Dolphin spongers are workaholic loners

From ABC Science, News in Science, 11 December 2008:
Female dolphins that use marine sponges to help them forage for prey spend less time socialising with others, but still produce the same number of offspring, according to a US study.
Researchers have long known of a bottlenose dolphin population in Western Australia's Shark Bay that use sponges as foraging tools, but they have been puzzled as to why only some of the dolphins use the sponges and why most are female.
In a study published on the PLoS One website, the team from Washington's Georgetown University reveal how the sponge-using female dolphins spend more time foraging than other dolphins and dive for longer in deep water habitats. Read more.
Also featured on Discovery News.

Hep C diagnosis: a testing time

From The Hep C Review, Hepatitis C Council of NSW, December 2008:
The hep C virus is one slippery customer. Once inside, it sits quietly in the body, causing few or no symptoms that might give its presence away. It can remain unnoticed (asymptomatic) for a long time – up to ten years in some people – even to the point where it might have caused some people serious damage to the liver. The symptoms it does trigger, such as tiredness, abdominal pain and nausea, can cause problems but are so vague they can often be dismissed as simply being the result of other conditions such as the ‘flu, or the stresses of life in general.
What’s more, in the first couple of months after infection, conventional tests don’t always detect signs of the virus, so there is a risk of someone with hep C getting the all-clear. And not all people who receive a positive diagnosis will develop liver disease – some clear the virus within six months of infection without needing any treatment, and others may carry the virus in their body for decades without liver problems.
All this makes diagnosis of hep C difficult, but there usually comes a point in chronic infection – infection that lasts longer than six months after first contracting the virus – where either a doctor or the patient will get the feeling that something isn’t right, and the process of diagnosing hep C begins. Read more (pdf file, page 16).

HIV: a Nobel discovery

From ABC Science Online, 27 November 2008:
Dr Jonathan Anderson saw his first patient with HIV in 1987 as a GP registrar in the UK. The man was sick but no one could work out why, until he was tested for a new virus that was only just emerging into the medical consciousness
Five years earlier, two French researchers, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier, isolated a new human retrovirus from the lymph nodes of a man with swollen lymph glands.
It was the first time that scientists had identified a link between a virus and a host of opportunistic infections caused by damage to the body's immune system. This condition would later be called AIDS — acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
On 10 December, the researchers will receive the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for the profound effect this discovery has had on the prevention and treatment of AIDS over the last 25 years.
In that time, while a cure has been elusive, there have been huge breakthroughs in treatments and quality of life of Australians living with HIV. Read more.

Exercise can battle breathlessness

From The Australian, 21 November 2008:
IT happens regularly in Barry Blaikie's life: he finds himself standing breathless and paralysed in a street or shopping mall, trying desperately to drag enough oxygen into his damaged lungs to take that next step. People stop to help and ask him what's wrong, and he's brutally honest about his condition.
"I tell people straightaway I've got airways disease." But it's the next question that always bothers him. "Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, someone says 'did you smoke?' And you know what happens when you say yes -- all recognition just switches straight off," says Blaikie, the 73-year-old former West Australian state MP who quit smoking more than 30 years ago.
"If you have AIDS there is some empathy -- if you smoke there's none, if you have smoked there's none."
Airways disease, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), is an umbrella term for several different conditions with the shared features of chronic, irreversible and worsening breathlessness. The most common conditions that come into the COPD category are chronic bronchitis and emphysema. Most people with COPD, but not all, have smoked.
According to a report released last week by the Australian Lung Foundation, this year COPD cost the Australian economy an estimated $98 billion in healthcare costs, lost productivity and loss of wellbeing. Heather Allan, executive director of the foundation's COPD National Program, says the report confirms fears about the high prevalence of COPD. The report shows 2.1 million Australians currently have some form of COPD and of those, 1.2 million have symptomatic COPD. Read more.