By Dr. Sanjay Gupta
Chief Medical Correspondent

Dr. Sanjay Gupta at a chimpanzee sanctuary in Cameroon.

This week, I am in Cameroon investigating a piece for the CNN documentary “Planet in Peril.” I am writing this from a small village called Nyabissan. Don’t bother trying to find it on a map. It is in the heart of the jungle and one of the more remote places I have ever been. (Editor's note: the path to Nyabissan was not very forgiving. Dr. Gupta explains HERE)

In fact, you are reading this blog because Neil Hallsworth, our camera man, was able to point a small, portable satellite dish in the sky and get a signal and then send this piece along with some of the video we shot back to Atlanta.

We picked this place because it is a hot spot in the world of viruses. It turns out there is a constant exchange of viruses here between animals and humans. There is a very cozy relationship here between humans and animals, such as rodents, snakes, mammals and other primates.

Just today, we passed two men who had killed an enormous viper, another hunter with a pangolin (also known as a scaly anteater) and two young kids with two dead monkeys. While this “Bush Meat” represents a necessary part of the diet, it can sometimes be a problem.

In fact, if you look at some of the deadliest viruses and other pathogens that have ever plagued mankind, they have come from animals, and many of them from this part of Africa. Somewhere in the hunting, slaughtering and eating of these animals, a pathogen makes a leap.

Most times it is inconsequential, but in a few rare cases it results in disaster. Think about Marburg, ebola, malaria and HIV, not to mention many of the influenza viruses. One of the mandates for the “virus hunters” we’re traveling with (Dr. Nathan Wolfe, Mat Lebreton and Karen Saylors, all with the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative) is to try and stop that exchange of pathogens, and in the process stop the next potential pandemic.

Next, I will share my experiences going out into the bush and looking at the practice of safe hunting. As I sit here in the jungle, I am wondering if you think we’re doing enough to monitor and stop emerging diseases around the world.

Editor’s Note: Medical news is a popular but sensitive subject rooted in science. We receive many comments on this blog each day; not all are posted. Our hope is that much will be learned from the sharing of useful information and personal experiences based on the medical and health topics of the blog. We encourage you to focus your comments on those medical and health topics and we appreciate your input. Thank you for your participation.

By Miriam Falco
CNN Medical Managing Editor

You may not know it, but the first-ever high level meeting on HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis is underway at the United Nations right now. The former president of Portugal and UN Secretary General's Special Envoy to Stop TB, Dr. Jorge Sampaio, told reporters yesterday that the "meeting was convened to draw the attention of the world to a much neglected topic" – how TB is affecting HIV/AIDS patients and vice versa.

People living with HIV/AIDS cannot be cured, but they can live longer, with the help of antiretroviral drugs. Thanks to generous donations from the Global Fund,  UNAIDS, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.S. PEPFAR plan – the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, even people in the poorest countries are gaining access to these life-saving drugs.

The Global Fund even documented some intriguing stories of people being pulled from the brink of death by taking anti-retroviral drugs in a collection of photographs taken by some of the world's best photographers. These pictures and stories go on display at the Mellon Library in Washington DC tomorrow, June 11th.  You can see a special preview here.

However, too many HIV/AIDS patients aren't living long enough to reap the benefits of antiretrovirals because they've dying of TB first. The World Health Organization says an estimated one third of people living with HIV or AIDS also are infected with TB. If you're one of those people, you're up to 50 times more likely to develop TB than non-HIV infected people and the WHO says TB kills up to half of all AIDS patients worldwide.

The statistics for TB around the world are quite startling. According to the latest figures from the CDC, approxiamately 2 billion people, or one third of the worlds population carry the bacteria that causes tuberculosis - that doesn't mean they have active TB, but they could develop it.

The WHO says "HIV is the most potent risk factor for converting latent TB into active TB, while TB bacteria accelerates the progress of AIDS infection in the patient." Dr. Jim Reichman from the New Jersey Medical School Global Tuberculosis Institute puts it another way: "TB accelerates AIDS and AIDS accelerates TB."

The CDC also says 16 percent of TB cases among 25-44 year-olds in the United States in 2005 were occuring in HIV infected people.

So you may not have HIV or AIDS or TB for that matter and may not live in a poor country with fewer resources to control these diseases. But, as we all learned a year ago in the Andrew Speaker case, we may be just a vacation away or a a plane trip away from coming in contact with someone carrying TB. Speaker, you may recall, is the Atlanta lawyer who contracted TB while traveling in Asia and later flew to and from Europe, knowing he had multi-drug resistant tuberculosis.

“TB is preventable and curable and it's been so for decades" says Dr. Reichmann. This is why health officials are trying to convince the global leaders gathering at the U.N. today, to encourage countries around the world to invest more in TB prevention and treatment. To paraphrase many TB & AIDS experts, to control TB anywhere, you have to control it everywhere. But so far there's no big celebrity sponsored campaign to raise a lot of money for eradicating TB. That's why Dr. Marcos Espinal, Executive Secretary of the Stop TB Partnership told reporters yesterday, "what's highly needed is a global plan for TB and that countries embrace the plan" in order to stop the spread of HIV and TB.

Editor’s Note: Medical news is a popular but sensitive subject rooted in science. We receive many comments on this blog each day; not all are posted. Our hope is that much will be learned from the sharing of useful information and personal experiences based on the medical and health topics of the blog. We encourage you to focus your comments on those medical and health topics and we appreciate your input. Thank you for your participation.

By Shahreen Abedin
CNN Medical Producer

While researching "The Body Project," an eating disorders prevention program that's seeing remarkable progress so far in an area that has seen few if any truly effective programs at all, I interviewed Carolyn Becker, a psychologist at Trinity University in San Antonio who specializes in eating disorders. 

Becker adapted the program's curriculum specifically to be administered to college-age women by their own peers in sorority houses.  Studies show a reduction of eating disorder risks by 61 percent through The Body Project.  

All the sororities at Trinity have been using the body program since 2001, and Becker says the college adaptation has had results comparable to the original model, which was focused on both high school and college-age women and administered by teachers and counselors. 

The program works by making women recognize how "the thin ideal" - the notion that you need to be skinny to be beautiful – is thrust upon us through media and marketing images.  Then, through acts of "body activism," like leaving "you are beautiful" notes in dieting books and posting similar messages in public restrooms, participants begin to reject the thin ideal for themselves and their own bodies.

According to Becker, we're about to see this project implemented on college campuses on a grand scale, mainly because of the role of Delta Delta Delta (a.k.a. Tri Delta), the national sorority that has rolled out the program in eleven of its chapters so far.  Tri Delta funded the publication of the college-based curriculum, which will be available to any college that wants to use it, and although Becker doesn't have definite numbers, she tells me she conservatively estimates that we'll see the program implemented in at least 20 to 25 college campuses in the 2008-2009 academic year.   

It makes me think about my college days, when I was finally on my own and could make a 2 A.M. fast food run or eat cookie dough for dinner, without having to answer to the parentals.  Now that I think about it, it was one of those first steps of adulthood:  having complete autonomy over my own eating habits. 

How did your college experience shape how you eat as an adult?  Did you basically stick to what you were already doing at home?  Did you put on the 'freshmen fifteen, or was that just a myth for you?  Did you end up losing weight in an effort to conform to aesthetic ideals instilled in us on campus?  Did you feel like you were under a lot more pressure to conform than you were in high school? 

Editor's Note: Medical news is a popular but sensitive subject rooted in science. We receive many comments on this blog each day; not all are posted. Our hope is that much will be learned from the sharing of useful information and personal experiences based on the medical and health topics of the blog. We encourage you to focus your comments on those medical and health topics and we appreciate your input. Thank you for your participation

By Val Willingham
CNN Medical Producer

I'm not wild about babies. Don't get me wrong – it's not that I dislike them – I'm just not like a lot of my female friends who oooh and ahhh every time an infant enters the room. But I wanted to be a mom, so in my early 30s I did have a child. A beautiful little girl, who, even at the age of 21, still is my baby. My husband and I wanted our daughter. She was planned. We started thinking about having a child in September 1986. She was born in July 1987. We were blessed, and if you look at statistics, we also were lucky.

According to the American Fertility Association more than 15 percent of couples in the U.S. have difficulty conceiving a child. Many people are delaying having children – about 20 percent of women in the United States now have their first child after age 35. And as we age, it becomes more and more difficult to conceive. According to Dr. Robert Stillman, director of the Shady Grove Fertility Reproductive Science Center in Rockville, Maryland, "It's just the natural aging process, and women can make that worse by smoking, alcohol abuse, excessive weights - both high and low."

In her 30s and 40s, a female's reproductive cycle begins to change. As a woman ages, her eggs are more likely to develop abnormalities The probability of having a baby drops between 3 and 5 percent per year after the age of 30, a rate that can be even higher after 40. In fact a woman in her 40s faces a 50 percent risk of suffering from a miscarriage, and there can be other problems. "As women age, they can end up with uterine problems, such as fibroid tumors, ovarian cysts or growths endometriosis," Stillman adds. Many couples turn to expensive, state-of-the-art procedures such as in-vitro fertilization in order to have children.

When women get into their 50s, typically menstruation and ovulation cease with menopause. But you wouldn't necessarily know that by looking at Hollywood. Many stars are having kids well into midlife. Stillman says there is nothing wrong with that, but many older people come into his office wanting to get pregnant with their own eggs, because aging Celebrity X just had twins. Stillman knows that's not possible and says these actresses need to be honest. He feels it's frustrating. "If they are going to be on the cover of People, they have a responsibility to their following, not to mislead people that fertility is easy at 52. It's not. They are (using) donor eggs."

So yes, there really is a biological clock. And while it keeps tick, tick ticking, couples need to think about their odds when it comes to having little ones later in life.

Are you thinking of having a child? Are you having problems? Are you someone who was successful giving birth at a later age? Tell us your story. We'd like to hear about it.

Editor’s Note: Medical news is a popular but sensitive subject rooted in science. We receive many comments on this blog each day; not all are posted. Our hope is that much will be learned from the sharing of useful information and personal experiences based on the medical and health topics of the blog. We encourage you to focus your comments on those medical and health topics and we appreciate your input. Thank you for your participation.

By Miriam Falco
CNN Medical Managing Editor

There's been a lot of news about cancer this week.  Specifically, one of the deadliest, brain cancer.  Sen. Ted Kennedy is fighting it.  Fashion icon Yves Saint Laurent died after battling it for a year.  This news overshadowed some important advances in cancer research presented at the largest cancer conference in the world.  Every year physicians, researchers, pharmaceutical companies and journalists gather for the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncologists (ASCO). This year more than 33,000 people attended the 44th annual conference.  There's always an expectation of a big, blockbuster report that will make a huge impact on cancer patients. 

This year researchers presented more than 5,000 studies - some small or preliminary, others significantly advancing patient care.  ASCO president and breast cancer specialist Dr. Nancy Davidson points out that, "Today, there are more than 10 million cancer survivors (in the United States) compared to 3 million in the 1970s."

Here's a brief round-up (in no particular order) of some of the findings that caught my eye at this year's conference:

 -      A drug approved for osteoporosis called Zometa not only helped reduce bone loss in premenopausal breast cancer survivors, it also helped reduce the risk of relapse by a third.  It's too early to say whether these women will live longer, but researchers saw these benefits without going on chemotherapy.

-       Doctors can use a test that costs about $100 to determine whether the drug Erbitux will help prevent the spread of colon cancer.  Researchers found Erbitiux did not work with tumor cells that have a mutated form of a certain protein.  However, if the patient's tumor had a normal version of the protein, taking Erbitux plus regular chemotherapy reduced his or her risk of recurring cancer by 32 percent.

This is important because  it helps doctors determine who will benefit from this drug.  It saves patients from wasting time on a drug that won't work for them, avoids their dealing with any side effects that can occur and saves a lot of money because this relative new drug is very expensive ($8,000 for 4 dosages; patients usually need 12). 

-       Researchers also found that adding this same colon cancer drug Erbitux to standard chemotherapy in non-small cell lung cancer patients, compared with those on only standard chemotherapy extends survival by a month.  One month more may not seem like a lot, and the researchers themselves call it "a small step forward that opens up new avenues in research."  But it shows that this drug, which targets a specific characteristic of the tumor, has a survival benefit. That's important to patients and their families and represents another step forward in treating the No. 1 cancer killer in the world.

This is not a comprehensive synopsis of the meeting, and several experts I spoke with wouldn't call these "home run" findings – more like somewhere between a single and a double (their analogy, not mine).  But researchers are learning more about what's going on inside a tumor and finding ways to stop cancer from spreading.  That's good news for the more than 1.4 million Americans who will develop cancer this year.  But fighting cancer depends on having the resources to conduct more research.  Another theme of this conference was lack of research dollars.  Davidson, the oncology group's president, says National Institutes of Health funding declined by $500 million since 2003.  The National Cancer Institute’s director Dr. John Niederhuber told reporters, "We're supporting fewer clinical trials."

That's because the NIH budget has been flat since 2004 – add in inflation – and the actual money is less. Less money means less research.  Do you think the U.S. government needs to spend more on cancer research?  If so, at what cost to other health initiatives?

For more information on these studies and information on cancer, you can go to ASCO's newly launched website http://www.cancer.net.  The American Cancer Society, at www.cancer.org, also has a lot helpful information for you. 

Editor's Note: Medical news is a popular but sensitive subject rooted in science. We receive many comments on this blog each day; not all are posted. Our hope is that much will be learned from the sharing of useful information and personal experiences based on the medical and health topics of the blog. We encourage you to focus your comments on those medical and health topics and we appreciate your input. Thank you for your participation.

By Dr. Sanjay Gupta
CNN Chief Medical Correspondent

We now know Sen. Ted Kennedy flew down to Durham, North Carolina, over the weekend, and underwent awake brain surgery at 9 Monday morning at Duke. The operation was "successful," according to his surgeons, and a significant amount of his malignant glioma was removed. The whole thing was a bit of a surprise given that his doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital hadn't publicly raised the possibility of an operation. They mentioned only chemotherapy and radiation as his options. Clearly, over the last couple of weeks, the senator and his family decided they wanted more. They wanted to fight this tumor, and they talked to experts all over the country and finally decided on Dr. Allan Friedman at the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke to help them in his battle.

So, what sort of things go into that decision making process?

Well, for starters, Duke is a highly regarded brain tumor hospital. The chief of neurosurgery has been at Duke for over three decades and removes around 90 percent of the brain tumors at that hospital. Its staff members,  along with those of several other hospitals, are regarded as experts in what is known as brain "mapping." Even as a neurosurgeon,  I find mapping to be a truly wondrous advancement.  As the patient, in this case the senator, lies awake on the table with his head immobilized, the doctors probe various areas of the brain with a device that looks like a small fork. Carefully, they "map" out the areas of his brain responsible for things like speech. While they are probing with a slight electrical current, if the patient suddenly has trouble raising his hand or identifying an object, the doctors know to stay away from that area – even if tumor is present. The risks would outweigh the rewards. First do no harm.

Kennedy may have ended up at Duke simply because he really liked the doctors and felt comfortable in their hands – attitude, such an important thing for a patient. He may have gone to Duke because he thought they were the "best." Finally, it could also be because of a vaccine clinical trial that is going on there. Just today, researchers at Duke reported on a small study that found that a cancer vaccine could double the survival time of people with one of the deadliest brain tumors, from around 14 1/2 months to 33 months.
 
The surgery Kennedy had today will most likely be covered by his health plan because removing the tumor is an approved treatment, even though he left his network of doctors in Boston to travel to Durham.  According to the NIH, health insurance and managed care providers often do not cover the patient care costs associated with clinical trials, if that is the route he decides to go.

All of this got me to thinking: how does the average person make these decisions? How do they decide where they are going to get treated and is it even possible for most to find the "best" in the country? I'm eager to hear your experiences and any tips you might have for fellow bloggers and patients.

Editor’s Note: Medical news is a popular but sensitive subject rooted in science. We receive many comments on this blog each day; not all are posted. Our hope is that much will be learned from the sharing of useful information and personal experiences based on the medical and health topics of the blog. We encourage you to focus your comments on those medical and health topics and we appreciate your input. Thank you for your participation.