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Blackburn suffered a second consecutive 2-1 defeat at the Festival of Football as AEK Athens emerged triumphant on a rainy night in Sydney.

Ignacio Scocco and Nikos Lyberopoulos netted in the space of three minutes midway through the first half to set up the Greek side’s victory.

Rovers, who also went down 2-1 to Rangers in their opening game on Sunday, pulled a goal back late on through centre-back Phil Jones but it was more than they deserved in a match completely dominated by AEK.

The diabolical conditions meant only a small crowd turned up but they were treated to some good football for most of the 90 minutes, especially from the Greeks.

It was AEK’s second win in as many games in the tournament, meaning a draw with Scottish champions Rangers on Sunday will assure them top spot in the table.

Rovers manager Sam Allardyce made five changes to the side that lost to Rangers including starting Australia international Brett Emerton on the right side of midfield, but it made little difference as the Greeks controlled the early exchanges.

Phil Jones

AEK were finding plenty of joy down their right and it was no surprise it was an attack down that channel that led to the opening goal on 21 minutes.

Nathan Burns raced onto a long pass from Pantelis Kafes and beat Jones for pace before cutting the ball back for Kafes who produced an audacious flick pass to Lyberopoulos.

He controlled and teed up Scocco, who beat one defender and lashed a low shot past Paul Robinson into the far corner.

Scocco turned provider three minutes later, receiving a pass from Burns on the right before his wicked centre found its way to Lyberopoulos who produced a sensational finish on the half-volley past a stranded Robinson.

Both sides lost their way in the second half as both managers made a raft of substitutions but Rovers pulled one back with a rare shot on target eight minutes from time.

The AEK defence went to sleep at a free-kick and allowed substitute Morten Gamst Pedersen to float in a cross that was headed home by Jones.

Sam Allardyce has hit out at AEK Athens’ ‘over-physical’ approach to yesterday’s pre-season friendly claiming they almost appeared to be looking to harm his players deliberately.

The Rovers boss was left furious after yesterday’s 2-1 defeat to the Greeks in their second game of the Sydney Festival of Football – accusing them of particularly targeting talismanic midfielder David Dunn.

Dunn, who picked up a slight knock in the first half, was replaced by Morten Gamst Pedersen on just 57 minutes with his side trailing 2-0 but Allardyce admitted it was just a case of self preservation.

The midfielder was involved in a number of flash points during a heated encounter, with Rovers upset at a series of bad challenges being put in by the Greek outfit.

Gael Givet limped out of the action in the first half and, with Chris Samba and Nikola Kalinic still absent through injury, Allardyce claimed Athens’ robust approach was the last thing his Premier League preparations needed.

“I was very, very surprised and I’m very, very sad that tackles like that were going in,” Allardyce said.

“People say and talk about the physical game of the Premier League but we don’t go around tackling players like that.

Scientists have developed a new pain-relief pill from a chemical used by sea snails to catch their prey.

It was found to be as effective as morphine for relieving the most severe forms of pain but without the added risk of addiction.

Marine cone snails produce a saliva that contains a deadly dose of peptide toxins to help the slow-moving creatures catch prey. They inject passing victims with needle-like teeth that shoot out of their mouths.

Scientists have already transformed one of the chemicals into a pain-reliever for humans. However, it has to be injected directly into the spinal cord which limits how much it can be used.

Now researchers in Australia, led by David Craik of the University of Queensland, have developed a form of the painkiller that can be taken orally.

The modified chemical was found to reduce severe pain in rats at a much lower dose than existing medications, according to an article in Chemical & Engineering News.

‘For years people have been saying that peptides make fantastic drug leads because they’ve very potent,’ Professor Craik told the magazine.

However, peptides were regarded as poor drugs as they were not stable and could not be taken orally.

This could be set to change, after the team led by Professor Craik, found they could stabilise the amino-acid chains by synthetically lashing the head to the tail.

‘All you need is for the ends to be roughly close to one another,’ he said.

The drug could potentially revolutionise the treatment of the most severe forms of pain and Professor Craik is keen to take his research further.

Colourful cone snails are some of the most venomous creatures on the planet. But the powerful poisons they produce can, in tiny doses, help to reveal how nerve cells function — and potentially help to treat conditions from epilepsy to, as in today’s case, chronic neuropathic pain that is thought to affect up to eight per cent of the world’s population.

Hopes of a treatment have been raised by research on two species of cone snail that eat worms: Conus regius, which measures up to three inches in length and lives from Georgia southward along Central America to Brazil’s central coast; and the second is the similarly sized Conus victoriae, which lives off Australia.

The toxins named RgIA and Vc1.1 from snail venom can treat nerve hypersensitivity and pain according to University of Utah scientists. “It is a previously unrecognised mechanism for treating pain,” said Prof Michael McIntosh, one of the team that reports the finding today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Numerous analgesic compounds currently available are largely ineffective” for chronic nerve pain, Prof McIntosh and colleagues write. The team not only reveals a previously unrecognised molecular mechanism for the treatment of neuropathic pain but the involvement of a protein, called the alpha9 alpha10 nicotinic receptor – in nerve injury.

Vc1.1, also known as ACV1, was found by University of Melbourne scientist Prof Bruce Livett and is being developed by an Australian company, Metabolic, and is undergoing trials in human patients.

Prof McIntosh added that he hopes the new findings also make it feasible to develop a painkiller based on RgIA that could be taken orally, but he believes that will take around a decade.

The study dealt with what is known as neuropathic pain, which is chronic pain due to injury to the nerves, spinal cord or brain. Such pain can result from diabetes damage to nerves in the feet or elsewhere, spinal injury, degenerative disc disease, alcoholism, failed low-back surgery, tumours compressing nerves, spinal tumours, repetitive motion disorders, multiple sclerosis, infection, stroke, traumatic brain injury, shingles, nerve toxins and electrical or other damage to peripheral nerves.

Symptoms can include numbness and pain that feels like constant burning, “pins and needles,” sharp shooting pain, electricity or electrical shock, or tingling. People with neuropathic pain often are hypersensitive to previously innocuous stimuli – for example, feeling pain from a foot rubbing against the inside of a shoe – and feel an exaggerated response to things that are painful.

Common pain medicines like aspirin, ibuprofen and paracetamol often fail to relieve neuropathic pain. Morphine-like drugs such as oxycodone sometimes are used, but can cause constipation, nausea and a spaced-out feeling.

“There really is no highly effective treatment available for this kind of severe pain, so having a new way to treat it is exciting,” Prof McIntosh says. If the new discovery eventually leads to a new pain drug that is combined with existing treatments, “you may be able to reduce the pain to a lower level than ever before.”

Researchers have also identified a natural painkiller produced in humans, termed opiorphin, which is several times as potent as morphine in pain studies in rats, according to a second study in the same issue of PNAS. Catherine Rougeot of the Institut Pasteur, Paris, and colleagues had recently identified a potent pain sensation inhibitor in rats called sialorphin and wondered whether humans also secrete a similar compound. The researchers successfully isolated opiorphin from human saliva that works in the same way. The analgesic properties of opiorphin warrant further study, they report.

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