Professor Roger Byard, University of Adelaide, highlighted the highly toxic nature of many herbal substances that often mistakenly considered safe.

The forensic pathologist said: “There’s a false perception that herbal remedies are safer than manufactured medicines, when in fact many contain potentially lethal concentrations of arsenic, mercury and lead.

“These substances may cause serious illnesses, exacerbate pre-existing health problems or result in death, particularly if taken in excess or injected rather than ingested.”

The expert also warned against the risks arising from the interaction between herbal medicines and prescription drugs that could lead serious health damage, including liver, renal and cardiac failure, strokes, movement disorders, muscle weakness and seizures.

Professor Byard said: “Herbal medicines are frequently mixed with standard drugs, presumably to make them more effective. This can also have devastating results.” Zeenews

Over the past few years, it has been known that adult cells can be reprogrammed into cells with characteristics similar to embryonic stem cells by turning on a select set of genes.

Most embryonic stem cells are derived from embryos that develop from eggs fertilised in vitro in a fertilisation clinic.

Although the reprogrammed cells, called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), have tremendous potential for regenerative medicine, the conversion is extremely inefficient.

“The low efficiency of the reprogramming process has hampered progress with this technology and is indicative of how little we understand it,” explains Duanqing Pei, senior author of a new study on the subject.

“Further, this process is most challenging in human cells, raising a significant barrier for producing iPSCs and serious concerns about the quality of the cells that are generated,” explains Pei from South China Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine.

Researchers found that adding vitamin C, an essential nutrient that is abundant in citrus fruits, enhanced iPSC generation from both mouse and human cells.

Vitamin C accelerated gene expression changes and promoted a more efficient transition to the fully reprogrammed state, said a release of the South China Institute.

Somewhat to their surprise, they found that other antioxidants do not have the same effect, but vitamin C does seem to act at least in part through slowing cell senescence. These findings were published online in Cell Stem Cell. The Times of India.

Pham Le Tuan, head of the Planning and Finance Department under the Ministry of Health, told the Daily on Tuesday that the State budget for preventive medicine was poor and failed to meet the basic demand of the health care sector.

According to the department, 2007 saw a low expenditure rate for preventive medicine. In some provinces, the budget for preventive medicine reached only 12%-13% compared to 14% of the total State budget for the segment.

To promote expenditure for the segment, the National Assembly approved a regulation that requires a province to spend at least 30% of its total budget for health care. However, the Ministry of Finance has not issued any guidance on how to deploy the regulation.

Tuan said the regulation was difficult to implement because in reality the provincial health care budget is only enough to ensure basic operations of the health care system.

Tuan suggested the ministries of health and finance clarify preventive medicine’s scope and scale clearly and lay a foundation to calculate real demand for budget allocation.

“The Ministry of Finance needs to issue a detailed circular to guide provinces on how to allocate provincial budgets for preventive medicine,” Tuan noted.

The Health Ministry reported that the total State budget for health care in 2008 was VND607 billion, up by 13.36% compared to 2007, VND303 billion of which came from the Central Government and the rest from provincial budgets.

This year saw the incredible increase in expenditure for preventive medicine of 253.5% compared to 2008 as the State has spent VND1,539 billion for health care, VND715 billion of which came from the Government.

Health Minister Nguyen Quoc Trieu said that 2009 had seen many epidemics, particularly H1N1 swine flu. By Hien Nguyen, The Saigon Times Daily

The drug may interfere with the body’s mistaken destruction of the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, the researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“What this study does is open the door to a whole new way to approaching type 1 diabetes,” Dr. Mark Pescovitz of Indiana University, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

Rituxan, known generically as rituximab, is made by Genentech, a unit of Roche Holding AG and Biogen Idec Inc. It was designed to wipe out immune cells known as B lymphocytes, which proliferate out of control in lymphoma.

The same cells are also involved in the autoimmune destruction of healthy cells and tissue seen in rheumatoid arthritis and, in theory, in juvenile diabetes.

Usually, by the time diabetes symptoms appear, 80 to 90 percent of those insulin-producing cells have been destroyed. The Pescovitz team gave Rituxan hoping to save the remaining cells.

The treatment worked at first and the body produced more insulin. But over time, the effects faded, and insulin production began to decline at the same rate as among people who received placebo.

Pescovitz said he was not disappointed. Further tests will show if repeated treatments with Rituxan or newer drugs that also eliminate B lymphocytes will keep insulin production up.

“When you look at rituximab in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, patients do require redosing at four- to six-month intervals,” he said.

That was not tried in this study, said Pescovitz, because “at the time, we didn’t know if it would work and we didn’t know if it would be safe. So we aimed for a one-year endpoint and a single course of drug. We got what we hoped we would see.”

About 15,000 children and teenagers in the United States are diagnosed with type 1 diabetes each year, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Type 1 diabetes accounts for about 5 percent of diabetes cases globally. China Daily