Kathmandu  - Nepalese authorities Saturday confirmed the second outbreak of bird flu in the eastern part of the country.

The new cases of the deadly strain of H5N1 virus were discovered after 149 chickens died at a poultry farm in Saranamati village of Jhapa district, about 450 kilometres east of Kathmandu, government officials said.

Officials sent samples of the dead fowl to England for tests.

New Delhi - Twenty-nine people have died of hepatitis in Sabarkantha district of India's Gujarat state in the past fortnight, officials said Friday.

Sabarkatha district collector M Thennarasan said the disease was a mutant form of the hepatitis B virus. He said more than 40 people had been hospitalized with suspected infection.

The hepatitis B virus is usually transmitted through body fluids and, therefore, rarely occurs in very large numbers. It can be transferred through blood transfusion, infected needles or unprotected sex.

London, Feb 20 : While trying to unravel the normal function of a protein implicated in Alzheimer's disease (AD), scientists have discovered a naturally occurring protein that provides a new therapeutic target for the disease.

The new finding, by scientists in California and France, rules out the current theory that AD is a disease of toxicity stemming from damage caused by sticky plaques that collect in the brain.

Washington, Feb 20 : Malarial parasite breaks down an important amino acid, called arginine, in a bid to adapt and thrive within the human body, according to researchers from Princeton University and the Drexel University College of Medicine.

It was found that the parasite might trigger a more critical and deadlier phase of the disease by depleting arginine.

Washington, February 20 : Scientists at the University of Illinois say that they have found how a cellular protein recognizes an invading virus and alerts the body to the infection.

Taekjip Ha, a physics professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, says that the study settles a debate over how the protein, RIG-I (pronounced rig-EYE), is able to distinguish between viral RNA and self (or cellular) RNA.

"RIG-I is the first molecule in the immune response to detect viral RNA," said Sua Myong, lead author on the study and a professor at the U. of I.''s Institute for Genomic Biology.

Washington, February 20 : An American study has shed some light on how microscopic changes to brain cause schizophrenia.

"We found several microscopic pathologies and behavioral traits that are hallmarks of schizophrenia. These findings in mice may help shed light on how schizophrenia, an often severe and debilitating disease, emerges in humans," says Dr. Ulrich Mueller, a professor at Scripps Research, who was senior author of the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.