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LONDON – For men with fertility problems, some doctors are prescribing a very conventional way to have a baby: more sex.
In a study of 118 Australian men with damaged sperm, doctors found that having sex every day for a week significantly reduced the amount of DNA damage in their patients’ sperm. Previous studies have linked better sperm quality to higher pregnancy rates.
The research was announced Tuesday at a meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Amsterdam.
Dr. David Greening of Sydney IVF, a private fertility clinic in Australia, and colleagues looked at 118 men who had damaged sperm. Greening and colleagues told the men to have sex every day for a week. After seven days, the doctors found that in 81 percent of the men, there was a 12 percent decrease in the amount of damaged sperm.
Many fertility experts suggest men abstain from sex before their partners have in-vitro fertilization, to try to elevate their sperm counts.
Sperm quality can also be improved if men don’t smoke, drink moderately, exercise, or get more antioxidants.
Since concluding the study, Greening says he now instructs all couples seeking fertility advice to start by having more sex. “Some of the older men look a little concerned,” he said. “But the younger ones seem quite happy about it.”
Experts think sex helps reduce the DNA damage in sperm by getting it out of the body quickly; if sperm is in the body for too long, it has a higher chance of getting damaged.
Some experts said that while Greening’s research is promising, it doesn’t prove that daily sex for men with fertility problems will actually produce more babies.
Greening said he and his colleagues are still analyzing the study data to determine how many women got pregnant.
“Looking at sperm DNA is just one part of the puzzle,” said Bill Ledger, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Sheffield, who was not connected to the research. “Maybe this will improve pregnancy rates, but we still need to do more studies.”
Ledger said instructing couples with infertility problems to have more sex could stress their relationship. “This may add even more anxiety and do more harm than good,” he said. He said couples shouldn’t feel pressured to adjust their sex lives just for the sake of having a baby.
Greening said the study’s findings were ultimately very intuitive. “If you want to have a baby, our advice is to do it often.”
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ATLANTA – In a startling measure of just how widely a new disease can spread, researchers accurately plotted swine flu’s course around the world by tracking air travel from Mexico.
The research was based on an analysis of flight data from March and April last year, which showed more than 2 million people flew from Mexico to more than 1,000 cities worldwide. Researchers said patterns of departures from Mexico in those months varies little from year to year; swine flu began its spread in March and April this year.
Passengers traveled to 164 countries, but four out of five of those went to the United States. That fits with the path of the epidemic a year later. The findings were reported Monday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The research shows promise in forecasting how a new contagion might unfold, indicated one government health official who praised the work.
“We share a common interest in this issue: If we map the global airline distribution network, can we anticipate, once a virus emerges, where it is likely to show up next?” asked Dr. Martin Cetron of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He leads CDC’s division of global migration and quarantine.
The new swine flu virus was first reported in the United States in mid-April, but the first large outbreak was in Mexico at about the same time. Health officials believe cases of the new virus were circulating in Mexico in March.
Scientists have long assumed a relationship between air travel and spread of the virus. But the new research for the first time confirmed the relationship, said Dr. Kamran Khan, who led the study. He is a researcher at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.
For years, Khan and his colleagues have been working on a system to use air travel information quickly to determine how a new contagion is likely to spread around the world.
Their data sources include the International Air Transport Association, an international trade association representing 230 airlines and the vast majority of scheduled international air traffic.
The study showed the majority of passengers flew to the United States, with Canada a distant second and France a more distant third.
More than 90 percent of the time, Khan and his colleagues accurately matched air traffic volumes to which countries did and did not suffer swine flu outbreaks as a result of air traffic.
The top 11 destination cities from Mexico were all in the United States. Los Angeles was the leader, receiving about 9 percent of all passengers from Mexico, and New York City was second, with about 5 percent.
In contrast, the only South American entry in the top 40 destination cities was Buenos Aires, at No. 22. Passengers were even fewer when it came to cities in neighboring Guatemala and other Central American countries.
The data show not only how disease spreads out of Mexico, but also that air travel is mainly among more industrialized countries, experts said.
A second study released by the journal found a sharp rise in pneumonia cases in non-elderly Mexicans from late March to late April. Normally, only about a third of severe pneumonia cases in Mexico are in people ages 5 to 59. But during the recent swine flu outbreak, more than 70 percent were in that younger age group.
The study seems to support plans to target swine flu prevention efforts to the young, experts said.
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WASHINGTON (AFP) – President Barack Obama on Saturday urged his fellow Americans to get tested for HIV in an effort to reduce transmission of the virus that causes AIDS.
“On this 14th commemoration of National HIV Testing Day, I urge Americans to take control of their own health — and protect those they love — by getting tested for HIV and working to reduce HIV transmission,” Obama said in a statement.
“While its impacts are not evenly spread — infection rates are particularly high among gay and bisexual men, African Americans and Latinos — when one of our fellow citizens becomes infected with HIV every nine-and-a-half minutes, the epidemic affects all Americans,” he said.
Obama noted that of the estimated 1.15 million people infected with HIV in the United States, more than 230,000 — one in five — do not know they are infected.
The US president last month unveiled a plan to commit 63 billion dollars over six years to battle chronic global health crises, including AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, a continuation of a landmark initiative launched by his predecessor George W. Bush.
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Drug manufacturers will offer some $80 billion in prescription discounts for Medicare recipients under a deal unveiled on Saturday, which could boost President Barack Obama as he pushes to overhaul the $2.5 trillion U.S. healthcare system.
“The agreement reached today to lower prescription drug costs for seniors will be an important part of the legislation I expect to sign into law in October,” Obama said in formally announcing the pact.
The companies have agreed to provide for the next decade a 50 percent discount for those elderly and disabled Americans in the Medicare health insurance program who face a gap in coverage after their drug costs reach a certain level, known as the “doughnut hole”.
“The existence of this gap in coverage has been a continuing injustice that has placed a great burden on many seniors,” Obama said in a statement. Medicare coverage does not apply to payments between $2,700 and $6,154.
The deal was negotiated between the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America industry association and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus who is leading one of many congressional panels drafting healthcare legislation.
“This commitment to support legislation that will help close the coverage gap reflects our ongoing work with Congress and the Administration to make comprehensive health care reform a reality this year,” the industry group said in a statement.
UNINSURED AMERICANS
Costs for healthcare have soared faster than the inflation rate and the Democratic president has pledged to work to curb those costs as well as find a way to provide coverage to the 46 million uninsured Americans.
Americans strongly support fundamental changes to the healthcare system and a move to create a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll published on Saturday.
The White House has said some $950 billion in cuts have been found to cover its reform efforts but there are reports that the costs could reach as much as $1.6 trillion and still not cover everyone, setting off a fierce debate on how to close the gap.
That has given Republicans an opening to attack, particularly since Americans are growing worried about the eye-popping record budget deficits facing the country — more than $1.8 trillion in fiscal 2009 alone.
Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives proposed a draft of their healthcare bill on Friday that calls for all citizens to be able to get insurance regardless of medical history and that coverage should be mandatory for individuals and businesses.
They would create a new government plan to help cover the uninsured — a move backed by Obama but resisted by Republicans and some centrist Democrats who fear it will overwhelm private insurers and require vast amounts of public funding.
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OTTAWA (AFP) – A Canadian federal court on Thursday upheld pharmaceutical giant Pfizer’s patent for Viagra, dashing generic drug maker Novopharm’s longing for sales of cheaper erection drugs.
Judge Michael Kelen said in his decision that Novopharm failed to demonstrate the Pfizer patent was invalid.
He ordered Canada’s health minister not to grant the generic drug maker’s request for special permission to manufacture a Viagra knock-off until the Pfizer patent expires in 2014.
Pfizer had filed the application to prohibit Novopharm from introducing a generic version of the hugely popular drug.
Sildenafil, the key ingredient in Viagra, was initially developed by Pfizer in the mid-1980s as one of a number of compounds for the treatment of hypertension and angina.
Angina patients unexpectedly experienced erections while being treated with sildenafil to lower their blood pressure, and so it was marketed to treat erectile dysfunction.
In its submissions, Novopharm, a subsidiary of the world’s largest generic drug-maker Teva Pharmaceutical, questioned the timing of patent filings around Pfizer’s discovery of the active ingredient in Viagra.
But in his decision, Judge Kelen said: “The court concludes that the applicants have met their legal burden to establish the validity of the patent.”
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