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This week’s news includes the finding that UN peacekeepers unleashed the cholera epidemic in quake-ravaged Haiti, a report that finds living close to nuclear power plants does not cause leukemia in children, a French court decision that clears scientists in a growth hormone scandal, fungus-resistant GM corn, another hit to the XMRV-chronic fatigue link, and ancient ants the size of small birds.

The UN brought cholera to Haiti

United Nations peacekeepers inadvertently sparked the cholera outbreak that killed thousands of people in Haiti, according to an independent report released last week. Genetic and epidemiological data strongly suggested that Nepalese UN staffers working in the earthquake-ravaged island nation brought with them a strain of the cholera bacteria common to South Asia. Improper disposal of waste water at a camp housing the workers is likely to blame for the spread of the disease. (Hat tip to ScienceInsider.)

Evidence contravenes nuke plant-leukemia link

Children living within 5 kilometers of a nuclear power plant are not at an increased risk for developing leukemia, according to an analysis released last week by an independent government advisory committee in the United Kingdom. The report covered a period of 35 years and studied the incidence of the cancer in children under the age of 5 living in close proximity to the UK’s 13 nuclear power stations. Alex Elliott, chair of the committee and a clinical physicist at the University of Glasgow, told Nature that the report found “no significant association” between leukemia in the children living close to the plants, challenging a 2008 German study that suggested living within 5 kilometers of nuclear facilities doubled the risk of leukemia in children.

Growth hormone scandal in court

A French biochemist and a pediatrician were cleared last week of involuntary manslaughter and other charges stemming from the administration of growth hormones to children from 1959-1988, according to ScienceInsider. During that era, growth hormone was derived from pituitary glands harvested from human cadavers, and 125 French children died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD)—a prion-mediated brain condition—after receiving the treatment. This latest ruling, handed down by a French appeals court, was the latest in two decades of litigation over the cases, and upholds a 2009 ruling that cleared Fernand Dray (the Pasteur Institute biochemist who was tasked with purifying the hormone formulations) and Elisabeth Mugnier (the pediatrician who oversaw the pituitary sample collection and administration of the treatments) of wrongdoing.

Fungus-proof GM corn

With the help of a family of highly-conserved immune proteins, researchers in Australia are developing corn that can fight off yield-decreasing fungal infections. Biochemist Marilyn Anderson of La Trobe University is partnering with agribusiness giant Pioneer to create corn that expresses a particular defense protein called NaD1 that is normally only present in the flowers of the ornamental tobacco plant. If corn plants engineered to express NaD1 in all parts of the plant can resist fungal infections, it may be possible to greatly increase annual crop yields, Anderson told the ABC.

Another study fails to find XMRV in chronic fatigue patients

The latest in a string of studies searching for a mouse virus in patients suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome has failed to turn up evidence of the pathogen, XMRV. The study, which was published online last week in the Journal of Virology, couldn’t detect XMRV in 100 people with chronic fatigue syndrome, including 14 of the patients who tested positive in the 2009 Science study that originally posited a link between the virus and the syndrome. University of Utah in Salt Lake City virologist Ila Singh, who led the new study, suggests (as have others) that the XMRV previously found in chronic fatigue patients was a result of contamination in the lab. But Judy Mikovits, senior author of that 2009 Science paper and virologist at the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease, is standing by her findings. “We have complete confidence in every bit of the results in the Science paper,” she told ScienceInsider.

There goes the picnic

A new species of extinct, 2-inch-long ant would have been a real bummer to prehistoric picnickers. A fossilized impression of the flying ant, named Titanomyrma lubei, was found in 50 million-year-old rock from Wyoming by two paleoentomologists who were poking around in drawers at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. But even at more than 5 centimeters long, the species is still not the largest ant ever. Fossil ants from Germany and queens from an extant African species of driver ant are even bigger. (Hat tip to Wired.)

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