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Global update: The world’s first face transplant
Surgeons in France have performed the world’s first face transplant, on a 38-year-old woman whose nose and lips had been torn off by a dog. The complex, high-risk operation, which involved grafting on a triangle of facial material from a deceased donor, was carried out late last month at the University hospital in Amiens.
A statement issued by the hospital said the team of doctors for “the first partial face transplant” was led by Prof Jean-Michel Dubernard, who performed the world’s first hand transplant at Lyon’s Edouard Herriot hospital in 1998, and Prof Bernard Devauchelle, head of maxillo-facial surgery at the Amiens hospital in northern France.
The French team took the surgical world by surprise. Many had expected the first face transplant to take place in the United States, after an announcement in the summer that Cleveland clinic in Ohio had finally got ethical approval and was about to start interviewing prospective patients. But Michael Earley, consultant plastic surgeon and a member of the Royal College of Surgeons’ working party on facial transplantation, said that it was an operation waiting to happen.
“It could have been done anywhere where there are trained micro-surgeons and plastic surgeons — China, Australia or other countries — from a technical point of view. What has been holding it back are ethical issues.”
There were long-term risks of rejection, which would leave the patient worse off than before. They would also have to take immuno-suppressant drugs for life.
Birds in Spain and Morocco are having trouble hearing and copying each other’s songs because of the way their habitat has been broken up, according to a study released last week. As a result the birds are living in more isolated groups and only learning songs from their closest neighbours. The researchers believe that these changes in song patterns are an early warning of habitat fragmentation, which could lead to lower genetic diversity and inbred populations.
Paola Laiolo and José Tella, of the Estación Biológica de Doñana in Seville, recorded and analysed the songs of a rare and specialized songbird called Dupont’s lark, across 21 localities in Spain and Morocco.
This lark has particular requirements and can only live in arid scrub steppe. By comparing song similarity between birds, the researchers could show that broken habitats made the male larks mimic their neighbours’ songs more than expected, but lose touch with birds on the other side of the habitat break.
“Neighbours shared up to 70 per cent of their phrases, while non-neighbours shared only around 30 per cent,” said Dr Laiolo. By contrast birds living in pristine habitat shared around 45 per cent of their phrases with non-neighbours over a similar distance.
The researchers believe that an increase in agricultural land, forest plantations and roads has fragmented the arid steppe habitat, preventing the Dupont’s lark from sharing songs over greater distances. — Dawn/The Guardian News Service
Using sophisticated radar aboard the European Mars Express spacecraft, scientists have for the first time peered into the heart of Mars, uncovering ancient geological structures and reservoirs of ice more than a mile beneath the arid surface.
“We’re looking at the third dimension on Mars, something no other mission has done before,” Agustin Chicarro, project scientist for the European Space Agency, said during a news conference from the agency’s Paris headquarters. Chicarro said instruments aboard the spacecraft, which has been orbiting Mars since December 2003, had revealed what looked like an ancient impact basin in the temperate region and fresh stores of ice near the north pole.
But the craft’s radar, known as the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding, did not uncover any evidence of liquid water underground. “We certainly can say we observed a significant amount of subsurface water in the form of ice,” said team member Jeffrey Plaut of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “But there’s no current evidence yet for subsurface liquid water.”
The question of liquid water on Mars is key to determining whether some form of rudimentary life could have, or still might, exist on Mars. Though the Martian surface is too inhospitable to support life as we know it, scientists have speculated that rudimentary life forms could exist in relatively warm, subsurface pools.
Researchers working in Gabon and Congo have identified three species of fruit bat as the long-sought reservoirs of one of the deadliest known human pathogens, the Ebola virus. The team tested more than 1,000 bats and other animals before tracing the virus to fruit bats, which are commonly eaten by people in Central Africa, according to a report in the latest issue of the journal Nature.
Researchers found minute genetic traces of the virus in 22.6 per cent of the bats tested. More importantly, they found that the virus produces no symptoms in infected bats, thus allowing it to spread without disabling its carrier, said lead researcher Eric Leroy, an immunologist with the International Centre for Medical Research in Gabon.
Dr Sanford Kuvin, head of tropical infectious diseases at Israel’s Hebrew University, said the study provided strong evidence of Ebola’s presence in bats and should prompt people in the region to “avoid contact with the creatures at all costs.”
Ebola haemorrhagic fever first came to light in 1976, erupting simultaneously in 55 villages near the headwaters of the Ebola River in the Democratic Republic of Congo, then known as Zaire. About 90 per cent of those infected died. According to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been 17 outbreaks since then. — Los Angeles Times
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