Writing in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, a team of researchers says that testing hair from Asian monkeys living close to people may provide early warnings of toxic threats to humans and wildlife.
In parts of South and Southeast Asia, macaques and people are synanthropic, which means they share the same ecological niche. They drink from identical water sources, breathe the same air, share food sources, and play on the same ground.
"Macaques are similar to humans anatomically, physiologically and behaviorally," said the senior author on the study, Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel, a senior research scientist at the National Primate Research Center at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Children whose parents refuse to vaccinate them are nine times more likely to get chickenpox compared to fully immunized children, according to a new study led by a vaccine research team at Kaiser Permanente Colorado's Institute for Health Research. The study was published today in the January issue of the journal Archives of Pediatrics&Adolescent Medicine.
To assess the risk of varicella vaccine refusal, researchers reviewed the electronic health records of 86,993 children between the ages of 12 months and 8 years who were members of Kaiser Permanente Colorado between 1998 and 2008. First, investigators confirmed which children
had varicella infections. Next, they verified whether parents had refused some or all varicella vaccines for their children.
