Lance Armstrong’s seven Tour de France titles will not be awarded to any other riders, the International Cycling Union has announced.

Armstrong was stripped of his yellow jerseys for doping by cycling’s governing body on Monday.

“The management committee decided not to award victories to any other rider or upgrade other placings in any of the affected events,” said a UCI statement.

 

American Armstrong crossed the line first every year between 1999 and 2005.

The UCI acknowledged that “a cloud of suspicion would remain hanging over this dark period – but that while this might appear harsh for those who rode clean, they would understand there was little honour to be gained in reallocating places”.

The body has also ordered Armstrong and others to pay back all prize money from this period, and has commissioned an independent investigation into the whole Armstrong affair. Pending the results of the report, defamation proceedings against Paul Kimmage, a former cyclist and Sunday Times journalist, have been suspended.

The statement added: “The committee agreed that part of the independent commission’s remit would be to find ways to ensure that persons caught for doping were no longer able to take part in the sport, including as part of an entourage.”

Armstrong, 41, and his United States Postal Service team ran “the most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping programme that sport has ever seen”, a 1,000-page United States Anti-Doping Agency report concluded.

In the report, it was also claimed that Armstrong paid the UCI $100,000 (£62,300) for the fight against anti-doping.

Floyd Landis, a former colleague of Armstrong’s who now admits to using drugs, claims this was hush money to cover up a positive test for the banned substance EPO that was collected from Armstrong during his victory at the Tour of Switzerland in 2001.

 

Faecal matter can be found on just over a quarter of our hands, new research suggests. In some cases the quantity of germs is equivalent to the number in a dirty toilet bowl. So why are the British so bad at washing their hands?

Poo, it’s getting everywhere. Faecal bacteria are present on 26% of hands in the UK, 14% of banknotes and 10% of credit cards, according to new research carried out by hygiene experts from Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL) and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). It has been published to promote the UN’s Global Handwashing Day.

They say one of the biggest shocks is the level of germs. Findings suggest 11% of our hands are so “grossly contaminated” they are carrying as many germs as a dirty toilet bowl. It’s the same for 8% of cards and 6% of notes. We already know faecal matter can be found on one in six mobile phones.

“People may claim they wash their hands regularly but the science shows otherwise,” says QMUL’s Dr Ron Cutler, who led the study.

The British are particularly bad, other research suggests. Many of us also lie and claim we have washed our hands when we haven’t, especially after going to the toilet.

In a recent UK-wide study, 99% of people interviewed at motorway service stations toilets claimed they had washed their hands after going to the toilet. Electronic recording devices revealed only 32% of men and 64% of women actually did.

Even when faced with a serious health threat, many still don’t bother. More newly published findings, this time from an international study by Harvard University, suggest only 53% of people washed their hands more frequently during the 2009 swine flu pandemic. It looked into how people changed their behaviour to reduce the spread of the H1N1 virus, and the British were the worst of the five countries studied.

The British approach to hand washing is often “bizarre” and “peculiar”, say hygiene experts. So what is our problem? A lot comes down to perception and how we see ourselves, also to a lack of understanding about the simplest hygiene.

“It’s peculiar but many people in the UK don’t think they carry any diseases,” says Dr Lisa Ackerley, a consultant in environmental hygiene and co-founder of Hygiene Audit Systems. “They live in a country with modern facilities and think things are clean.”

The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry study of 40 girls revealed differences in the structure of areas linked to empathy and emotions.

Previous work has found similar results in boys.

Experts suggest it may be possible to use scans to spot problems early, then offer social or psychological help.

An estimated five in every 100 teenagers in the UK are classed as having a conduct disorder.

It is a psychiatric condition which leads people to behave in aggressive and anti-social ways, and which can increase the risk of mental and physical health problems in adulthood.

Rates have risen significantly among adolescent girls in recent years, while levels in males have remained about the same.

Fear detector

In this study, funded by the Wellcome Trust and Medical Research Council, UK and Italian researchers conducted brain scans of 22 teenage girls who had conduct disorder and compared them with scans of 20 who did not.

They also checked the scans against others previously taken of teenage boys with conduct disorder.

The team found part of the brain called the amygdala was smaller in the brains of male and female teenagers with conduct disorder than in their peers.

The amygdala is involved in picking up whether or not others feel afraid – and plays a role in people feeling fear themselves.

Girls with conduct disorder also had less grey matter in an area of the brain called the insula – linked to emotion and understanding your own emotions.

However the same area was larger in boys with conduct disorder than healthy peers, and researchers are not yet sure why that is the case.

The brains of those with the worst behaviour were most different from the norm.

Biological basis

Dr Andy Calder, from the MRC cognition and brain sciences unit, who worked on the study, said: “The origins of these changes could be due to being born with a particular brain dysfunction or it could be due to exposure to adverse environments such as a distressing experience early in life that could have an impact on the way the brain develops.”

Dr Graeme Fairchild, of the University of Cambridge who also worked on the study, said there were potential uses for the finding.

“In the US, people are already using brain scans to argue diminished responsibility. I think we’re too early in our understanding to really do that, but it is happening.

“It would also be possible to use scans where a person is at high risk of offending in the future.

“More help could be given to the family and, in the same way that someone with language impairment receives extra help, help could be given to teach a person to understand emotions – and the emotions of others – better.”

Dr Michael Craig of King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry, who is also looking at using scans to pick up early signs of conditions such as anti-social behaviour, autism and attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), said: “The important thing is that in the studies to date there has been an absence of research looking at females, so this work is an important first step.

“And it suggests that at least a component of this has a biological basis – and there are people who don’t believe there is one.”

The National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death looked at the care given to more than 300 patients at NHS and private hospitals in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

It found that many were given insufficient time or information to properly consent to the operations.

Post-surgery care was also found to be lacking, the watchdog said.

In particular, it highlighted the fact patients were not always given access to dieticians and psychologists.

The report also suggested the failings could be contributing to the high number of readmissions – nearly a fifth of the patients had to return within six months.

 

The so-called “placebo effect” was examined in 104 patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) in the US.

Those with a particular version of the COMT gene saw an improvement in their health after placebo acupuncture.

The scientists warn that while they hope their findings will be seen in other conditions, more work is needed.

Edzard Ernst, a professor of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter, said: “This is a fascinating but very preliminary result.

“It could solve the age-old question of why some individuals respond to placebo, while others do not.

“And if so, it could impact importantly on clinical practice.

“But we should be cautious – the study was small, we need independent replications, and we need to know whether the phenomenon applies just to IBS or to all diseases.”

US scientists say a human and animal trial of a controversial new IVF treatment has yielded promising results.

The findings in Nature magazine show healthy-looking embryos can be created from a mix of three adult donors.

Human embryos were grown in the lab and some appeared normal, while monkeys born using the same technique remained fit and well, now aged three.

A public consultation on the ethics of using this IVF in the UK is under way.

Its findings will be reported to the health secretary in spring 2013.

The technique is designed to prevent debilitating and fatal “mitochondrial” diseases, which are passed down only from mother to child and which cause muscle weakness, blindness and heart failure.

By using two female egg donors, these DNA errors could be cancelled out, scientists believe.

Three-person IVF uses the core genetic information from mother and father as usual, but puts it into a donor egg which contains healthy mitochondria.

Mitochondria sit in the cystoplasm of the egg – akin to the white of a hen’s egg. They contain only a tiny fraction of our genetic material, with the bulk that determines things like our hair and eye colour housed in the nucleus – a speck in the yolk if you use the hen’s egg analogy.

Scientists have been studying two ways of creating three person embryos.

One way is to take the nucleus from the mother’s egg and put it into a donor egg that has healthy mitochondria and has had its own nucleus removed. This new egg can then be fertilised with the father’s sperm.

Another way is to fertilise the mother’s egg first before removing the nucleus and putting it into the donor egg.

The latest study looked at the first method.

 

Many doctors do not know how to support young people who self-harm, according to a new study.

The report, carried about by a leading mental health charity, says often teachers and parents also feel unable to deal with the issue.

YoungMinds says it has spoken to 2,500 people across the UK about their attitudes towards self-harm.

The group was made up of GPs, teachers, teenagers and their parents.

The research, said to be the first of its kind, shows almost half of the 200 doctors questioned felt they didn’t understand why someone would want to hurt themselves.

More than 80% felt they had not had enough training specific to self-harm.