HEALTH BULLETIN

Jamaica Reach to Recovery's breast cancer run

Jamaica Reach to Recovery, an affiliate of the Jamaica Cancer Society, will be hosting its annual fund-raising Breast Cancer 5K Run/Walk on Saturday, starting at 7 a.m., at Stadium East in St Andrew.

Entry forms are available online at www.jamaicacancersociety.org or at The Jamaica Cancer Society, 16 Lady Musgrave Road, Kingston 5. If you are unable to participate on Saturday, your gifts, which would go directly to assisting the medical treatment of breast cancer survivors, can be sent to Jamaica Reach to Recovery, 16 Lady Musgrave Road, or call 978-0375.

All are invited to participate. Every participant is a partner in this journey, and every step counts towards helping Jamaica Reach to Recovery carry out life-saving Breast Cancer initiatives.

Naps help preschoolers with memory - study

Children who took midday naps an average of a little longer than an hour performed better on a task that day and the next day than did the kids who didn't nap, scientists reported recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

They also found that the non-nappers couldn't make up the deficit with night-time sleep.

"With increased curriculum demands and taxpayer pressure, classroom nap opportunities are becoming devalued," the researchers wrote. These children are in the process of growing from babies who slept off and on all day to children who sleep primarily at night.

"We offer scientific evidence that the midday naps for preschoolers support the academic goals of early education," lead researcher Rebecca Spencer, a research psychologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said in a statement.

Napping should be considered for helping children who have learning delays, the scientists said.

And they concluded, "Although curriculum demands for preschool classrooms are increasing, the benefit of the sleep on learning warrants preservation of the nap opportunity."

Cats hold key to AIDS vaccine for humans?

Researchers may be one step closer to creating an AIDS vaccine as new study findings suggest an immune response against a cat AIDS virus protein is the key to developing a vaccine for humans.

"One major reason why there has been no successful HIV vaccine to date is that we do not know which parts of HIV to combine to produce the most effective vaccine," said Janet Yamamoto, a professor of retroviral immunology at the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine and the study's corresponding author, in a news release

The scientists are working on "a T-cell-based HIV vaccine that activates an immune response in T cells from HIV-positive individuals against the feline AIDS virus," according to the news release.

"T-cell peptides are small pieces of protein that can prompt the body's T cells to recognise viral peptides on infected cells and attack them."

However, not all HIV peptides can be successfully used in vaccine components.

"In humans, some peptides stimulate immune responses, which either enhance HIV infection or have no effect at all, while others may have anti-HIV activities that are lost when the virus changes or mutates to avoid such immunity. So, we are looking for those viral peptides in the cat AIDS virus that can induce anti-HIV T-cell activities and do not mutate," she added.

Study collaborator Dr Jay A. Levy, a professor of medicine at UCSF, noted, "We want to stress that our findings do not mean that the feline AIDS virus infects humans, but rather that the cat virus resembles the human virus sufficiently so that this cross-reaction can be observed."