UBS Group AG Chief Executive Officer Sergio Ermotti said the impact of global tariffs on the US economy and inflation remain unclear, making it harder to predict the outlook for Federal Reserve policy.
“In the US, we still believe that growth will be there but the inflation question and how it plays out into the central bank’s policies remains open,” Ermotti said in a Bloomberg Television interview in Hong Kong on Thursday.
Olympic silver medallist Ben Proud has admitted a lack of trust in the system is behind his decision to join the Enhanced Games.
UK Sport reacted with outrage after Proud became the first Briton to sign up for the Games, which are a version of the Olympics where doping is permitted.
Bosses at UK Sport, the government agency which invests lottery funding into Olympic and Paralympic sport, were quick to condemn the 30-year-old – and threatened to pull any financial support.
Proud is a world and European champion at 50m freestyle. By competing in Las Vegas next May, he will automatically be banned from international competition.
He had previous campaigned against doping in sport, and his team-mates, Adam Peaty and Duncan Scott, have spoken out against doping in the past.
But that hasn’t stopped the 30-year-old making the decision to jump ship, and, speaking to The Times, he has pointed the ‘blame’ at those close to home.
Ben Proud has pointed the finger at anti-doping authorities and British swimming as his reasons for signing up to the Enhanced Games
Proud, pictured, with his mother, said he now needs to think about financial benefits on offer
‘I might take you all the way back to Sochi, to the Olympics in Russia,’ he said, referring to the Games that were dominated by doping involved in the Russia team.
‘I watched that documentary about it, Icarus. That was a really painful documentary for me to see. Coming up through the British system, we have such a good standard. “We’re 100 per cent me”, “everything that goes into our body is our sole responsibility” etc. And I’m very much a sucker for rules. I comply as best I can. But seeing that this can actually go on behind the scenes, I was like, “Well, what’s the point?”
‘I did then say to myself, it’s easier for me just to completely ignore it and focus on myself. But fast forward to the scandal with the Chinese swimmers. There’s a lot of questions going around and the answers just aren’t quite good enough to really regain trust in the system.’
Proud raised the issue of two doping scandals. First was Russia’s involvement, and the second was how 23 Chinese swimmers were allowed to compete in Paris at the Games last year.
All of the swimmers tested positive for a banned drug in 2021 and it has not been fully explained why they were allowed to compete three years later. That, for Proud, is an issue.
He added: ‘We dedicate such a big portion of our lives to this [anti-doping], and the fact that there could be people slipping through the system unscathed is quite hurtful.
‘I don’t want to say I’ve been treated unfairly because I’ve stuck by the rules, but if there are people getting away with it that’s a complete no-go.’
He went onto add that a lack of prize money on offer for British swimmers was a leading factor in his decision and that he was not bothered about funding potentially being pulled.
He also pointed to recent doping issues in the sport and how they have been dealt with
The inaugural Enhanced Games, set to take place in Las Vegas next May, will feature swimming, track and field and weightlifting, in an event designed to disrupt a status quo in the international anti-doping movement that some feel is failing.
It is backed by a group called 1789 Equity which is supported in part by Donald Trump Jr.
It has obtained funding ‘in the double-digit millions,’ according to founder Aron D’Souza. Athletes will compete for up to $500,000 in purses per event, with bonuses starting at $250,000 for those who break records.
Concerns have been raised over the health of those taking part, with the World Anti-Doping agency (Wada) branding it ‘dangerous and irresponsible’.
Travis Tygart, chief executive of the US Anti-Doping Agency, described it as ‘a clown show’.
A BOA spokesperson said: ‘We remain vehemently opposed to what we believe to be a cynical and dangerous event.’
A sample collected by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover from an ancient dry riverbed in Jezero Crater could preserve evidence of ancient microbial life. Taken from a rock named “Cheyava Falls” last year, the sample, called “Sapphire Canyon,” contains potential biosignatures, according to a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
A potential biosignature is a substance or structure that might have a biological origin but requires more data or further study before a conclusion can be reached about the absence or presence of life.
“This finding by Perseverance, launched under President Trump in his first term, is the closest we have ever come to discovering life on Mars. The identification of a potential biosignature on the Red Planet is a groundbreaking discovery, and one that will advance our understanding of Mars,” said acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy. “NASA’s commitment to conducting Gold Standard Science will continue as we pursue our goal of putting American boots on Mars’ rocky soil.”
Perseverance came upon Cheyava Falls in July 2024 while exploring the “Bright Angel” formation, a set of rocky outcrops on the northern and southern edges of Neretva Vallis, an ancient river valley measuring a quarter-mile (400 meters) wide that was carved by water rushing into Jezero Crater long ago.
“This finding is the direct result of NASA’s effort to strategically plan, develop, and execute a mission able to deliver exactly this type of science — the identification of a potential biosignature on Mars,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “With the publication of this peer-reviewed result, NASA makes this data available to the wider science community for further study to confirm or refute its biological potential.”
The rover’s science instruments found that the formation’s sedimentary rocks are composed of clay and silt, which, on Earth, are excellent preservers of past microbial life. They also are rich in organic carbon, sulfur, oxidized iron (rust), and phosphorous.
“The combination of chemical compounds we found in the Bright Angel formation could have been a rich source of energy for microbial metabolisms,” said Perseverance scientist Joel Hurowitz of Stony Brook University, New York and lead author of the paper. “But just because we saw all these compelling chemical signatures in the data didn’t mean we had a potential biosignature. We needed to analyze what that data could mean.”
First to collect data on this rock were Perseverance’s PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) and SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) instruments. While investigating Cheyava Falls, an arrowhead-shaped rock measuring 3.2 feet by 2 feet (1 meter by 0.6 meters), they found what appeared to be colorful spots. The spots on the rock could have been left behind by microbial life if it had used the raw ingredients, the organic carbon, sulfur, and phosphorus, in the rock as an energy source.
In higher-resolution images, the instruments found a distinct pattern of minerals arranged into reaction fronts (points of contact where chemical and physical reactions occur) the team called leopard spots. The spots carried the signature of two iron-rich minerals: vivianite (hydrated iron phosphate) and greigite (iron sulfide). Vivianite is frequently found on Earth in sediments, peat bogs, and around decaying organic matter. Similarly, certain forms of microbial life on Earth can produce greigite.
The combination of these minerals, which appear to have formed by electron-transfer reactions between the sediment and organic matter, is a potential fingerprint for microbial life, which would use these reactions to produce energy for growth. The minerals also can be generated abiotically, or without the presence of life. Hence, there are ways to produce them without biological reactions, including sustained high temperatures, acidic conditions, and binding by organic compounds. However, the rocks at Bright Angel do not show evidence that they experienced high temperatures or acidic conditions, and it is unknown whether the organic compounds present would’ve been capable of catalyzing the reaction at low temperatures.
The discovery was particularly surprising because it involves some of the youngest sedimentary rocks the mission has investigated. An earlier hypothesis assumed signs of ancient life would be confined to older rock formations. This finding suggests that Mars could have been habitable for a longer period or later in the planet’s history than previously thought, and that older rocks also might hold signs of life that are simply harder to detect.
“Astrobiological claims, particularly those related to the potential discovery of past extraterrestrial life, require extraordinary evidence,” said Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “Getting such a significant finding as a potential biosignature on Mars into a peer-reviewed publication is a crucial step in the scientific process because it ensures the rigor, validity, and significance of our results. And while abiotic explanations for what we see at Bright Angel are less likely given the paper’s findings, we cannot rule them out.”
The scientific community uses tools and frameworks like the CoLD scale and Standards of Evidence to assess whether data related to the search for life actually answers the question, Are we alone? Such tools help improve understanding of how much confidence to place in data suggesting a possible signal of life found outside our own planet.
Sapphire Canyon is one of 27 rock cores the rover has collected since landing at Jezero Crater in February 2021. Among the suite of science instruments is a weather station that provides environmental information for future human missions, as well as swatches of spacesuit material so that NASA can study how it fares on Mars.
Managed for NASA by Caltech, NASA JPL built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover on behalf of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio.
Image: NASA’s Perseverance rover discovered leopard spots on a reddish rock nicknamed “Cheyava Falls” in Mars’ Jezero Crater in July 2024. Scientists think the spots may indicate that, billions of years ago, the chemical reactions in this rock could have supported microbial life; other explanations are being considered. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Original story from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (IL, USA).
Method used to screen and prepare metagenomic libraries for the presence of antibiotic resistance genes in tiny environmental samples.
Scientists from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (IL, USA) have developed a method to isolate genes from amounts of microbial DNA so tiny that it would take 20,000 samples to weigh as much as a single grain of sugar. In a recent paper, researchers discovered previously unknown antibiotic resistance genes in bacterial DNA isolated from human stool and from fish tanks at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium (IL, USA).
“With antibiotic resistance on the rise, it’s more important than ever to understand the full diversity of mechanisms bacteria may be using to inactivate or avoid antibiotics,” commented senior author Terence Crofts. “If we can get a clearer view of the antibiotic resistance genes that exist out in the environment, that will give biomedical researchers a chance to look out for them in the clinic and potentially design more effective drugs.”
Crofts previously developed the method, known as METa assembly, to improve a microbiology tool known as a functional metagenomic library, which enables researchers to capture bacterial genes from the environment. The method allows researchers to collect soil, stool or other environmental samples and screen for the presence of potentially new microbial genes without having to culture the microbes or sequence their genomes. What’s more, METa assembly requires 100 times less DNA than standard functional metagenomic libraries, which is useful where microbes are scarce or when researchers can’t take large samples.
“We used to take the DNA out of the bacteria and just sequence it, but there are so many new genes in those environments that our sequencing ability has far outstripped our ability to actually guess at the functions of those genes,” Crofts explained. “A lot of these genes have unknown functions, so functional metagenomic screens are a way to get around that problem.”
Instead of sequencing the DNA, the researchers use an enzyme to chop it into gene-size pieces, which they then introduce to E. coli bacteria in the lab. E. coli, which is easier to grow in lab settings than many other microbes, incorporates the foreign DNA into its genetic machinery and begins to take on its traits. Crofts says antibiotic resistance traits are especially well-suited for study using functional metagenomic libraries because they’re usually controlled by a single gene, and it’s easy to tell whether bacteria have it or not.
“If E. coli has a resistance gene, it can survive an antibiotic. If it doesn’t, it dies,” he shared. “We might have 10 million E. coli cells in a petri dish with 10 million unique random chunks of environmental DNA. If we expose it to a particular antibiotic and only 10 colonies survive, we know those 10 had a resistance gene. Then it becomes very easy to take those colonies and sequence the chunk of DNA they grabbed from that environmental sample.”
Even if the sequencing result turns up genes for unknown proteins, the researchers know that they have a role in antibiotic resistance and can immediately drill down to study their mechanisms.
Crofts and his team tested the method on a sample of water from a large tank at Shedd Aquarium, where microbes are far less populous than in other environments like soil. They also tested a tiny sample from a product that usually teems with bacteria: human fecal matter.
“Because aquatic samples are usually less dense with microbes, you usually can’t get as much DNA out of them, but we showed that we could still make good libraries from the aquarium sample,” Crofts explained. “It’s also significant that we could make a functional metagenomic library from just a swab sample of fecal matter. That could be useful for clinical settings.”
The bacterium turning plant waste into power
New study shows how bacteria juggle energy needs while digesting complex carbons.
The team didn’t just make libraries from these samples, they made new discoveries about how microbes resist antibiotics. For example, in tetracycline-resistant sequences from Shedd Aquarium, the researchers identified new types of efflux pumps – protein channels that pump substances across the cell membrane – that remove tetracycline from cells.
Interestingly, some of the E. coli colonies from the human fecal sample resisted a group of antibiotics known as streptothricins. These were tested in the 1940s, but were never brought to market due to kidney toxicity in mammals. But with so much resistance in the current antibiotic landscape, Crofts says biomedical researchers are looking into streptothricin again (in less toxic forms).
“We found what looks like an entirely new family of streptothricin resistance proteins in our sequences,” he remarked. “Streptothricin is being brought up as this potentially clinically useful antibiotic, but we should really be trying to find out what resistance is already out there in the environment. And instead of making traditional streptothricins less toxic, maybe we should make a next-generation analog that can beat the antibiotic resistance mechanisms that may already exist in nature.”
Crofts plans to deploy his METa assembly method to agricultural systems – sampling soil and from ‘nose to tail’ in livestock – since antibiotic resistance not only occurs on the farm, it often originates on the farm.
“We produce a lot of antibiotics by culturing soil bacteria that make antibiotics as weapons to fight other bacteria. So, soils therefore have a very rich diversity of antibiotic resistance genes,” Crofts concluded. “Agriculture puts all these mammals in close association with this reservoir of antibiotic resistance genes in the soil. Since we’re giving these animals large amounts of antibiotics it becomes a very ripe environment for resistance to develop and jump into bacteria that can impact our own health.”
This article has been republished from the following materials. Material may have been edited for length and house style. For further information, please contact the cited source. Our press release publishing policy can be accessed here.
Header image: The orange dot at the centre is the powerful explosion that repeated several times over the course of a day. Credit: ESO/A. Levan, A. Martin-Carrillo et al.
Astronomers have detected an explosion of gamma rays that repeated several times over the course of a day, an event unlike anything ever witnessed before. The source of the powerful radiation was discovered to be outside our galaxy, its location pinpointed by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most powerful explosions in the universe, normally caused by the catastrophic destruction of stars. But no known scenario can completely explain this new GRB, whose true nature remains a mystery.
GRBs are produced in catastrophic events like dying stars exploding in powerful blasts or stars being ripped apart by black holes. These celestial flashes of gamma-rays usually last just milliseconds to minutes, but this signal—GRB 250702B—lasted about a day.
“This immediately alerted us to the unusual nature of this explosion,” said Tanmoy Laskar, assistant professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Utah and co-author of a study on this event recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The initial alert about this GRB came on July 2, 2025, from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Fermi detected not one, but three bursts from this source over the course of several hours. Retrospectively, it was also discovered that the source had been active almost a day earlier, as seen by the Einstein Probe, an X-ray space telescope mission by the Chinese Academy of Sciences with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. Such a long and repeating GRB has never been seen before.
The gamma-ray discovery only gave an approximate location—in a very crowded part of the sky filled with stars from our Milky Way—making it difficult to locate the source of the flash. To pinpoint the precise position of its origin, the team turned to ESO’s VLT.
“Before these observations, the general feeling in the community was that this GRB must have originated from within our galaxy. The VLT fundamentally changed that paradigm,” said Andrew Levan, astronomer at Radboud University, The Netherlands, and co-lead author of the study.
Using the VLT’s HAWK-I camera, they found evidence that the source may actually reside in another galaxy and later confirmed this using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
“What we found was considerably more exciting: the fact that this object is extragalactic means that it is considerably more powerful,” said Antonio Martin-Carrillo, astronomer at University College Dublin, Ireland, and co-lead author of the study. The size and brightness of the host galaxy suggest it may be located a few billion light-years away, but more data are needed to refine this distance.
The nature of the event that caused this GRB is still unknown. One possible scenario is a massive star collapsing onto itself, releasing vast amounts of energy in the process.
“Just like other GRBs, this event also left behind lower-energy light cascading across the spectrum, all the way from X-rays to radio waves,” said Laskar. “Traditional collapsing-star models seem to be able to explain this residual, fading light, but the still-unknown distance to the event makes it difficult to be sure.”
Alternatively, a star being ripped apart by a black hole could produce a day-long GRB, but to explain other properties of the explosion would require an unusual star being destroyed by an even more unusual black hole.
To learn more about this GRB, the team has been monitoring the aftermath of the explosion with different telescopes and instruments, including the VLT’s X-shooter spectrograph and the James Webb Space Telescope, a joint project of NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency. Measuring the distance to the galaxy that hosted the event will be key to deciphering the cause behind the explosion.
Adapted from the original post by the European Southern Observatory.
*****
This research was presented in the paper “The day long, repeating GRB 250702B: A unique extragalactic transient” (doi: 10.3847/2041-8213/adf8e1), published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on August 29, 2025.
Find a full list of coauthors here.
Research on the microbes living in our digestive tract has triggered a ‘revolution’ in nutritional science.
In the last few years, dietary fiber has become the “new protein”, added to foods in abundance to feed our gut’s microbiome and boost our health.
However, a study on mice published in 2024 suggests that not all fiber supplements are equally beneficial.
Related: Eating Fiber Could Protect You From Infections. Here’s Why.
A form that is readily found in oats and barley, called beta-glucan, can control blood sugar and assist in weight loss among mice fed a high-fat diet.
Researchers at the University of Arizona (UA) and the University of Vienna found it decreased a mouse’s fat content and body weight within 18 weeks.
Other fibers they tested, including wheat dextrin, pectin, resistant starch, and cellulose, had no such effect, despite shifting the makeup of the mouse microbiome significantly compared to mice fed no fiber supplements.
“We know that fiber is important and beneficial; the problem is that there are so many different types,” explained biomedical scientist Frank Duca from UA in July last year.
“We wanted to know what kind of fiber would be most beneficial for weight loss and improvements in glucose homeostasis so that we can inform the community, the consumer, and then also inform the agricultural industry.”
Dietary fibers are the main source of energy for bacteria living in our guts, and yet less than 5 percent of people in the US consume the recommended 25–30 grams (0.9–1 ounce) of fiber a day.
To make up for this, fiber supplements and ‘invisible fiber’-infused foods are growing in popularity. But fibers are extremely diverse, so which do we choose?
Some fibers, like oat beta-glucans and wheat dextrin, are water-soluble, meaning they are easily fermented by gut bacteria.
Others, like cellulose and resistant starch, are less soluble or insoluble, meaning they stick to other materials to form stool.
frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share” referrerpolicy=”strict-origin-when-cross-origin” allowfullscreen>Until now, writes biomedical scientist Elizabeth Howard from UA and her colleagues, “there is no study that has investigated the role of various fibers in one cohort.”
To make up for this, the current study tested several forms of fiber in one cohort of mice. Only beta-glucan was found to increase the number of Ileibacterium in the mouse intestine. Other studies on mice have linked this bacterium to weight loss.
Sure enough, long before the 10-week marker, mice fed beta-glucan showed reduced body weight and body fat content compared to mice fed other forms of fiber.
The findings align with another recent study by Duca, which fed barley flour, rich in beta-glucan, to rodents. Even though the rats continued eating just as much of their high-fat diet as before, their energy expenditure increased and they lost weight anyway.
A similar outcome was observed in mice fed beta-glucan in the new study. These animals also showed increased concentrations of butyrate in their guts, which is a metabolite made when microbes break down fiber.
Butyrate induces the release of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), which is the natural protein that synthetic drugs like Ozempic mimic to stimulate insulin release.
“Part of the benefits of consuming dietary fiber is through the release of GLP-1 and other gut peptides that regulate appetite and body weight,” said Duca.
“However, we don’t think that’s all of the effect. We think that there are other beneficial things that butyrate could be doing that are not gut peptide related, such as improving gut barrier health and targeting peripheral organs like the liver.”
Far more research is needed before these results can be extended to humans, but the findings suggest that some fibers may be better suited to weight loss and insulin control than others.
The study was published in the Journal of Nutrition.
An earlier version of this article was published in July 2024.
Vets are urging farmers to put in place mitigation strategies to curtail a surprising increase in respiratory disease linked to immunosuppression in young, suckled, grazing calves.
The rise in cases of classic pneumonia in suckled calves at grass in May, June and July has been significant, says Colin Mason, veterinary investigation officer at Scotland Rural College’s (SRUC) Disease Surveillance Centre, Dumfries.
See also: Advice on reducing pneumonia risk as autumn weather swings
“The thing that’s surprising is it’s occurring at a time when animals should be living their best life: they’re outside, suckling their dam’s milk, on good grass – especially in Scotland. They’re not wanting for anything.”
Unlike parasitic pneumonia associated with lungworm, which is often seen at grass in August and September, these cases are typically bacterial infections.
Colin explains that bacterial pneumonia is an “opportunist” that will take advantage of a compromised animal.
This is seen in the case data, with many individuals showing sign of predisposing factors that are potentially compromising immunity and acting as a gateway for respiratory issues.
The four main predisposing factors are:
Colin estimates that 20% of cases of respiratory disease in first-grazing suckler calves could be tick related.
Tick-borne fever, for example, will compromise the immunity of infected cattle by negatively affecting white blood cells.
Tick-spread and tick-borne diseases are on the rise, making it an area for concern for all farmers, regardless of geography (see “Tick-borne disease on the up”).
Prevention involves avoiding ground with dense vegetation or long grass.
Licensed pour-on treatments can also be used, but options are limited and climate change and increased tick spread may mean a different approach is required in the future.
“We might have to think about how we breed cattle that are more resistant to ticks. We can’t be wholly reliant on chemicals to control the problem, we need to find sustainable solutions to cope,” he says.
Vitamin E and selenium are important for immunity, particularly in fast-growing continental calves.
“Their requirements for vitamin E and selenium can be quite high to manage oxidative stress in growing muscles.
“It’s down to whether they’re getting sufficient,” Colin says.
More than half of all calves presented for post-mortem at SRUC Veterinary Services between 2016 and 2020 had signs of deficiency (see table), which could be compromising their immune status.
Colin urges farmers to ensure suckler cows are supplemented sufficiently, including during outwintering and after turnout, when it can be forgotten. That way, trace elements can be transmitted to calves via the dam’s milk.
Calves should be supplemented accordingly.
When calf pneumonia is a problem at grass, he suggests working with a vet to blood test six typical cows to establish selenium and vitamin E status.
Appropriate supplementation can then be planned and could involve boluses, supplementing dams or providing licks.
Level of mineral and trace element deficiency in calves at post-mortem |
|
| Post-mortems reveal high incidence of vitamin E and selenium deficiency | |
|
Trace element |
Percentage of results deficient |
|
Vitamin E |
58% |
|
Selenium |
54% |
|
Cobalt |
17% |
|
Copper |
6% |
|
Source: Review of beef calf mortality from SRUC Veterinary Services, based on 1,662 post-mortems carried out 2016-2020 of calves less than six months old , 24% of whom had respiratory disease |
|
Exposure to bovine viral diarrhoea (BVD) will have a negative impact on any animal’s ability to mount an effective immune response. The key is to work with a vet to understand a herd’s BVD status and design a herd-specific control strategy.
This should focus on routine testing, vaccination, and identifying and removing persistently infected animals, which act as the main route of infection.
Coccidiosis can cause acute, bloody scours or death, but more commonly can simply reduce calf resilience and act as a gateway disease for other problems.
“Very often, respiratory disease follows on from an episode of gut disease, so it’s always worth reviewing coccidiosis status as part of this,” Colin suggests.
This should involve working with a vet to identify risk factors, putting preventive strategies in place with a focus on exceptional hygiene, and targeting treatment as necessary.
In general, any unexplained calf deaths at about eight weeks old should also be investigated, to ensure any issues are addressed promptly.
“You’re not expecting calves to die at that stage, especially of respiratory disease, so [even] small levels [of mortality] are significant,” Colin emphasises.
Immunosuppression caused by bovine viral diarrhoea (BVD) exposure was the root cause of “quite extreme” respiratory disease on a Scottish farm where beef calves graze the lower hill.
The farm’s vet, Rachel Bragg, of the Farm Animal Practice at The Royal Dick Veterinary School, says 30 calves aged between five days and one month old required treatment for pneumonia in the 250-cow suckler herd.
Treatments increased soon after a routine BVD test found a persistently infected (PI) calf, which was then removed.
“The PI was found quite early on, but the respiratory effects lasted for some months afterwards,” she says.
A couple of calves were lost, while others were repeat treated.
“The earlier they were caught, the better the response.”
The incidence was surprising considering weather and grazing conditions were good, says Rachel.
She urges farmers to question any unusual respiratory disease patterns, as they could be an indication of something else causing immunosuppression.
In addition, those calves that recover after treatment for pneumonia will be more likely to grow suboptimally and succumb to pneumonia again at housing because of long-term lung damage.
With that in mind, having a vaccination programme in place prior to housing is essential, she says.
© Adobe Stock
Tick-borne disease now needs to be considered on most farms, given ticks’ widening geographical spread.
According to data from Scotland’s Rural College Veterinary Services centres, diagnosis of redwater fever and tick-borne fever have doubled since 2010, while the spread of these diseases has increased in Scotland.
Historically, ticks were more of a problem in the west of Scotland and England and in upland rough grazing.
However, Colin Mason says they are now also seen further east and on lowland pastures. In addition, increased tree planting in Scotland has created the perfect thick vegetation for ticks.
This means more farmers need to develop preventative strategies.
In Dorset, vet Lucy Hepworth of Friars Moor Livestock Health, has not seen more pneumonia in beef calves at their first grazing.
However, she has noticed an increase in tick risk and tick-borne disease over the past 20 years.
As a result, she says it is something that increasingly needs to be considered.
“The farm/vet team should look at whether it’s in the background when assessing disease in youngstock,” Lucy says.
Although youngstock need to be exposed to ticks to some degree to build a level of immunity, issues arise when tick levels are high.
“We don’t want them to be exposed massively, as it overwhelms their immune response. That’s where it suppresses immunity and allows other diseases to take hold,” she says.
So far in Channing Tatum’s career, the actor thinks he has one “mistake” that stands out among the rest.
In a Tuesday profile with Vanity Fair alongside his Roofman co-star Kirsten Dunst, Tatum was asked if there were any roles that he passed on because it wasn’t the right fit at the right time. Turns out, he had an answer: an unrealized adaptation of Beauty and the Beast from Guillermo del Toro.
“One of the biggest mistakes of my career: Guillermo del Toro wanted to do Beauty and the Beast, his version of the Beast. And I’d just had a baby, I was on a movie that was absolutely killing me, and the script wasn’t totally there yet,” he explained. “I was just in a place in my head that I was like, ‘I don’t think I can do this right now.’”
The Blink Twice star continued, “It was the biggest mistake, because I’m the biggest Guillermo fan ever. And I think Guillermo doing Beauty and the Beast would’ve been the sickest movie ever.”
Dunst then asked, “And he never did it?” to which Tatum confirmed, “He didn’t do it.”
“He’s got a billion other things that he wants to do. He’s such a creator,” he added. “I’ll probably never forgive myself on that one, but I hope we get to work together one day.”
In 2012, del Toro was attached to direct the Emma Watson-starring live action remake of the Disney story. However, he exited the project two years later, and the film was later directed by Bill Condon.
Del Toro’s latest project is another adaptation, his take on Frankenstein, which stars Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi and Mia Goth. The film had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where it was met with a 14-minute standing ovation.
Gabriele De Marco, PhD
Credit: ResearchGate
Adding golimumab to a methotrexate and corticosteroid regimen reduced the need for rescue corticosteroids and maintained treatment efficacy in people with early psoriatic arthritis (PsA).1
“Current guidance on first-line treatment recommends a step-up approach with methotrexate or other conventional synthetic DMARDs before consideration of biological or targeted synthetic DMARDs.2 Yet, health inequities remain globally, limiting access to these advanced therapies despite the advent of more cost-effective biosimilars, underscoring the need for pragmatic and effective treatment strategies in psoriatic arthritis. Identifying the best treatment strategy for managing psoriatic arthritis is the top research priority identified by patients and their carer,” lead investigator Gabriele De Marco PhD, National Institute for Health and Care Research Leeds Biomedical Research Centre, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, and Leeds Institute of Rheumatic and Musculoskeletal Medicine, University of Leeds, United Kingdom, and colleagues wrote.1
De Marco and colleagues conducted a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, parallel-group, single-center study between November 3, 2015, and January 26, 2022, in 84 adults with treatment-naïve active PsA who had not been treated with conventional synthetic, biologic, or targeted synthetic disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs or systemic treatments. The study randomized participants 1:1 to receive either combination therapy of golimumab and methotrexate (n = 43) or placebo and methotrexate (n = 41) and stratified them by the number of involved peripheral joints at baseline. Around half (n = 46; 55%) of participants were male and 38 (45%) were female. They had a mean age of 42.5 years (SD, 12.4); 61 (73%) participants were White and 7 (8%) were other ethnicities.
At baseline, all participants received a single dose of 120 mg intramuscular methylprednisolone administration and then commenced weekly methotrexate increasing to 25 mg within 28 days. They received golimumab or placebo by subcutaneous injections every 4 weeks with the possibility of additional methylprednisolone permitted once by week 24, totaling up to 240 mg exposure.
The study’s primary endpoint was the difference in mean Psoriatic Arthritis Disease Activity Score (PASDAS) at week 24 in the intention-to-treat population, which investigators compared using analysis of covariance via multiple linear regression. The trial design was put together with input from people with lived experience of PsA.
Investigators found that PASDAS did not differ between treatment groups at week 24, with an unadjusted mean of 3.09 (SD, 1.32) in the placebo and methotrexate group and 2.70 (SD, 1.38) in the golimumab and methotrexate group (adjusted difference, –0.55 [95% CI, 1.12-0.03]; P = .064). Notably, more participants in the placebo and methotrexate group received additional corticosteroids before week 24 (20; 49%]) compared to 9 (21%) in the golimumab group (OR, 0.28 [95% CI, 0.11-0.72]; P = .009).1
In terms of safety, there were similar rates of adverse events (AE) in the placebo and methotrexate group (38; 93%) and the golimumab and methotrexate group (41 [95%]; risk difference 0.03 [95% CI, –0·09 to 0·15]), although investigators noted that altered laboratory investigations and infections occurred more frequently in the golimumab and methotrexate group. There were no deaths, serious, or unexpected adverse events.
“Both interventions led to improved disease activity in patients with early, untreated psoriatic arthritis, without a clinically or statistically significant difference in PASDAS between treatment groups at week 24. Participants in the placebo and methotrexate group required more rescue corticosteroids. Sustained results were observed at week 52 in both groups, without serious or unexpected adverse events,” De Marco and colleagues wrote.1