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A team of scientists has called for new awareness of the potential for antibiotic-resistant illnesses from the marine environment, and pointed to the marine realm as a source for possible cures of those threats.

The group stated that newly completed studies of ocean beach users point to an increasing risk of staph infections, and that current treatments for seafood poisoning may be less effective due to higher than expected antibiotic resistance.

The group also asserts that new research has identified sponge and coral-derived chemicals with the potential for breaking down antibiotic resistant compounds and that could lead to new personalized medical treatments.

“While the marine environment can indeed be hostile to humans, it may also provide new resources to help reduce our risks from illnesses such as those caused by water borne staph or seafood poisoning,” stated Paul Sandifer, chief scientist of NOAA’s Oceans and Human Health Initiative.

“It is critically important that we continue research on the complex interactions between the condition of our oceans and human health,” said Carolyn Sotka, also with the NOAA Oceans and Human Health Initiative.

“We’ve found significant new tools to fight the antibiotic resistance war,” said NOAA research scientist Peter Moeller, in describing the identification of new compounds derived from a sea sponge and corals.

According to Moeller, “The first hit originates with new compounds that remove the shield bacteria utilize to protect themselves from antibiotics. The second hit is the discovery of novel antibiotics derived from marine organisms such as corals, sponges and marine microbes that fight even some of the worst infectious bacterial strains.”

“With the variety of chemicals we find in the sea and their highly specific activities, medicines in the near future can be customized to individuals’ needs, rather than relying on broad spectrum antibiotics,” he added.

The research team noticed a sponge that seemed to thrive despite being located in the midst of a dying coral reef.

After extraction, testing showed that one of the isolated chemicals, algeliferin, breaks down a biofilm barrier that bacteria use to protect themselves from threats including antibiotics.

The same chemical can also disrupt or inhibit formation of biofilm on a variety of bacteria previously resistant to antibiotics which could lead to both palliative and curative response treatment depending on the problem being addressed.

“This could lead to a new class of helper drugs and result in a rebirth for antibiotics no longer thought effective,” said Moeller. “Its potential application to prevent biofilm build-up in stents, intravenous lines and other medical uses is incredible,” he added.

Iridium Satellite LLC said on Thursday it had no advance warning of an impending collision between one of its communications satellites and a defunct Russian military satellite above Siberia.

Amid questions of liability, negligence and possible lawsuits, the closely held company rejected suggestions that it might have come to disregard “conjunction reports” — potential accident alerts — routinely relayed by the US military.

“Iridium didn’t have information prior to the collision to know that the collision would occur,” said Liz DeCastro, a company spokeswoman. “If the organizations that monitor space had that information available, we are confident they would have shared it with us.”

She was responding to questions about an 18-month-old presentation by retired US Air Force General John Campbell, Iridium’s executive vice president for government programs.

Iridium had been receiving a weekly average of 400 conjunction reports from the US Strategic Command’s Joint Space Operations Centre that tracks debris in space, Campbell told a June 2007 forum hosted by the George C Marshall Institute, a Washington research group.

“So the ability actually to do anything with all the information is pretty limited,” he said, describing a kind of data overload. The conjunction reports were issued every time a potential threat object was to pass within five kilometers (3 miles) of a commercial satellite, he said.

“Even if we had a report of an impending direct collision, the error would be such that we might manoeuvre into a collision as well as move away from one,” he told the panel.

Campbell then endorsed the so-called “Big Sky” theory — that space is so vast that the chances of a collision are infinitesimal, despite more than 18,000 pieces of orbiting junk big enough to track.

“We figure that the risk of a collision on any individual conjunction is about 1 in 50 million,” he said at the time, adding: “Clearly that risk is something bigger than zero.”

‘DODGEBALL’ TO AVOID DEBRIS

Marine Corps General James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a former head of the command that runs US military space operations, said countries with satellites in space will have to play “dodgeball” for decades to avoid debris from the collision. It occurred about 485 miles above the Russian Arctic on Tuesday.

James Lewis, a former official at the State and Commerce departments now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, raised a question at the same forum about whether Iridium might have a case against the Russians.

“There was negligence somewhere,” he said. Asked about this at the forum, Cartwright declined to discuss it but said he would like to see more information-sharing on debris avoidance with Russia, China, France and other countries using space.

The mishap marked the first time two intact spacecraft accidentally ran into each other, Nicholas Johnson, chief scientist of NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, told Space.com.

There have been four other cases in which space objects have collided accidentally in orbit, NASA said. But those were considered minor events and involved parts of spent rockets or small satellites.

Cartwright, who from 2004 to 2007 headed the Pentagon’s Strategic Command responsible for space operations, said the military had been alerted by Iridium to the sudden “non-reporting” of the destroyed craft.

Iridium runs a network that uses 66 satellites to provide voice and data services for areas not served by ground-based communications networks. The network has about 300,000 clients.

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said it was not possible for the US military to track and predict the movements of all 18,000 objects in space all the time.

“Because there is so much, you have to prioritize what you’re looking at,” he said. “There are limits on your ability to track and compute every piece…”

“We did not predict this collision,” he said.

China added significantly to space debris when it used a ground-based ballistic missile to blow apart an obsolete weather satellite in a January 2007 arms test. The United States used a missile from a Navy warship to explode a tank of toxic fuel on a crippled U.S. spy satellite last February.

China’s anti-satellite test “alone increased our risk due to space junk by a factor of about three and increased the overall risk of collision by about 15 percent,” Campbell told the forum in 2007.

A new study by researches at Queensland University of Technology has revealed the identity and origin of tiny, potentially hazardous particles emitted from common laser printers.

Professor Lidia Morawska from QUT’s International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health conducted the study to find the answer of questions raised by earlier findings that almost one third of popular laser printers emitted large numbers of ultrafine particles.

These tiny particles are potentially dangerous to human health because they can penetrate deep into the lungs.

Morawska said the latest study found that the ultrafine particles formed from vapours, which are produced when the printed image is fused to the paper.

“In the printing process, toner is melted and when it is hot, certain compounds evaporate and those vapours then nucleate or condense in the air, forming ultrafine particles,” Morawska said.

“The material is the result of the condensation of organic compounds which originate from both the paper and hot toner,” Morawska added.

In the study, the researchers compared a high-emitting printer with a low-emitting printer and found that there were two ways in which printers contributed to the formation of these particles.

“The hotter the printer gets, the higher the likelihood of these particles forming, but the rate of change of the temperature also contributes,” Morawska said.

“The high emitting printer operated at a lower average temperature, but had rapid changes in temperature, which resulted in more condensable vapour being emitted from the printer.

“The printer with better temperature control emitted fewer particles,” Morawska added.

Morawska said this study provided information, which would help consumers better understand the risks of laser printers and would help the printer industry to design low or no emission printers.

A new study has shown that exercise improves quality of life in postmenopausal women regardless of whether they lose weight.

For the study, Corby K. Martin, Ph.D., of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center and Louisiana State University System, Baton Rouge and colleagues studied the effect of 50 percent, 100 percent and 150 percent of current public health physical activity recommendations on quality of life in 430 sedentary postmenopausal women (average age 57.4).

Participants were randomly assigned to a non-exercise control group (n=92) or one of three exercise groups: exercise energy expenditure of 4 kilocalories per kilogram (2.2 pounds) of body weight per week (4-KKW) (n=147), 8-KKW (n=96) or 12-KKW (n=95).

A short health survey was used to measure physical and mental aspects of quality of life at the beginning of the study and six months later.

“Adherence to exercise was 95.4 percent, 88.1 percent and 93.7 percent for the 4-, 8- and 12-KKW groups, respectively, and each group spent 73.9, 138.3 and 183.6 minutes per week exercising,” the authors said.

The average weight loss in the control, 4-KKW, 8-KKW and 12-KKW groups was 0.94 kilograms (2.07 pounds), 1.34 kilograms (2.95 pounds), 1.86 kilograms (4.10 pounds) and 1.34 kilograms (2.95 pounds), respectively.

“A dose-response effect of exercise on quality of life was noted for all aspects of quality of life except bodily pain,” the authors said.

“In addition, the 4-KKW group had significantly improved general health perception, vitality and mental health compared with the control group. All three exercise groups had significantly improved social functioning compared with the control group.

“Our results indicate that improved quality of life can be added to the list of exercise benefits and that these improvements are dose dependent and independent of weight loss, at least among people similar to this study’s sample.

“The exercise doses are easily obtainable and were well tolerated by sedentary women, resulting in confidence that the exercise doses used in this study can be achieved by women in the community,” they added.

The study is published in February 9 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.