Flu virus can be transmitted even before the appearance of their symptoms as experiments with ferrets (European polecat) have shown, according to a study.

If applied to human, it suggests that people pass on flu to others before they know they are infected, making it very difficult to contain epidemics.

Knowing if people are infectious before they have symptoms is important to help authorities plan for an epidemic, but it has been difficult to establish this from data collected during outbreaks, the journal Public Library of Science ONE reports.

Previous research using math models estimated that most flu transmission occurs after the onset of symptoms, but some happens earlier.

The flu strain used in the study was from the 2009 swine flu pandemic, which killed almost 300,000 people worldwide. It is the first to investigate this question experimentally in an animal model. Ferrets are commonly used in flu research because they are susceptible to the same virus strains and show similar symptoms to humans.

Ferrets with flu were put in contact with un-infected ferrets for short periods at different stages after infection. Transmission occurred before the first symptom.The researchers found that ferrets were able to pass on flu to others just 24 hours after becoming infected themselves. The animals did not suffer from fever until 45 hours after infection and began sneezing after 48 hours.

Wendy Barclay, professor from the Department of Medicine at Imperial College London and study co-author, said: "This result has important implications for pandemic planning strategies. It means that the spread of flu is very difficult to control, even with self-diagnosis and measures such as temperature screens at airports.

"It also means that doctors and nurses who don`t get the flu jab are putting their patients at risk because they might pass on an infection when they don`t know they are infected," added Barclay, according to an Imperial College statement.

The results are consistent with earlier studies which found that sneezing is not necessary to transmit flu -- droplets of virus are expelled into the air during normal breathing.

Kim Roberts, who is now based at Trinity College Dublin and led the study said: "Ferrets are the best model available for studying flu transmission, but we have to be cautious about interpreting the results in humans."

Teenagers who are overweight or obese are much more likely to develop gallstones, compared with peers of a healthy weight, US research suggests.

Healthcare providers Kaiser Permanente looked at 510,000 children aged 10-19.

The study, in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition, found 766 had gallstones.

It found those who were overweight were twice as likely as those with a healthy weight to have gallstones - the rate was higher among those who were obese.

Those who were moderately obese were four times more likely to have gallstones than those with a normal body mass index, and this rose to six times for those classed as extremely obese.

A UK obesity expert said it was yet another sign that obesity-linked disorders were being seen at increasingly young ages.

Gallstones are small stones, usually made of cholesterol, that form in the gallbladder.

Often they do not cause any symptoms, but if one becomes trapped it can trigger intense abdominal pain.

They can block the passage of bile into the intestine, which in turn can cause severe damage or infection in the gallbladder, liver, or pancreas and - if left untreated - can be fatal.
'Historically rare'

Gallstone disease is linked to increased weight in adults.

The team from Kaiser Permanente looked at electronic health records of the teenagers, who were all enrolled in its Southern California Children's Health Study

There was a stronger association between weight and gallstones in girls than in boys.

Lead author of the study, Corinna Koebnick, said: "Although gallstones are relatively common in obese adults, gallstones in children and adolescents have been historically rare.

"These findings add to an alarming trend - youth who are obese or extremely obese are more likely to have diseases we normally think of as adult conditions."

National Obesity Forum chairman Prof David Haslam said the fact gallstones were being seen in obese teenagers was not surprising - but that it was worrying.

"We know there is a link between the condition and obesity. But yet again we are seeing an adult illness in young people - because of obesity.

"We have already seen Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. Now it's gallstones.

"And because these conditions are coming earlier, deaths will come earlier."

Your tweets can reveal whether you are a psychopath, with the frequent use of words such as 'die', 'kill' and 'bury' among the key warning signs.

Swearing too much is also a giveaway, according to research by computer science professors and doctoral students at London's Online Privacy Foundation.

The boffins claim users' word choices indicate personality traits and their research could be used by police to identify potential threats or by bosses when hiring employees.

Chris Sumner, who heads the foundation, warned: 'People are making judgements about others based on social media. Companies even exist that will do this for you if you're hiring.
'However, almost all research says more research is needed before social media screening should be considered for use.'

Previous studies have looked at relationships between a person's mental health and their language but few have focused on social media - used by millions every day to share their thoughts and feelings with the world.

Engineering and computer science professor, Taghi Khoshoftaar, and doctoral student, Randall Wald, applied existing psychological formula to a person's writing to determine if they were psychopathic.

They used a computer programme to scan tweets - as well as looking at questionnaire answers - of nearly 3,000 volunteers and found around 1.4 per cent showed showed psychopathic tendencies.

But the research is limited, with the computer programme not able to recognise abbreviated words common on Twitter or the tone of a tweet.

Wald told US newspaper Sun Sentinel: 'It is not enough to send in the SWAT team because someone is highly rated on this.'

India's rising global presence is often associated with its booming tech sector. But in many poor countries, India's role is that of a low-cost pharmacy. The country has become a leading supplier of affordable HIV/AIDS and Tuberculosis medications and is the second leading provider of medicines distributed by UNICEF in the developing world. This, however, may change.

On Wednesday, the Indian Supreme Court is set to hear a landmark patent case that could limit Indian companies' right to make inexpensive copies of pricey drugs developed and patented in the U.S. and Europe. The high-profile case the first of its kind to reach India's highest court has created a sharp divide between defenders of intellectual property rights, who demand that India do more to protect patented drugs developed in the West, and international aid groups who say excessive pharmaceutical patenting stifles generic competition that makes life-saving medication accessible to patients around the world. "This case is key because the scaling up AIDS treatment around the world has come from Indian made medicines," says Leena Menghaney, manager of Doctors without Borders' access to medicines campaign in India. "If they did not exist or were not available most governments would not have ventured into starting large scale AIDS treatment programs."

At the heart of the current dispute is the breakthrough cancer drug Glivec (Gleevec in the U.S.). Novartis, the Swiss drug company that helped develop the drug, is appealing the rejection of its 2006 patent application in India. In the U.S., where patent laws make it easier to register a patent claim, a monthly dose of Glivec can cost as much $5,000. In India, locally made generics cost patients $200.

In 1970, the Indian government disallowed the patenting of drugs, paving the way for Indian pharmaceutical companies to freely produce medicines pioneered by foreign drug companies at a fraction of the cost. Today, India's pharmaceutical industry is worth $10 billion a year and is one of the nation's largest sectors. The price of HIV/AIDS treatment, a first-line combination of stavudine, lamivudine, and nevirapine, which cost patients $10,000 a year in 2000, now sells for $150 worldwide, due primarily to Indian companies' low cost manufacturing. This rush of cheap drugs, which are also produced in the U.S. and Europe, now provides medication for 80% of the 6 million people receiving treatment in the developing world today, according to Doctors Without Borders.

In 2005, as a requirement of admission into the WTO, India reenacted patent protections for intellectual property, which included medicines. The Indian patent law, however, set the bar much higher than in the U.S. "India has time and again really expressed a strong preference for public health concerns over private patent rights," says Shamnad Basheer, a professor of intellectual property law at the National University of Juridical Sciences in Calcutta. Earlier this year, the Indian patent office reasserted its preference for generic competition, stating that if a patented drug in the Indian marketplace is not made widely available at a reasonable price, then generic manufacturers are entitled to make their own versions of the drug and pay a royalty to the patent holder.

Novartis' first attempts at patenting Glivec were rejected in India because it was considered to be an updated version of an existing Novartis drug, and therefore not eligible for patent protection. To protect consumers of low-cost medicines and its pharmaceutical industry Indian patent law aims to curtail a process known as 'evergreening,' in which pharmaceutical companies make sometimes minor improvements to an old medicine, allowing them to renew their patent. Under India's tough standards, modifications that do not improve the efficacy of the drug are not eligible for extended patents.

Novartis cites modifications that make its new drug more effectively absorbed into the bloodstream, an improvement that was granted a patent in the U.S. in 2001. "All the drugs that come out from USDA are not new molecules that are formed every year," says Ranga Iyer, former head of the Organization of Pharmaceutical Producers of India. "They are newer versions of penicillin and other drugs. Do we call that evergreening? No. There's a lot of work going on to do that." Iyer and other critics of India's patent laws claim they are stifling innovation on new groundbreaking drugs. "If you tell an innovator to set prices low enough that everybody can afford it, how can a company recover cost?" says Iyer. "If innovation is not protected, people will not innovate."

But international pharmaceutical companies aren't the only ones innovating. Generic drug manufacturers have also pioneered new treatments, creating pediatric HIV/AIDS drugs to cater to a segment of the market in developing countries that the big global drug manufacturers tend to overlook. Breakthroughs often come from publicly funded labs making the cost of research and development not as high as it seems, says Yusuf Hamied, chairman of the Indian pharmaceutical company CIPLA. "If you look at the world's top 50 drugs being sold today, they are being marketed and sold by companies that did not invent them," says Hamied. "I respect patents. I'll pay a royalty. But I shouldn't be denied the right to produce drugs for poor people at reasonable prices."

For both proponents and critics of India's patent laws, the supreme court's interpretation will set an important precedent. Foreign drug companies see India as a growing market, but perhaps more importantly as a potential model for other developing countries' patent regulations. If the court rules in favor of Novartis' claim, aid groups worry it will set off numerous new patent claims making it impossible for India to produce cheap generics of all sorts. But the court is unlikely to lower the standard thereby granting Novartis a patent, says Shamnad Bhasheer. The Indian laws were designed specifically to favor public health interests, and the court would likely only lower the standard if it believed that innovation, particularly by Indian companies, was being stifled.

Green tea not just helps in weight loss but also getting rid of smoking. And to be true, it is becoming more and more popular in India with every passing day.

Green tea is more popular in China than the generally consumed tea with milk and loads of sugar in India. But as tea with milk helps us put on more and more weight, green tea has a number of benefits that help people live a healthy life.

Drink green tea to get over the nicotine urge, say Chinese researchers - and this is a finding that medical professionals in Kerala have reacted positively to.

A recent study titled 'A Revolutionary Approach for the Cessation of Smoking', published in Science China Life Sciences, a peer-reviewed open-access journal, cites how researchers used custom-developed cigarettes with components of green tea as filters in a bid to treat addiction to smoking.

Phinse Philip, a lecturer in the Community Oncology Division of the Malabar Cancer Centre, said pharmacotherapy such as nicotine replacement therapy had generally been found effective in getting smokers to give up the habit.

"A majority of users smoke as it purportedly gives them some form of relaxation. The oral intake of the amino acid L-Theanine, uniquely found in green tea, is known to have anti-stress effects and acts as a relaxing agent. The study conducted in China shows that green tea may be an alternative to quit this addictive habit," Phillip said.

Even though there has been a nationwide ban on smoking in public since 2008, it continues to be rampant in public places in Kerala, including bus stops and cinema halls.

Around 21.9 per cent of Kerala's population is addicted to smoking and in the process, makes itself vulnerable to a wide variety of diseases such as cancer, heart ailments and osteoporosis.

Thomas Varughese, head of surgical oncology and reconstructive surgery at Kochi's Lakeshore Hospital and Research Centre, said drinking green tea after quitting smoking completely could contribute to reversing the possibility of lung cancer.

"Green tea, which is rich in antioxidants, can help in restoring the oxidant/antioxidant imbalance among those who have quit tobacco-use completely, both smoking and smokeless, provided they have used it long enough to cover the impact of the period of use," said Varughese.

He also pointed out that smokers typically have low levels of vital nutrients like Vitamins C and E, zinc, calcium, folate and the Omega-3 essential fatty acid which are vital for the human body's immune system and proper metabolic activity.

"Consumption of green tea can boost the body's immune system by fighting free radicals and can reduce the risk from damage caused by toxins in cigarette smoke," Varughese added. (IANS)