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International Workshop: Infant Formula Adulteration With Melamine Underscores Need For Better Detection Methods
Following the recent adulteration of infant formula and other milk products with the industrial chemical melamine, the U. S. Pharmacopeial (USP) Convention is holding an international workshop this week to explore better ways to detect deliberately falsified protein content in food ingredients. The presence of false protein can lead to illness and death, as with thousands of Chinese children in the tragic melamine adulteration of infant formula this year and with pets in the United States in 2007. Vulnerabilities in global supply chains for food and drug ingredients allow such adulteration to affect people worldwide, which is what happened in similar instances where toxic diethylene glycol was substituted for the sweetener glycerin in toothpaste and cough syrup. USP is a scientific nonprofit organization that sets official standards for the identity, quality, purity, and strength of prescription and over-the-counter drugs. USP also sets widely recognized standards for the quality and purity of food ingredients and dietary supplements.
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Promising Antimicrobial Attacks Virus, Stimulates Immune System
A promising antimicrobial agent already known to kill bacteria can also kill viruses and stimulate the innate immune system, according to researchers at National Jewish Health. In a paper appearing online June 4 in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, Michael Howell, PhD, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, and his colleagues demonstrated that the synthetic compound CSA-13 can kill vaccinia virus in cell cultures and in mice. Additionally, they showed that CSA-13 stimulates cells to produce their own antimicrobial proteins.
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Foreign Aid Donors Should Prioritize Maternal Mortality In Developing Countries, NYT Opinion Piece Says
One of the "most lethal forms of sex discrimination" is the "systematic inattention to reproductive health care, from family planning to childbirth" in developing countries, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof writes. According to Kristof, a woman dies every minute somewhere in the world from pregnancy or childbirth complications, and 20 times that number suffer childbirth injuries. Providers of foreign aid, including the U.S., "have never shown much interest in maternal mortality, and impoverished women are typically the most voiceless, neglected people in their own countries -- so they die at astonishing rates," Kristof writes.Kristof highlights the childbirth experience of a 19-year-old Pakistani woman named Shazia Allahdita whose infant died in childbirth after her relatives refused to take her to the hospital because they did not want to pay for the taxi fare. Kristof writes that "[i]f men had uteruses, "paternity wards" would get res, ambulances would transport pregnant men to hospitals free of charge, deliveries would be free, and the Group of Eight industrialized nations would make paternal mortality a top priority." Kristof notes that there is "the dawn of a global movement against maternal mortality," with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon working with the U.S. and other countries to plan a "landmark global health session" on Sept. 23. The session will focus, in part, on maternal health, which Kristof terms a "milestone." He concludes, "My dream is that Barack and Michelle Obama will leap forward and adopt this cause -- and transform the prospects for so many young women like Shazia" (Kristof, New York Times, 7/29).
Sexual Health

Head Movement Is More Important Than Gender In Nonverbal Communication, Psychologists Find

It is well known that people use head motion during conversation to convey a range of meanings and emotions, and that women use more active head motion when conversing with each other than men use when they talk with each other. When women and men converse together, the men use a little more head motion and the women use a little less. But the men and women might be adapting because of their gender-based expectations or because of the movements they perceive from each other. What would happen if you could change the apparent gender of a conversant while keeping all of the motion dynamics of head movement and facial expression? Using new videoconferencing technology, a team of psychologists and computer scientists - led by Steven Boker, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia - were able to switch the apparent gender of study participants during conversation and found that head motion was more important than gender in determining how people coordinate with each other while engaging in conversation. The scientists found that gender-based social expectations are unlikely to be the of reported gender differences in the way people coordinate their head movements during two-way conversation. The researchers used synthesized faces - known as avatars - in videoconferences with naç¯ve participants, who believed they were conversing onscreen with an actual person rather than a synthetic version of a person. In some conversations, the researchers changed the gender of the avatars and the vocal pitch of the avatar"s voice - while still maintaining their actual head movements and facial expressions - convincing naç¯ve participants that they were speaking with, for example, a male when they were in fact speaking with a female, or vice versa. "We found that people simply adapt to each other"s head movements and facial expressions, regardless of the apparent sex of the person they are talking to," Boker said. "This is important because it indicates that how you appear is less important than how you move when it comes to what other people feel when they speak with you." He presented the findings at the annual convention of the Association for Psychological Science in San Francisco. A paper detailing the results is scheduled for publication in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. The study, funded by the National Science Foundation, used a low-bandwidth, high-frame-rate videoconferencing technology to record and recreate facial expressions to see how people alter their behavior based on the slightest changes in expression of another person. The U.Va.-based team also includes researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, University of East Anglia, Carnegie Mellon University and Disney Research. A video demonstration is available online at: http://faculty.virginia.edu/humandynamicslab/. The technology uses statistical representations of a person"s face to track and reconstruct that face. This allows the principal components of facial expression - only dozens in number - to be transmitted as a close rendition of the actual face. It"s a sort of connect-the-dots fabrication that can be transmitted frame by frame in near-real time. Boker and his team are trying to understand how people interact during conversation, and how factors such as gender or race may alter the dynamics of a conversation. To do so, they needed a way to capture facial expressions people use when conversing. "From a psychological standpoint, our interest is in how people interact and how they coordinate their facial expressions as they talk with one another, such as when one person nods while speaking, or listening, the other person likewise nods," Boker said. It is this "mirroring process" of coordination that helps people to feel a connection with each other. "When I coordinate my facial expressions or head movements with yours, I activate a system that helps me empathize with your feelings," Boker said. The technology the team developed further allows them to map the facial expressions of one person onto the face of another in a real time videoconference. In this way they can change the apparent gender or race of a participant and closely track how a naç¯ve participant reacts when speaking to a woman, say, as opposed to a man. "In this way we can distinguish between how people coordinate their facial expressions and what their social expectation is," Boker said. Fariss Samarrai University of Virginia


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