Cheap cervical cancer test is boost for poor countries
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News in perspective Upfront – Talk about a roller-coaster ride. Just days after basking in the limelight of the successful launch of the Large Hadron Collider, operators at CERN are starting to realise the size of their challenge. An estimated 1 billion people watched as protons made their first historic turns of the 27-kilometre experiment under the Swiss-French border on 10 September, but two days later the explosion of a transformer stalled progress for a week. Then on 19 September, just as the team was gearing up for the first particle collisions, a mechanical failure knocked the machine out. It could take up to two months to repair. Investigations are ongoing, but it appears that an electrical connection between two magnets melted during a test to make sure the equipment could handle the enormous currents required to bend protons around the ring. The failure damaged the cryogenic plumbing that keeps the superconducting magnets at -271 °C, releasing large quantities of helium gas and causing several magnets to warm up by more than 100 °C. Although a spokesperson at CERN would not rule out collisions this year, that now looks unlikely. Operators had anyway planned to shut the machine down over the winter, partly because it draws so much power it would strain the local electricity grid. Fixing the problem will probably require replacing at least one of the LHC’s 15-metre-long, 35-tonne magnets. To do this, an eighth of the underground ring will need to be warmed to room temperature, which will take two to three weeks, and then cooled down again over a similar period. “After such a spectacular start there are a lot of disappointed people here,” says Steve Myers, CERN’s head of accelerators and beams. “We never expected something like this.” Despite the problems, the official inauguration is still scheduled for 21 October. WILL women in poor countries soon have access to a cervical cancer test like their richer sisters? Almost all of the 250,000 women who die of cervical cancer each year live in poor countries where regular western-style screening is just too expensive. But using PCR to test for the strains of HPV that cause cervical cancer might be the answer. These HPV tests reveal early cancer even more reliably than the Pap tests familiar to most western women, so they needn’t be repeated as often. But they are more costly. Now John Sellors at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, and colleagues, have developed a “streamlined” HPV test they hope will cost just $5 a pop. When the team tried it on 2400 women in China, it flagged up 90 per cent of women with cervical cancer, making it only slightly less reliable than full-blown PCR (The Lancet, DOI: 10.1016/S1470- 2045(08)70210-9 ). Peter Sasieni of Cancer Research UK says even testing poor women once or twice in their lives could halve deaths from cervical cancer. SHUTTLE DOUBLE FOR HUBBLE You don’t see this too often: two space shuttles on neighbouring launch pads at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Atlantis is being primed for the fourth Hubble Space Telescope repair mission on 10 October, while Endeavour is being readied as a lifeboat in case Atlantis becomes crippled in orbit. In most cases, the International Space Station acts as a safe haven for the crew if anything goes awry with the shuttle. But the ISS orbits at an altitude 250 kilometres lower than Hubble. “So if something should malfunction in Atlantis, like a loss of oxygen or re-entry guidance fuel, it wouldn’t be able to make it to that safe haven,” says NASA spokesman Bill Johnson. “So we have Endeavour ready, on a launch-on-need basis, for a rescue mission.” The last time two separate shuttles were readied was in September 1990, when Discovery and Columbia had consecutive missions. US TO TAKE A DRILL TO ITS COASTS “There are a lot of disappointed people here. We never expected this” The US is taking major steps towards drilling for oil off its coasts – but will it be worth it? Last week, a 27-year ban on oil and gas drilling off US coasts was lifted by the House of Representatives, and the Senate is now debating whether to follow suit so that oil companies can move in. Yet the oil and gas currently off- limits may not be plentiful, according to a 2007 US Department of Energy study that compared deposits in the Gulf of Mexico that are open for drilling with off-limits reserves along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. The study found that if offshore drilling were allowed on both coasts as close as 5 kilometres from shore, oil production from the continental states, excluding Alaska, would only increase by 7 per cent by 2030. Further, the study found that due to the small and dispersed nature of the reserves, “a significant portion of the resource would not be economically attractive to develop”. “This whole ‘Drill baby, drill!’ campaign is a hoax,” says Dan Weiss of the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. “Most of the oil and gas off our shores is already available for production.” Yet the figures could be misleading. Nicholas Pardi of the US Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service notes that much of the area under moratorium hasn’t been surveyed since the 1970s, when sub-seafloor detection technology was still in its infancy. “We estimated there were 9 billion barrels in the Gulf [of Mexico] in 1987 and now estimate 45 billion barrels there. With better technology we’re able to see reserves that we weren’t able to before.” JAY DICKMAN/CORBIS –The Gulf of Mexico has oil, the Atlantic is less certain– Nothing to LHC Best cancer test 6 | NewScientist | 27 September 2008 www.newscientist.com
Transcript of Cheap cervical cancer test is boost for poor countries
News in perspective
Upfront–
Talk about a roller-coaster ride. Just days after basking in the limelight of the successful launch of the Large Hadron Collider, operators at CERN are starting to realise the size of their challenge.
An estimated 1 billion people watched as protons made their first historic turns of the 27-kilometre experiment under the Swiss-French border on 10 September, but two days later the explosion of a transformer stalled progress for a week. Then on 19 September, just as the team
was gearing up for the first particle collisions, a mechanical failure knocked the machine out. It could take up to two months to repair.
Investigations are ongoing, but it appears that an electrical connection between two magnets melted during a test to make sure the equipment could handle the enormous currents required to
bend protons around the ring. The failure damaged the cryogenic plumbing that keeps the superconducting magnets at -271 °C, releasing large quantities of helium gas and causing several magnets to warm up by more than 100 °C.
Although a spokesperson at CERN would not rule out collisions this year, that now looks unlikely. Operators had anyway planned toshut the machine down over the winter, partly because it draws so much power it would strain the local electricity grid.
Fixing the problem will probably require replacing at least one of the LHC’s 15-metre-long, 35-tonne magnets. To do this, an eighth of the underground ring will need to be warmed to room temperature, which will take two to three weeks, and then cooleddown again over a similar period.
“After such a spectacular start there are a lot of disappointed people here,” says Steve Myers, CERN’s head of accelerators and beams. “We never expected something like this.”
Despite the problems, the official inauguration is still scheduled for 21 October.
WILL women in poor countries soon have access to a cervical cancer test like their richer sisters?
Almost all of the 250,000 women who die of cervical cancer each year live in poor countries where regular western-style screening is just too expensive. But using PCR to test for the strains of HPV that cause cervical cancer might be the answer. These HPV tests reveal early cancer evenmore reliably than the Pap tests familiar to most western women, so they needn’t be repeated as
often. But they are more costly. Now John Sellors at McMaster
University in Hamilton, Canada, and colleagues, have developed a “streamlined” HPV test they hope will cost just $5 a pop. When the team tried it on 2400 women in China, it flagged up 90 per cent of women with cervical cancer, making it only slightly less reliable than full-blown PCR (The
Lancet, DOI: 10.1016/S1470-2045(08)70210-9 ). Peter Sasieni of Cancer Research UK says eventesting poor women once or twice in their lives could halve deaths from cervical cancer.
SHUTTLE DOUBLE FOR HUBBLEYou don’t see this too often: two space shuttles on neighbouring launch pads at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Atlantis is being primed for the fourth Hubble Space Telescope repair mission on 10 October, while Endeavour is being readied as a lifeboat in case Atlantis becomes crippled in orbit.
In most cases, the International Space Station acts as a safe haven for the crew if anything goes awry with the shuttle. But the ISS orbits at an altitude
250 kilometres lower than Hubble. “So if something should malfunction in Atlantis, like a loss of oxygen or re-entry guidance fuel, it wouldn’t be able to make it to that safe haven,” says NASA spokesman Bill Johnson. “So we have Endeavour ready, on a launch-on-need basis, for a rescue mission.”
The last time two separate shuttles were readied was in September 1990, when Discovery and Columbia had consecutive missions.
US TO TAKE A DRILL TO ITS COASTS
“There are a lot of disappointed people here. We never expected this”
The US is taking major steps towards drilling for oil off its coasts – but will it be worth it?
Last week, a 27-year ban on oil and gas drilling off US coasts was lifted by the House of Representatives, and the Senate is now debating whether to follow suit so that oil companies can move in.
Yet the oil and gas currently off-limits may not be plentiful, according to a 2007 US Department of Energy study that compared deposits in the Gulf of Mexico that are open for drilling with off-limits reserves along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. The study found that if offshore drilling were allowed on both coasts as close as 5 kilometres from shore, oil production from the continental states, excluding Alaska, would only increase by 7 per cent by 2030. Further, the study found that due to the small and dispersed nature of the
reserves, “a significant portion of the resource would not be economically attractive to develop”.
“This whole ‘Drill baby, drill!’ campaign is a hoax,” says Dan Weiss of the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. “Most of the oil and gas off our shores is already available for production.”
Yet the figures could be misleading. Nicholas Pardi of the US Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service notes that much of the area under moratorium hasn’t been surveyed since the 1970s, when sub-seafloor detection technology was still in its infancy. “We estimated there were 9 billion barrels in the Gulf [of Mexico] in 1987 and now estimate 45 billion barrels there. With better technology we’re able to see reserves that we weren’t able to before.”
JAY
DICK
MAN
/COR
BIS
–The Gulf of Mexico has oil, the Atlantic is less certain–
Nothing to LHC Best cancer test
6 | NewScientist | 27 September 2008 www.newscientist.com
