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Pivotal Data Show Bronchial Thermoplasty Can Improve Quality Of Life And Reduce Asthma Attacks And Emergency Room Visits For Adults With Severe Asthma
Results of the Asthma Intervention Research 2 (AIR2) Trial of the Alair(R) Bronchial Thermoplasty System, developed by Asthmatx, Inc., were announced at ATS 2009, the International Conference of the American Thoracic Society, in San Diego, Calif. The AIR2 results demonstrated statistically significant improvements in quality of life measurements, reductions in asthma attacks (severe exacerbations) and emergency room visits for respiratory symptoms in adults with severe asthma who underwent bronchial thermoplasty delivered by the Alair System.
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A Selection Of Thursday's Editorials And Opinions
The GOP Can Stop ObamaCare Wall Street Journal
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Nationwide Health IT Expansion Could Create Jobs
As unemployment rises, the medical world prepares to create thousands of jobs as part of an industry-wide effort to transfer paper health records to electronic medical record systems, CBS News (Chicago) reports. "With the initiative of electronic health records, we expect that there will be new types of jobs," a spokeswoman for the American Health Information Management Association, an industry group that predicts the initiative will create 75,000 jobs, told CBS. People with two year associate degrees will be eligible for many of the jobs, which can carry a starting pay of $25,000 to $45,000, the spokeswoman said (Tucker, 6/18).
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'Ballooning' Spiders Grounded By Infection

Money spiders infected with Rickettsia bacteria are less likely to "balloon" - that is, to use their silk as sails to catch gusts of wind and travel long distances. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Biology suggest that it may be in the bacteria"s interests to ground the spiders and that this reduction in dispersal could reduce gene flow and impact on reproductive isolation within the meta-population. While working at the University of East Anglia, Sara Goodacre led an international team of researchers who investigated the microbes" effect on the spiders" ballooning behavior. She said, "Because we found no reduction in fitness associated with Rickettsia infection, the reduced long-distance dispersal seems unlikely to be simply due to decreased body condition caused by illness. Rather, we believe that reducing long-distance dispersal could be an evolved adaptive modification by bacterial infections to promote their own transmission". The researchers treated the spiders with antibiotics to reduce the bacterial infection and showed that this increased their ballooning frequency. They also observed that Rickettsia-infected spiders reared in the laboratory had reduced long-distance (but not short-distance) dispersal. This parasite-induced change in a non-reproductive trait has never been shown before and, according to Goodacre, "Clearly shows that the dynamics of ecosystem services such as a spider"s pest-controlling function may be altered as a consequence of bacterial infection". Notes: Microbial modification of host long-distance dispersal capacity Sara L Goodacre, Oliver Y Martin, Dries Bonte, Linda Hutchings, Chris Woolley, Kamal Ibrahim, C.F. George Thomas and Godfrey M Hewitt BMC Biology (in press) Article All articles are available free of charge, according to BioMed Central"s open access policy. Graeme Baldwin BioMed Central


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