Sea Breezes Carry Unhealthy Whiff of Ozone

Bracing seaside air may not be so healthy after all. The mix of sea salt, ship fumes and city smoke leads to a chemical reaction that encourages the formation of ozone smog.

A team led by James Roberts, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, has developed a new mass spectrometer capable of measuring nitryl chloride (ClNO2) – a chemical that encourages the formation of ozone.

This compound is created when nitrogen oxides – from ship exhausts and city smoke – mix with aerosol particles containing chloride, such as sea salt spray. Until recently there was no way of measuring nitryl chloride, so nobody knew how much was floating around.

Cruising along the south-east coast of the US, Roberts and his colleagues recorded unexpectedly high levels of nitryl chloride near the cities of Houston and Miami.

We saw nitryl chloride levels over one part per billion on several occasions, more than 20 times greater than previous estimates from numerical models," says Roberts.

Night-time nitryl

The highest levels of nitryl chloride occurred at night, when nitrogen oxides – from ship exhaust plumes and industrial pollution – mixed with chlorine from sea salt spray. During the day the action of sunlight on nitryl chloride breaks it down into chlorine atoms and nitrogen dioxide.

These reactive chlorine atoms play a key role in encouraging ozone to form. In the lower atmosphere ozone is a major pollutant, causing respiratory problems and increasing human mortality rates.

"Such chemistry could occur in any urban coastal regions, potentially leading to a globally significant effect," says Lucy Carpenter, an atmospheric chemist at the University of York, UK.

Roberts suggests that areas at risk are likely to include southern California and the eastern seaboard of the US, much of the Mediterranean region and large parts of southern Asia. But as yet it is hard to judge how widespread the pollution is.

"Extrapolating the results to the global scale is problematic. It is possible, if not likely, that the overall importance of nitryl chloride is limited to heavily polluted conditions relatively close to major nitrogen oxide sources, such as those investigated in this study," says Bill Keene, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Virginia.

But even if the problem is largely confined to industrial ports, that doesn't mean it should be ignored.

"These results reinforce the need to control nitrogen oxide emissions to the greatest reasonable extent," says Alex Pszenny, from the University of New Hampshire.

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4 get cancer from teen’s donated organs

GARDEN CITY, N.Y. - Alex Koehne had a love for life, and always wanted to help people.

So when his parents were told that their 15-year-old son was dying of bacterial meningitis, the couple didn't hesitate in donating his organs to desperately ill transplant recipients.

"I immediately said, 'Let's do it'," Jim Koehne recalled. "We both thought it was a great idea. This is who Alex was."

A year later, their dream that Alex's spirit might somehow live on has become a nightmare.

Autopsy discovery
It turned out that Alex did not die of bacterial meningitis, but rather a rare form of lymphoma that wasn't found until his autopsy, and apparently spread to the organ recipients. The Long Island couple was told that two of the recipients have died, and two others had the donor kidneys removed and are getting cancer treatment.

The revelation has led two hospitals to revise transplant procedures, although the state Health Department found that no one was to blame. Experts say the possibility of getting cancer from an organ donor is extremely rare: Only 64 cases have been identified in a national study of 230,000 cases, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing.

"A 15-year-old boy's organs are a gift from the Almighty," said transplant surgeon Lewis Teperman, noting the majority of organ donors are much older than Alex. "Usually the organs from a 15-year-old are perfect. In this case, they weren't."

Teperman is the director of transplantation at New York University Medical Center, where two of the transplants were done and lead author of a report on the case.

Last March, Alex was taken to Stony Brook University Hospital on Long Island after treatment at another hospital for nausea, vomiting, severe back and neck pain, seizures and double vision. Doctors told his parents they suspected he had bacterial meningitis — an infection of the fluid surrounding the spinal cord and brain — although tests didn't reveal what bacteria caused it.

He was treated with antibiotics but died on March 30.

The Koehnes requested an autopsy. They were told a month later that Alex had actually died from a rare form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a blood cancer which affects fewer than 1,500 patients in the U.S. annually.

"Our jaws dropped," Jim Koehne recalled. "We walked out of there crying."

Jim and Lisa Koehne (pronounced KAY-na) later learned that a 52-year-old man died of the same rare lymphoma about four months after receiving Alex's liver. The couple said they were also told a 36-year-old woman who received Alex's pancreas also developed lymphoma and died.

Two patients who received the kidneys are undergoing cancer treatment and are faring well, according to the report in the January issue of the American Journal of Transplantation.

All four recipients were notified immediately of the autopsy results and got chemotherapy, the report said. None have been publicly identified.

The transplants were done at Stony Brook, NYU Medical Center and the University of Minnesota, according to Newsday, which first reported on the case.

The report's authors noted a diagnosis of bacterial meningitis does not preclude donating organs because the recipients can be given antibiotics to prevent infection, but they concluded "a more thorough evaluation of the donor" should be done when there is any doubt.

"Tumors, especially lymphoma, can masquerade as other causes of death, and may be missed in potential donors," they wrote.

Teperman, who was not involved in the case, said the review did not fault anyone who made the incorrect diagnosis.

Rare situation
"No one was able to say they could have figured out that this diagnosis was lymphoma," he said. "We are recommending that if the reported case is bacterial meningitis, maybe wait and get more cultures, possibly don't take the organs."

But, he added, this case is so rare that it would have been difficult for anyone to predict what might have happened, and that physicians acted in good faith in trying to harvest organs for desperately ill recipients.

NYU and Minnesota now follow the recommendation for additional tests for bacterial meningitis.

Stony Brook officials said they followed organ donor network guidelines, but cited federal privacy laws in declining to specifically discuss the Koehne case.

A review by the state Health Department "did not find flaws in policies, procedures and actions at Stony Brook" involving Alex's case, said agency spokeswoman Claudia Hutton.

The New York Organ Donor Network, which coordinated the transplants, issued a statement of sympathy for the family. The network pointed out that 22,000 patients received life-saving organ transplants in the U.S. in 2007, and another 6,411 patients died while awaiting organ donations.

The Koehnes have not sued, although their attorney, Edward Burke, said they are considering all legal options.

At 5-foot-11, Alex was already as tall as his father. He was in the church youth ministry and was a lineman for the East Hampton High Bonackers junior varsity team.

"He loved football," his dad recalled. "He would watch ESPN every morning and then come downstairs and tell me all about it."

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The Koehnes have started a foundation to fund cancer research, which is receiving strong community support.

"Alex had more friends than we knew," his father said.

Despite the outcome, he and his wife believe organ donors save lives, and have no regrets about their decision.

"We would absolutely, positively do it again," Jim Koehne said. "I haven't done it yet, but I am definitely going to sign up myself."

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Sex and Financial Risk Linked in Brain

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A new brain-scan study may help explain what's going on in the minds of financial titans when they take risky monetary gambles - sex. When young men were shown erotic pictures, they were more likely to make a larger financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of something scary, such a snake, or something neutral, such as a stapler, university researchers reported.

The arousing pictures lit up the same part of the brain that lights up when financial risks are taken.

"You have a need in an evolutionary sense for both money and women. They trigger the same brain area," said Camelia Kuhnen, a Northwestern University finance professor who conducted the study with a Stanford University psychologist.

Their research appears in the current edition of the peer-reviewed journal NeuroReport.

The study only involved 15 heterosexual young men at Stanford University. It focused on the sex and money hub, the V-shaped nucleus accumbens, which sits near the base of the brain and plays a central role in what you experience as pleasure.

When that hub was activated by the erotic images, the men were far more likely to bet high on a random chance game that would earn them either a dollar or a dime. Each man made more than 50 gambles under brain scans.

Stanford psychologist Brian Knutson, a lead author of the study, says it's all about the power of emotion and arousal and our financial decisions. The trigger doesn't have to be sex - it could be chocolate or a winning lottery ticket.

"It didn't matter if the sexy woman didn't tell you anything about the odds of winning a roulette game," Knutson said. "What really matters is that the sexy woman is having an emotional impact. That bleeds over into your financial decisions."

Kuhnen said the same link could hold true for women, but they didn't test it because it is more difficult to find an erotic image that would appeal to many different heterosexual women compared to heterosexual men.

The link between sex and greed goes back hundreds of thousands of years, to men's evolutionary role as provider or resource gatherer to attract women, said Kevin McCabe, professor of economics, law and neuroscience at George Mason University, who wasn't part of the study.

"Risk-taking is a natural way of increasing your relative success, but, of course, there's a downside to it, what we're seeing right now in the economy," McCabe said.

The results of the study jibe with the real life on the trading floor, said Phil Flynn, a former Chicago commodities floor trader and current analyst at Alaron Trading Corp.

"I'm not shocked that it may be part of the deal," Flynn said Friday. "When you talk about all the euphemisms for trading (on the floor), they can be used for sex as well."

("Massaging the market" and "hardcore" were about the cleanest that he and his colleagues could come up with.)

The study conforms with recent research that indicates men shown a pornographic movie were more likely to make riskier sexual decisions. Another suggests straight men think less about their financial future after being shown pictures of pretty women.

One still-to-be-published study at Harvard University found a link between higher testosterone levels and financial risk-taking.

But the study conducted at Stanford, funded by the National Institutes of Health, went deeper, using functional magnetic resonance imaging machines. It's part of a new but growing field called neuroeconomics that attempts to take the hard-wired science of brain biology and mix it with the softer sciences of psychology and economics to figure out why we make the financial decisions we do.

An earlier study by the same team found that the brain's reward area lit up at about the same time as risky decision-making.

The erotic pictures experiment was designed to find which was the cause and which was the effect. The answer: Lighting up the reward area, in this case with soft-core pictures, caused the risk-taking, Kuhnen said.

"The more activation there you have, the more prone you are to taking more risk," Kuhnen said. "It could be a feedback loop."

The flip side was that the photos of snakes and spiders activated the portion of the brain often associated with pain, fear and anger. And those people were more likely to bet low.

This all makes sense to Harvard economist Terry Burnham, author of the book "Mean Genes." Burnham said it could be all summed up in a famous line from the movie "Scarface."

"In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women."

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