32
percent
Fraction of stay-at-home
kids in Ghana with
schistosomiasis
6
percent
Fraction of school-going
kids in Ghana with
schistosomiasis
Gene therapy helps hemophiliacs
Virus induces liver to generate blood-clotting factor
By Nathan Seppa
A gene therapy based on a cargo-toting
virus that gravitates to liver cells might
provide hemophilia B patients with
long-lasting protection against bleeding, an international team of scientists
reports online December 10 in the New
England Journal of Medicine.
Hemophilia B is the second most
common form of hemophilia, a hereditary disorder in which blood fails to clot
properly. Patients must receive preventive injections of a clotting compound
called factor IX to prevent bleeding from
cuts, scratches or bruises. In the new
study, four of six hemophilia B patients
given the gene therapy no longer needed
the clotting compound.
The work “is truly a landmark study,
since it is the first to achieve long-term
expression of a blood protein at thera-
peutically relevant levels,” physician
Katherine Ponder of Washington
University in St. Louis, who wasn’t part
of the study team, wrote in the same
issue of the journal.
NEWS BRIEFS
Chronic fatigue paper pulled
The editors of Science fully retracted
a controversial paper that claimed a
virus called XMRV might be to blame
for chronic fatigue syndrome. Since
the paper’s publication in Science in
2009, multiple researchers, including
some of the scientists who originally
claimed to have found the link, failed
to detect the XMRV virus as well as
closely related viruses in blood sam-
ples from people with chronic fatigue
syndrome. What’s more, the original
report didn’t include key controls and
left out vital information, Science’s
editor-in-chief, Bruce alberts, wrote
in the December 23 retraction. “We
regret the time and resources that
the scientific community has devoted
to unsuccessful attempts to replicate
these results,” alberts writes.
— Laura Sanders
School doesn’t bug some kids
Rural african children who go to school
are much less likely to contract a seri-
ous parasitic infection than kids not in
school, researchers at the university
of Ghana in Legon reported December
7 in Philadelphia at a meeting of the
american Society of Tropical Medicine
and hygiene. The researchers analyzed
samples from more than 300 children
and found that 32 percent of kids
who stayed home were infected with
Schistosoma mansoni, a parasitic worm
that can cause fever, blood loss and
lethargy. Only 6 percent of children in
school had the parasite. Stay-at-home
kids typically help with farming and are
exposed to irrigation canals and other
water sources that harbor the parasite,
Tandoh said. — Nathan Seppa
The heights of power
Powerful people overestimate their
height, a result that makes it easier
than ever to look down on the little
guy. In a new study, subjects were
asked to describe a situation in
which either they were powerful or
someone else held power over them.
People primed to feel powerful underestimated the height of a pole and
chose taller avatars, Michelle Duguid
of Washington university in St. Louis
and Jack Goncalo of Cornell university
report in an upcoming Psychological
Science. — Laura Sanders
www.sciencenews.org
January 14, 2012 | SCIENCE NEWS | 9
