This Just In

Welcome Back The elephant population of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Virunga National Park, which was 4,300 in the 1960s, plummeted to 265 in 2003. But the number of elephants has now grown to 340, announced the Wildlife Conservation Society in June 2006. Scientists attribute the recovery to the efforts of the park guards; they are paid just $1 per month by the government, but their salaries have been raised to $30 per month through support from UNESCO. Protecting wildlife is a dangerous profession: Poachers have killed more than 100 guards since 1996.

Don’t Flush Sewage treatment officials in the San Francisco Bay area reported in May 2006 that over-the-counter and prescription medications flushed into their treatment systems are ending up in the bay. That’s because sewage plants are designed to handle organic and biodegradable waste, not medicines. “Unfortunately, the advice of the past was ‘Dump it down the toilet.’ Now we’re trying to turn that around,” says Phil Bobel, a spokesman for the Bay Area Pollution Prevention Group. The group held community-wide Safe Medicine Disposal Days in May. Meanwhile, Los Angeles has started its own “No Drugs Down the Drain” program, accepting meds at hazardous-waste drop-off points. We hope other cities will follow.

Extra-Strength Danger Just eight extra-strength acetaminophen tablets (such as Tylenol) taken daily for two weeks can result in signs of liver damage, reports a University of Southern California study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on July 5, 2006. Blood tests of almost 40 percent of participants put on the pain relief regimen showed liver abnormalities. Eight tablets contain 4 grams of acetaminophen—the maximum recommended dose. “This drug has a narrow safety window, so I would not advise exceeding 4 grams a day,” says lead researcher Neil Kaplowitz, MD.

Pomegranate Power Pomegranate juice may help patients live longer after treatment for prostate cancer, according to a study conducted by the University of California at Los Angeles, published in July. Taken daily, an 8-ounce glass of the juice slowed the rate at which patients’ rising prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels doubled—from an average of 15 months to 54 months—thus slowing the progression of their disease. Whether pomegranate juice will help healthy men reduce their risk remains to be seen. “It is much more difficult to prove that something prevents cancer from occurring than to show that the same thing affects a cancer that has already developed,” says study leader Allan J. Pantuck, MD. “It’s worth investigating.”

Safety Measures? The number of lab animals used in Europe will soon increase, predicts The Economist of London. That’s the downside to the otherwise well received REACH legislation (Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals) by the European Union requiring toxicity tests on thousands of household and industrial chemicals. Some 30,000 chemicals that were approved for use before 1981 must now be tested. More animals will be used as subjects, though the European Commission hopes to find alternatives to animal testing wherever possible. The exact number of animals to be involved is not known yet, but some estimates put it between one and three million.

Unhappy Hunting Reducing starvation-level populations of deer, elk and other animals through hunting neither works nor helps manage disease, found a University of Georgia study published in the August 22, 2006 issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. Although hunting wild animals to cull population is a popular method to reduce disease transmission in the US, Great Britain and Europe, researchers from the university’s Institute of Ecology found that it does not take into account the extent to which surviving animals compensate—and often overcompensate—by reproducing in larger numbers. When hunting was used in Europe to control the spread of swine fever, the number of infected animals actually increased by 25 percent.

Better Now Than Never It’s never too late to begin an exercise program, say researchers from Germany’s University of Heidelberg. In a study of nearly 800 adults published in the July 19, 2006 online edition of the journal Heart, the researchers found subjects who had exercised throughout their lives were less susceptible to coronary heart disease than those who had not. But the study also showed that participants who said they had only begun regular exercise after the age of 40 were 55 percent less likely to develop heart disease than those who had never exercised. Shifting from “a sedentary to an active physical activity pattern, even if initiated at older age” helps, the researchers wrote.

Handle with Care Exposure to everyday levels of pesticides can slightly increase a person’s risk of Parkinson’s disease, according to a study by the Harvard School of Public Health published in July 2006. More than 143,000 participants exposed to pesticides (even at levels used in backyard gardening) had a greater incidence of the illness than those who reported no exposure. The normal risk for Parkinson’s is about 3 percent, and exposure to pesticides may raise that to about 5 percent, says study leader Alberto Ascherio, PhD. However, the causes of Parkinson’s are not fully understood, and the levels of exposure of study participants were not quantified. For now,
Ascherio recommends “taking extra care in handling pesticides,” for the risk “may be higher
for some products, and we still do not know
which they are.”