Health & Science

The lifesaving effect of HPV vaccines

Vaccination against the human papillomavirus may be controversial, but a new study has shown it to be stunningly effective. The rate of infection with the cancer-causing strain of HPV has been cut in half among American teenage girls since 2006, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first recommended that 11- and 12-year-old girls be vaccinated against the sexually transmitted virus. That success comes even though only about a third of girls that age have received the full three-shot course of the vaccine. “These are striking results,” CDC Director Thomas R. Frieden tells The New York Times. “They should be a wake-up call that we need to increase vaccination rates.” About 79 million mostly young Americans are infected with HPV, which is the primary cause of cervical cancer. The CDC says that upping vaccination rates to 80 percent—a level achieved in many other countries—would prevent almost 17,000 cancer deaths over the lifetimes of girls now 13 or younger. Yet surveys suggest that resistance to the vaccine is growing. Many parents fear that it promotes promiscuity, or that it has dangerous side effects—concerns that health officials say have no basis in fact. “It is possible to protect the next generation from cancer,” says Frieden, “and we need to do it.”

Pollution’s links to autism

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A new study has found the strongest link yet between air pollution and autism, which experts now say affects one in 50 U.S. schoolchildren. Pregnant women who lived in areas with high levels of diesel exhaust and airborne mercury were found to be twice as likely to have a child with autism as those living in places with the lowest pollution levels. The presence of other pollutants, such as lead, manganese, and methylene chloride, increased the odds of having a child with autism by 50 percent. The study, conducted by the Harvard University School of Public Health, analyzed data from a long-term nationwide study of 116,430 nurses, 325 of whom had children with autism. “Our findings raise concerns,” study author Andrea Roberts tells NYDailyNews.com, “since, depending on the pollutant, 20 to 60 percent of the women in our study lived in areas where risk of autism was elevated.”

The littlest galaxy

Astronomers have spotted the smallest galaxy yet, says Space.com, bolstering a long-held theory about the early makeup of the universe. Known as Segue 2, the tiny galaxy consists of about 1,000 stars held together by a small quantity of dark matter; the nearby Milky Way galaxy, in comparison, has 100 billion stars. “Finding a galaxy as tiny as Segue 2 is like discovering an elephant smaller than a mouse,” says cosmologist James Bullock of the University of California, Irvine. Physicists have long believed that small clumps of dark matter the size of the one in Segue 2 were “almost certainly the first things to form in the universe,” Bullock says. That would mean that thousands of them should still exist, yet until Segue 2 was spotted, astronomers had only ever detected massive collections of dark matter at least a million times the mass of the sun, seeming to point to “some flaw in our theory of how the universe works,” Bullock says. He calls the far smaller Segue 2 “a tip-of-the-iceberg observation,” suggesting that many more such mini-galaxies are out there waiting to be found.

Did men cause menopause?

Now there’s one more thing for women to blame on men: menopause. It’s long been assumed that men prefer younger women because older ones can’t bear children and pass on their genes. A provocative new study suggests it happened the other way around—namely, that women developed menopause because men’s lust for younger women made it pointless for them to remain fertile into old age. Using a computer model to track the evolutionary consequences of mating preferences, researchers at McMaster University in Canada found that were it not for men’s age bias in selecting a mate, “women would be reproducing, like men are, for their whole lives,” computational biologist Rama Singh tells CBSNews.com. That, after all, is the norm in the animal kingdom, where menopause is rare; male chimpanzees, our closest relatives, actually prefer to mate with older females. The study suggests that men’s preference for younger mates allowed certain genetic mutations to flourish that over time undermined the fertility of older women. If true, that would mean that in evolutionary terms, menopause is reversible. Indeed, if women were to refuse to have sex with men of a certain age, study co-author Jonathon Stone says, “male menopause will be the eventual evolutionary outcome.”