New Delhi, May 21 (IANS) In a startling revelation, researchers now report that lip kissing was practiced by the peoples of the ancient Middle East 4,500 years ago, moving the earliest documentation for kissing back 1,000 years.

Earlier research hypothesised that the earliest evidence of human lip kissing originated in a very specific geographical location in South Asia 3,500 years ago, from where it may have spread to other regions, simultaneously accelerating the spread of the herpes simplex virus 1.

Now, researchers from the University of Copenhagen and University of Oxford, in a new article published in the journal Science, draw on a range of written sources from the earliest Mesopotamian societies, saying that kissing was already a well-established practice 4,500 years ago in the Middle East.

In ancient Mesopotamia, which is the name for the early human cultures that existed between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in present-day Iraq and Syria, people wrote in cuneiform script on clay tablets.

"Many thousands of these clay tablets have survived to this day, and they contain clear examples that kissing was considered a part of romantic intimacy in ancient times, just as kissing could be part of friendships and family members' relations," said Dr Troels Pank Arboll, an expert on the history of medicine in Mesopotamia.

Therefore, kissing should not be regarded as a custom that originated exclusively in any single region and spread from there but rather appears to have been practiced in multiple ancient cultures over several millennia," he added.

In addition to its importance for social and sexual behaviour, the practice of kissing may have played an unintentional role in the transmission of microorganisms, potentially causing viruses to spread among humans.

However, the suggestion that the kiss may be regarded as a sudden biological trigger behind the spread of particular pathogens is more doubtful.

The spread of the herpes simplex virus 1, which researchers have suggested could have been accelerated by the introduction of the kiss, is a case in point.

"There is a substantial corpus of medical texts from Mesopotamia, some of which mention a disease with symptoms reminiscent of the herpes simplex virus 1," Dr Arboll said.

In fact, research into bonobos and chimpanzees, the closest living relatives to humans, has shown that both species engage in kissing, "which may suggest that the practice of kissing is a fundamental behaviour in humans, explaining why it can be found across cultures," added Dr Sophie Rasmussen.

New Delhi, April 19 (IANS) Indian diet rich in iron, zinc, and fibre, regular consumption of tea, and use of turmeric in meals lowered severity and death due to Covid in the country, according to a study published in the April edition of the Indian Journal of Medical Research by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the death rate was reportedly 5-8 fold lower in India which is densely populated as compared to lesser-populated western countries.

The study, conducted by an international team of scientists including from India, Brazil, Jordan, Switzerland, and Saudi Arabia, aimed to investigate whether dietary habits were associated with the variations in Covid-19 severity and deaths between Western and Indian population.

"Our results suggest that Indian food components suppress cytokine storm and various other severity-related pathways of Covid-19 and may have a role in lowering severity and death rates from Covid-19 in India as compared to western populations," said the researchers including from Centre for Genomics and Applied Gene Technology at Institute of Integrative Omics & Applied Biotechnology, in West Bengal, and Policy Center for Biomedical Research at Translational Health Science & Technology Institute in Haryana.

"However, large multi-centered case-control studies are required to support our current findings," they added.

The findings showed that the components of Indian diets, which maintain high iron and zinc concentrations in blood and rich fibre in foods, played a role in preventing carbon dioxide (CO2) and lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-mediated Covid-19 severity.

LPS is a common inflammatory mediator to induce inflammatory processes in the brain.

Further, regular consumption of tea by Indians helped maintain high HDL (high-density lipoprotein), also called "good" cholesterol. The catechins in tea also acted as a natural atorvastatin (a statin medication used to prevent cardiovascular diseases) in lowering triglyceride in blood.

Importantly, they said, regular consumption of turmeric in daily food by Indians led to a strong immunity.

The curcumin in turmeric may have prevented pathways and mechanisms associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection and Covid-19 severity and lowered the death rate, said the researchers.

On the other hand, increased consumption of red meat, dairy products and processed foods resulted in an increase in the severity and death due to Covid in the western populations.

These foods "activate cytokine storm-related pathways, intussusceptive angiogenesis, hypercapnia and enhance blood glucose levels due to high contents of sphingolipids, palmitic acid and by-products such as CO2 and LPS" they wrote in the study.

Palmitic acid - the most common saturated fatty acid found in the human body - also induces ACE2 expression and increases the infection rate, the team said.

Coffee and alcohol that are highly consumed in western countries also led to an increase in severity and death rates from Covid-19 by deregulating blood iron, zinc and triglyceride levels.

For the study, the team used blood transcriptomes of severe Covid-19 patients from three western countries (showing high fatality) and two datasets from Indian patients.

Gene set enrichment analyses were performed for pathways, metabolites, nutrients, etc., and compared for Western and Indian samples to identify the food- and nutrient-related factors, which may be associated with Covid-19 severity.A

Data on the daily consumption of twelve key food components across four countries were collected and a correlation between nutrigenomics analyses and per capita daily dietary intake was also investigated.

Bareilly (UP), April 11 (IANS) Cow urine, which has been touted as a miracle medicine for decades, has now found to be unsuitable for direct human consumption as it contains potentially harmful bacteria.

Research carried out by Bareilly-based ICAR-Indian Veterinary Research Institute (IVRI), the country's premier animal research body, has found that the urine of buffalo was more effective on certain bacteria.

The study led by Bhoj Raj Singh of the institute along with three Ph.D students, found that urine samples from healthy cows and bulls contained at least 14 types of harmful bacteria with the presence of Escherichia coli, which can cause stomach infections, most commonly detected.

The findings of the peer-reviewed research have been published in online research website, Researchgate.

Singh, who heads the department of epidemiology at the institute, said, "Statistical analysis of 73 urine samples of cow, buffaloes and humans suggest that antibacterial activity in buffalo urine was far more superior than cows. Urine of buffalo was significantly more effective on bacteria like S Epidermidis and E Rhapontici."

He explained, "We collected urine samples of three types of cows -- Sahiwal, Tharparkar and Vindavani (cross breed) from local dairy farms -- along with samples of buffaloes and humans. Our study, carried out between June and November 2022, concluded that a sizeable proportion of urine samples from apparently healthy individuals carry potentially pathogenic bacteria."

The urine of some individuals, irrespective of sex and breeder species, might be inhibitory to a select group of bacteria but the common belief, that cow urine is antibacterial, cannot be generalised.

He further said, "In no case can urine be recommended for human consumption. Some people put forth the contention that distilled urine does not have infectious bacteria. We are carrying out further research on it."

Notably, cow urine is widely sold in the Indian market without the food safety and standards authority of India (FSSAI) trademark by many suppliers.

New York, March 23 (IANS) The number of "hidden" infections tied to a place, or cases of infected people who show no symptoms, could be the key indicator for dengue risk, suggests a new study.

So far, for mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue fever, the abundance of the insects in places where people gather has served as the main barometer for infection risk.

The new study, published in the journal PNAS Nexus, found that 8 per cent of human activity spaces accounted for more than half of infections during a dengue outbreak. And these "super spreader" spaces were associated with a predominance of asymptomatic cases, or 74 per cent of all infections.

"That's the complicated nature of this virus. We have underestimated the role of asymptomatic cases in spreading dengue," Gonzalo Vazquez-Prokopec, Associate Professor of environmental sciences at Emory University said.

"Symptomatic cases represent only the tip of the iceberg," he added

Generally, about 50 to 70 per cent of dengue cases are asymptomatic, making detection by public health officials impractical, but the study reveals that asymptomatic cases are tied to a third of transmission.

"The lesson is that we need to focus on prevention of dengue outbreaks," Vazquez-Prokopec said. "The interventions for dengue for decades have been reactive. Simply reacting by closing a net around reported cases of the disease, however, will fail to contain an outbreak because that's missing the super spreaders."

For the study, the researchers wanted to determine the role of asymptomatic cases. People without symptoms may continue to go about their daily routines, unknowingly infecting any mosquitoes that bite them, which can then later spread the virus to more people.

The study involved 4,600 people in two different neighbourhoods in the Amazonian city of Iquitos in Peru, a dengue hotspot.

They were surveyed three times a week about their mobility. This data was used to map "activity spaces," such as residences, churches and schools.

Blood analyses confirmed a total of 257 symptomatic cases of dengue during the six-year study period. That led to investigations of other participants whose activity spaces overlapped with the symptomatic cases. More than 2,000 of these location-based contacts were confirmed by blood tests to have dengue infections and more than half of them reported not having any noticeable symptoms.

The results pinpointed the role of asymptomatic "super spreaders" in a dengue outbreak. A small number of the activity spaces, or 8 per cent, were linked to more than half of the infections and most of the cases associated with those places were asymptomatic.

"We found that the mosquito numbers in a location alone is not a predictor of the risk of infection," Vazquez-Prokopec said.

Instead, risk prediction for a location requires a cascade of circumstances -- a high number of asymptomatic cases frequenting the location combined with high levels of mosquitos and high numbers of people who are not immune to the particular serotype of dengue virus that is circulating.

"For diseases that are directly spread from one person to another, like Covid-19, what matters is who you were near," he said. "But in the case of dengue, what matters most is where you went."