QUIRKY SCIENCE
Building Bones With 3D Printing
A Northwestern Engineering research team has developed a 3-D printable ink that produces a synthetic bone implant that rapidly induces bone regeneration and growth. This hyperelastic "bone" material, whose shape can be easily customised, one day could be especially useful for the treatment of bone defects in children.
Bone implantation surgery is never an easy process, but it is particularly painful and complicated for children. With both adults and children, often times bone is harvested from elsewhere in the body to replace the missing bone, which can lead to other complications and pain. Metallic implants are sometimes used, but this is not a permanent fix for growing children.
"Adults have more options when it comes to implants," said Ramille N. Shah, who led the research. "Pediatric patients do not. If you give them a permanent implant, you have to do more surgeries in the future as they grow. They might face years of difficulty."
Shah and her team aim to change the nature of bone implants, and they particularly want to help pediatric patients. Shah is an assistant professor of materials science and engineering in Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and of surgery in the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
Free of Measles
The Region of the Americas is the first in the world to have eliminated measles, a viral disease that can cause severe health problems, including pneumonia, blindness, brain swelling and even death. This achievement culminates a 22-year effort involving mass vaccination against measles, mumps and rubella throughout the Americas.
The declaration of measles' elimination was made by the International Expert Committee for Documenting and Verifying Measles, Rubella, and Congenital Rubella Syndrome Elimination in the Americas. The announcement came during the 55th Directing Council of the Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization (PAHO/WHO), which is currently underway and is being attended by ministers of Health from throughout the Americas.
Measles is the fifth vaccine-preventable disease to be eliminated from the Americas, after the regional eradication of smallpox in 1971, poliomyelitis in 1994, and rubella and congenital rubella syndrome in 2015.
Before mass vaccination was initiated in 1980, measles caused nearly 2.6 million annual deaths worldwide. In the Americas, 101,800 deaths were attributable to measles between 1971 and 1979. A cost-effectiveness study on measles elimination in Latin America and the Caribbean has estimated that with vaccination, 3.2 million measles cases will have been prevented in the Region and 16,000 deaths between 2000 and 2020.
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