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NEW DELHI — “Wizard of Oz” heroine Dorothy only had to click her ruby red slippers together and they would spirit her home to Kansas.

Now, an Indian high-tech start-up is promising to do the same in real life with a new, GPS-enabled smart sports shoe that vibrates to give the wearer directions.

The fiery red sneakers, which will also count the number of steps taken, distance travelled and calories burned, will go on sale in September under the name LeChal, which means “take me along” in Hindi.

The shoes come with a detachable Bluetooth transceiver that links to a smartphone app to direct the wearer using Google maps, sending a vibrating signal to indicate a left or right turn.

They are the brainchild of 30-year-old Krispian Lawrence and Anirudh Sharma, 28, two engineering graduates who founded their tech start-up Ducere in a small apartment in 2011 with backing from angel investors and now employ 50 people. 

“We got this idea and realised that it would really help visually challenged people, it would work without any audio or physical distractions,” said Lawrence in an interview with AFP.

“But then we were trying it out on ourselves and suddenly we were like, ‘wait a minute, even I would want this,’ because it felt so liberating not having to look down at your phone or being tied to anything.”

“The footwear works instinctively. Imagine if someone taps your right shoulder, your body naturally reacts to turn right, and that’s how LeChal works.”

Growing sector

Smart shoes aimed at specific demographic markets — such as dementia sufferers and children whose parents want to keep track of their movements — are already commercially available.

But Lawrence and Sharma believe theirs will be the first to target mass-market consumers, and have focused on creating stylish rather than purely functional footwear.

As well as the red sneaker, they are marketing an insole to allow users to slip the technology into their own shoes.

“Earlier, wearable technology was always seen as machine-like, nerdy glasses or watches, but now that is changing,” said Lawrence.

They say they have 25,000 advance orders for the shoes, which will retail at between $100 and $150. 

Demand has so far mostly been through word of mouth and through the lechal.com website. But the company is in talks with retailers to stock the shoes ahead of the holiday season in India and the United States.

It forecasts it will sell more than 100,000 pairs of the shoes, which are manufactured in China, by next April.

Wearable technology is a growing global sector. Market tracker IDC forecast in April that sales would triple this year to 19 million units worldwide, growing to 111.9 million by 2018.

The industry’s rapid growth has given rise to fears about privacy, although Ducere says it will record no data on users and maintains robust security.

The company still hopes its product will be useful for visually impaired people, and experts at the L.V. Prasad Eye Institute in the southern city of Hyderabad are testing its suitability.

“It’s a perfect intuitive wearable item. You may forget to wear a belt or a helmet, but shoes you can never leave the house without,” said Anthony Vipin Das, a doctor at the institute.

“LeChal solves orientation and direction problems, it’s a good assistant to the cane.”

Possible problems include battery failure or loss of Bluetooth connectivity, which Das says could be fixed by providing a live feed of a user’s position to a friend or relative, with their consent.

The company says it could use a portion of any future profits to subsidise the shoes for disabled users.

For all the shoes’ high-tech features, Lawrence’s favourite thing is that he no longer loses his phone — if the wearer moves too far from his or her phone, the shoes buzz to warn them.

“I’m a very forgetful person and the best part is that the shoes don’t let you forget your phone,” he said.

WASHINGTON — An experimental drug from Swiss pharma giant Novartis reduced deaths from chronic heart failure by 20 per cent compared with an existing treatment, according to the results of a vast new study.

The new drug, called LCZ696, has been labelled a potential “blockbuster” with sales in the billions of dollars, say analysts. 

Cardiovascular failure, in which the heart does not pump blood effectively, kills at least 26 million people a year worldwide. 

Novartis unveiled the highly anticipated results on Saturday at a meeting of the European Society of Cardiology in Barcelona, Spain and simultaneously in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The study — conducted with more than 8,400 patients in 47 countries over 27 months — compared the safety and effectiveness of the drug on patients with heart failure to the current gold standard, Enalapril.

At the end of the observation period, 21.8 per cent of participants taking LCZ696 died from heart failure, a fifth lower than the 26.5 per cent who died taking Enalapril.

Novartis plans to request authorisation to bring the medication to market from the US drug regulator by the end of the year, and from the European Union equivalent in early 2015.

It said in a statement that the results were “highly significant and clinically important”.

The drug also reduced hospitalisations by 21 per cent, the study showed.

“I think that when physicians see these data, they will find it compelling, and what we will see is a paradigm shift,” said Milton Packer, a clinical sciences professor at the University of Texas and a co-author of the study.

Despite existing treatments, the mortality rate from heart failure remains high, with around 50 per cent of patients dying within five years of diagnosis, Novartis said.

The condition leads to shortness of breath, fatigue, and fluid retention in the arms and legs.

Novartis announced last March it was ending its clinical trial early because the results showed a marked improvement over Enalapril, the medication most often prescribed for heart failure, high blood pressure and other heart problems.

But the new drug, LCZ696, is likely to be expensive, analyst Tim Anderson of Sanford C. Bernstein told The New York Times.

Anderson said the drug may cost as much as $7 (five euros) a day — or $2,500 a year — in the United States, nearly double the $4 a day pricetag on other options, which are available as generics.

The study found an increased risk of low blood pressure with LCZ696, but fewer instances of kidney problems than with the group taking Enalapril.

Outcasts United: An American Town, a Refugee Team, and One Woman’s Quest to Make a Difference

Warren St. John

New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2009

Pp. 320

“Outcasts United” portrays the dramatic situation of refugees resettled in a small American town in northern Georgia. Their situation is similar to what happens in many countries every day, including Jordan. The book tells the story of the football team they formed and their coach, Luma. 

Warren St. John, a talented journalist, felt the sorrow of these refugees and wanted to present their story to the world. He travelled to Clarkston, Georgia, interviewed the refugees and wrote this book. In it, one sees how the refugees, coming from different countries and backgrounds, struggled to adapt to their new life. One also learns how a sympathetic Muslim woman from Amman, Jordan, made a difference by volunteering to be their team coach.

Clarkston is a small southern town where only local people lived up through the 1980s. The mayor used to say, Clarkston was “just a sleepy little town by the railroad tracks.” (p. 33)

Then in the 1990s, Clarkston was designated a refugee settlement centre, receiving families from Liberia, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries torn by war. Many changes occurred in the town as a result of the diversity of traditions and cultures of the newcomers. It wasn’t easy for the locals to accept the population increase in their small, quiet town. Some of them even left their town. Others treated the refugees like outcasts. 

Luma came to the town not as a refugee but to shop! After finishing her studies in the US, she wanted to live independently and refused to go back to Jordan. Then she started to work as a volunteer with the refugees. It was not easy to deal with the refugees who had suffered a lot in their lives. Every one of them had experienced a different kind of pain; some of them had lost a father, a mother or other close relative. One example was Jeremiah whose mother was forced to run away, leaving his sick brother and father to die, in order to save him and his other brother.

Luma needed strength and courage to deal with the kids. She faced many challenges to get the boys to work together. Sometimes she had to be very strict with them, like when she didn’t allow them to play until they finished their homework. Another serious decision Luma made was not allowing them to talk to each other in their own language. She wanted them to feel responsible and united. She worked to be close to the boys so they listened to her. Because of her efforts, football became an important thing in the boys’ lives. Bien, one of the team members, said in describing his summer, “Without football, life was boring.” (p. 101)

The problems Luma faced were not only among the refugee boys but from the larger society as well. Being a newcomer is not easy, and establishing a football team is harder. The team faced rejection from people living in the town. The first season was especially tough because the team didn’t have a practice field, but Luma kept on encouraging the boys and making them focus on the positive side rather than on the negative.

Another season came and the refugee team kept struggling. St. John poignantly conveys how little boys suffer just as do adult refugees and immigrants. Reading this book, one finds many similarities between the refugees and immigrants in Clarkston and refugees in Jordan and other countries.

Like in the US, refugees in Jordan don’t enjoy the same standard of living as most local people, and they are often at risk. They have to work harder; they work longer hours for less pay. At times, working illegally is the only way to survive. They face the danger of deportation and have no idea what they will face in the country where they will eventually be resettled. 

Due to these similarities and more, this story will appeal to many people all over the world, including in Jordan, which hosts many refugees seeking asylum or relocation.

Wassim Shamass and Sally Bland

By Deborah Netburn

Los Angeles Times (MCT)

If you thought trying to get a groggy teenager out of bed in time for school each morning was your own private struggle, you thought wrong.

The American Academy of Paediatrics declared the chronic sleepiness of our nation’s teenagers a public health issue in a recent policy statement. And to help fix the problem, the organisation called for middle and high schools to push back their start times 30 minutes to an hour to allow students to get more rest.

“A substantial body of research has now demonstrated that delaying school start times is an effective countermeasure to chronic sleep loss,” the organisation said. “The American Academy of Paediatrics strongly supports the efforts of school districts to optimise sleep in students.”

Sleep deprivation in teenagers is widespread. Eighty-seven per cent of high school students in the US are getting less than the recommended 8.5 to 9.5 hours of sleep, and high school seniors get less than seven hours of sleep a night, on average, the AAP says.

In addition, 28 per cent of high school students report falling asleep at school at least once a week, while one in five say they fall asleep doing homework with similar frequency.

The exhaustion has serious consequences. The AAP reports that the average teenager in the US regularly experiences levels of sleepiness similar to people with sleep disorders such as narcolepsy. Adolescents are also at higher risk for car accidents resulting from drowsy driving. And, as many of us know from personal experience, lack of sleep affects mood, attention, memory and behaviour control.

So can’t they just go to bed earlier? The answer is: not really. Studies suggest that at the onset of adolescence, there is a delay in when the body starts to secrete melatonin, a hormone that tells the body it’s time to go to sleep. Researchers have also found that it takes the adolescent brain longer to wind down and fall asleep after being awake for 14.5 to 18.5 hours than it does for people in other stages of life.

“This research indicates that the average teenager in today’s society has difficulty falling asleep before 11:00pm and is best suited to wake up at 8:00am or later,” the AAP statement says.

As of the 2011-12 school year, 43 per cent of US public high schools had a start time before 8:00am.

“When high school classes begin early in the morning, we ask teens to shine when their biological clock tells them to sleep,” Timothy Morgenthaler, president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, said in a statement.

Studies have shown that when school starts later, it can help students get an additional hour of sleep per night, improve attendance rates, lower dropout rates, and even reduce the number of car crashes among adolescent drivers. Whether a later start time improves academic performance is still up in the air.

The AAP acknowledges that later start times can be hard for schools to implement logistically, but they argue that it is worth the effort.

“Both the urgency and the magnitude of the problem of sleep loss in adolescents and the availability of an intervention that has the potential to have broad and immediate effects are highly compelling,” they said.

Five years ago, a Spanish lawyer took Google to court because he wanted to “suppress” an old legal notice against him which kept appearing every time that anyone searched his name. It was information concerning foreclosure of his home in 1998 — the same year that Google was launched — which he claimed was “no longer relevant”, and was an “unfavourable link” that affected his reputation. Mario Costeja González was seeking to assert the so-called “right to be forgotten” concept.

In May this year, a European court issued a ruling that supports his right and it has started a chain reaction that will affect everyone and everything on the Internet.

It means that individuals have the right to “redact results” on searches of their names if the info is inadequate, irrelevant or out of date.

Since the beginning of June, Google has been drowning under requests from Europeans who wish to exercise their newly won “right to be forgotten”. In fact, Google said it received 41,000 requests from people in the first four days, amounting to more than 10,000 requests per day. That’s seven requests per minute and the numbers are expected to increase. Google is planning to hire new staff just to handle these requests.

Why did the European court rule against Google? Because it defined Google as a “data controller” under a European law on data protection, which gives individuals strong rights over data that others hold about them.

However, there are many critics of this ruling and various experts who believe it’s just not applicable.

To begin with, the “right to be forgotten” is hard to implement, as Google could censor its search results in Europe, but users elsewhere in the world could see that information and just send it to anyone in Europe. Additionally, with basic technical know-how or by downloading an “unblock” product, anyone can change his/her country IP address and browse the web without local limitations — just like users in Arabian Gulf countries do all the time to access blocked sites.

Every country, or region, will ask Google to censor different information and the result will be a mess of censored/uncensored information by country that will not provide global removal of information. 

Some countries may even take an opposite stance, demanding that the right to public freedom of information prevents Google from removing any information from the public record. Simply, any person should be able to know anything about anybody if it’s public record.

Even if it were possible to force search companies, or social networks, to erase the past, it could do more harm than good. It would prevent users from discovering the inconvenient truths about those who would like their past covered up. 

The Internet is now the depository of human history, but it’s not just about celebrities and public figures. It takes data-basing to a whole other level of personalised data, covering every member of society, due to social networks and search engines making every person searchable and identifiable. That’s why the Internet has a long memory, but you’re actually creating it yourself through your real-life actions and your online activity.

Sooner or later, you will feel that some information about you on the Internet appears to be unfair, one-sided or just plain wrong. What will you do? Can you actually do anything after agreeing to its “terms and conditions of use”?

You should take personal responsibility for every service you subscribe to and every piece of information — text, photos and/or videos — that you post. The culture of just ticking “I accept all terms” without reading these terms must change.

When you join a “free” service, realise that nothing is actually free. The service is exchanging the right to use — and sometimes own — your information with your right to use and benefit from the service.

This whole issue of a user’s rights to controlling information about himself or herself will create all sorts of legal, technological and moral discussions for years to come. As people’s requests pour into Google, you can also expect some ridiculous demands to emerge like someone asking for all personal history to be erased from the Internet. The notion of deleting oneself from the web is now growing as a demand.

This is the 21st century. Today we have our “actual selves” and our “digital selves” and surely our existence in the digital world requires more protection but in a way that makes sense and which is based on a logic of what should and what should not be censored. This is just the beginning of a very long debate that could shape the information age.

NEW YORK — Tired of treadmills? Bored with bicep curls? It may be time to scale a wall, climb a rope and drag a tyre. Fitness experts say obstacle course gyms offer a fun, goal-oriented workout that cultivates endurance, strength and agility.

Christine King, 31, an insurance adjuster, regularly drives 40 minutes to climb ropes and drag tyres at MYLO Obstacle Fitness, an outdoor obstacle course gym located in Austin, Texas.

“It’s personal training without the stresses of an indoor gym,” said King, who added that she was “never very athletic”, but delights in the outdoors, the laid-back vibe and the detailed instruction she gets at the course.

“I was always kind of intimidated by the gym,” she said. “Here there’s always someone telling me how do things correctly.”

Mylo Villanueva, the US Marine Corps veteran who owns and operates MYLO Obstacle Fitness, said mastering the course takes more skill than brawn.

“Once they learn technique, they learn it doesn’t require too much strength,” said Villanueva.

Most of his clients are women aged 22 to 50, who relish the accomplishment of scaling a 2.4-metre wall as much as they appreciate the ease their training brings to everyday chores.

“I hear things like, ‘Before, I couldn’t load the truck with dirt,’ and ‘Now I’m able to lift buckets,’ said Villanueva.

The indoor obstacle course at Warrior Fitness Boot Camp in New York City attracts a mixed bag of enthusiasts, from fitness freaks to runners to “moms and pops” just trying to get back in shape, according to instructor Ruben Belliard.

The course includes hurdles, walls and monkey bars. Everyone has a partner and all the instructors are former marines.

“We tell them what to do, how to do it,” said Belliard. “You pace yourself, you do what you can.”

Most people, he said, are stronger than they think.

“We designed the course so everybody can do it. Most people climb over the 1.8-metre wall on the first try,” he said.

Jessica Matthews, an exercise physiologist at Miramar College in San Diego, California, said the obstacle course on her campus attracts students, staff and faculty of all fitness levels.

The course changes all the time as new obstacles are added or rearranged, said Matthews, who recommends varying obstacle course work with flexibility exercises.

“You need the foundation of fitness to make it through whatever is thrown your way,” she said.

Villanueva says he likes to put an extra, unexpected obstacle at the end of a workout, on the top of a hill.

“I relate a lot of things to life. Life will beat you down. In order to get up you have to push yourself,” he said. “So rain or shine, we’re out there. And I know if I’m going to fall off a 3.6-metre wall, there’s a guy there to catch me.”

CHICAGO — Genetic studies of some of the earliest Ebola cases in Sierra Leone reveal more than 300 genetic changes in the virus as it leapt from person to person, changes that could blunt the effectiveness of diagnostic tests and experimental treatments now in development, researchers said on Thursday.

“We found the virus is doing what viruses do. It’s mutating,” said Pardis Sabeti of Harvard University and the Broad Institute, who led the massive study of samples from 78 people in Sierra Leone, all of whose infections could be traced to a faith healer whose claims of a cure attracted Ebola patients from Guinea, where the virus first took hold.

The findings, published in Science, suggest the virus is mutating quickly and in ways that could affect current diagnostics and future vaccines and treatments, such as GlaxoSmithKline’s Ebola vaccine, which was just fast-tracked to begin clinical trials, or the antibody drug ZMapp, being developed by California biotech Mapp Biopharmaceutical.

The findings come as the World Health Organisation said that the epidemic could infect more than 20,000 people and spread to more countries. A WHO representative could not immediately be reached for comment on the latest genetic study.

Study coauthor Robert Garry of Tulane University said the virus is mutating at twice the rate in people as it was in animal hosts, such as fruit bats.

Garry said the study has shown changes in the glycoprotein, the surface protein that binds the virus to human cells, allowing it to start replicating in its human host. “It’s also what your immune system will recognise,” he said.

In an unusual step, the researchers posted the sequences online as soon as they became available, giving other researchers early access to the data.

Erica Ollmann Saphire of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, has already checked the data to see if it impacts the three antibodies in ZMapp, a drug in short supply that has been tried on several individuals, including the two US missionaries who contracted Ebola in Sierra Leone and who have since recovered.

“It appears that they do not [affect ZMapp],” said Saphire, who directs a consortium to develop antibody treatments for Ebola and related viruses. But she said the data “will be critical to seeing if any of the other antibodies in our pool could be affected”.

Saphire said the speed with which Sabeti and colleagues mapped genetic changes in the virus gives researchers information that “will also be critical” to companies developing RNA-based therapeutics.

That could impact treatments under way from Vancouver-based Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corp. and privately held Profectus BioSciences of Tarrytown, New York.

Part of what makes the data useful is the precise picture it paints as the epidemic unfolded. Sabeti credits years of work by her lab, colleagues at Tulane and the Sierra Leone Ministry of Health and Sanitation in developing a response network for Lassa fever, a virus similar to Ebola that is endemic in West Africa.

Several of the study authors gave their lives to the work, including Dr Sheik Humarr Khan, the beloved “hero” doctor from the Kenema Government Hospital, who died from Ebola.

The team had been doing surveillance for two months when the first case of Ebola arrived from Guinea on May 25. That case involved a “sowei” or tribal healer, whose claim of a cure lured sick Ebola victims from nearby Guinea.

“When she contracted Ebola and died, there were a lot of people who came to her funeral,” Garry said. One of these was a young pregnant woman who became infected and travelled to Kenema Government Hospital, where she was diagnosed with Ebola.

With the Lassa surveillance team in place, they quickly began testing samples.

“We’ve been able to capture the initial spread from that one person and to follow all of these contacts and everything with sequencing,” Garry said.

The team used a technique called deep sequencing in which sequences are done repeatedly to generate highly specific results, allowing them to see not only how the virus is mutating from person to person, but how it is mutating in cells within the same person.

What is not clear from the study is whether the mutations are fuelling the epidemic by allowing the virus to grow better in people and become easier to spread. That will require further tests in the lab, Garry said.

DOHA — High-ranking Saudi envoys held talks with the Qatari emir on Wednesday after months of strained relations over Doha's support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Libya and Syria.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al Faisal, intelligence chief Prince Khaled Bin Bandar, and Interior Minister Nayef Bin Abdulaziz met with Qatar's emir Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani in Doha, the official Qatari News Agency said.

They discussed "brotherly relations between the two countries and means of strengthening and developing them" as well as cooperation between the six Gulf Arab states, it said.

They also discussed "matters of mutual interest, especially recent international and regional developments”.

Relations between Qatar and fellow Gulf States plumbed a new low in March with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirate all withdrawing their ambassadors.

The visit by the Saudi envoys came ahead of a meeting of Gulf foreign ministers on Saturday at which the rift within the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council is expected to be high on the agenda.

Qatar's critics within the bloc have long been hostile to the Muslim Brotherhood, fearful that its brand of grass-roots activism and political Islam could undermine their own authority.

The three governments all supported the Egyptian army's overthrow of the Brotherhood's elected president Mohamed Morsi in July last year and its subsequent bloody crackdown on his supporters.

Qatar gave several fugitive Brotherhood leaders refuge, while Saudi Arabia followed Egypt's move last December to designate the Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation.

The rift has been further highlighted in recent days by Washington's confirmation on Tuesday that UAE warplanes had this month twice bombed Islamist militia in Libya reportedly backed by Qatar.

The air raids failed to prevent the militia from seizing Tripoli airport from nationalist rivals who had held it since the overthrow of long-time dictator Muammar Qadhafi in 2011.

The Saudi foreign minister warned in March that there could be no rapprochement with Qatar until it changes policy.

A short statement on the official Saudi Press Agency on Wednesday said that the delegation returned to the kingdom after a "brief brotherly visit to Qatar”.

The Qatari emir made an unannounced visit to Saudi Arabia last month for talks with King Abdullah on Gaza, where the Islamist de facto ruler Hamas was strongly backed by Doha in the deadly seven-week conflict with Israel that ended with a ceasefire on Tuesday.

Names matter though it’s what they actually represent or refer to that matters even more. Take, for example, a person with an “unconventional” name. Once you get past the first time surprise you stop thinking how unconventional the name is and you only see the person, what she or he means to you. The same goes about a high-tech device, whether it’s called a computer, a tablet or a smartphone, or a phablet — some unconventional name, the portmanteau word for a phone that is almost as large as tablet.

Still, with the ever growing number of communication and computer-based devices, the newest of which being the connected watch, giving a meaningful name to equipment may help to better deal and communicate with it, or at least to think about it.

The term personal computer (PC) was coined in the early 1980s and now refers to what we commonly call today a desktop computer. PC is too general and not fashion anymore but it was how all machines were called back then, except for really big mainframes or servers. In between the huge mainframes and the PC there was nothing in those days.

Back to smartphones, the only devices that truly deserve to be called personal computers.

The one single attribute that makes them unique, different from all computer formats and designs, is the fact that they are permanently tethered to us — or us to them if one prefers. I for one take my smartphone with me all the time when I move from one room to another in my apartment. The bond is stronger than with any other electronic device. Not even my wristwatch is nearly as dear or as important to me. Besides, the phone serves as a watch as well. There is hardly a device that is so personal.

We’re now used to calling them smartphones but the term is less accurate than PC. Moreover smart can be applied to any high-tech device nowadays, given that they almost all come with smart functions and features, since they all sport a processor, memory of some kind, a digital storage area and before anything else connectivity to the web.

Renaming smartphones as personal computers won’t change the technology, or improve functionality or the machines’ performance. It may, however, change our already strong feeling towards them. Suffice it to see the tens of thousands of applications available for these devices. Desktops are nowhere near.

Actually the adjective personal was aptly used about 18 years ago with the PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) that is practically forgotten now. The PDA, however ridiculous it may appear now with its weak, outdated characteristics, was the true ancestor of the smartphone, with its size and the role it was supposed to play as a really personal computer-based device. However and essentially, the lack of telephony and wireless Internet (understandably, back then) quickly killed the PDA. What remains today from it, again, is the notion of “personal”; a legacy to take into consideration.

It is strange and totally unexplained that the industry didn’t carry further the PDA terminology and that from the concept of “personal” it didn’t extrapolate, in any manner, a more significant neologism in naming smartphones. The IT gurus could have coined a term that would have been more representative of the device’s functionality.

Granted, coming up with a name that would mean exactly what it should and that would be attractive enough, is not easy. Industry leaders spend fortunes paying consultants and advertising specialists to find the name that would do the job. It requires knowledge, technique and loads of creativity. Besides, smartphone is not that bad, given that the “smart” part in it flatters users, making them feel, well, smart.

I have the feeling that in a couple of years someone is going to find a better name, one where the “personal” notion is emphasised and clearly expressed.

WASHINGTON — Mice that were raised in a sterile environment or given antibiotics early in life lacked a common gut bacteria that appears to prevent food allergies, US researchers recently said.

The bacterium, called Clostridia, appears to minimise the likelihood that rodents will become allergic to peanuts, and researchers would like to find out if it does the same in people.

In the meantime, they found that supplementing rodents with probiotics containing Clostridia later in life could reverse the allergy, according to the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Environmental stimuli such as antibiotic overuse, high-fat diets, caesarean birth, removal of common pathogens and even formula feeding have affected the microbiota with which we’ve co-evolved,” said senior study author Cathryn Nagler, food allergy professor at the University of Chicago.

“Our results suggest this could contribute to the increasing susceptibility to food allergies.”

Researchers say the incidence of food allergies among children in the United States rose 18 per cent from 1997 to 2007.

The precise cause of food allergies is unknown, but some studies suggest that changes in diet, hygiene and use of antimicrobial soap and disinfecting products may lead to changes in the bacteria of the gastrointestinal tract that leave people more susceptible.

Some food allergies can be fatal.

Researchers experimented on mice, exposing some mice born and raised in sterile conditions to peanut allergens. They also tested mice given antibiotics as newborns, a practice which significantly reduced gut bacteria.

Both groups of mice showed significantly higher levels of antibody response against peanut allergens than did regular mice with average gut bacteria.

Their sensitisation to food allergens could be reversed if Clostridia bacteria were introduced back into the guts of the mice.

“It’s exciting because we know what the bacteria are; we have a way to intervene,” Nagler said.

“There are of course no guarantees, but this is absolutely testable as a therapeutic against a disease for which there’s nothing.”

More research is needed to see if the effect would be the same in humans, she said.