Two more people died of Malaria on Wednesday night, taking the death toll in Mumbai to 45. The number of Malaria patients has gone up to 988 since August 1. That belied the claims made by the Health authorities that Malaria is showing signs of decline now.

The latest victims were from Goregaon and Haji Ali. Situation is going from bad to worse in many parts of Mumbai. The BMC is working hard to deal with the crsis and bring the situation under control.

Ironically, Mumbai's Mayor Shraddha Jadhav does not acknowledge that Malaria has raised a panic button in the city. She claimed the BMC has been successful in preventing malaria cases in the city!

Want to slow down the aging process of your brain? Well, then start keeping you heart healthy, suggests a new study.

In the study, people whose hearts pumped less blood had brains that appeared older than the brains of those whose hearts pumped more blood.

Decreased cardiac index, the amount of blood that pumps from the heart in relation to a person's body size, was associated with decreased brain volume using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Researchers observed the link even in those participants who did not have cardiovascular disease, such as heart failure or coronary heart disease. As the brain ages, it begins to atrophy (shrink) and has less volume.

The decrease in brain volume is considered a sign of brain aging. More severe brain atrophy occurs in those with dementia, such as Alzheimer's disease.

"The results are interesting in that they suggest cardiac index and brain health are related," said Angela L. Jefferson, the study's lead author and associate professor of neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine.

"The association cannot be attributed to cardiovascular disease because the relationship also was seen when we removed those participants with known cardiovascular disease from our analyses," Jefferson added.

In the observational study, which cannot establish cause and effect, researchers examined brain and heart MRI information on 1,504 participants of the decades-long Framingham Offspring Cohort who did not have a history of stroke, transient ischemic attack or dementia. Participants were 34 to 84 years old and 54 percent were women.

Researchers measured cardiac output using MRI and normalized the data for each participant's body surface area. Brain volume was assessed using MRI. Participants were divided into three groups based on cardiac index values.

The participants who had the lowest cardiac index, or the least amount of blood pumping from the heart for their body size, showed almost two years more brain aging than the people with the highest cardiac index.

The participants in the middle cardiac index group, who had low but still normal levels of blood pumping from the heart, also showed almost two years more brain aging than the people with the highest (or healthiest) cardiac index.

"We expected an association between the lowest levels of cardiac index and smaller brain volumes, but we were surprised to find people on the lower end of normal cardiac index also have smaller brain volumes when compared to people with very health cardiac index," Jefferson said.

Doctors say they have used a genetically engineered herpes virus to treat successfully patients with head and neck cancer.

A London hospital trial of 17 patients found that use of the virus alongside chemotherapy and radiotherapy helped kill the tumours in most patients.

It works by getting into cancer cells, killing them from the inside, and also boosting the patient's immune system.

Further trials are planned for later in the year.

Head and neck cancer, which includes cancer of the mouth, tongue and throat, affects up to 8,000 people every year in the UK.

Study leader Dr Kevin Harrington, who is based at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, said current treatments were effective if the cancer was picked up early but that many patients were not diagnosed until it was more advanced.

The herpes virus, which is also being tested in patients with skin cancer, is genetically manipulated so that it grows inside tumour cells but cannot infect normal healthy cells.

Once there it has a triple effect - it multiplies, killing tumour cells as it does so, it is engineered to produce a human protein that activates the immune system and it also makes a viral protein that acts as a red flag to immune cells.
'Potential weapon'

In the 17 patients injected with the virus, in addition to their standard treatment, at the Royal Marsden Hospital, 93% showed no trace of cancer after their tumour had been surgically removed.

More than two years later, 82% of patients had not succumbed to the disease.

Only two of 13 patients given the virus treatment at a high dose relapsed, the journal Clinical Cancer Research reported.

There were no safety concerns with use of the virus, the researchers said, and it is hoped the virus could one day be used to fight other types of cancer.

"Around 35 to 55% of patients given the standard chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment typically relapse within two years, so these results compare very favourably," said Dr Harrington.

He is now planning a trial comparing the viral treatment with the standard treatment in people newly diagnosed with head and neck cancer.

Dr Alison Ross, senior science information officer at Cancer Research UK, said it would be some time before the treatment could be used in patients as it still needed to be tested directly against standard treatment.

But she added: "This small study highlights the potential of using genetically modified viruses as a weapon to fight cancer."

Drinking red wine can help people live a longer and healthier life, says a research team led by an Indian American scientist.

The researchers found the extract, resveratrol, contained in red grape skin reduced inflammation in humans that led to heart disease, strokes and type 2 diabetes, the Telegraph reported.

Researchers led by Paresh Dandona, chief of endocrinology at Buffalo University, New York, concluded that consuming resveratrol could help reduce the development of type 2 diabetes, ageing, heart disease and strokes, reports the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, Dandona, who did his MBBS from New Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), and his team used participants where half were given a natural supplement containing 40 milligrams of resveratrol while the other volunteers received an identical pill containing no active ingredient.

Participants took the pill once a day for six weeks. Blood samples were collected at the start of the trial and at week one, three and six.

The results showed that resveratrol suppressed molecules known to cause inflammation in the body. It also suppressed compounds in the blood vessels which interfere with the production of insulin, reducing the risk of developing diabetes.

Blood samples from the participants who received the placebo showed no change in these pro-inflammatory markers.