institute of Psychological Sciences) believes brain fatigue may underlie a phenomenon observed in some schizophrenia patients; that a familiar person has been replaced by an impostor. Speaking to the Times Online, Dr Moulin suggested that such patients may be suffering from chronic ‘jamais vu’, as seen in two-thirds of the volunteers in a study who were asked to write ‘door’ 30 times in 60 seconds – they eventually began to doubt that ‘door’ was a real word.
Professor of geophysics Greg Houseman (School of Earth and Environment) spoke to the Guardian about the human toll of the devastating earthquake in Sichuan, China. “It’s a very active area – there’s a lot of deformation going on,” he said. “You can get very large earthquakes occurring where buildings are well constructed and you might get 50 or 100 people dying. But if the buildings are poorly constructed, you can get 10 or 20,000 deaths.”
Engineering geologist Dr Bill Murphy (School of Earth and Environment) also spoke to CNN Special Report and the Christian Science Monitor about why so many buildings, including many schools, collapsed during the Sichuan earthquake. “It’s not so much the magnitude but the amount of shaking,” he said. “Some of these aftershocks have been earthquakes in their own right … that might cause some additional buildings to collapse.”
Professor Christoph Bluth (School of Politics and International Studies) wrote an opinion piece for the Yorkshire Post about the political obstacles facing Pakistan as it moves towards democracy. “The first is that the history of all the major participants in this process is tainted. The PPP leadership has a history of corruption and collusion. The second is that President Musharraf will continue to cling to power and he has seriously damaged the main institutions of the state.”