Blood test may ‘predict’ premature birth: experts

‘Flu season was deadliest’

WASHINGTON, June 9, (Agencies): US and Danish researchers has said they have developed an inexpensive blood test that may predict with up to 80 percent accuracy whether a pregnant woman will give birth prematurely.

While more research is needed before the test is ready for widespread use, experts say it has the potential to reduce fatalities and complications from the 15 million premature births per year worldwide.

The test can also be used to estimate the mother’s due date “as reliably as and less expensively than ultrasound,” said the report in the journal Science.

The test measures the activity of maternal, placental and fetal genes, assessing levels of cell-free RNA, which are messenger molecules that carry the body’s genetic instructions.

“We found that a handful of genes are very highly predictive of which women are at risk for preterm delivery,” said co-senior author Mads Melbye, a visiting professor at Stanford University and CEO of the Statens Serum Institut in Copenhagen.

“I’ve spent a lot of time over the years working to understand preterm delivery. This is the first real, significant scientific progress on this problem in a long time.”

Another top researcher was Stephen Quake, professor of bioengineering and of applied physics at Stanford University, who led a team that created a blood test for Down syndrome in 2008 -- now used in more than three million pregnant women per year.

Defined as a baby arriving at least three weeks early, premature birth affects nine percent of US births and is the top cause of death before age five among children worldwide.

Until now, some tests for predicting premature birth were available but they tended to work only in women at high risk, and were accurate only about 20 percent of the time, according to the report.

To develop the test, researchers examined blood samples from 31 Danish women to identify which genes gave reliable signals about gestational age and prematurity risk.

After more research is done and the test eventually comes to market, researchers say it will likely be simple and inexpensive enough to use in poor areas.

The past flu season was the deadliest for US children in nearly a decade, health officials said Friday.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials said they had received reports of 172 pediatric flu deaths since October. That surpasses the 2012-2013 flu season, when there were 171. An average season sees about 110.

There were more deaths in 20092010, but that was when a rare flu pandemic occurred involving a new strain. More than 300 children died that season.

Besides that pandemic year, this past winter had the most pediatric flu deaths since the CDC started counting them in 2004.

The past flu season wasn’t a pandemic, but it was long — 19 weeks. It also was unusually intense, with high levels of illness reported in nearly every state for weeks on end.

The season peaked in early February. It was mostly over by the end of March, although some flu continued to circulate. The most recent pediatric death occurred in late May.

The season was driven by a kind of flu that tends to put more people in the hospital and cause more deaths, particularly among young children and the elderly.

Making a bad year worse, the flu vaccine didn’t work very well.

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One type of superbug bacteria is increasingly spreading among people who inject drugs, according to a new government report.

Users of heroin and other injection drugs were 16 times more likely than other people to develop severe illnesses from MRSA, said the report published Thursday.

“Drug use has crept up and now accounts for a substantial proportion of these very serious infections,” said Dr William Schaffner of Vanderbilt University, one of the study’s authors.

The US is in the midst of its deadliest drug epidemic ever. While overdose deaths have been the main concern, some studies have noted HIV and hepatitis C infections are spreading among drug users. The authors say the new report is one of the first — and the largest — to highlight how superbug bacterial infections are spreading, too.

MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, often live on the skin without causing symptoms. But they can become more dangerous if they enter the bloodstream, destroying heart valves or causing other damage. Health officials have tied MRSA to as many as 11,000 US deaths a year.