Bubba the turkey was genetically altered at birth to gain weight and then be carved up for dinner.

Turkeys usually have very little to be thankful for on Thanksgiving because they’re typically the main dish.

But this year, at least one bird at a northern California animal sanctuary has a new lease on life.

Bubba the butterball of a turkey was genetically altered at birth to gain weight and then be carved up for dinner.

But life presented him with a second chance when a rescuer found Bubba limping along a busy road.

And an animal sanctuary in Placer County just happened to have room for one more.

Now the bird has plenty of space to rest his swollen feet and enjoy the rest of his days.

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La Jolla, California (January 18, 2020). A new study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation enrolled people with HIV who also happened to have a terminal illness to study where HIV hides in the human body so doctors can better treat and maybe even cure HIV.

Selfless Terminally Ill Persons Join Doctors To Study HIV

Despite understanding that HIV exists throughout the human body, researchers working toward a cure of HIV do not understand how HIV populates deep tissues. “Unfortunately, we simply cannot know the answer until a person is deceased and subject to an autopsy. Delays between death and when tissues are collected means the virus degrades, obscuring where HIV really hides,” said Davey Smith, MD, the senior author and Chief of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at UC San Diego.

To fill this gap, the team turned to terminally ill persons who happened to have HIV, and with their consent, the team serially collected blood while the person was alive, and then performed a rapid autopsy at the time of their death. “This donation at the end of one’s life is the first of its kind in HIV research, and allowed us to discover all the places HIV hides, even during treatment where the virus is difficult to detect in standard blood tests.”

Terminally ill volunteers were eager to support this groundbreaking work. “Our participants have HIV but are dying of something else, like cancer. They are going through a lot, but they still want to leave a larger legacy behind and help find a cure for HIV,” said Sara Gianella, MD, assistant professor at UC San Diego Health and study coauthor. Study participants were either self-referred from hearing about the study or referred from their primary HIV providers. “Only one potential volunteer decided ultimately not to participate,” added Dr. Gianella.”It is an amazing gift from both the participants and their families.”

Where does HIV hide?

Study investigators found HIV in every one of the 30 organ sites they studied, even when the deceased participant was taking modern HIV therapy . When the virus was sequenced, some of the virus had genetic defects, which meant that it was nonfunctional or likely ‘dead’, but most of the virus seemed to be intact and able to grow.

“As expected, most of the HIV was in the blood, gut and lymph nodes,” said Antoine Chaillon, MD, PhD, assistant professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at UC San Diego and the study’s lead author. “But, intact HIV was also found in the brain, liver, spleen, kidney, basically everywhere.”

It seems that having HIV in all these tissues can cause problems, even when someone is taking HIV therapy, and active HIV growth is ‘undetectable’ in blood. Being ‘undetectable’ in blood means that a person’s HIV therapy has basically stopped the growth of HIV in the blood. Although antiretroviral therapy can keep HIV from replicating, it does not stop all of the problems associated with HIV. Persons with HIV have more inflammation-related diseases, like heart attacks, stroke and cancer, than people who do not have HIV. “We do not fully know why,” Dr. Gianella said. “We think that when HIV tries to regrow in each of these tissues where it was lying dormant, it can cause an inflammatory response. Even though the antiretroviral therapy keeps it from fully replicating, it still causes local damage.”

“Yes,” Dr. Smith added. “For example, half of persons with HIV have neurocognitive impairment even when taking the very best HIV therapy. How HIV causes local inflammation in the brain, even during therapy, may explain this.”

“Further improving the health of people with HIV likely means we need to figure out how to clear HIV from its hiding places,” Dr. Chaillon said. “This means new therapies.”

How HIV moves in the body?

Two of the study’s participants had stopped taking their HIV therapy, leading to even more new insights. “Sometimes when people have a terminal illness they don’t want to keep taking their medicines anymore,” Dr. Gianella explained. “This gave us a unique opportunity to study how the virus replicated and moved in the body while the virus was untreated. We collected the participant’s blood before and after stopping their therapy, while they were alive, and then we collected all the tissues after they died. Since HIV evolves quickly within a person, we were able to identify the same viruses that restarted replicating in the blood after the person stopped their therapy in all their tissues after death.”

“We expected the replicating virus to seed blood cells and cells in the gut and lymph nodes,” added Dr. Chaillon, “but we were surprised at how quickly the virus was everywhere!” The team used new analytical methods, to find that the virus moved between tissues in the body. Cells in the blood and the gut seemed to be the source of most HIV in the rest of the body, and most HIV was trafficked through the body by the blood.

What does this mean for curing HIV?

Developing a way to keep HIV from replicating when therapy is stopped, often called ‘therapy free remission’, is a major goal for HIV researchers. Two people seem to have achieved this goal through treatments with special bone marrow transplants. “But even in these patients they still have intact virus throughout their body, even if it cannot get to the bloodstream,” said Dr. Smith. “Our study found that HIV was mainly trafficked through the body in the blood. This might explain why we saw therapy-free remission in the two persons with bone marrow transplants,” Dr. Smith explained. “After the transplants, their blood cells were protected and could no longer carry HIV. They still have intact virus throughout their body, but it can’t get to the bloodstream to start replicating.”

“But, HIV in these tissues still likely cause local inflammation and damage,” Dr. Chaillon added. “We need new ways to clear those places and extensions of our work can some day answer how.”

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A cure for aging?

The research was carried out at University of Southern California and focuses on a kind of cell known as a senescent cell. Much aging-related research focuses on these, as they are key players in how humans grow old. Essentially, these are cells that have ceased the ability to divide and are therefore thought to be a key driver in age-related decline, along with conditions such as arthritis and heart disease.

“Senescent cells are effectively the opposite of stem cells, which have an unlimited potential for self-renewal or division,” says lead author Alireza Delfarah. “Senescent cells can never divide again. It’s an irreversible state of cell cycle arrest.”

While this is a well-established function of senescent cells, the biological processes underpinning this behavior aren’t so well understood. To investigate this, the team performed an analysis of the metabolic pathways in epithelial cells that had become senescent.

This led the researchers to discover that the cells had stopped producing a class of chemical compounds called nucleotides. These are the building blocks of DNA, and the researchers found through further experiments that when they intervened to stop the cells producing nucleotides, they indeed went on to become senescent.

“This means that the production of nucleotides is essential to keep cells young,” Delfarah says. “It also means that if we could prevent cells from losing nucleotide synthesis, the cells might age more slowly.”

That is easier said than done, but the discovery marks an important step in this direction. If we understand how and why cells become senescent, then we may be able to design drugs that target those particular machinations. But equally important, identifying what makes these cells unique will make it easier to design drugs that selectively target them and not other healthy ones.

These medications are part of a class of drugs called senolytics, which focus on eliminating senescent cells for healthier aging. Last year, scientists made a breakthrough in this area, demonstrating a new type of senolytic compound that could slow down the deterioration of aging mice with just three days of treatment.

The thinking with this kind of research isn’t necessarily to stop aging altogether, but to make aging in humans a more palatable experience by keeping us fitter and healthier for longer. Senescent cells are implicated in a range of age-related conditions, so new methods of clearing them away or preventing their buildup in the first place could open up some exciting possibilities.

“To drink from the fountain of youth, you have to figure out where the fountain of youth is, and understand what the fountain of youth is doing,” says study author Nick Graham. “We’re doing the opposite; we’re trying to study the reasons cells age, so that we might be able to design treatments for better aging.”

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LOS ANGELES (CBS)  — A bill requiring hearing aids for babies and young children is one step closer to passage.

The bill cleared the state assembly and is now headed to the California senate.

CBS2/KCAL9’s Randy Paige spoke to one family at a hearing clinic about the impact of the vote.

He listens to a 5-year-old girl as she gushes about one of her favorite things — ice cream!

“I like vanilla and chocolate but do you know this kind of ice cream…,” says Zoe.

You’re witnessing a miracle and it’s made possible by the tiny piece of technology tucked inside the little girl’s ear — a hearing aid.

When Zoe was diagnosed with a severe hearing loss as a baby, it was a race against time to get her fitted for hearing aids. With each passing day, her brain was missing out on critical auditory clues about the world around her.

She was unable to hear the frequencies of her own mother’s voice.

“When you have an infant and you have all these aspirations for them, Rhodes scholar, or whatever, and you don’t even know if they’re going to be able to talk it’s just so painful,” says Zoe’s mom.

“The first sIx months are critical so that the brain can start making sense of what all these sounds are and what it means,” says Cathleen Mathes, president and CEO of the John Tracy Center, a nationally recognized clinic for families with children who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Mathes was also Zoe’s therapist.

Paige asks what would have happened if Zoe hadn’t received her hearing aids early on.

“It would be very difficult for her to gain spoken language skills,” says Mathes, who acknowledges without the early intervention Zoe would be unable to speak in long, full sentences, “the way we heard her speak today,” she says.

Zoe’s mom says she had to borrow used hearing aids from the Tracy Clinic — at first — and it was a financial struggle to come up with the $8,000 she needed to buy Zoe’s aids a short time later.

” I saw my bank account go from positive to  negative pretty fast,” she says.

That’s because health insurance companies in California are not required to cover the cost of hearing aids in children.

It’s estimated that only one in 10 families have private insurance that has a policy that covers hearing aids.

That could soon change. A parent-led initiative has now passed the state assembly and headed to the California senate.

If AB598 is passed into law, it would require health insurance companies to include coverage for children’s hearing aids.

“I actually think about the light coming through the window and the dust settling in the room,” says Zoe’s mom

She looks at a photo — taken on the day Zoe first heard her mother’s voice.

“From about 10 feet away, when they turned on her hearing aids I called her name and she lit up. And I knew that she was on. So I said Zoe, and she turned around and she looked at me and smiled and I just knew that we were connected and I was, I just I can’t tell you how excited I was to see her and know that we were going to be okay.”

And now nearly five years later, Zoe carries the promise of all of the other children who need the key to unlock the sounds of the outside world — but many may not be able to afford it.

Backers of the bill are optimistic about the future. They say if it sails through the senate, Govenor Newsom has shown that he cares about the needs of young children.

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