Scientists Blame Kidney, Liver Problems On Contaminated Food

SCIENTISTS, under the aegis of Mycotoxicology Society of Nigeria (MSN), have blamed increasing cases of kidney and liver failures on consumption of fungal contaminated food. 

   They also revealed that about 25 per cent of foods produced across the world are affected by Mycotoxin.     

   Speaking on the theme: "Mycotoxin Hazards, Management and its Regulation in Nigeria", at the just concluded 8th Annual Conference and Workshop, held at the Federal Polytechnic, Ado-Ekiti, the President of the association, Dr. Olusegun Atanda, attributed the increase in fungal contaminated foods to poor storage methods used in many African nations where there are lots of moisture.    

  He pointed out that Africa is prone to a lot of hazards from Mycotoxin, because food items, like yams, tomatoes, potatoes and many others, are easily exposed to contamination when stored in moisturised places, which make them get moulds and other fungi.      

   The hazard of eating food contaminated with Mycotoxin, according to him, includes damage to kidney, liver and immune suppressions.    

   He urged the general public to always avoid eating yams, tomatoes, potatoes, all tubers, and other foods that are often stored until they get contaminated with Mycotoxin. He warned that even cooking them would not prevent kidney and or liver disorders.

  According to Atanda, Mycotoxins are secondary metabolite of fungi produced on agricultural produce during processing and storage up to when they are consumed. 

   He said the association has been working hard to create awareness on Mycotoxins and their effects on food security and human health since it was founded in 2006.

   Atanda urged the United Nations to declare a 'World Mycotoxins Day' because of the danger it poses to humans and animals. He noted that this would allow more people to know about the danger and how to prevent it.

The Rector of the Federal Polytechnic, Mrs. Theresa Akande, in her address, said: "In total ignorance, we ordinarily mistook the greenish patches on food, e.g. maize, sweet and Irish potatoes to be bad or immature portions, which many do not care to remove because it is not known that they are infestation by germs that could not be killed by burning or cooking for an appreciable period of time."   

 The Ekiti State Commissioner for Agriculture, Mr. Babajide Arowosafe, who was represented by the Permanent Secretary, Mr. Abegunde, said hosting the 8th conference was timely because the state government is carrying out its 8-Point Agenda, which includes modern agriculture.    He advised members of the Mycotoxicology Society to continue to carry out more researches on Mycotoxin and come out with solutions that will help improve agricultural products

Bengal to get India's first transplant hospital

KOLKATA: Bengal is set to get India's first hospital exclusively dedicated to organ transplant by 2015. The Rs200-crore hospital with 150 beds will have two air-ambulances and digital operating theatres and will come up at Andal inBurdwan.

However, there's a catch. The fate of the hospital depends on the completion of a 650-acre airport inAndal, which is expected to be done by the year-end.

"We will start our construction as soon as the first flight takes off. It's imperative to have an airport close to the hospital. The financial aspects and design are already in place. This will be the first hospital exclusively for transplant in India and we have shortlisted doctors from the US and UK," said Dr Satyajit Bose, chairman of Mission Hospital in Durgapur.

He added that at the initial stage, the hospital will have facilities for liver, kidney, bone marrow and pancreas transplant.

Surgeons who will join the hospital will be offered a share in the hospital. "They'll be owners too, and will be highly motivated in their involvement. Life is precious. I just returned from Tuscanyon Sunday. Over there, I saw an OPD for animals. I doubt we have any OPD of such high standard here. I've been to Newcastle where there's an institute for transplant. I found a Bengali surgeon there too. who was involved in transplant as well.

So why can't we replicate the model in Bengal," questioned the doctor on Monday.

"Seven people can benefit from one cadaver. Suppose a rural youth, who is married and has children, has renal failure and needs kidney transplant, is it possible for him to commute back and forth from Kolkata for his treatment?" asked Bose.

A transplant-only hospital was earlier slated to come up at Rajarhat but the plan was later scrapped.

According to Brojo Roy, chief of Ganadarpan, an organization that is dedicated to motivating individuals to donate their bodies after death, a medical unit exclusively dedicated to organ transplant is unlikely to be sustainable.

"Since 2010 in Bengal, there have been only five instances of organ transplant - one liver transplant and four kidney transplants. This rate can hardly keep a hospital afloat. In Tamil Nadu, there are roughly 100 transplants every year. Even that figure doesn't seem enough to sustain a business. This is probably why there have been no such hospitals in the country," said Roy.

Bose responded: "There is lack of awareness. A vast segment is skeptical, fearful even, when it comes to transplant. I'm confident that as the hospital grows, so will the numbers," he said.

Facilities on offer

150 beds

Two air ambulances

Digital operation theatres

Doctors from US, UK

Liver, kidney, bone marrow and pancreas transplants at the initial stage

Surgeons who join the hospital to be offered shares

The FLS (Fatty liver Shionogi) mouse reveals local expressions of lipocalin-2, CXCL1 and CXCL9 in the liver with non-alcoholic steatohepatitis

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) encompasses a wide spectrum of diseases, ranging from simple steatosis to nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), which carries a significant risk of progression to cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. Since NASH is a progressive but reversible condition, it is desirable to distinguish NASH from simple steatosis, and to treat NASH patients at an early stage.

To establish appropriate diagnosis and therapy, the pathological mechanisms of the disease should be elucidated; however, these have not been fully clarified for both NASH and simple steatosis. This study aims to reveal the differences between simple steatosis and NASH. 

Methods: This study used fatty liver Shionogi (FLS) mice as a NASH model, for comparison with dd Shionogi (DS) mice as a model of simple steatosis.

Genome-wide gene expression analysis was performed using Affymetrix GeneChip Mouse Genome 430 2.0 Array, which contains 45101 probe sets for known and predicted genes. Quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) and immunohistochemistry were used to investigate gene expression changes and protein localizations. 

Results: DNA microarray analysis of the liver transcriptomes and qRT-PCR of both types of mice revealed that LCN2, CXCL1 and CXCL9 mRNAs were overexpressed in FLS mouse livers.

Immunohistochemistry showed that CXCL1 protein was mainly localized to steatotic hepatocytes. CXCL9 protein-expressing hepatocytes and sinusoidal endothelium were localized in some areas of inflammatory cell infiltration.

Most interestingly, hepatocytes expressing LCN2, a kind of adipokine, were localized around almost all inflammatory cell clusters. Furthermore, there was a positive correlation between the number of LCN2-positive hepatocytes in the specimen and the number of inflammatory foci. 

Hepatic Cells Can be Used for Cure of Terminal Liver Diseases

A study has been carried out by a group of researchers from the Second Military Medical University. As per the study, hepatic stem cells can prove beneficial when it comes to the cure of last stage liver diseases.

Hepatic stem cells are produced by patient's own cells. The study, which has been published in the Cell Stem Cell Journal, has found if hepatic cells are repopulated in patient's body then terminal stage of patient can be cured.

The study titled as Reprogramming Fibroblasts into Bipotential Hepatic Stem Cells by Defined Factors has also unveiled there are a number of liver diseases that can be treated through the same manner.

The study was funded by the Chinese government. Lead researcher Prof. Hu Yiping was of the view that was in 1990s that they started carrying out research on hepatic stem cells.

Prof. Yiping said his main aim of carrying out the study was to know more about the link between the cells and liver diseases. While carrying out the study, he realized that hepatic cells can be used as a novel treatment for terminal stage liver illnesses.

The realization was then experiment on mice and the study continued for four years.

Stevie Wright of the Easybeats Battling Health Problems

Stevie Wright, the lead singer of the Australian band the Easybeats who scored the hit Friday on My Mind in 1967, is currently hospitalized for a myriad of problems.

According to the Sydney Telegraph, Wright was admitted to St. Vincent's Hospital last week for a seizure but it has since been discovered that he has problems with his liver, lungs, kidneys and stomach. Wright told the paper "I'm having procedures. I had a cough, so specialists started with my lungs, then my groin was giving me trouble ... They are also looking at an infection in my throat and stomach. And then there are the liver and kidney issues."

Wright, who recently had a section of intestine removed, is a survivor of both alcohol and drug addiction.

Engineered liver tissue developed at MIT could help scientists test new drugs, vaccines for malaria

Although malaria has been eradicated in many countries, including the United States, it still infects more than 200 million people worldwide, killing nearly a million every year. In regions where malaria is endemic, people rely on preventive measures such as mosquito netting and insecticides. Existing drugs can help, but the malaria parasite is becoming resistant to many of them.

Scientists working to develop new drugs and vaccines hope to target the parasite in the earliest stages of an infection, when it quietly reproduces itself in the human liver.

In a major step toward that goal, a team led by MIT researchers has now developed a way to grow liver tissue that can support the liver stage of the life cycle of the two most common species of malaria, Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax. This system could be used to test drugs and vaccines against both species, says Sangeeta Bhatia, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.

Bhatia is the senior author of a paper describing the liver-tissue system in the July 17 issue of the journal Cell Host & Microbe. The paper's lead author is Sandra March, a research scientist in Bhatia's lab, and scientists from the Broad Institute, Sanaria Inc. and the University of Lisbon also contributed to the research.

Reproducing infection

The malaria life cycle has several stages. Once the parasite infects a human victim, through a mosquito bite, it takes up residence in the liver. The parasite spends about a week in the liver, producing tens of thousands of copies that eventually burst free to infect blood cells. After this initial infection, P. vivax can lurk for weeks, months or even years, reactivating to cause another malaria bout.

So far, researchers have been able to grow P. falciparum in human blood and, to a certain extent, in its liver stages, but they have not been able to reliably grow P. vivaxin either stage. P. falciparum has the highest malaria mortality rate, but P. vivax can cause debilitating, long-term infections. To eradicate malaria, drugs and vaccines that target both species will probably be needed, Bhatia says.

Bhatia - who is also a senior associate member of the Broad Institute and a member of MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science - has previously created micropatterned surfaces on which liver tissue can be grown, surrounded by supportive cells. These engineered cells survive for up to six weeks and mimic most of the functions of liver cells in the body, including drugmetabolism and production of liver proteins.

Using unique, frozen samples of P. falciparum obtained in collaboration with Stephen L. Hoffman and his team at Sanaria, the researchers infected healthy liver cells and observed the development of liver-stage parasites using an automated imaging system designed in collaboration with Anne Carpenter's group at the Broad Institute. This system allows them to quickly evaluate not only how much infection has occurred, but also the effects of potential drugs. They can also measure how weakened forms of the parasites, which could be used as vaccines, perform in the liver.

To test the system's usefulness, the researchers studied a P. falciparum vaccine that is now in clinical trials. For a weakened, or attenuated, parasite to succeed as a vaccine, it must infect the liver and progress enough to raise an immune response, but then arrest and not reach the blood stage. The researchers showed that the vaccine now in trials does follow that trajectory.

The new system could also be used for larger-scale drug studies than previously possible, Bhatia says. Researchers now use liver cancer cells grown in the lab to studyP. falciparum infection, but those cells have deficient drug metabolism and keep growing instead of providing a quiet home for the parasite to persist.

Obtaining enough P. vivax samples to test the system took several years, but the team eventually acquired samples, flown in from Thailand, India and South America. Using these samples, they were able to grow P. vivax in liver tissue and show that it produces small persistent parasites that appear to be dormant forms called hypnozoites.

"We don't want to call them hypnozoites yet, because nobody has a gold-standard marker for them, but we have persistent small forms that live for three weeks. So we are optimistic and doing more to wake them up again. Reactivation would be the ultimate confirmation," Bhatia says.

The researchers are now working on confirming that the P. vivax they grew in the liver tissue really did create hypnozoites. Once this is confirmed, they plan to start testing some candidate drugs, now in development, against P. vivax.

Splitting donated liver shown to be safe, allowing doctors to save 2 lives from single organ

BOSTON, July 17, 2013 -- Donor organ allocation policy could be changed to nearly eliminate waitlist mortality for children —without additional risk to adult recipients.

BOSTON, July 17, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Split liver transplantation carries no increased risk of failure in either recipient, allowing surgeons to safely save two lives from a single donated organ (graft), according to new research from Boston Children's Hospital published online in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.  

Due to their regenerative nature, livers donated by a deceased adult or adolescent can be surgically split into two unequally sized portions; the smaller segment is allocated to a young child awaiting transplant and the larger portion to an adult.

"Infants waiting for a donor liver have the highest waitlist mortality of all liver transplant candidates, and dozens of children die each year waiting for size-appropriate organs to become available," says Heung Bae Kim, MD, director of Boston Children's Hospital's Pediatric Transplant Center and lead author on the study. "If we can increase the number of split livers to just 200 a year, which would still affect less than four percent of the total number of livers transplanted each year, it would save virtually every small child waiting for a new liver."

Based on his recent findings, (which includes research on how well children function with split livers) Kim is advocating for changes in how donor livers are allocated—automatically placing infants and small children at the top of the liver waitlist, thereby giving pediatric transplant surgeons the option to split the first graft to become available. Once the liver has been split, the smaller portion is transplanted into a child and the larger portion is transplanted into the next appropriate adult on the list.

Analyzing United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) records, Boston Children's researchers looked at data compiled over a fifteen year period (1995-2010), studying the graft survival rates of 62,190 first-time adult deceased-donor liver transplant recipients, 889 of whom received partial grafts from a split liver transplant. The research shows that from 2002 forward the vast majority of adults who received a split graft experienced a risk of graft failure comparable to those who received a whole graft.

"After an extensive review of the data, it's clear that in the current era, with the exception of a small, very sick population of patients, adults who receive a split graft can expect to fare as well as those who received a whole organ," says Ryan Cauley, MD, MPH, first author on the paper. "Because risks once associated with this technique are now negligible, if a center has a patient waiting for a liver and it has access to a split graft, there's no reason not to accept it."

In addition to saving young patients, Kim's proposed amendments to the allocation process could take place without sweeping change, affecting only an extremely small portion of available grafts. "There are around 500 to 600 pediatric liver transplants done each year in the United States, with split liver transplant only accounting for 120 of the total number," Kim says. "By splitting just 80 more livers a year, it would make grafts available to virtually every small child on the waitlist. Given the current national debate on maximizing access to organs for children, it's my hope that implementing changes that would benefit children without harming adults would be considered favorably."

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/07/17/5573325/splitting-donated-livers-shown.html#storylink=cpy