By STEPH YIN Neanderthals and modern humans diverged from a common ancestor about half a million years ago. Living in colder climes in Eurasia, Neanderthals evolved barrel chests, large skulls and strong hands. In Africa, modern humans acquired shorter faces, a prominent chin and slender limbs. Then, roughly 50,000 years ago, the two species encountered one another and interbred, as modern humans spread out of Africa. The legacy of this interbreeding has been the subject of much scientific inquiry in the past few years. Today, up to 4 percent of the genes of non-Africans are Neanderthal in origin.. These may have influenced a diverse range of traits, including keratin production, disease risk and the propensity to sneeze after eating dark chocolate. Where did all the other Neanderthal DNA go? Why did a Neanderthal-human hybrid not prevail? Two recent studies converge on an explanation. They suggest the answer comes down to different population sizes between Neanderthals and modern humans, and this principle of population genetics: In small populations, natural selection is less effective. “Neanderthals have this small population over hundreds of thousands of years, presumably because they’re living in very rough conditions,” said Graham Coop, a genetics professor at the University of California, Davis, and an author of one of the studies, published Tuesday in PLOS Genetics. As a result, Neanderthals were more inbred than modern humans and accumulated more mutations that have a slightly adverse effect, such as increasing one’s risk of disease, but do not prevent one from reproducing (and thus, passing such mutations along). © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 22845 - Posted: 11.09.2016

Ian Sample Science editor US military scientists have used electrical brain stimulators to enhance mental skills of staff, in research that aims to boost the performance of air crews, drone operators and others in the armed forces’ most demanding roles. The successful tests of the devices pave the way for servicemen and women to be wired up at critical times of duty, so that electrical pulses can be beamed into their brains to improve their effectiveness in high pressure situations. The brain stimulation kits use five electrodes to send weak electric currents through the skull and into specific parts of the cortex. Previous studies have found evidence that by helping neurons to fire, these minor brain zaps can boost cognitive ability. The technology is seen as a safer alternative to prescription drugs, such as modafinil and ritalin, both of which have been used off-label as performance enhancing drugs in the armed forces. But while electrical brain stimulation appears to have no harmful side effects, some experts say its long-term safety is unknown, and raise concerns about staff being forced to use the equipment if it is approved for military operations. Others are worried about the broader implications of the science on the general workforce because of the advance of an unregulated technology. © 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Sleep
Link ID: 22844 - Posted: 11.08.2016

By Simon Oxenham Isy Suttie has felt “head squeezing” since she was young. The comedian, best known for playing Dobbie in the BBC sitcom Peep Show, is one of many people who experience autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) – a tingly feeling often elicited by certain videos or particular mundane interactions. Growing up, Suttie says she had always assumed everyone felt it too. Not everyone feels it, but Suttie is by no means alone. On Reddit, a community of more than 100,000 members share videos designed to elicit the pleasurable sensation. The videos, often described as “whisper porn”, typically consist of people role-playing routine tasks, whispering softly into a microphone or making noises by crinkling objects such as crisp packets. The most popular ASMR YouTuber, “Gentle Whispering”, has over 250 million views. To most of us, the videos might seem strange or boring, but the clips frequently garner hundreds of thousands of views. These videos often mimic real-life situations that provoke ASMR in susceptible people. Suttie says her strongest real-world triggers occur during innocuous interactions with strangers, like talking about the weather – “it’s almost as if the more superficial the subject the better,” Suttie says. She feels the sensation particularly strongly when someone brushes past her. For Suttie, the feelings are so powerful that she often feels floored by them, and they even overcome pain and emotional distress. During a trip to the dentist, she still experiences the pleasurable tingles when the assistant brushes past her, she says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 22843 - Posted: 11.08.2016

Anesthesia during early childhood surgery poses little risk for intelligence and academics later on, the largest study of its kind suggests. The results were found in research on nearly 200,000 Swedish teens. School grades were only marginally lower in kids who'd had one or more common surgeries with anesthesia before age 4, compared with those who'd had no anesthesia during those early years. Whether the results apply to sicker children who have riskier surgeries with anesthesia is not known. But the researchers from Sweden's Karolinska Institute and doctors elsewhere called the new results reassuring, given experiments in young animals linking anesthesia drugs with brain damage. Previous studies of children have been relatively small, with conflicting results. The new findings, published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics, don't provide a definitive answer and other research is ongoing. The study authors and other doctors say the harms from postponing surgery must be considered when evaluating any potential risks from anesthesia in young children. The most common procedures in the study were hernia repairs; ear, nose or throat surgeries; and abdominal operations. The researchers say the operations likely lasted an hour or less. The study did not include children with other serious health problems and those who had more complex or risky operations, including brain, heart and cancer surgeries. The research involved about 33,500 teens who'd had surgery before age 4 and nearly 160,000 who did not. ©2016 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Sleep
Link ID: 22842 - Posted: 11.08.2016

By Jessica Boddy Glasses may be trendy now, but for centuries they were the stodgy accessories of the elderly worn only for failing eyes. Now, new research suggests that aging bonobos might also benefit from a pair of specs—not for reading, but for grooming. Many older bonobos groom their partners at arm’s length instead of just centimeters away, in the same way that older humans often hold newspapers farther out to read. This made researchers think the apes might also be losing their close-up vision as they age. To see whether their hypothesis held, the researchers took photos of 14 different bonobos of varying ages as they groomed one another (above) and measured the distance between their hands and faces. By analyzing how this so-called grooming distance varied from ape to ape, the researchers found that grooming distance increased exponentially with age, they report today in Current Biology. And because both humans and bonobos shows signs of farsightedness around age 40, deterioration in human eyes might not be the mere result of staring at screens and small text, the scientists say. Rather, it might be a deep-rooted natural trait reaching back to a common ancestor. © 2016 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 22841 - Posted: 11.08.2016

By Felicity Muth Kirsty Graham is a PhD student at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, who works on gestural communication of chimpanzees and bonobos in Uganda and DRCongo. I recently asked her some questions about the work that she does and some exciting recent findings of hers about how these animals communicate. How did you become interested in communication, and specifically gestures? Languages are fascinating – the diversity, the culture, the learning – and during undergrad, I became interested in the origins of our language ability. I went to Quest University Canada (a small liberal arts university) and learned that I could combine my love of languages and animals and being outdoors! Other great apes don’t have language in the way that humans do, but studying different aspects of communication, such as gestures, may reveal how language evolved. Although my interest really started from an interest in languages, once you get so deep into studying other species you become excited about their behaviour for its own sake. In the long run, it would be nice to piece together how language evolved, but for now I’m starting with a very small piece of the puzzle – bonobo gestures. How do you study gestures in non-human primates? There are a few different approaches to studying gestures: in the wild or in captivity; through observation or with experiments; studying one gesture in detail or looking at the whole repertoire. I chose to observe wild bonobos and look at their whole repertoire. Since not much is known about bonobo gestural communication, this seemed like a good starting point. During my PhD, I spent 12 months at Wamba (Kyoto University’s research site) in the DRCongo. I filmed the bonobos, anticipating the beginning of social interactions so that I could record the gestures that they use. Then I spent a long time watching the videos, finding gestures, and coding information about the gestures. © 2016 Scientific American

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 22840 - Posted: 11.07.2016

By LISA SANDERS, M.D. Yesterday we challenged Well readers to take on the case of a 63-year-old artist who, over the course of several months, developed excruciating headaches, along with changes in his personality, his thinking, even in the way he painted. We provided you with some of the doctor’s notes and medical imaging results that led the doctor who finally made the diagnosis in the right direction. After an extensive evaluation, that doctor asked a single question that led him to make the diagnosis. We asked Well readers to figure out the question the doctor asked and the diagnosis it suggested. It must have been a tough case — or else you were all too worried about the coming election to rise to the challenge — because we got just over 200 responses, fewer than usual. Of those, only six of you figured out the right diagnosis, and only three of you got the question right as well. Despite that, I was very impressed by the thinking of even those who didn’t come up with the right diagnosis. Many of you thought about environmental factors like his recent retirement and his exposure to possible toxins from his painting, and that kind of thinking was, in my opinion, the very essence of thinking like a doctor. Strong work, all of you. The question the doctor asked that led him to the correct diagnosis was: Can you hear your heartbeat in your ears? The patient could. And that suggested the diagnosis: A dural-arteriovenous fistula, or DAVF © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 22839 - Posted: 11.07.2016

By Esther Crawley We know almost nothing about chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). And yet it causes misery and suffering for hundreds of thousands of people, including many children. One in a hundred teenagers in the UK miss a day a week or more of school because of it, and 2 per cent are probably missing out on the normal stuff that teenagers do. Those I see in my clinic are sick with disabling fatigue, memory and concentration problems, and terrible pain. On average, they miss a year of school, on top of which mothers give up work and siblings suffer. Yet progress on this illness is being hampered by controversy, with some people disputing both its cause and treatment. Some still dismiss it as a non-illness; others decry attempts to treat it with psychological therapy. The result is that few patients are offered treatment and there is almost no research on the condition. This illness is more common than leukaemia and more disabling than childhood arthritis, but few specialists treat it. How have we arrived at a position where the biggest reason for teenagers to miss school long-term is rarely studied and society allows so few to receive treatment? Part of the difficulty is that CFS/ME is not a single illness. Both children and adults have different clusters of symptoms that may represent different illnesses with different biology, requiring different treatments. This may explain why treatments only work for some – and is a problem for those trying to develop them and for people who don’t get better. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Depression; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 22838 - Posted: 11.07.2016

By Neuroskeptic A new paper could prompt a rethink of a basic tenet of neuroscience. It is widely believed that the motor cortex, a region of the cerebral cortex, is responsible for producing movements, by sending instructions to other brain regions and ultimately to the spinal cord. But according to neuroscientists Christian Laut Ebbesen and colleagues, the truth may be the opposite: the motor cortex may equally well suppress movements. Ebbesen et al. studied the vibrissa motor cortex (VMC) of the rat, an area which is known to be involved in the movement of the whiskers. First, they determined that neurons within the VMC are more active during periods when the rat’s whiskers are resting: for instance, like this: whiskerThe existence of cells whose firing negatively correlates with movement is interesting, but by itself it doesn’t prove that much. Maybe those cells are just doing something else than controlling movement? However, Ebbesen et al. went on to show that electrical stimulation of the VMC caused whiskers to stop moving, while applying a drug (lidocaine) to suppress VMC activity caused the rat’s whiskers to whisk harder. Ebbesen et al. go on to say that the inhibitory role of VMC may extend to other regions of the rat motor cortex, and to other movements beyond the whiskers: Rats can perform long sequences of skilled, learned motor behaviors after motor cortex ablation, but motor cortex is required for them to learn a task of behavioral inhibition (they must learn to postpone lever presses)35. When swimming, intact rats hold their forelimbs still and swim with only their hindlimbs. After forelimb motor cortex lesions, however, rats swim with their forelimbs also36.

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 22837 - Posted: 11.07.2016

By Solomon Israel, A May-December romance brings benefits for young female gray jays mated to older males, according to new Canadian research. The paper, published this month in the journal Animal Behaviour, used almost four decades of data on a marked population of gray jays in Ontario's Algonquin Park to study how the birds adjust their reproductive habits in response to changes in temperature and other conditions. Gray jays, also known as Canada jays or whisky jacks, don't migrate south in the winter, instead living year-round in boreal forests across Canada and the northern U.S. They manage this feat of survival by caching food all over their large, permanent habitats, then retrieving it during the winter months. The small, fluffy birds take advantage of those winter supplies to nest much earlier than most other birds, laying eggs between late February and March. Gray jays don't migrate during the winter, instead relying on hidden caches of food to feed themselves and their offspring. (Dan Strickland) The researchers found that female gray jays that laid their eggs earlier in the season had the most reproductive success, with a higher survival rate for offspring. ©2016 CBC/Radio-Canada

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 22836 - Posted: 11.07.2016

By Marian Vidal-Fernandez, Ana Nuevo-Chiquero, The title of this article might trigger self-satisfied smiles among first-borns, and some concerns among the rest of us. Many studies show children born earlier in the family enjoy better wages and more education, but until now we didn’t really know why. Our recently published findings are the first to suggest advantages of first born siblings start very early in life—around zero to three years old! We observe parents changing their behaviour as new children are born, and offering less cognitive stimulation to children of higher birth order. It now seems clear that for those born and raised in high-income countries such as the United States, the UK and Norway, earlier-born children enjoy higher wages and education as adults—known as the “birth order effect”. Comparing two siblings, the greater the difference in their birth order, the greater the relative benefit to the older child. However, to date we’ve had no evidence that explains where such differences come from. We know it’s not an effect of family size, because the effect remains when comparing siblings within the same family and families with the same number of children. While it makes sense that parents earn more money and gain experience as they get older and have more children, they also need to divide their economic resources and attention among any children that arrive after the first born. We wondered where in childhood these differences began, and what the cause or causes might be. © 2016 Scientific American,

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 22835 - Posted: 11.05.2016

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER and AARON E. CARROLL New parents get a lot of advice. It comes from breast-feeding “lactivists” and Ferberizers, attachment parents and anti-helicopter ones. It’s not enough to keep babies fed, rested and changed — they also need to learn grit and sign language. So when the American Academy of Pediatrics recently issued new infant sleep guidelines — highlighting a recommendation that babies sleep in their parents’ rooms for at least six months but ideally a full year — some parents despaired. The academy said that sharing a room could cut babies’ chance of dying in their sleep by “up to 50 percent.” Suffocation, strangulation or sudden infant death syndrome, known as SIDS, kills 3,500 babies a year in this country. The academy’s previous recommendations — place babies on their backs to sleep, without loose bedding, in their own cribs — have been an undisputed success in helping to cut SIDS deaths by 53 percent from 1992 to 2001, but SIDS is still the largest cause of infant mortality in the United States after the first month of life. Yet the recommendation drew skepticism from some doctors, who argued that a close look at the evidence showed that the benefits of room-sharing didn’t always justify its costs to parents, who would have to sacrifice privacy, sex and, above all, sleep. Sharing a room can make breast-feeding and bonding easier. It has historically been common around the world, and many parents do it by choice or necessity. But the evidence is not conclusive, and doctors need to understand the trade-offs before demanding that parents follow the recommendation. Doing so will be part of making parenthood possible in a society in which most parents work, yet receive less government support than in any other industrialized country. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 22834 - Posted: 11.05.2016

Laura Sanders A protein that can switch shapes and accumulate inside brain cells helps fruit flies form and retrieve memories, a new study finds. Such shape-shifting is the hallmark move of prions — proteins that can alternate between two forms and aggregate under certain conditions. In fruit flies’ brain cells, clumps of the prionlike protein called Orb2 stores long-lasting memories, report scientists from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, Mo. Figuring out how the brain forms and calls up memories may ultimately help scientists devise ways to restore that process in people with diseases such as Alzheimer’s. The new finding, described online November 3 in Current Biology, is “absolutely superb,” says neuroscientist Eric Kandel of Columbia University. “It fills in a lot of missing pieces.” People possess a version of the Orb2 protein called CPEB, a commonality that suggests memory might work in a similar way in people, Kandel says. It’s not yet known whether people rely on the prion to store long-term memories. “We can’t be sure, but it’s very suggestive,” Kandel says. When neuroscientist Kausik Si and colleagues used a genetic trick to inactivate Orb2 protein, male flies were worse at remembering rejection. These lovesick males continued to woo a nonreceptive female long past when they should have learned that courtship was futile. In different tests, these flies also had trouble remembering that a certain odor was tied to food. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2016. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Prions
Link ID: 22833 - Posted: 11.04.2016

By Greg Miller In the mid-19th century, some European doctors became fascinated with a plant-derived drug recently imported from India. Cannabis had been used as medicine for millennia in Asia, and physicians were keen to try it with their patients. No less an authority than Sir John Russell Reynolds, the house physician to Queen Victoria and later president of the Royal College of Physicians in London, extolled the medical virtues of cannabis in The Lancet in 1890. “In almost all painful maladies I have found Indian hemp by far the most useful of drugs,” Reynolds wrote. Like other doctors of his day, Reynolds thought cannabis might help reduce the need for opium-based painkillers, with their potential for abuse and overdose. “The bane of many opiates and sedatives is this, that the relief of the moment, the hour, or the day, is purchased at the expense of to-morrow’s misery,” he wrote. “In no one case to which I have administered Indian hemp, have I witnessed any such results.” More than 125 years later, the misery caused by opioids is clearer than ever, and there are new hints that cannabis could be a viable alternative. Some clinical studies suggest that the plant may have medical value, especially for difficult-to-treat pain conditions. The liberalization of marijuana laws in the United States has also allowed researchers to compare overdoses from painkiller prescriptions and opioids in states that permit medical marijuana versus those that don’t. Yet following up on those hints isn’t easy. Clinical studies face additional hurdles because the plant is listed on Schedule I, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA’s) list of the most dangerous drugs. © 2016 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 22832 - Posted: 11.04.2016

Ramin Skibba A large, multi-lab replication study has found no evidence to validate one of psychology’s textbook findings: the idea that people find cartoons funnier if they are surreptitiously induced to smile. But an author of the original report — published nearly three decades ago — says that the new analysis has shortcomings, and may not represent a direct replication of his work. In 1988, Fritz Strack, a psychologist now at the University of Würzburg, Germany, and colleagues found that people who held a pen between their teeth, which induces a smile, rated cartoons as funnier than did those who held a pen between their lips, which induced a pout, or frown1. Strack chose cartoons from Gary Larson's classic 1980s series, The Far Side. Strack’s study has been quoted as a classic demonstration of what’s known as the ‘facial feedback hypothesis’ — the idea that facial expressions can influence a person’s own emotional state. The paper has been cited more than a thousand times, and has been followed by other research into facial feedback. In 2011, for example, researchers reported that injections of Botox, which affects the muscles of facial expression, dampen emotional responses2. But as part of a growing trend to reproduce famous psychology findings, a group of scientists revisited the experiment. They describe the collective results of 17 experiments, with a total of nearly 1,900 participants, in a paper published on 26 October in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science3. © 2016 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 22831 - Posted: 11.04.2016

By Dan Hurley The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed 89 cases of the paralyzing disease in the United States through September. A 6-year-old boy suspected of having AFM died in Seattle on Sunday, the first death believed to be caused by the disease. One of the drugs in development, pocapavir, was used briefly on a few patients during a 2014 outbreak of AFM under a compassionate-use exception that allows extremely sick patients to be given unapproved drugs without the usual kinds of placebo-controlled trials required by the Food and Drug Administration. “There were a couple of kids who got pocapavir in the Colorado outbreaks,” said Benjamin Greenberg, a neurologist who has treated children with AFM at the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas. “It had relatively weak but measurable impact on viral replication. A larger study would definitely be warranted. We'll take anything we can get.” Although the CDC says no cause has been conclusively linked to AFM, many researchers suspect a family of viruses known as enteroviruses. “I have been studying enteroviruses for 40 years now,” said John Modlin, deputy director of the polio eradication program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “If I had a child with acute flaccid myelitis, I would be on the phone in a second to the companies making these drugs.” © 1996-2016 The Washington Post

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 22830 - Posted: 11.04.2016

By Kelly Servick Mark Hutchinson could read the anguish on the participants’ faces in seconds. As a graduate student at the University of Adelaide in Australia in the late 1990s, he helped with studies in which people taking methadone to treat opioid addiction tested their pain tolerance by dunking a forearm in ice water. Healthy controls typically managed to stand the cold for roughly a minute. Hutchinson himself, “the young, cocky, Aussie bloke chucking my arm in the water,” lasted more than 2 minutes. But the methadone patients averaged only about 15 seconds. “These aren’t wimps. These people are injecting all sorts of crazy crap into their arms. … But they were finding this excruciating,” Hutchinson says. “It just fascinated me.” The participants were taking enormous doses of narcotics. How could they experience such exaggerated pain? The experiment was Hutchinson’s first encounter with a perplexing phenomenon called opioid-induced hyperalgesia (OIH). At high doses, opioid painkillers actually seem to amplify pain by changing signaling in the central nervous system, making the body generally more sensitive to painful stimuli. “Just imagine if all the diabetic medications, instead of decreasing blood sugar, increased blood sugar,” says Jianren Mao, a physician and pain researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston who has studied hyperalgesia in rodents and people for more than 20 years. © 2016 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 22829 - Posted: 11.04.2016

Ian Sample Science editor The devastating impact of cigarette smoke on the body’s DNA has been laid bare by the first comprehensive study into the damage tobacco inflicts on human cells. People who smoke a pack of cigarettes each day for a year develop on average 150 extra mutations in every lung cell, and nearly 100 more mutations than usual in each cell of the voice box, researchers found. More still build up in the mouth, bladder, liver and other organs. While chemicals in tobacco smoke have long been known to raise the risk of at least 17 forms of cancer, the precise molecular mechanisms through which they mutate DNA and give rise to tumours in different tissues have never been clear. “This is about running down the root cause of cancers,” said David Phillips, a professor of environmental carcinogenesis at King’s College London and a co-author on the study. “By identifying the root causes, we gain the sort of knowledge we need to think more seriously about cancer prevention.” More than 70 of the 7,000 chemicals found in tobacco smoke are known to cause cancer. Some damage DNA directly, but others ramp up mutations in more subtle ways, often by disrupting the way cells function. The more mutations a cell acquires, the more likely it is to turn cancerous. © 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 22828 - Posted: 11.04.2016

By Simon Makin Cerebral autopsy specimen of a patient diagosed having Alzheimer Disease. In the HE stain numerous plaque formations within the neuropil background are visible. Credit: WIKIPEDIA, CC BY-SA 3.0 On Monday Pres. Barack Obama proclaimed November “National Alzheimer's Disease Awareness Month.” The administration’s ambitious goal is to prevent and treat Alzheimer's by 2025. Although there are currently no approved therapies that slow or stop progression of the disease, several approaches are showing promise. In a study published today in Science Translational Medicine, a team from Merck Research Laboratories reports results of early human and animal trials of a drug called verubecestat, which targets the production of protein plaques associated with the disease. “It's a summary of the discovery and early-stage profiling of what we hope is going to be a new therapeutic for Alzheimer's,” says team leader Matthew Kennedy. “It represents well over a decade of investment in this project by many, many scientists.” Definitive conclusions will have to await the results of larger, ongoing phase III clinical trials to assess their efficacy, effectiveness and safety, but the results are promising, experts say. Verubecestat is a so-called BACE1 inhibitor. BACE1 (for Beta-site Amyloid precursor protein Cleaving Enzyme 1, aka beta-secretase 1) is an enzyme involved in producing amyloid beta (Ab), a protein that clumps together, eventually forming the plaques surrounding neurons that are the disease's key hallmark. The amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer's proposes that the accumulation of amyloid beta aggregates in the brain drives a cascade of biological events leading to neurodegeneration. By blocking BACE1, the hope is this approach could prevent the buildup of these clumps in the first place. But until now, development of these drugs has been hindered by problems finding molecules with the right characteristics, and concerns over theoretical and actual side effects. © 2016 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 22827 - Posted: 11.03.2016

By SABRINA TAVERNISE WASHINGTON — A decade after electronic cigarettes were introduced in the United States, use has flattened, sales have slowed and, this fall, NJoy, once one of the country’s biggest e-cigarette manufacturers, filed for bankruptcy. It is quite a reversal for an invention once billed as the biggest chance to end smoking as we know it and take aim at the country’s largest cause of preventable death. Use of the devices is slumping because they are not as good as cigarettes at giving a hit of nicotine. Dealing another strike against them, the country’s top public health authorities have sent an unwavering message: Vaping is dangerous. The warning is meant to stop people who have never smoked — particularly children — from starting to vape. But a growing number of scientists and policy makers say the relentless portrayal of e-cigarettes as a public health menace, however well intentioned, is a profound disservice to the 40 million American smokers who could benefit from the devices. Smoking kills more than 480,000 Americans a year. “We may well have missed, or are missing, the greatest opportunity in a century,” said David B. Abrams, senior scientist at the Truth Initiative, an antismoking group. “The unintended consequence is more lives are going to be lost.” American public health experts, led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have long been suspicious of e-cigarettes. The possible risks of vaping are vast, officials warn, including the potential to open a dangerous new door to addiction for youth. Scientists will not know the full effect for years, so for now, they caution, be wary. But mounting evidence suggests vaping is far less dangerous than smoking, a fact that is rarely pointed out to the American public. Britain, a country with about the same share of smokers, has come to the opposite conclusion from the United States. This year, a prestigious doctors’ organization told the public that e-cigarettes were 95 percent less harmful than cigarettes. British health officials are encouraging smokers to switch. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 22826 - Posted: 11.03.2016