A.
Americans Spend Too Little Time With Primary Care Doctors
Narrator: This is Science Today. The average American spends about thirty minutes per year with a primary care physician. This falls short of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's recommendation of 40 minutes per year for adults. Dr. Andrew Bindman of the University of California , San Francisco led a comparison study of primary care practice in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand.
Bindman: They have many more primary care physicians per capita than we have here in the United States.
Narrator: Bindman says part of the problem in the U.S. is a growing pay disparity between primary care doctors and specialists and fewer medical school students entering the field.
Bindman: International studies have suggested that the degree to which a health care system invests in primary care is in fact an important predictor of how good the health care system works. So, while there's great interest and there's a lot of value in certain aspects of technology in the U.S. health care system, I think that we have prioritized that to such a degree that we've kind of lost sight of what the main target here is, which is to keep our population healthy.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
B.
How Eating Broccoli May Boost Your Immune System
Narrator: This is Science Today. A chemical compound released after consuming broccoli, a Brassica vegetable already known for its anti-cancer properties, has been found to boost the immune system to protect against bacteria and viruses, too.
Bjeldanes: Here we have an immune stimulator and an anti-cancer agent in one and that it raises the possibility that it is in fact the immune stimulation that is leading to the cancer protective effect.
Narrator: Len Bjeldanes of the University of California , Berkeley , says the compound, called diindolylmethane, or DIM, was fed to mice infected with a virus and caused an eighty percent reduction in the amount of virus measured in their blood.
Bjeldanes: What we look for are chemicals that are produced in the body from immune cells called cytokines – these are chemicals that are important in activating the immune response and help the body fight the bad guys, like bacteria or viruses. We get a really nice, strong response from these cytokines.
Narrator: The next step, will be testing these effects in humans. For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
C. National Efforts to Clean Up Groundwater Using Microbes
Narrator: This is Science Today. A team of University of California researchers has discovered that microbial proteins can be used to improve water quality. Peter Weber, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, says bacteria growing in groundwater at an abandoned mine in Wisconsin excreted proteins that not only reduced sulfate, but also caused the aggregation of heavy metal nanoparticles in the water. The goal is to utilize this process in efforts to clean the environment.
Weber: One way would just simply be to take the proteins, the components of the proteins and manufacture them at some level and putting them into a system in such a way that it would cause the precipitation of potential pollutants.
Narrator: Weber says the U.S. Department of Energy is already using microbes in the Pacific Northwest.
Weber: So, it's already something that people are doing out there – trying to use microbes to get heavy metals, other contaminants out of groundwater. And this would just be another entrée where people could use the knowledge of microbes as it were to clean up a system.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
D.
Focusing on New Systems & Materials in Earthquake Retrofitting & Repair
Narrator: This is Science Today. In earthquake-prone, geographic regions such as California, keeping on top of the latest technologies in structural retrofitting and repair is crucial. At the University of California, Irvine, engineers are involved with several major research projects. Ayman Mosallum is a professor in residence in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Mosallum: The research that we are doing here at UCI in the area of earthquake – especially in the retrofit and repair, it shows that there is a lot of promises of using aerospace materials and other materials. And I think this is what differentiates us as UCI than any other campus in the UC system is we are focusing on new systems, new materials, transferring the technology from the aerospace and we have shown that using some of these new systems, we can increase the safety of our structures, bridges and the seismic events.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
E. Researchers Work to Figure Out How Antidepressants Work
Narrator: This is Science Today. Researchers are trying to track genes that may be able to better predict how depressed patients will respond to certain antidepressants. Dr. Steve Hamilton, a psychiatrist and geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco says previous studies have found that genes thought to be related to the biological processes that antidepressants were linked to, were actually not involved to a great extent.
Hamilton : What this highlights is that we know very little about how antidepressants work – what they do in the brain. We know that they work and we know there's a period of time that's usually required for them to work, but we are only now beginning to get a glimpse of the biological processes that are underlying people getting better on these drugs.
Narrator: Hamilton 's work so far suggests that genes they had not previously known about may actually be involved.
Hamilton: If we're able to identify more specific targets for these drugs through genetic analysis that may give us a leg up in coming up with better treatments that make people feel better faster and with much more reliability.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
