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This summer intrepid travelers everywhere are strapping on backpacks, dousing themselves in mosquito spray, and getting their inoculations -- ready to embark on journeys that will take them into contact with some of the most virulent viruses and nastiest bacteria on the planet. Even those of us who aren’t going off the beaten track may end up in close quarters with microbes we’d rather not befriend. Explore some of the most common infectious diseases around the globe and how to identify them in this infographic.

The post Common infectious diseases contracted by travellers worldwide [infographic] appeared first on OUPblog.

On World Cancer Day 2012, we speak with Dr Lauren Pecorino, author of Why Millions Survive Cancer: the Successes of Science, to learn the latest in the field of cancer research. – Nicola

There are so many myths about cancer that it is sometimes difficult to understand exactly what it is. Can you briefly explain how cancer develops?

Cancer is a disease of the human genome. Many agents that cause cancer cause permanent changes to your genes. These permanent changes are called mutations. Cancer is usually caused by the accumulation of mutations over time. This is why cancer risk increases with age. The altered genes may produce faulty proteins that lead to abnormal cell growth and this appears as a tumour. Cancer is characterized by abnormal cell growth and the ability of tumour cells to spread throughout the body. It is this second characteristic, called metastasis that is the most difficult aspect to treat.

It is said that cancer now affects one in three people over a lifetime. What’s the latest progress in the field of cancer research?

There has been tremendous progress in the field of cancer management. The good news is that trends in death rates are decreasing for many cancers though that is not to say for all cancers. There are millions of cancer survivors who have had their diagnosis ten or more years ago. Many people are now living with cancer. Conventional treatments such as surgical procedures have been refined and new drugs that target tumour-specific molecules have proved efficient and promises less side effects.

In addition, we are learning to make lifestyle choices that science has shown reduces cancer risk — the most obvious being not smoking. We also have cancer screening programmes that can catch cancer early and even prevent cancer by treating pre-cancerous growths. The latest means for preventing a specific type of cancer is a cancer vaccine. Interestingly the vaccine designed to prevent cervical cancer vaccine also prevents several other cancers caused by the human papilloma virus such as some head and neck cancers.

What do you see as the priorities for future cancer research? Where will the next great advances be?

I see four main priorites for future cancer research.

1 –  To develop better and less invasive diagnostics so that we can detect cancer earlier. It is well-known that catching cancer earlier gives a better outcome or prognosis.

2 –  To expand our understanding of the individual molecular differences between tumors and to be able to fully practice personalized medicine which allows a better match between a patient and a drug. This understanding will need to be supported by technology that allows a patient’s tumour DNA to be sequenced (similar to the methods used for the Human Genome Project).

3 –  To understand if we can turn a cancer cell back into a normal cell. This may sound strange but lessons from stem cells and cloning tell us that changing one cell type into another is possible.

4 –  To better understand metastasis and how we can better treat it. The spreading of cancer cells throughout the body is the most difficult aspect of treating

By Steven Taylor CEO - Sjögren’s Syndrome Foundation The Sjögren's Syndrome Foundation (SSF) was saddened to hear about U.S. tennis star Venus Williams’ diagnosis of Sjögren’s syndrome and supports her courageous decision to step forward and share her diagnosis with the public. On behalf of the 4 million Americans with Sjögren’s

In her forthcoming memoir, Blue Nights, Joan Didion remembers the way her daughter’s (above, left) psychiatric diagnosis kept changing. Manic depression became OCD; OCD became something else, something she can’t remember now, but something that ultimately gave way to many other conditions before “the least programmatic of her doctors settled on one that actually seemed to apply”: borderline personality disorder.

Diagnosis never seems to lead to a cure, Didion observes, only an enforced debility. But as with a psychiatric evaluation of herself conducted in 1968 and excerpted in The White Album (and quoted in part below), Didion sees and reflects on the truths of the assessment even as she ponders it at arm’s length.

I’ll have much more to say about her new book when it’s out in November, but this paradoxical blend of skepticism, acceptance, and astringent detachment in matters pertaining to psychology and its insights and connection to the culture, has always characterized Didion’s writing. It’s one of the reasons I’m so drawn to her work.

In the title essay of The White Album, the one that begins with the famous line “We tell ourselves stories in order the live,” she recalls “a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition, but one I found troubling.” She continues:

I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no “meaning” beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience. In what would probably be the mid-point of my life I wanted still to believe in narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than ethical…

Another flash cut:

In June of this year patient experienced an attack of vertigo, nausea, and a feeling that she was going to pass out… The Rorschach record is interpreted as describing a personality in process of deterioration with abundant signs of failing defenses and increasing inability of the ego to mediate the world of reality and to cope with normal stress… Emotionally, patient has alienated herself almost entirely from the world of other human beings. Her fantasy life appears to have been virtually completely preempted by primitive, regressive libidinal preoccupations many of which are distorted and bizarre… In a technical sense basic affective controls appear to be intact but it is equally clear that they are insecurely and tenuously maintained for the present by a variety of defense mechanisms including intellectualization, obsessive-compulsive devices, projection, reaction-formation, and somatization, all of which now seem inadequate to their task of controlling or containing an underlying psyhotic process and are therefore in process of failure. The content of patient’s responses is highly unconventional and frequently bizarre, filled with sexual and anatomical preoccupations, and basic reality contact is obviously and seriously impaired at times. In quality and level of sophistical patients responses are characteristic of those of individuals of high average or superior intelligence but she is now functioning intellectually in impaired fashion at barely average level. Patient’s th