An American neurologist and an Italian epidemiologist whose work revolutionized the treatment of multiple sclerosis on Saturday won a prestigious Breakthrough Prize, the award nicknamed the “Oscars of science.”Stephen Hauser and Alberto Ascherio were recognized for their decades researching the debilitating neurodegenerative disease, which affects nearly three million people worldwide and was long considered an impenetrable enigma.Hauser’s work on multiple sclerosis (MS) started more than 45 years ago, when he met a young patient named Andrea, “an extraordinarily talented young woman who was already an attorney” and working at the White House under then-president Jimmy Carter, he told AFP.”Then MS appeared in an explosive fashion and destroyed her life,” he said.”I remember seeing her, unable to speak, paralyzed on the right side, unable to swallow, and soon, unable to breathe on her own, and I remember thinking that this was the most unfair thing I had ever seen in medicine.”Then 27 years old, he decided to make it his life’s work.- Rough road -“At the time, we had no treatments for MS. In fact, there was also a pessimism that treatments could ever be developed,” said Hauser, now 74 and director of the neuroscience institute at the University of California San Francisco.Scientists knew the disease, which damages the central nervous system and leads to paralyzing cognitive and motor problems, was caused by the immune system turning on the body.But they thought the white blood cells known as T cells were the lone culprit.Hauser questioned that.Studying the role played in the disease by B cells, another type of white blood cell, he and his colleagues managed to recreate the damage MS causes to the human nervous system in small monkeys known as marmosets.The US federal body overseeing medical research dismissed the link as “biologically implausible,” and turned down their application for funding for a clinical trial.But Hauser and his team pressed on.They persuaded pharmaceutical company Genentech to back testing. In 2006, they got resounding results: treatments targeting B cells were associated with “a dramatic, more than 90-percent reduction in brain inflammation,” Hauser said.It was “something of a scope that had never been seen before.”That threw open a door to bring new treatments to market that slow the advance of the disease in many patients.But it also raised other questions. For example, what would cause our white blood cells to turn against us?- The virus connection -That was a question that puzzled Ascherio, today a professor at Harvard.He decided to investigate why MS mostly affected people in the northern hemisphere.”The geographical distribution of MS was quite striking,” he told AFP.”MS is very uncommon in tropical countries and near the equator.”That made him wonder whether a virus could be involved.He and his team carried out a long-term study following millions of young US military recruits.After nearly 20 years of research, they came up with an answer. In 2022, they confirmed a link between MS and the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), a common infection responsible for another well-known disease, infectious mononucleosis, or mono.”Most people infected with EBV will never develop MS,” said Ascherio, 72.But everyone who develops MS has had EBV first.The discovery still did not explain why MS occurs. But it fuelled hope of finding new treatments and preventive measures for a disease that remains uncurable, and whose current treatments do not work on all patients.Ascherio’s breakthrough could also help treat other conditions.”We are now trying also to extend our investigation, to investigate the role of viral infection in other neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer’s or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,” also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, he said.The link remains theoretical for now. But “there is some evidence,” he said.”It’s like where we were on MS 20 or 30 years ago.”

The artist who painted US President Donald Trump in what he criticized as a “purposefully distorted” portrait has said his remarks have harmed her business.Colorado removed the official portrait of Trump from display in the state’s capitol building last month after the president complained that it was deliberately unflattering.”Nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves, but the one in Colorado, in the State Capitol… along with all other Presidents, was purposefully distorted,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on March 24.”The artist also did President Obama, and he looks wonderful, but the one on me is truly the worst,” Trump said.The 78-year-old Republican called for the oil painting to be taken down, and said the artist, Sarah Boardman, “must have lost her talent as she got older.”The Democrat-controlled Colorado legislature said the same day as Trump’s complaint that the painting would be removed from the gallery in the capitol’s rotunda — where it had been hung since 2019 — and placed in storage.Boardman has responded to Trump’s critique in a statement on her website, saying she completed the work “accurately, without ‘purposeful distortion,’ political bias, or any attempt to caricature the subject, actual or implied.””President Trump is entitled to comment freely, as we all are, but the additional allegations that I ‘purposefully distorted’ the portrait, and that I ‘must have lost my talent as I got older’ are now directly and negatively impacting my business of over 41 years,” the British-born artist said.Boardman added in the undated statement that for the six years that the portrait of Trump hung in the Colorado capitol, she “received overwhelmingly positive reviews” on the commissioned work.However, since Trump’s comments “that has changed for the worst,” she said.In addition to Trump and former president Barack Obama, Boardman was also commissioned to paint a portrait of ex-president George W. Bush.

Violent storms battering the central-eastern United States have killed at least 16 people, officials said, with the National Weather Service warning on Saturday of “severe” flash flooding in the coming days.A line of fierce storms stretching from Arkansas to Ohio has damaged buildings, flooded roadways and produced dozens of tornadoes in recent days.Tennessee was hardest hit by extreme weather, with state authorities saying on Saturday that 10 people had died across the western part of the state.Two people were killed due to floods in Kentucky, according to state Governor Andy Beshear, including a child who was “swept away by floodwaters.”Photos shared on social and local media showed widespread damage from the storm across several states, with homes torn apart, toppled trees, downed power lines and overturned cars.”Severe, widespread flash flooding is expected” into Sunday in parts of the central-eastern region, the National Weather Service (NWS) said, warning that “lives and property are in great danger.”Two storm-related deaths were recorded in Missouri and one in Indiana, according to local media reports and authorities.A five-year-old was found dead in a home in Little Rock, Arkansas “in connection to the ongoing severe weather,” the state’s emergency management agency said in a statement.”Flooding has reached record levels in many communities,” Kentucky’s Governor Beshear wrote on social media Saturday, urging residents in the state to “avoid travel, and never drive through water.”More than 100,000 customers were without power in Arkansas and Tennessee as of early Sunday, according to tracking website PowerOutage.us.The NWS on Saturday said that moderate to severe tornadoes could form in parts of the Tennessee Valley and Lower Mississippi Valley on Sunday, along with “severe thunderstorms.”Scientists say global warming is disrupting climate patterns and the water cycle, making extreme weather more frequent and ferocious.Last year set a record for high temperatures in the United States, with the country also pummeled by a barrage of tornadoes and destructive hurricanes.