Author: Amy Dockser Marcus

A WSJ article Monday reported that a federally funded working group is trying to determine whether a virus known as XMRV poses a risk to the nation’s blood supply. So how worried are public-health experts about XMRV?

In August, the last time emerging threats were assessed and ranked by the AABB, XMRV hadn’t yet appeared on the group’s radar. (The AABB is an association that includes facilities that collect virtually all of the U.S. blood supply.) But Susan L. Stramer, executive scientific officer at the American Red Cross and a member of the AABB committee that ranked diseases, said that if she had to do so today, she would likely rank XMRV as a “yellow” agent.

The committee prioritized the agents — including dengue and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease — based on the potential threat to blood safety, the scientific and epidemiologic data available so far and the level of public and regulatory concern. Agents with the highest priority were listed as red, followed by orange, then yellow.

There isn’t conclusive evidence yet about whether XMRV is transmitted in transfusions or causes disease in people who get transfused blood, but public and regulatory concern exists about XMRV, Dr. Stramer explained. As more information emerges about XMRV, she said, “the classification could change.”

The AABB published a fact sheet about the virus XMRV in January that provides background information about the virus, which has been linked to prostate cancer and chronic fatigue syndrome.

In the effort to try to delay and ultimately prevent Alzheimer’s disease, an important question needs to be answered: how to pay for the programs.

Many strategies are now in the works. At CFIT, a nonprofit program, members pay $4,000 annually. Kenneth S. Kosik, the program’s founder, helped raise more than $1 million in private donations to defray costs and offer scholarships, according to an article in today’s WSJ.

But other models are also being tried. The CDC and the Alzheimer’s Association, along with institutes that are part of the National Institutes of Health, created a public-health “road map’’ to cognitive health that would involve publicly funded programs. Read the report here.

In another effort, a pilot program was launched in March by SCAN Health Plan Arizona and a company called BrainSavers to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s for 150 members of SCAN, a Medicare Advantage plan. Three times a week, the SCAN members ages 65 and older attend one-hour classes that combine cognitive exercises with strength-building and other physical exercises, stress reduction and tips on diet. The participants are evaluated for cognitive and physical fitness before the class begins, then again at three months and six months. Another 150 SCAN members not taking the classes are serving as a control group for comparison.

The pilot classes are taking place mainly at assisted living facilities in Phoenix, but Paul E. Bendheim, founder and CEO of BrainSavers, says his goal is to partner with health plans around the country that will offer the class as a member service at a network of participating health clubs.

Dr. Bendheim says that data from the Alzheimer’s Association indicates that Medicare spends three times as much for an Alzheimer’s patient as it does for someone the same age without Alzheimer’s. He says BrainSavers is in discussion with health plans in California, Utah and New Mexico, hoping they will foot the bill for classes for their members

Image: Associated Press

Ever since Harold Varmus’s January public letter stating he asked Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center’s board to start looking for his successor as president, people have been wondering what the Nobel laureate is going to do next.

Now there may be an answer: Varmus is expected to be nominated by the White House very soon to head the National Cancer Institute, according to The Cancer Letter, a publication read by many in the cancer field.

There hasn’t been any official confirmation of the news. Rumors about his imminent appointment have circulated before but they were shot down earlier this month by Varmus in an email to Science.

The Health Blog tried to reach Varmus today without success. A spokeswoman at the NCI said today after the latest report: “We know nothing. The White House makes these announcements.’’

If the report is correct, Varmus, who won the Nobel in 1989 for cancer work, would succeed John Niederhuber, who has been in the job for three years. Varmus knows his way around the place. He already served as director of the National Institutes of Health, of which NCI is part, during an era when he oversaw a huge increase in the budget. And he has run Sloan-Kettering, a cancer research and treatment powerhouse, for 10 years. His bio is here.

His choice could mean interesting things for the NCI, which launched the massive caBIG project to create a collaborative information network to accelerate research and the development of drugs by sharing data.

Varmus is a proponent of getting scientific data into the public domain more quickly. One of the many things he has done is co-found the Public Library of Science, which wants to make scientific papers available to scientists as well as the public as quickly as possible.

Photo of Varmus in 1999 by Associated Press