BIRMINGHAM, England, October 27 /PRNewswire/ --

- Birmingham Children's Hospital Uses Cepheid's Xpert(TM) MRSA Test to Rapidly Identify the MRSA Infection amongst its patients

Birmingham Children's Hospital has introduced a new way of detecting the MRSA superbug amongst its most critically ill young patients.

LONDON, October 27 /PRNewswire/ -- Leading UK business communications specialists Central Telecom has retained one of the industry's most coveted awards for the fifth successive year.

Central, which employs more than 250 staff at its headquarters in Burton-on-Trent and regional offices in Guildford and the City of London, retained the title of Enterprise Converged Solution of the Year at the 7th annual Channel Network Awards held at The Hilton on Park Lane in London.

Central, a market leader in the field of convergence and IP Telephony won the title of Enterprise Convergence Solution of the Year for the fifth year in succession by designing and implementing a converged Nortel solution for Cheshire Building Society.

NORWICH, England, October 27 /PRNewswire/ -- In the wake of news that more people than ever before will face fuel poverty this winter, experts are stressing energy efficiency action as the only way homeowners will reduce their heating costs.

With an average energy bill set to climb to GBP1406 in 2009 (from GBP676 in 2005), the Energy Savings Trust is encouraging homeowners to actively think about the energy efficiency of their homes and make energy saving changes.

In support of this year's Energy Savings Week, which runs from Monday 20th to Sunday 26th October, property expert Anna Ryder Richardson has teamed up with the Energy Savings Trust and Anglian Home Improvements, to create an easy-to-follow energy efficiency guide for homeowners.

MAIDENHEAD, England, October 27 /PRNewswire/ --

- Data From Another Study Supported the use of ENBREL for up to Five Years in Ankylosing Spondylitis Patients

New safety and efficacy data for active ankylosing spondylitis (AS) patients treated with ENBREL(R) (etanercept) were presented at the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) Scientific Meeting, 24-29 October, in San Francisco, CA: (1),(2)

LONDON, October 27 /PRNewswire/ -- AboveNet Communications UK Ltd., a leading provider of fibre optic and IP transit connectivity solutions, today announced its customers will now be able to enjoy a faster, higher performance IP network connection in key European cities, with AboveNet's recently upgraded network routers. To meet demands for high bandwidth IP transit and VPN services, AboveNet has recently deployed Juniper MX960s in its European network in Paris, Frankfurt and Amsterdam.

Did the Bible's King David and his son Solomon control the copper industry in present-day southern Jordan? The possibility is raised once again by research reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Off-label prescription of a drug is generally legal, but promotion of off-label uses by a drug manufacturer is illegal. In an article in this week's PLoS Medicine, two physician researchers describe the techniques that they say drug companies use to covertly promote off-label use, even when such promotion is illegal.

Adriane Fugh-Berman (Georgetown University Medical Center) and Douglas Melnick (a preventive medicine physician working in North Hollywood, California) argue that while off-label drug use is "sometimes unavoidable" and sometimes "demonstrably beneficial," it has also been linked with serious side effects. Off-label drug use, they say, "should be undertaken with care and caution due to the uncontrolled experiment to which a patient is being subjected."

Bioniche Life Sciences Inc., a research-based, technology-driven Canadian biopharmaceutical company, today announced that Econiche(TM), the world's first vaccine designed to reduce the shedding by cattle of Escherichia coli (E. coli) O157:H7, has received full licensing approval from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA). Econiche is now available for unrestricted use by Canadian cattle producers and their veterinarians.

Econiche is a Canadian discovery developed by Bioniche Life Sciences Inc. The vaccine has the potential to significantly reduce the amount of E. coli O157 shed into the environment by beef and dairy cattle and, in turn, reduce the risk to human health.

MELBOURNE, Australia, October 27 /PRNewswire/ --

MuriGen Therapeutics today announced that its collaboration with CSL for the development of a new class of drugs that target arthritis and other inflammatory diseases has been restructured.

The collaboration was initially established in February 2006 by MuriGen Therapeutics and Zenyth Therapeutics Limited (now part of CSL Limited) and is developing therapeutic antibodies that inhibit the activity of the cytokine granulocyte colony stimulating factor (G-CSF).

The collaboration built on the discovery by Professor Ian Wicks, a clinical rheumatologist at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI) that antagonism of G-CSF or its receptor could ameliorate inflammatory conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis.

The ability to make fire millennia ago was likely a key factor in the migration of prehistoric hominids from Africa into Eurasia, a researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Institute of Archaeology believes on the basis of findings at the Gesher Benot Ya'aqov archaeological site in Israel. 

Earlier excavations there, carried out under the direction of Prof. Naama Goren-Inbar of the Institute of Archaeology, showed that the occupants of the site – who are identified as being part of the Acheulian culture that arose in Africa about 1.6 million years ago -- had mastered fire-making ability as long as 790,000 years ago. This revelation pushed back previously accepted dates for man's fire-making ability by a half-million years.