BBC News - Genes rather than stress 'makes women's hair go grey'

Genes rather than stress 'makes women's hair go grey'

A woman's genes are much more likely than lifestyle factors such as stress or diet to cause greying hair, a study suggests.

Unilever scientists studied more than 200 identical and non-identical Danish twin sisters aged between 59 and 81.

The scientists found little difference between the greyness of the identical twins - who share the same genes.

But there was more difference between non-identical twins, whose genes differ, the study found.

The study, published in the journal PLoS One, also suggests receding hair is linked to mainly genetic factors.

But it indicates hair-thinning on the top of the head is connected to environmental and lifestyle factors.

On the issue of greying hair, lead researcher Dr David Gunn said although many theories had been put forward to explain different rates of greying, there was little hard scientific evidence to back them up.

He said: "This study offers us a fascinating insight into the reason why women go grey and it certainly suggests that environmental factors are not as important as we once thought.

"The research indicates that irrespective of how stressful a woman's life is, there are greater forces at play which are more likely to cause her hair to grey."

Nina Goad, of the British Association of Dermatologists, said previous work had also found few identifiable environmental factors among people who went grey much earlier than their relatives.

"This means that for the majority of people, greying hair is not down to something you have done, but to genetic factors beyond your control, and that generally your lifestyle will not greatly impact on when your hair loses its colour," she said.

"There are of course exceptions to this rule."

Dr David Fisher, of the Dana Faber Cancer Institute, who had has conducted research into greying, agreed that genetics probably played a key role in controlling when hair turned grey.

However, he said there was also some evidence to suggest exposure to certain types of chemical could also promote greying.

News - Taking showers 'can make you ill'

Showering may be bad for your health, say US scientists, who have shown that dirty shower heads can deliver a face full of harmful bacteria.

Tests revealed nearly a third of devices harbour significant levels of a bug that causes lung disease.

Levels of Mycobacterium avium were 100 times higher than those found in typical household water supplies.

M. avium forms a biofilm that clings to the inside of the shower head, reports the National Academy of Science.

In the Proceedings journal, the study authors say their findings might explain why there have been more cases of these lung infections in recent years, linked with people tending to take more showers and fewer baths.

Water spurting from shower heads can distribute bacteria-filled droplets that suspend themselves in the air and can easily be inhaled into the deepest parts of the lungs, say the scientists from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Potential threat

Lead researcher Professor Norman Pace, said: "If you are getting a face full of water when you first turn your shower on, that means you are probably getting a particularly high load of Mycobacterium avium, which may not be too healthy."

While it is rarely a problem for most healthy people, those with weakened immune systems, like the elderly, pregnant women or those who are fighting off other diseases, can be susceptible to infection.

They may develop lung infection with M. avium and experience symptoms including tiredness, a persistent, dry cough, shortness of breath and weakness, and generally feel unwell.

When the researchers swabbed and tested 50 shower heads from nine cities in seven different states in the US, including New York City and Denver, they found 30% of the devices posed a potential risk.

Since plastic shower heads appear to "load up" with more bacteria-rich biofilms, metal shower heads may be a good alternative, said Professor Pace.

Showers have also been identified as a route for spreading other infectious diseases, including a type of pneumonia called Legionnaires' disease and chest infections with a bacterium called Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

Hot tubs and spa pools carry a similar infection risk, according to the Health Protection Agency.

News - China evacuates as storm strikes

China evacuates as storm strikes

Nearly one-million people have been evacuated from the coastal regions of China as Typhoon Morakot blew in.

Winds of up 119km/h (74mph) destroyed houses and flooded farmland, a small boy died when a building collapsed, before it weakened to a tropical storm.

In Taiwan, where the typhoon hit on Sunday, 12 people are confirmed dead.

Meanwhile, in Japan nine people are reported dead in floods and landslides after Typhoon Etau brought heavy rain to the west of the country.

Eight people died in Hyogo prefecture, including one man whose car was swept away by a swollen river, and another died in neighbouring Okayama prefecture.

Another 10 people are missing.

Mystery surrounding Air France flight

It is a mystery of aviation industry!!!
Where is the aeroplane?
Where is it?
Any news???



The disappearance of Air France 447 is shrouded in an air of mystery that sets it apart from other aircraft disasters.

Nearly all air crashes take place at or near airports - during take-off or landing. But the Airbus 330 came down four hours out of Rio de Janeiro, somewhere in a vast area of the Atlantic Ocean.

There was no distress signal.

The first Air France officials knew of something being wrong was when the plane failed to turn up on radar in Senegal.

For many hours it was possible to think that AF447 had had a communications failure, or that it had made a forced landing at sea, or even that it had been hijacked.

For a time the arrivals board at Charles de Gaulle airport bore the word "delayed" - as if to keep alive as long as possible the dwindling hope of a miracle.

The suffering of family members having to face the appalling reality can only be imagined.

But it must have been made worse by the absence of any clear information about what has happened. Until wreckage is found, no-one is officially dead.

'Totally routine'

In the absence of news, the airwaves have been crammed with all the regular disaster coverage: the coy intrusiveness of the television cameras, the repeated interviews with experts, the desperate hunt for a new angle - like the miracle couple who missed the plane because of a late taxi - in order to vary the fodder.

Consensus quickly developed that the most likely cause of the accident was a lightning strike.

But as more than one expert pointed out, if lightning alone caused planes to crash, then few people would be so foolhardy as to risk flying.

"For a plane to get hit by lightning is totally routine," said Pierre Sparaco, a member of the French Air and Space Academy.

"That is not enough to explain it. There must be a missing link. It is clearly something and something.

"Accident investigators talk always of a 'sequence of catastrophic events', and sequence is the key word," he said.

"It is not this thing or that thing that went wrong. It is this thing going wrong, leading to that thing going wrong etc etc."


Danger zone

According to Mr Sparaco, even in a worst case scenario, with lightning wiping out all the electronics, a modern airliner is still flyable.


"Something kicks in called the RAM air system, in which a small propeller descends and because of the speed of the plane generates enough electricity to run vital instruments.

"So even if there is a total power failure the pilot can still fly by wire long enough to get to land."

Meteorologists have been called in to explain what else might have happened, the extra factor that might have come on top of the lightning.

The accident took place in a turbulent area along the equator known as the Intertropical Convergence zone.

The zone has long been feared by sailors and aviators. In French, it is called the "pot au noir", meaning the murky cauldron.

According to meteorologist Pierre Lasnais, the zone "is prone to storms and lightning, but also to mini-cyclonic phenomena, which create extremely strong up currents, as well as hail stones that can be bigger than tennis-balls".

"It's possible for a plane to be exposed to lightning, and at the same to be caught in an up current which can reach speeds of 200 km/h," he says.

"You can imagine the effect that has on a plane - complete depressurisation of course, almost uncontrollable," he said.

But all this is the purest speculation.

Because until they find it, no-one can talk with any authority about what really happened to Flight 447.

How safe are US regional airlines?

BBC NEWS

Seven of the last eight fatal commercial plane crashes in the US involved regional airlines.


The most recent accident, in which a Continental Connection plane crashed into a house near Buffalo, New York, left 50 people dead.

Investigators have not yet said what caused the crash, but central to their inquiry have been questions about the crew's experience, training and working conditions.

And safety experts are asking the very same questions about the regional airline industry as a whole.

Second jobs

Alex Lapointe loves flying, which is fortunate, because he cannot be doing it for the money.

Just 24 years old, First Officer Lapointe has been a regional airline pilot for the last three years.

Like many regional carriers - which typically operate planes carrying fewer than 100 passengers - the company he works for pays a starting salary of around $20,000 (£13,256).

Some of his young pilot friends are saddled with more than $100,000 in student loans and he says many of them have taken second jobs.

"A lot of people I know have trade jobs or construction work they do electrical work. Some still work at the airport they grew up with pumping gas or working the line - anything they can to make an extra few dollars," he says.


He thinks that the new recruits are tiring themselves out and it is having an impact on safety.

"They don't have enough time to enjoy their days off and they're constantly working - they're doing the grind 24/7. When it's the fourth leg on a heavy flying day and the first officer's flying and the captain's working the radios and there's a hundred things going on, you're going to want both people in the cockpit well rested," says First Officer Lapointe.

Fatigue has long been of concern to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the federal agency responsible for investigating plane crashes in America.

In a number of recent regional accident reports, they concluded that pilot fatigue was partly to blame:


When a Corporate Airlines flight crashed in Kirksville, Missouri, in 2004, the NTSB said that fatigue contributed to the pilots' "degraded performance"
It found that the captain of a Delta Connection plane which overran the runway in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2007, had slept for only one of the previous 32 hours
When later that same year a Canadair jet overran the runway in Traverse City, Michigan, the NTSB ruled that fatigue was the likely cause of "poor decision-making"
Now the NTSB is investigating another regional accident where fatigue could have been a factor. Continental Connection Flight 3407 crashed near Buffalo, New York in February this year. All of the 49 passengers and crew on board died, as well as one person on the ground.

Pilot hours

In the immediate aftermath of the crash, speculation focused on the idea that an ice build-up on the wings had affected the plane's performance.

While ice has not been ruled out as a factor, the NTSB - which is holding a public hearing into the crash this week - has announced that the "circumstances of the crash have raised several issues that go well beyond the widely discussed matter of airframe icing".

They are looking at the experience and training of the crew, whether standard procedures were being followed and the issue of fatigue management.

Roger Cohen of the Regional Airline Association (the regional airlines' trade association) acknowledges that pilot fatigue is an issue but he insists it is an industry-wide problem that is not unique to the regional sector, and points to strict rules limiting pilot hours in the cockpit.

"They shouldn't be tired and that's the responsibility of anybody and the rules prevent you from being tired. Let me ask anybody else - should they come to their job tired? No they shouldn't, no-one should."

Regional airlines now operate half of all flights in America.

Their dramatic growth is in part due to the economy - as fewer passengers fly, smaller planes have become more economical.

But industry insiders have told the BBC that the regional airlines - in their rush to recruit extra staff - have hired pilots with drastically fewer flying hours.

Patrick Smith is a pilot for a major carrier and writes a weekly aviation column for Salon.com.

When he started out 20 years ago, he needed at least 1,500 flying hours to get a job at a regional airline.

Now, he says, it is common for pilots to be hired with 200-300 hours, which, he says, though legal is "astonishingly low".

And he explained that being a good pilot is about more than training.

"There's no good way to teach good judgement - only experience really can develop that," he says.

Safety programme

But federal officials are not just worried about low pay and inexperience.

Robert Sumwalt, a member of the board of the NTSB, is concerned that regional carriers do not have robust enough systems in place to monitor the performance of their pilots:

"When you look at the safety programmes that some of the regional carriers have, compared to what most of the major carriers have, there is a difference."

For more than a decade, safety experts have been advocating that all the airlines implement a program called Flight Operational Quality Assurance (FOQA).

Using FOQA, airline companies can check up on how everyone involved in a flight is doing and - if mistakes are occurring - develop a training system to correct them.

Following an NTSB guideline issued two years ago, almost all of the major airlines adopted the programme. But to Robert Sumwalt's dismay, only three of America's 50 regional carriers have it in place.

"Safety is not a luxury," he says. "I think that if it's good for the major carriers it needs to be good for the regional carriers and I think that the travelling public is entitled to that and furthermore they deserve it."

But Roger Cohen points out that it is a complex programme to implement and the Regional Airline Association is trying hard to put it in place:

"We've got carriers that are doing it - more are doing it every day. If we were to do this interview next week, we'd probably have more. If we do it in a month, we'd have even more... We are following all the rules."

Patrick Smith says following the rules is not enough.

Through his online column, he regularly hears from regional pilots suffering from low morale:

"I see red flags. I see very low-time pilots in hi-tech airplanes in miserable or at least unsavoury working conditions. And something needs to be done about that before there is a legacy of crashes."

At this week's NTSB Buffalo crash hearing, the issues of pilot experience, fatigue and working conditions are expected to come to the fore.

Swine Flu BBC News

News

What is swine flu?

Swine flu is a respiratory disease, caused by influenza type A which infects pigs.

There are many types, and the infection is constantly changing.

Until now it has not normally infected humans, but the latest form clearly does, and can be spread from person to person - probably through coughing and sneezing.


Go to see doctor if you get sick!!!


Source: BBC News