SÃO PAULO — Is Brazil destined to be the fattest country in the world? Some experts say it could be, and as soon as 2030.
health
RIO DE JANEIRO — A crucial element in the fight against insect-borne diseases like dengue fever or malaria is the use of insecticides to kill the bugs that transmit the illness. However, many communities that are affected by dengue fever are inaccessible to heavy-duty spraying equipment.
Engineers in Brazil have come up with one possible solution. It is called Motofog: a motorbike-mounted mobile insecticide sprayer that can reach those hard-to-get-to areas.
As well as a string of locations across Brazil, Motofog is also now being used in countries in Africa and the Caribbean.
Listen to the BBC World Service radio version of this report:
⇒ Watch the TV report here.
RIO DE JANEIRO — Exploring feelings through playing different roles is recognised as helping people with mental health problems. And the theory has led one doctor to bring Shakespeare to Rio de Janeiro.
“Ser ou não ser, eis a questão!” – “To be, or not to be. That is the question!” bellows a rugged, masked Hamlet, against the stunning backdrop of the Brazilian city’s golden Ipanema beach.
His fellow actors begin chanting Shakespeare’s famous words, before setting off in giddy skips, their faces in theatrical grimaces, around the circular stage. These performers are not part of a professional theatre company.
They are patients from the Nise da Silveira Psychiatric Hospital – many have diagnoses of severe schizophrenia and chronic psychosis.
Anadolu Agency
SÃO PAULO — Seven months into her pregnancy, Rosineide Moreira chose her first child’s birthday.
An hour after surgeons sliced painlessly into her, the 31-year-old chemical engineer from São Paulo was cradling her newborn daughter, Mariana, as planned — on 5 January 2015.
“We set a date that was convenient for both my husband and me,” Moreira said. “The doctor gave me the option of a natural birth, but we weighed up the pros and cons and decided we’d go with the c-section.”
Moreira’s story is not uncommon in Brazil, particularly in the country’s private health care network used by more than a quarter of the population, where 84.6 percent of babies are delivered by caesarean.
BBC World News
SÃO PAULO — Despite 25 years of research, a vaccine against HIV remains stubbornly out of scientists’ reach. There are, however, around 30 HIV vaccines in clinic trials around the world, and many others at different stages of development, both building on past experience and experimenting with new concepts.
Scientists at the University of São Paulo in Brazil have been working on their HIVBr18 vaccine since 2002. The team claims their vaccine is the only one in development which aims to trigger CD4+ T-cells — special immune system helper cells vital to coordinating the body’s immune defence system.
As part of a BBC Health Check special on HIV, our reporter in São Paulo, Ben Tavener, has been finding out how a vaccine in Brazil is progressing.
Anadolu Agency
SÃO PAULO – The latest in a series of protests against the World Cup in Brazil’s largest city, São Paulo, marched through the city center Wednesday evening in a bid to draw attention to problems with the country’s public health system.
Despite pouring rain, around 400 people gathered for the start of the fifth protest in a series, held under the banner of Não Vai Ter Copa (“There Will Be No World Cup”) at the world-famous São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) on the city’s central Avenida Paulista business avenue.
Rhesus monkeys at the Butantan Institute, São Paulo, are involved in the development of USP’s HIV vaccine. (Photo: Ben Tavener)
Scientists from the University of São Paulo (USP) say that a preliminary test on primates given a experimental anti-HIV vaccine being developed by the university has produced unexpectedly good results.
The study on rhesus monkeys gave three separate doses of the vaccine, prepared by USP scientists at the Faculty of Medicine, at varying intervals since last November at the university’s Butantan Institute, a world leader in pioneering vaccines and anti-venoms.
The immunising component of the vaccine has been developed and patented by the leading Brazilian university.
“We tested the immune response of the [monkeys] and the results were excellent,” lead vaccine developer Edécio Cunha Neto was quoted by Folha de S.Paulo newspaper as saying.
The results surprised scientists by how intense the response was in primates, after more muted results from tests on rats. Vaccine responses are usually expected to be lower in primates than in rodents, but in this case the primate responses were up to ten times higher.
HIV vaccine for humans?
The scientists’ goal is to create a safe and effective human vaccine that will immunise people against the virus which, if not kept at bay by antiretroviral drugs, leads to AIDS.
Figures from the World Health Organization says AIDS killed around 1.6 million people worldwide in 2012, and that 35 million people are currently living with HIV/AIDS.
Researchers developing the vaccine since 2002 first looked at human patients whose own immune systems were capable of recognising and fighting HIV, allowing them to work out which peptide components of the virus were triggering a response from the body.
This breakthrough gave rise to a targeted DNA vaccine, which has been tested on rodents modified to replicate human immune responses, and now on primates.
Researchers are looking to put the vaccine technology into a host virus which would be unable to infect the individual with HIV but would give greater immunisation.
The next stage for the vaccine will see it given to 28 of the rhesus monkeys to compare immune responses depending on a set of variables over two years. This development phase on monkeys is expected to last until 2016.
Financial and ethical cost
The first dose of the HIV vaccine was given to the healthy primates at the beginning of November 2013 in conjunctive with a flu-like virus, which scientists say catalyses a greater immune response.
The enclosure housing the monkeys at the Butantan Institute has been subject to tighter security since the beginning of trials due to increased activity by animal rights campaigners, who have questioned why the tests have to be carried out on primates.
However, researchers say that the final human destination for the vaccine means primates must be used in its development, given their genetic closeness to humans, but have stressed that the animals taking part in the experiments are well treated.
Eventually it is hoped to move the study onto a human testing phase, although the university is still looking for private investors as such a phase is expected to cost some R$250 million (US$105 million at today’s rate) to develop.
The study has so far cost around R$1 million (US$419,000), reports say.
Other HIV vaccines are in different phases of development across the world, and hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent annually on this medical holy grail.
(Report written for Anadolu Agency)
Ben Tavener 