Molecular hybridization strategy for tuning bioactive peptide function ...
Disease Threatens Tens Of Thousands In Gazan Shelters, UN And WHO Say
The threat of disease is intensifying in temporary shelters in the Gaza Strip, where tens of thousands of people fleeing Israeli bombardment are living in cramped conditions, according to the UN emergency relief organization OCHA.
Health services in the area have long been overstretched, and fresh waves of displacement ordered by Israeli forces have made their task even more difficult, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Saturday.
Respiratory infections and diarrhoea are among the most severe diseases in emergency shelters, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said on social media platform X on Friday.
Some 180,000 people are already suffering from respiratory infections, while more than 136,000 children under the age of five currently have diarrhoea, which can cause a life-threatening loss of water and vital minerals at this age if not treated.
There are also more than 55,000 cases of lice and scabies.
According to OCHA, the UN Children's Fund delivered 600,000 vaccine doses to the Gaza Strip on Friday. The aim is for young children to receive their routine immunizations next year despite the war. This includes immunizations against diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough.
Israel's military announced a four-hour tactical pause in fighting in a refugee camp in Rafah in the south of the Gaza Strip on Saturday.
Military activities there would be temporarily suspended for humanitarian reasons, an army spokesman announced in Arabic on X. The pause is so that the population can obtain supplies, he wrote.
Israel's military had previously called on residents of the embattled city of Khan Younis in the south of the coastal area to seek safety in Rafah near the Egyptian border.
Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip has now killed 21,672 people, according to the Hamas-controlled health authority in Gaza. The figures cannot be confirmed, but the UN and other observers point out that the authority's figures have been credible in the past.
While the Israeli army had previously stated that it was in the process of taking operational control of the area in the north, it is now focussing on the south and central Gaza Strip.
Progress in the north was continuing though, according to IDF Spokesman Daniel Hagari late on Saturday.
"In the northern Gaza Strip, we are focusing efforts in the area of Darj Tufah, Hamas's last significant stronghold in the northern Gaza Strip," Hagari said.
In Khan Younis, in the Gaza Strip's south-east, Hagari said the IDF on Saturday "raided the Hamas headquarters in the heart of the city, including the organization's intelligence command center."
The information could not be independently verified.
Israel suspects that Hamas leader Yehya al-Sinwar is currently hiding in the underground tunnels under Khan Younis. The Hamas stronghold is currently a focal point of Israel's ground offensive.
The army also "eliminated three terrorist cells," Hagari said.
"The southern region of Lebanon will not return to what it used to be. Throughout the day, several launches from Lebanon to Israel were identified, with many of Hezbollah's launches falling in Lebanese territory," he said, adding that 80% of Hezbollah's rockets on Friday fell in Lebanese territory. The information could not be independently verified.
Since the beginning of the Gaza war following the Hamas massacre in Israel on October 7, there have been repeated confrontations between the IDF and Hezbollah in the Israeli-Lebanese border region, with deaths and injuries on both sides. It is the most serious escalation since the second Lebanon war in 2006.
The Gaza war was triggered by Hamas and other groups' brutal terrorist attacks against Israel when they rampaged through Israeli border towns on October 7, killing 1,200 people.
Does Diabetes Make Lung Infection Worse? Here Is What New Research Says
In people with diabetes, high levels of blood sugar disrupts the function of key cell subsets in the lungs that regulate the immune response, increasing the risk of developing severe lung disease if infected with viruses such as influenza, as well as with bacteria and fungi. To understand the mechanism behind, researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel subjected multiple mouse models of types 1 and 2 diabetes to a variety of viral lung infections.
Just as in diabetic humans, in all these models the diabetic mice developed a severe, fatal lung infection following exposure to lung pathogens such as influenza. The immune reaction, which in nondiabetics eliminates the infection and drives tissue healing, was severely impaired in the diabetic mice, leading to uncontrolled infection, lung damage and eventual death, revealed the study published in Nature.
Further, to decode the basis of this heightened risk, the team performed an evaluation of gene expression on the level of individual cells, in more than 150,000 single lung cells of infected diabetic and nondiabetic mice.
In the diabetic mice they identified a dysfunction of certain lung dendritic cells, the immune cells that orchestrate a targeted immune response against pathogenic infection.
"High blood sugar levels severely disrupt certain subsets of dendritic cells in the lung, preventing these gatekeepers from sending the molecular messages that activate the critically important immune response," said Samuel Nobs, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute. "As a result, the infection rages on, uncontrolled."
Importantly, the scientists discovered how high sugar levels in diabetic mice disrupt the normal function of lung dendritic cells during infection. Altered sugar metabolism in these cells led to the accumulation of metabolic byproducts that markedly disrupted the normal regulation of gene expression, leading to aberrant immune protein production.
"This could explain why the functioning of these cells is disturbed in diabetes, and why the immune system is unable to generate an effective anti-infection defence," said Aleksandra Kolodziejczyk, another postdoctoral student at the Institute.
The scientists next found that tight control of blood sugar levels by insulin supplementation prompted the dendritic cells to regain their capacity to generate a protective immune response that could prevent the cascade of events leading to a severe, life-threatening viral lung infection.
Alternatively, administration of small molecules reversing the sugar-induced regulatory impairment corrected the dendritic cells' dysfunction and enabled them to generate a protective immune response despite the presence of high sugar levels.
Infection Risks In NSCLC Patients Undergoing Immune Checkpoint Inhibitor Treatment
The following is a summary of "Infectious Complications in Patients With Non-small Cell Lung Cancer Treated With Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors," published in the November 2023 issue of Pulmonology by Guo, et al.
Standard care for people with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI). However, there needs to be more information about how viral side effects affect ICI treatment. For a study, researchers sought to look back at all the NSCLC patients who were treated with ICIs at a top research center between 2007 and 2020. They used summary data to show how often infections happened, what infections there were, and how much healthcare was used during ICI treatment and within 3 months of stopping ICI therapy. Cox proportional hazard models determine how long people live without getting an illness based on their demographics and care.
Logistic regression, which shows relationships between patient or treatment characteristics and being admitted to the hospital or ICU, looks at the data and shows them as odds ratios (OR). Of 298 patients, 54.4% (n = 162) got infections. 59.3% (n = 96) of these patients had to stay in the hospital, and 15.4% (n = 25) had to go to the intensive care unit (ICU). Bacterial pneumonia was the most common sickness. Twelve cases (7.4%) got fungal illnesses. People who had chronic obstructive lung disease (COPD) (OR 2.15, 95% CI, 1.01-4.58), corticosteroid treatment within one month of infection start (OR 3.04, 95% CI, 1.47–6.30), or both an infection and irAE at the same time (OR 5.48, 95% CI, 2.15–14.00) were more likely to need to go to the hospital.
More people ended up in the intensive care unit (ICU) after taking corticosteroids (OR 3.09, 95% CI, 1.29–7.38).In the big, single-institution study, They found that more than half of people with NSCLC who are treated with ICI also get infections. They find that people with COPD, recent use of corticosteroids, and both irAE and infection are more likely to end up in the hospital and that strange infections like fungus can happen. It highlighted clinical awareness of infections as important complications during ICI therapy in patients with NSCLC.
Source: sciencedirect.Com/science/article/abs/pii/S1525730423001377
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