How often do you wash your towel? Some people wash once a week, while some, once a year. The towel is a fertile breeding ground for millions of microbes, especially those found on human skin and on the gut. No wonder the towel is one of the objects that facilitate fecal-oral contamination (literally connecting the two ends of the gut). Worse still, most people keep towels in the bathroom (near the toilet). Every flush of the toilet sends mist with millions of microbes, ranging from H.pylori, salmonella and other deadly bacteria and viruses. When you wash your hands ready for a meal, and dry them with your body towel, there's high chance you are directly ingesting your fecal matter, or, if in a shared lavatory, someone else's faeces. Unless cleaned well, viruses such as human papillomavirus (causes warts, anal cancer and cervical cancer) can be transmitted when towels are shared with infected individuals. So, what to do? 1. Launder towels once a week. 2. Use hot water and det...
Cancer is cruel: sometimes, life-saving surgery to cut out a tumour may be the very thing that spreads it to other parts of the body. But this spreading process can be hampered by giving a compound that is already used to treat heart failure. Most people who die from cancer do so because their tumour has spread, or metastasised. Yet most of today's cancer drugs don't stop metastasis, they just kill any cancer cells they come into contact with. The hope is that the compound could be part of a new class of drugs designed to block tumour spread . "This could be a very important advance," says Andrew Reynolds of the Institute of Cancer Research in London. Cancers are much easier to treat if they have not yet spread. A few years ago, a team led by Takashi Nojiri of Osaka University in Japan was exploring whether giving a drug called atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP) to patients before lung cancer surgery could reduce subsequent heart problems. ANP is a signalling molecule found in the heart and has been used as a treatment for heart failure in Japan for 20 years. The approach worked – and it also had another benefit. Two years later, 91 per cent of people treated with ANP were free from secondary tumours, compared with 75 per cent of a control group. You shall not pass Experiments in mice revealed that the molecule makes blood vessel walls less sticky, preventing circulating cancer cells from adhering to them and pushing their way through to form new tumours. Because ANP affects the blood vessels rather than the cancer cells, it could be used for all kinds of tumours, says Nojiri, who is working with the Japanese drug company Shionogi to turn ANP into a cancer drug. As in Nojiri's study, if given before surgery, it could be used to reduce the chance of the operation "seeding" tumours elsewhere in the body. It is thought that cutting into the tumour sometimes lets cancer cells escape. ANP could also be used as a general anti- metastasis drug, given whether or not people need cancer surgery. Nojiri speculates that the presence of natural ANP in the heart might explain why secondary tumours rarely form there.
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