When viruses enter cells they manufacture proteins to assist in growth and replication but the body’s immune system recognizes and attacks these non-native proteins. Human Papillomavirus (HPV)(1), which causes several types of cancer but is particularly associated with cervical cancer, has developed sneaky ways of hiding in the body, but researchers at the University of Leeds have found that its ability to trick the body’s first line of defence leaves it vulnerable to counter-espionage from a second defence system.

Professor Eric Blair(2) of the University’s Faculty of Biological Sciences and Dr Graham Cook(3) from the Leeds Institute for Molecular Medicine have been specifically looking at one of the proteins produced by HPV, called E7, and have discovered that it suppresses markers on the cell surface, making infected cells much less visible to T cells, one of the body’s key defense systems.

"March Madness", the annual tournament in college basketball to determine the national champion, impacts more than just sports fans. College basketball teams that make this year’s cut for the 'Sweet 16' may boost the number of students applying to their schools by as much as 3 percent next year, while the winner of the tournament, may see a 7 percent to 8 percent jump in applications, according to a new study.

Jaren Pope, assistant professor of agricultural and applied economics at Virginia Tech and his brother Devin Pope, an assistant professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, have co-authored a paper in Southern Economic Journal that finds a link between college sports success and college admissions around the country.

Experts estimate that $9 in productivity, health and other benefits are returned for every dollar invested in installing toilets for people in countries that today are off-track in meeting the UN Millennium Development Goal (MDG) for sanitation.

Achieving the sanitation goal – to simply halve the number of people without access to a toilet by 2015 – would cost $38 billion, less than 1% of annual world military spending. That investment, they say, would yield $347 billion worth of benefits – much of it related to higher productivity and improved health.

According to UN figures, meeting the sanitation MDG target would add 3.2 billion annual working days worldwide. Universal coverage would add more than four times as many working days.

A recent survey by the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and Harris Interactive, as part of their ongoing series, Debating Health: Election 2008, finds that Americans are generally split on the issue of whether the United States has the best health care system in the world (45% believe the U.S. has the best system; 39% believe other countries have better systems; 15% don’t know or refused to answer) and that there is a significant divide along party lines.

Nearly seven-in-ten Republicans (68%) believe the U.S. health care system is the best in the world, compared to just three in ten (32%) Democrats and four in ten (40%) Independents who feel the same way.

A polyphenols-rich diet keeps the heart younger, according to a study by the FLORA Project, a European Commission funded research studying the effects of flavonoids, a variety of polyphenols, on human health.

"The biological and protective activities of various flavonoids have been extensively studied in vitro, on cell- based assays," says Marie-Claire Toufektsian, leading author of the study. "Nevertheless, this kind of approach has a major limitation: it is extremely difficult to assess precisely the nature of all flavonoids absorbed following consumption of plants present in a given meal. In other words, laboratory cultured cells alone are not sufficient to study a complex mechanism such as that of absorption of food flavonoids. That is why we need to turn attention on other features. The most obvious solution appeared to be to study the effects of this kind of polyphenols on experimental animals. The turning point started from plants: those rich in flavonoids made the case of researchers."

Healthy men who report lower levels of the nutrient folate in their diets have higher rates of chromosomal abnormalities in their sperm, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Women of child-bearing age are encouraged to maintain adequate levels of folate in their diet, but the new findings, to be published Thursday, March 20, in the journal Human Reproduction, provide evidence that what men eat may also affect reproductive health.