The world should be aiming to get vaccines, which cut malaria cases by 75 percent, and are capable of eliminating malaria, licensed by 2030, according to the updated 2013 Malaria Vaccine Technology Roadmap.

This new target comes in addition to the original 2006 Roadmap's goal of having a licensed vaccine against Plasmodium falciparum malaria, the most deadly form of the disease, for children under 5 years of age in sub-Saharan Africa by 2015.

Dr Robert D. Newman, Director of the World Health Organization's (WHO) Global Malaria Programme, said that despite all the recent progress countries have made, and despite important innovations in diagnostics, drugs and vector control, the global burden of malaria remains unacceptably high.

Final results from Phase III trials of the most advanced vaccine candidate, RTS,S/AS01, will be available by 2015.

Depending on the final trial results, and depending on the outcome of the regulatory review by the European Medicines Agency, a WHO recommendation for use and subsequent prequalification of this first vaccine could occur in late 2015.

Dr Jean-Marie Okwo Bele , Director of WHO's Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals, said that the new vaccines should show at least 75 percent efficacy against clinical malaria, be suitable for use in in all malaria-endemic areas, and be licensed by 2030.

She said that the roadmap also sets a target for malaria vaccines that reduce transmission of the parasite.

Researchers including two Indian-origin scientists have confirmed that osteoporosis could be caused by type 2 diabetes.

Senior author Sundeep Khosla, MD, Mayo Clinic endocrinologist, said that this is the first demonstration - using direct measurement of bone strength in the body - of compromised bone material in patients with type 2 diabetes.

He said that clearly, the skeleton needs to be recognized as another important target of diabetes complications.

The Mayo researchers validated that assumption in a clinical study of 60 postmenopausal women, 30 of whom had type 2 diabetes. Using a new tool (OsteoProbe), the researchers performed micro indentation testing of the tibia (actually causing a microscopic crack) to measure bone material strength.

Compared to the control group of women, aged 50 to 80, the group with type 2 diabetes had significantly lower bone material strength.

There was no difference between the microarchitecture of the bone or bone density between the two groups.

The study showed that diabetic women with lower bone material strength had also experienced higher levels of hyperglycemia over the previous 10 years, suggesting potential detrimental effects of poor glucose control on bone quality.

The resounding message: Conventional measurements underestimated the risk of fracture among patients with type 2 diabetes and loss of bone material strength, or bone quality, is a clear, downstream consequence of the disease.

Co-author Shreyasee Amin, M.D, said that the new technology may help in studying other conditions where fractures occur at higher than expected bone density.

The study has been published in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research.

A new study has revealed that higher overall acidity of the diet, regardless of the individual foods making up that diet, increases the risk of type 2 diabetes.

The study of more than 60,000 women was conducted by Dr Guy Fagherazzi and Dr Francoise Clavel-Chapelon, Center for Research in Epidemiology and Population Health, INSERM, Paris, France, and colleagues, and is the first large prospective study to demonstrate these findings.

A western diet rich in animal products and other acidogenic foods can induce an acid load that is not compensated for by fruit and vegetables; this can cause chronic metabolic acidosis and lead to metabolic complications.

A total of 66,485 women from the E3N study (the French Centre of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition were followed for new diabetes cases over 14 years.

Their dietary acid load was calculated from their potential renal acid load (PRAL) and their net endogenous acid production (NEAP) scores, both standard techniques for assessing dietary acid consumption from nutrient intake.

During follow-up, 1,372 new cases of incident type 2 diabetes occurred. In the overall population, those in the top 25 percent (quartile) for PRAL had a 56 percent increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes compared with the bottom quartile.

Women of normal weight, BMI of 25 and under, had the highest increased risk (96 percent for top quartile versus bottom) while overweight women (BMI 25 and over) had only a 28 percent increased risk (top quartile versus bottom). NEAP scores showed a similar increased risk for higher acid load.

"A diet rich in animal protein may favour net acid intake, while most fruits and vegetables form alkaline precursors that neutralise the acidity. Contrary to what is generally believed, most fruits such as peaches, apples, pears, bananas and even lemons and oranges actually reduce dietary acid load once the body has processed them," researchers said.

"In our study, the fact that the association between both PRAL and NEAP scores and the risk of incident type 2 diabetes persisted after adjustment for dietary patterns, meat consumption and intake of fruit, vegetables, coffee and sweetened beverages suggests that dietary acids may play a specific role in promoting the development of type 2 diabetes, irrespective of the foods or drinks that provide the acidic or alkaline components," they added.

The study is published in the journal Diabetologia.

A decade-long research effort to uncover the environmental causes of breast cancer by studying both lab animals and a group of healthy US girls has turned up some surprises, scientists say.

At the center of the investigation are 1,200 school girls who do not have breast cancer, but who have already given scientists important new clues about the possible origins of the disease.

Some risk factors are well understood, including early puberty, later age of childbearing, late onset of menopause, estrogen replacement therapy, drinking alcohol and exposure to radiation.

Advances have also been made in identifying risky gene mutations, but these cases make up a small minority.

"Most of breast cancer, particularly in younger women, does not come from family histories," said Leslie Reinlib, a program director at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

"We have still got 80 percent that has got to be environmental," said Reinlib, who is part of the Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Program (BCERP) program that has received some $70 million in funds from the US government since 2003.

Some of its researchers track what is happening in the human population, while others study how carcinogens, pollutants and diet affect the development of the mammary glands and breast tumours in lab mice.

The program`s primary focus is on puberty because its early onset "is probably one of the best predictors of breast cancer in women," Reinlib said.

Puberty is a time of rapid growth of the breast tissue. Research on survivors of the Hiroshima atomic bombings in Japan has shown that those exposed in puberty had a higher likelihood of developing breast cancer in adulthood.

The 1,200 US girls enrolled in the study at sites in New York City, northern California and the greater Cincinnati, Ohio, area beginning in 2004, when they were between the ages of six and eight.

The aim was to measure the girls` chemical exposures through blood and urine tests, and to learn how environmental exposures affected the onset of puberty and perhaps breast cancer risk later in life.

Researchers quickly discovered that their effort to reach girls before puberty had not been entirely successful.

"By age eight, 40 percent were already in puberty," said Reinlib. "That was a surprising bit of information."

Further research has shown that the girls appear to be entering puberty six to eight months earlier than their peers did in the 1990s.

A study published last week in the journal Pediatrics on this cohort of girls found that obesity was acting as a primary driver of earlier breast development.

Other studies on the girls have focused on chemicals that are known as endocrine disruptors because they are believed to cause either earlier or later breast development.

Initial results showed "for the first time that phthalates, BPA, pesticides are in all the girls they looked at," said Reinlib.

Researchers were taken aback by the pervasiveness of the exposures, but also by the data which appeared to show some plastic chemicals might not be as influential on breast development as some have feared.

"They didn`t find much of an association between puberty and phthalates, which are these chemicals that leach out of plastic bottles and Tupperware," Reinlib said.

Another major finding regarded blood chemicals from two nearby groups in Ohio and Kentucky, both drinking water that was apparently contaminated by industrial waste.

Girls in northern Kentucky had blood levels of an industrial chemical -- perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA or C-8) found in Teflon non-stick coating for pans -- three times as high as those who drank water from the Ohio River near Cincinnati, where water was filtered with state-of-the-art technology.

"Northern Kentucky did not have granular activated carbon filtration" in their water supply said researcher Susan Pinney, a professor at the University of Cincinnati School of Medicine.

"In 2012 they put it in after they learned of our preliminary results." Families were also notified of their daughters` blood levels, she said.

The chemicals can linger in the body for years. Researchers were dismayed to learn that the longer the girls spent breastfeeding as infants -- typically touted for its health benefits -- the higher their PFOA levels compared to girls who were fed formula.

What cannot be studied in the girls is tried on lab mice, who in one experiment are being fed high-fat diets and exposed to a potent carcinogen to see how the two interact.

Mammary tumors develop much faster in the high-fat diet group, said scientist Richard Schwartz of the department of microbiology and molecular genetics at Michigan State University.

Fat mice have more blood supply in the mammary glands, higher inflammation levels and display changes in the immune system.

Follow-up studies suggest that cancer risk stays high even if mice are fed high-fat diets in puberty and switched to low-fat diets in adulthood, he said.

"The damage is already done," he said. "Does this mean that humans are at risk the same way? We don`t know that with certainty."

But the findings do reinforce the advice that people often hear regarding how to maintain good health -- avoid fatty foods, maintain a normal weight and reduce chemical exposures wherever possible, experts say.

"It can`t hurt, and it can only help," said Schwartz.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women globally and took 508,000 lives in 2011, according to the World Health Organization.

A new study has suggested that preeclampsia- a condition in pregnancy characterized by high blood pressure, sometimes with fluid retention and protein excretion in the urine- during pregnancy is a risk factor for developing kidney failure later in life.

Recent data from registry-based studies suggest that preeclampsia may be associated with an increased risk of developing kidney failure, but the magnitude of this link and the contributions of individuals' other medical conditions remain unknown.

To investigate the issue, researchers led by Andrea Kattah, MD (Mayo Clinic) studied 8362 residents of Olmsted County, MN who gave birth between 1976 and 1982. Kidney failure cases were identified by linkage with the United States Renal Data System; each case was matched to two controls.

A total of 20 cases of kidney failure were identified and available for analysis.

"Preeclampsia is associated with a higher odds of end stage renal disease. However, after adjusting for diabetes and hypertension, the association was attenuated and no longer significant," the researchers said.

The study was presented at ASN Kidney Week 2013 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, GA.