The Earth is warmer now than it has been at any time in the past 2000 years, the most comprehensive study of climatic history has revealed.

The newly published findings are a blow to sceptics who maintain that global warming is part of the natural climatic cycle rather than a consequence of human industrial activity.

Professor Philip Jones, a director of the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit and one of the authors of the research, said: ‘You can’t explain this rapid warming of the late 20th century in any other way. It’s a response to a build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.’

‘What we found was that at no point during those two millennia had it been any warmer than it is now. From 1980 onwards is clearly the warmest period of the last 2000 years,’ said Prof Jones.

The study reinforces recent conclusions published by the UN’s intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC). Scientists on the panel looked at temperature data from up to 1000 years ago and found that the late 20th century was the warmest period on record.

German Cancer Aid, the leading German cancer charity, has asked the German health ministry to stop its anti-smoking advertising campaign (‘smoke free’) immediately.

The campaign, funded by the tobacco industry, is intended to prevent young people taking up smoking. But a spokesperson for the charity claims that the series of attractive advertisements glamorises smoking rather than deterring people from taking it up.

The advertisements show attractive young people smoking, accompanied by big slogans such as ‘Smoking soothes’ and ‘Smokers have contacts’ and with statements in smaller type such as ‘Right, but with carcinogenic substances such as arsenic, radon, or tar.’

The criticism was supported by delegates at the recent world conference on tobacco and health held in Helsinki.

Denouncing the present US healthcare system as irrational, wasteful, and unfair, a group of 8000 US doctors has called for the adoption of a single-payer national healthcare system in the USA.

The group calls for the elimination of all for-profit hospitals and private insurance plans and the creation of a system paid for entirely with government funds that would cover every American.

The plan was drawn up by the Physician’s Working Group for Single-Payer National Health Insurance. The group contends the plan would be so much more efficient than the current US system that it would save enough to pay for health insurance for the 41 million Americans who now lack coverage.

At a press conference in Washington, DC, Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and one of the authors of the proposal, said the US system was ‘riddled with waste and profiteering’ that a national system would eliminate.

A sialic acid-rich carbohydrate known as sialyl Lewis X juts out from many cells, especially cancer cells, and binds to molecules known as selectins that are found on the surfaces of platelets and endothelial cells. This binding enables cancer cells to spread, or metastasize, beyond their point of origin. Ten years of experimental data from numerous groups worldwide have shown that patients whose cancer cells express sialyl Lewis X – about 25% to 35% of patients with breast, colon, thyroid, and gastric cancers – have a much poorer prognosis for survival.

Esko and his co-workers at the University of California, San Diego, established that specific two-sugar units, known as disaccharides, serve as primers for cells to start making sialyl Lewis X. By modifying these disaccharides with various chemical groups and adding the modified primers to cell cultures as decoys, the researchers found that they could shunt at least some of a cancer cell’s carbohydrate-forming reactions away from the pathway that makes sialyl Lewis X on proteins.

Although Esko’s results are still preliminary, pharmaceutical interest in tinkering with the ways in which cancer cells use sugars is once again heating up.

Coronary stenting was introduced in 1989 to treat the acute complications of percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA) but is now routinely used for most angioplasties. The elective stent era began with the publication in 1994 of two randomised clinical trials showing a reduced rate of restenosis with coronary stenting compared with ordinary PTCA. Subsequently, the use of stents has increased exponentially; some consensus panels endorsed this clinical enthusiasm for coronary stenting even before a large body of high-quality evidence was available.

In this paper a total of 29 trials involving 9918 patients were identified and analysed. The authors concluded that in the controlled environment of randomised clinical trials, routine coronary stenting is safe but probably not associated with important reductions in rates of mortality, acute myocardial infarction, or coronary artery bypass surgery compared with standard PTCA with provisional stenting. Coronary stenting is associated with substantial reductions in angiographic restenosis rates and the subsequent need for repeated PTCA, although this benefit may be overestimated because of trial designs. The incremental benefit of routine stenting for reducing repeated angioplasty diminishes as the crossover rate of stenting with conventional PTCA increases.