A look to die for? How Liverpool council is fighting sunbed obsession

There is strong evidence linking sunbed use to skin cancer, and tanning machines are particularly damaging to people under the age of 35. Photograph: Frank Augstein/AP

A stroll down County Road in Liverpool reveals why the city is often referred to as the sunbed capital of the UK. Shops offering tans sit beside cafes and clothes stores. Now nail salons and hairdressers, even gyms, frequently offer sunbed facilities alongside other services. We estimate there are at least 200 sunbed businesses in the city, but there could be more as these outlets don't have to be licensed.

In Liverpool young people in particular regularly use sunbeds. In 2009 Cancer Research UK revealed half of 15- to 17-year-old girls in the city had used a sunbed, compared to 11% nationally.

One of the key priorities identified by our health and wellbeing board, in its new role, is skin cancer prevention. Skin cancer is the fastest growing cancer among 18- to 35-year-olds and is largely preventable. There is strong evidence that links sunbed use to skin cancer and these tanning machines are particularly damaging to people under the age of 35.

This is why last week we launched a campaign that educates young people in our city about the dangers of sunbeds. The campaign is also asking the government to grant local authorities the power to license sunbed businesses, so we can keep track of where they are and how they are operating.

Our campaign is not just about advertising our message and hoping people will listen, we are looking at the motivations of sunbed users and leveraging the truly collaborative approach to tackling behaviour change that the local authority's new public health role brings.

We involved young girls in the campaign development to get an understanding of why they use sunbeds and to ensure the campaign spoke to them. These girls say they feel better about themselves with a tan. Responding to this insight, we have a fake tan brand supporting the campaign by teaching girls how to use fake tan, to get the tanned look, without the health risks.

We also spoke to mums and discovered many are unaware of the risks themselves and don't speak to their daughters about sunbeds in the same way they would about drinking, smoking or unprotected sex. We'll be educating both teenagers and engaging with their parents via our schools, so they feel confident having these conversations.

It was only recently that councils became responsible for public health, as part of the health and social care bill, but it's already evident the transfer brings advantages. We're able to use the wide range of functions local authorities discharge to change behaviour in our city.

This isn't the first time we've taken a collaborative approach of combining the efforts of the NHS and the local authority in Liverpool.

In 2006 we played a pivotal role in influencing parliamentary vote in favour of legislation on smoking. Now, with public health being the responsibility of the council, there is an even greater opportunity to influence health through almost every area of policy, from planning and licensing to education, housing and economic growth.

We are asking the government to grant all local authorities (not just Liverpool), the power to license sunbed businesses and tighten regulations. We want to work with the sunbed industry to ensure a number of minimum standards are met – such as provision of goggles, skin assessments and approved educative materials about the risks.

We want to protect young people, who are most vulnerable, from the dangers of sunbeds and to ensure the rest of the population can make an informed choice about using them.

We hope that by asking for these powers across England and by sharing our learning we can encourage other authorities to take a similar approach to tackling this problem.

Paula Grey is joint director of public health at Liverpool city council.

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View the original article here

A look to die for? How Liverpool council is fighting sunbed obsession

There is strong evidence linking sunbed use to skin cancer, and tanning machines are particularly damaging to people under the age of 35. Photograph: Frank Augstein/AP

A stroll down County Road in Liverpool reveals why the city is often referred to as the sunbed capital of the UK. Shops offering tans sit beside cafes and clothes stores. Now nail salons and hairdressers, even gyms, frequently offer sunbed facilities alongside other services. We estimate there are at least 200 sunbed businesses in the city, but there could be more as these outlets don't have to be licensed.

In Liverpool young people in particular regularly use sunbeds. In 2009 Cancer Research UK revealed half of 15- to 17-year-old girls in the city had used a sunbed, compared to 11% nationally.

One of the key priorities identified by our health and wellbeing board, in its new role, is skin cancer prevention. Skin cancer is the fastest growing cancer among 18- to 35-year-olds and is largely preventable. There is strong evidence that links sunbed use to skin cancer and these tanning machines are particularly damaging to people under the age of 35.

This is why last week we launched a campaign that educates young people in our city about the dangers of sunbeds. The campaign is also asking the government to grant local authorities the power to license sunbed businesses, so we can keep track of where they are and how they are operating.

Our campaign is not just about advertising our message and hoping people will listen, we are looking at the motivations of sunbed users and leveraging the truly collaborative approach to tackling behaviour change that the local authority's new public health role brings.

We involved young girls in the campaign development to get an understanding of why they use sunbeds and to ensure the campaign spoke to them. These girls say they feel better about themselves with a tan. Responding to this insight, we have a fake tan brand supporting the campaign by teaching girls how to use fake tan, to get the tanned look, without the health risks.

We also spoke to mums and discovered many are unaware of the risks themselves and don't speak to their daughters about sunbeds in the same way they would about drinking, smoking or unprotected sex. We'll be educating both teenagers and engaging with their parents via our schools, so they feel confident having these conversations.

It was only recently that councils became responsible for public health, as part of the health and social care bill, but it's already evident the transfer brings advantages. We're able to use the wide range of functions local authorities discharge to change behaviour in our city.

This isn't the first time we've taken a collaborative approach of combining the efforts of the NHS and the local authority in Liverpool.

In 2006 we played a pivotal role in influencing parliamentary vote in favour of legislation on smoking. Now, with public health being the responsibility of the council, there is an even greater opportunity to influence health through almost every area of policy, from planning and licensing to education, housing and economic growth.

We are asking the government to grant all local authorities (not just Liverpool), the power to license sunbed businesses and tighten regulations. We want to work with the sunbed industry to ensure a number of minimum standards are met – such as provision of goggles, skin assessments and approved educative materials about the risks.

We want to protect young people, who are most vulnerable, from the dangers of sunbeds and to ensure the rest of the population can make an informed choice about using them.

We hope that by asking for these powers across England and by sharing our learning we can encourage other authorities to take a similar approach to tackling this problem.

Paula Grey is joint director of public health at Liverpool city council.

• What do you think? Email sarah.marsh@theguardian.com if you want to contribute an article to this debate.

Not already a member? Join us now for more comment, analysis and the latest job opportunities in local government.

View the original article here

A look to die for? How Liverpool council is fighting sunbed obsession

There is strong evidence linking sunbed use to skin cancer, and tanning machines are particularly damaging to people under the age of 35. Photograph: Frank Augstein/AP

A stroll down County Road in Liverpool reveals why the city is often referred to as the sunbed capital of the UK. Shops offering tans sit beside cafes and clothes stores. Now nail salons and hairdressers, even gyms, frequently offer sunbed facilities alongside other services. We estimate there are at least 200 sunbed businesses in the city, but there could be more as these outlets don't have to be licensed.

In Liverpool young people in particular regularly use sunbeds. In 2009 Cancer Research UK revealed half of 15- to 17-year-old girls in the city had used a sunbed, compared to 11% nationally.

One of the key priorities identified by our health and wellbeing board, in its new role, is skin cancer prevention. Skin cancer is the fastest growing cancer among 18- to 35-year-olds and is largely preventable. There is strong evidence that links sunbed use to skin cancer and these tanning machines are particularly damaging to people under the age of 35.

This is why last week we launched a campaign that educates young people in our city about the dangers of sunbeds. The campaign is also asking the government to grant local authorities the power to license sunbed businesses, so we can keep track of where they are and how they are operating.

Our campaign is not just about advertising our message and hoping people will listen, we are looking at the motivations of sunbed users and leveraging the truly collaborative approach to tackling behaviour change that the local authority's new public health role brings.

We involved young girls in the campaign development to get an understanding of why they use sunbeds and to ensure the campaign spoke to them. These girls say they feel better about themselves with a tan. Responding to this insight, we have a fake tan brand supporting the campaign by teaching girls how to use fake tan, to get the tanned look, without the health risks.

We also spoke to mums and discovered many are unaware of the risks themselves and don't speak to their daughters about sunbeds in the same way they would about drinking, smoking or unprotected sex. We'll be educating both teenagers and engaging with their parents via our schools, so they feel confident having these conversations.

It was only recently that councils became responsible for public health, as part of the health and social care bill, but it's already evident the transfer brings advantages. We're able to use the wide range of functions local authorities discharge to change behaviour in our city.

This isn't the first time we've taken a collaborative approach of combining the efforts of the NHS and the local authority in Liverpool.

In 2006 we played a pivotal role in influencing parliamentary vote in favour of legislation on smoking. Now, with public health being the responsibility of the council, there is an even greater opportunity to influence health through almost every area of policy, from planning and licensing to education, housing and economic growth.

We are asking the government to grant all local authorities (not just Liverpool), the power to license sunbed businesses and tighten regulations. We want to work with the sunbed industry to ensure a number of minimum standards are met – such as provision of goggles, skin assessments and approved educative materials about the risks.

We want to protect young people, who are most vulnerable, from the dangers of sunbeds and to ensure the rest of the population can make an informed choice about using them.

We hope that by asking for these powers across England and by sharing our learning we can encourage other authorities to take a similar approach to tackling this problem.

Paula Grey is joint director of public health at Liverpool city council.

• What do you think? Email sarah.marsh@theguardian.com if you want to contribute an article to this debate.

Not already a member? Join us now for more comment, analysis and the latest job opportunities in local government.

View the original article here

Fighting cancer with nanoparticles

Main Category: Cancer / Oncology
Also Included In: Immune System / Vaccines
Article Date: 17 Aug 2013 - 0:00 PDT Current ratings for:
Fighting cancer with nanoparticles

Researchers at the University of Georgia are developing a new treatment technique that uses nanoparticles to reprogram immune cells so they are able to recognize and attack cancer. The findings were published recently in the early online edition of ACS Nano.

The human body operates under a constant state of martial law. Chief among the enforcers charged with maintaining order is the immune system, a complex network that seeks out and destroys the hordes of invading bacteria and viruses that threaten the organic society as it goes about its work.

The immune system is good at its job, but it's not perfect. Most cancerous cells, for example, are able to avoid detection by the immune system because they so closely resemble normal cells, leaving the cancerous cells free to multiply and grow into life-threatening tumors while the body's only protectors remain unaware.

Shanta Dhar and her colleagues are giving the immune system a boost through their research.

"What we are working on is specifically geared toward breast cancer," said Dhar, the study's co-author and an assistant professor of chemistry in the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. "Our paper reports for the first time that we can stimulate the immune system against breast cancer cells using mitochondria-targeted nanoparticles and light using a novel pathway."

In their experiments, Dhar and her colleagues exposed cancer cells in a petri dish to specially designed nanoparticles 1,000 times finer than the width of a human hair. The nanoparticles invade the cell and penetrate the mitochondria - the organelles responsible for producing the energy a cell needs to grow and replicate.

They then activated the nanoparticles inside the cancer cells by exposing them to a tissue-penetrating long wavelength laser light. Once activated, the nanoparticles disrupt the cancer cell's normal processes, eventually leading to its death.

The dead cancer cells were collected and exposed to dendritic cells, one of the core components of the human immune system. What the researchers saw was remarkable.

"We are able to potentially overcome some of the traditional drawbacks to today's dendritic cell immunotherapy," said Sean Marrache, a graduate student in Dhar's lab. "By targeting nanoparticles to the mitochondria of cancer cells and exposing dendritic cells to these activated cancer cells, we found that the dendritic cells produced a high concentration of chemical signals that they normally don't produce, and these signals have traditionally been integral to producing effective immune stimulation."

Dhar added that the "dendritic cells recognized the cancer as something foreign and began to produce high levels of interferon-gamma, which alerts the rest of the immune system to a foreign presence and signals it to attack. We basically used the cancer against itself."

She cautions that the results are preliminary, and the approach works only with certain forms of breast cancer. But if researchers can refine the process, this technology may one day serve as the foundation for a new cancer vaccine used to both prevent and treat disease.

"We particularly hope this technique could help patients with advanced metastatic disease that has spread to other parts of the body," said Dhar, who also is a member of the UGA Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center, Cancer Center and Center for Drug Discovery.

If the process were to become a treatment, doctors could biopsy a tumor from the patient and kill the cancerous cells with nanoparticles. They could then produce activated dendritic cells in bulk quantities in the lab under controlled conditions before the cells were injected into the patient.

Once in the bloodstream, the newly activated cells would alert the immune system to the cancer's presence and destroy it.

"These are the things we can now do with nanotechnology," Dhar said. "If we can refine the process further, we may be able to use similar techniques against other forms of cancer as well."

Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release. Click 'references' tab above for source.
Visit our cancer / oncology section for the latest news on this subject.

Besides Dhar and Marrache, other UGA researchers on the project were Smanla Tundup and Donald A. Harn. The work was supported by a startup grant from the National Institutes of Health (P30 GM 092378) to UGA, by the UGA Office of the Vice President for Research to Dhar and by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH AI056484) to Harn.

Ex Vivo Programming of Dendritic Cells by Mitochondria-Targeted Nanoparticles to Produce Interferon-Gamma for Cancer Immunotherapy

ACS Nano, DOI: 10.1021/nn403158n

University of Georgia

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Study of melittin-based pore formation has implications for fighting cancer and bacteria

Main Category: Cancer / Oncology
Also Included In: Infectious Diseases / Bacteria / Viruses
Article Date: 17 Aug 2013 - 0:00 PDT Current ratings for:
Study of melittin-based pore formation has implications for fighting cancer and bacteria

A new study by Rice University biophysicists offers the most comprehensive picture yet of the molecular-level action of melittin, the principal toxin in bee venom. The research could aid in the development of new drugs that use a similar mechanism as melittin's to attack cancer and bacteria.

The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Melittin does its damage by penetrating the outer walls of cells and opening pores that allow the contents of the cell to escape. At low concentrations, melittin forms transient pores. At higher concentrations, the pores become stable and remain open, and at still higher doses, the cell membrane dissolves altogether.

"This strategy of opening holes in the cell membrane is employed by a great number of host-defense antimicrobial peptides, many of which have been discovered over the past 30 years," said Rice's Huey Huang, the lead investigator of the study. "People are interested in using these peptides to fight cancer and other diseases, in part because organisms cannot change the makeup of their membrane, so it would be very difficult for them to develop resistance to such drugs."

But the clinical use of the compounds is complicated by the lack of consensus about how the peptides work. For example, scientists have struggled to explain how different concentrations of melittin could yield such dramatically different effects, said Huang, Rice's Sam and Helen Worden Professor of Physics and Astronomy.

In the new study, Huang and Rice graduate student Tzu-Lin Sun partnered with colleagues Ming-Tao Lee at the National Synchrotron Radiation Research Center (NSRRC) in Hsinchu, Taiwan, and with Wei-Chin Hung at the Republic of China Military Academy in Fengshan, Taiwan. The team used a combination of experiments to zero in on the molecular activity of melittin at the "minimal inhibitory concentration" (MIC), the lowest concentration that's been shown to slow the growth of target cell populations. The MIC for melittin is a dose that results in stable pore formation, rather than complete dissolution of the membrane.

"We want to understand how pore formation works at this critical concentration, including both at the molecular scale -- what are the shapes of the pores themselves -- and the cellular scale -- how are the pores arranged and distributed over the surface of the membrane," Huang said.

To find the answer, the team correlated the results of two different types of experiments. In the first type, which was conducted at Rice, the team used confocal microscopy to film "giant unilamellar vesicles" (GUVs), synthetic membrane-enclosed structures that are about the same size as a living cell. The outer surface of the GUV became green when bound to melittin that was labeled with a fluorescent dye. The GUV was filled with a solution that contained a red fluorescent dye.

In the experiments, Sun used a needle-like glass pipette to partially aspirate and grab dye-filled GUVs, which were then placed into a melittin-infused solution beneath the microscope. Time-lapse videos of the experiments show that dye-labeled melittin begins sticking to the surface of the GUV within seconds. Within about two minutes, so much melittin binds to the outside of the GUV that the outer surface area increases by up to 4.5 percent. At a critical threshold, the expanding surface changes configuration to accommodate the increased load of melittin. At this point, pores form across the entire surface of the GUV. On the video, the bright red dye within the GUV rapidly leaks out at this critical pore-forming stage.

"The experiment shows how the MIC brings about a new physical state that results in cell death," Huang said. "By correlating these findings with other data about the molecular characteristics of the pores themselves, we get the first complete picture of the process of stable, melittin-induced pore formation."

The molecular level data came from a series of X-ray diffraction experiments performed by Lee at NSRRC. In those experiments, samples of multilayered membranes were bombarded with X-rays. Each layer contained an ordered arrangement of pores, and the stacked layers contained a 3-D lattice of regularly arranged pores. By examining how X-rays scattered away from the sample, Lee and Hung were able to determine the precise contours of the melittin-induced pores.

Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release. Click 'references' tab above for source.
Visit our cancer / oncology section for the latest news on this subject. Please use one of the following formats to cite this article in your essay, paper or report:

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karate. "Study of melittin-based pore formation has implications for fighting cancer and bacteria." Medical News Today. MediLexicon, Intl., 17 Aug. 2013. Web.
17 Aug. 2013. APA

Please note: If no author information is provided, the source is cited instead.

'Study of melittin-based pore formation has implications for fighting cancer and bacteria'

Please note that we publish your name, but we do not publish your email address. It is only used to let you know when your message is published. We do not use it for any other purpose. Please see our privacy policy for more information.

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Stop Fighting With Your Hair! 50 Humidity-Approved Styles

Brandy's touchable, effervescent style proves that tight curls don't have to be tightly controlled. Give your 'do a similar finish by mixing a few drops of hair oil with a dollop of pomade and raking the mixture through dry strands.

Try curly hairstyles on you using our Virtual Makeover tool.

View the original article here

Stop Fighting With Your Hair! 50 Humidity-Approved Styles

Brandy's touchable, effervescent style proves that tight curls don't have to be tightly controlled. Give your 'do a similar finish by mixing a few drops of hair oil with a dollop of pomade and raking the mixture through dry strands.

Try curly hairstyles on you using our Virtual Makeover tool.

View the original article here

Stop Fighting With Your Hair! 50 Humidity-Approved Styles

Brandy's touchable, effervescent style proves that tight curls don't have to be tightly controlled. Give your 'do a similar finish by mixing a few drops of hair oil with a dollop of pomade and raking the mixture through dry strands.

Try curly hairstyles on you using our Virtual Makeover tool.

View the original article here