Public forum Wednesday, 5 June 2013

Diseases that were largely eradicated forty years ago are returning. Across the world children are getting sick and dying from preventable conditions because nervous parents are skipping their children’s shots.

Yet the stories of vaccine reactions are frightening, with cases of people being damaged, even killed, by vaccines. How do we decide whether to vaccinate or not, and what are the real risks?

• Why are Melbourne babies getting whooping cough?
• Why are measles epidemics appearing in Europe?
• Why does vaccination remain so controversial?
• While more than 90% of Australians support vaccination, why are many of us delaying or refusing vaccines?
• What’s going wrong with the community conversation about vaccination?

Explore these issues and more at a public forum with Sonya Pemberton, the producer of JABBED, a documentary premiering on SBS TV on Sunday 26 May 2013. [continue reading…]

Sydney researchers have discovered a new type of immune cell in skin that plays a role in fighting off parasitic invaders such as ticks, mites, and worms, and could be linked to eczema and allergic skin diseases.

The team from the Immune Imaging and T cell Laboratories at the Centenary Institute worked with colleagues from SA Pathology in Adelaide, the Malaghan Institute in Wellington, New Zealand and the USA.

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The winner of the Centenary Institute Lawrence Creative Prize will be announced at 12.30 pm, Thursday 15 November 2012, at a lunch at UBS in Sydney.

He will receive $25,000, and a glass trophy designed by Australian sculptor Nick Mount.

The 2012 finalists are:

• Robert McLaughlin, a medical engineer from the University of Western Australia (UWA), who has developed an optical probe that fits inside a hypodermic needle and can help surgeons accurately determine the boundaries of breast cancer tumours.
• Marc Pellegrini, from Melbourne’s Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI), whose discoveries about how the body regulates its immune system are being applied to clinical trials of cancer vaccines and treatments for HIV and hepatitis.
• Jian Yang, from the Diamantina Institute at the University of Queensland, who has solved a major puzzle of missing heritability by developing software and methods to determine the multiple genes involved in conditions such as schizophrenia, obesity and diabetes.

Walter and Eliza Hall Institute researchers, with the help of NICTA’s Victoria ICT Laboratory, are a step closer to being able to model the complexity of our immune system in a computer thanks to research published in Science today.  This will be a critical tool in developing new vaccines and better therapies for autoimmune diseases.

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How our skin says, “Don’t worry, these are good guys,” revealed today in PNAS.

There are more bacteria living on our skin and in our gut than cells in our body. We need them. But until now no-one knew how the immune system could tell that these bacteria are harmless.

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The Centenary Institute Lawrence Creative Prize is a $25,000 award for outstanding creativity in biomedical research by young scientists.  Here are the three finalists.  The winner will be announced at an awards luncheon on Wednesday 19 October at the UBS dining room in Sydney.  For more information call Niall on 0417 131 977 or niall@scienceinpublic.com.au

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This week on radio, Tim Thwaites is talking about booze and the immune system; Twitter and the world’s mood; general anaesthetic; a nose for death; and more… [continue reading…]

• High resolution images
• Liver factsheet
• Paper citation and abstract

Our livers can fight back against the immune system – reducing organ rejection but also making us more susceptible to liver disease. [continue reading…]