Alternative medicines are popular, but do any of them really work?

Alternative medicines are popular, but do any of them really work?

(ISTOCKPHOTO/ ) – Coconut oil is sometimes recommended for helping prevent Alzheimer’s disease.

By Paul Offit

If people want to burn fat, detoxify livers, shrink prostates, avoid colds, stimulate brains, boost energy, reduce stress, enhance immunity, prevent cancer, extend lives, enliven sex or eliminate pain, all they have to do is walk in to a vitamin store and look around.

The shelves will be lined with ginkgo or rose and orange oils touted as aids for memory; guarana and cordyceps for energy; chicory root for constipation; lemon balm oil, ashwagandha, eleuthero, Siberian ginseng and holy basil for stress; sage and black cohosh for menstrual pain; coconut oil and curry powder for Alzheimer’s disease; saw palmetto for prostate health; sandalwood bark to prevent aging; garlic for high cholesterol; peppermint oil for allergies; artichoke extract and green papaya for digestion; echinacea for colds; chondroitin sulfate and glucosamine for joint pain; milk thistle for hepatitis; St. John’s wort for depression; and tongkat ali for sexual potency.

The question, however, is: Which products work? And how do we know they work? Fortunately, thanks to James Lind, we can figure it out.

When Lind climbed aboard the HMS Salisbury intent on testing whether citrus was a cure for scurvy in 1740, he moved medicine from a faith-based system to an evidence-based system. No longer do we believe in treatments. We can test them to see whether they work.

Although the size and cost of clinical studies have increased dramatically since the days of Lind, the claims made about alternative remedies are testable, eminently testable.

In that sense, there’s no such thing as alternative medicine. If clinical trials show that a therapy works, it’s good medicine. And if a therapy doesn’t work, then it’s not an alternative.

For example, Hippocrates used the leaves of the willow plant to treat headaches and muscle pains. By the early 1800s, scientists had isolated the active ingredient: aspirin. In the 1600s, a Spanish physician found that the bark of the cinchona tree treated malaria. Later, cinchona bark was shown to contain quinine, a medicine now proven to kill the parasite that causes malaria. In the late 1700s, William Withering used the foxglove plant to treat people with heart failure. Later, foxglove was found to contain digitalis, a drug that increases heart contractility. More recently, artemisia, an herb used by Chinese healers for more than a thousand years, was found to contain another anti-malaria drug, which was later called artemisinin.

“Herbal remedies are not really alternative,” writes Steven Novella, a Yale neurologist. “They have been part of scientific medicine for decades, if not centuries. Herbs are drugs, and they can be studied as drugs.”

Looking at the claims

In many case, though, when natural products have been put to the test, they’ve fallen short of their claims. For instance, although mainstream medicine hasn’t found a way to treat dementia or enhance memory, practitioners of alternative medicine claim that they have: ginkgo biloba. As a consequence, ginkgo is one of the 10 most commonly used natural products.

MORE HERE:-

http://tinyurl.com/mfmw8q7

 

 

Related articles

• Can the IoE Revolutionize Alternative Medicine? (blogs.cisco.com)
• Prince Charles and homeopathy: crank or revolutionary? | Telegraph (richarddawkins.net)
• Prince Charles and homeopathy: crank or revolutionary? (telegraph.co.uk)

7 Reasons Why Religion Is a Form of Mental Illness

7 reasons why religion is a form of mental illness

Article by Sweet  Tea The Southern Skeptic Fairy

I would like to propose that religious beliefs be placed in the DSM as a category of mental illness for the following reasons:-

(1) Hallucinations – the person has invisible friends who (s)he insists are real, and to whom (s)he speaks daily, even though nobody can actually see or hear these friends.

(2) Delusions – the patient believes that the invisible friends have magical powers to make them rich, cure cancer, bring about world peace, and will do so eventually if asked.

(3) Denial/Inability to learn – though the requests for world peace remain unanswered, even after hundreds of years, the patients persist with the praying behaviour, each time expecting different results.

(4) Inability to distinguish fantasy from reality – the beliefs are contingent upon ancient mythology being accepted as historical fact.

(5) Paranoia – the belief that anyone who does not share their supernatural concept of reality is “evil,” “the devil,” “an agent of Satan”.

(6) Emotional abuse – ­ religious concepts such as sin, hell, cause feelings of guilt, shame, fear, and other types of emotional “baggage” which can scar the psyche for life.

(7) Violence – many patients insist that others should share in their delusions, even to the extent of using violence.

Pill To Gill | Mood Drugs In Waterways, Alter Fish Behaviour, Study Finds

Mood-changing drugs enter waterways, affect fish, study finds

Courtesy of Umeå University, Science and World Science staff

      Some medicines that end up in the world’s wa­ter­ways af­ter be­ing used are af­fect­ing fish be­hav­ior, ac­cord­ing to a new stu­dy.

Tomas Brodin of Swe­den’s Umeå Uni­vers­ity and col­leagues found that wild Eu­ro­pe­an perch ate faster, be­came bolder and acted less so­cial af­ter ex­po­sure to an anxiety-moderating drug known as Ox­aze­pam.

Perch. (Courtesy Ben       Christensen)

      Residues of the drug of­ten wind up in nat­u­ral aquat­ic sys­tems af­ter peo­ple con­sume it, the re­search­ers said. They’re ex­cret­ed, flushed down the toi­let, trea­ted at wastewa­ter treat­ment plants, and end up in the wa­ter un­changed.

Brodin and col­leagues dosed wild perch with amounts of Ox­aze­pam equiv­a­lent to those found in Swe­den’s riv­ers and streams. Their re­sults, they said, sug­gested that even small amounts of the drug can al­ter the be­hav­ior and for­ag­ing ra­tes of these fish. 

“Nor­mally, perch are shy and hunt in schools. This is a known stra­tegy for sur­viv­al and growth. But those who swim in Ox­aze­pam be­came con­sid­erably bold­er,” said Brodin, lead au­thor of the re­port, pub­lished in the Feb. 15 is­sue of the jour­nal Sci­ence. The af­fect­ed fish left their schools to seek food on their own, a be­hav­ior that can be risky, he ex­plained; they al­so ate more quick­ly.

“We’re now go­ing to ex­am­ine what con­se­quenc­es this might have. In wa­ters where fish beg­in to eat more ef­fi­cient­ly, this can af­fect the com­po­si­tion of spe­cies, for ex­am­ple, and ultima­tely lead to un­ex­pected ef­fects, such as in­creased risk of al­gal bloom­ing,” said Brodin.

“The so­lu­tion to the prob­lem is not to stop med­i­cat­ing ill peo­ple but to try to de­vel­op sew­age treat­ment plants that can cap­ture en­vi­ron­men­tally haz­ard­ous drugs,” added en­vi­ron­men­tal chem­ist Jerk­er Fick, a co-au­thor of the stu­dy.

The sci­en­tists added that the find­ings should be seen as a point­er about what might be un­der­way in many wa­ters around the world, though full­er stud­ies are re­quired be­fore any far-reach­ing con­clu­sions can be drawn.

Related articles

• Psychiatric Meds in Water Supply May Alter Fish Behavior – U.S. News & World Report (health.usnews.com)
• Drugs Laked Into Rivers Make Fish Antisocial (news.yahoo.com)
• Study: Anxiety Drugs Found In Fish Could Have Evolutionary Consequences (washington.cbslocal.com)
• Drug passed on to fish boosts their confidence (smh.com.au)
• Pill to Gill: Antianxiety Drugs in Flushed into Water May Be Making Fishes Fearless (scientificamerican.com)
• Anxiety Drug in Water Makes Shy Swedish Fish Greedy (bloomberg.com)
• Drug residues ‘alter fish behaviour’ (bbc.co.uk)

Genetically Engineered Meat, Coming Soon to a Supermarket Near You

Genetically Engineered Meat, Coming Soon to a Supermarket Near You

 by  Bruce Friedrich

If you’re one of the 91 percent of Americans who opposes genetically engineered (GE) meat, you may have limited time to act: The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has proposed approval of the first-ever GE animal, called “AquAdvantage Salmon.” If this first approval proceeds, the process is likely to become top secret in the future: we won’t find out about new GE animals until after they’re approved for human consumption, and they won’t be labeled. Welcome to the new world of genetically engineered meat — unless we act now.

The Process

The problems begin with FDA’s bizarre decision to consider GE meat using its “New Animal Drug Approval” (NADA) process, a process designed for evaluation of new animal drugs (hence the name), not genetically engineered animals. The GE salmon themselves are, according to this analysis, the animal drug. As food blogger Ari LeVaux explains on Civil Eats, “the drug per se is AquaBounty’s patented genetic construct… Inserted at the animal’s one-cell stage, the gene sequence exists in every cell of the adult fish’s body.”

Of course, NADA was not designed to analyze the human health or environmental consequences of new animal drugs, and because the animals are the drugs in this process, their welfare is also ignored. In all three areas, there is ample reason for concern.

Human Health

Since they aren’t consumed by humans, new animal drugs are not evaluated for their human health impact, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that FDA’s analysis in this area has been almost nonexistent. Health and consumer rights advocates have raised alarms, noting among other concerns, that: 1) these animals will require massive doses of antibiotics to keep them alive in dirty, crowded aquaculture conditions, and we don’t know these antibiotics’ effect on human health; 2) the limited testing that has been conducted was carried out by or for AquaBounty and included shockingly small sample sizes; and 3) what studies have been done indicated increased allergic potential and increased levels of the hormone IGF-1, which is linked to various cancers — an outcome ignored in FDA’s approval according to the Consumers Union, Food & Water Watch, and the Center for Food Safety.

Our Environment

The process of examining new drugs’ environmental impact is also lax, so it’s also not surprising that FDA bungled this analysis as well. As just one glaring example, the agency looked only at how one small pilot project in Canada and Panama will affect U.S. waters, ignoring its legal obligations to consider the likelihood of salmon escaping as the pilot program expands—an expansion the company has already announced. Similarly, FDA suggests that the GE salmon’s lack of fear and rapacious appetite means that they could not survive escape. Another possibility, ignored by FDA and feared by environmental groups including Friends of the Earth, is that escapees would “wreak havoc on the ecosystem.” The Center for Food Safety (CFS) points out that every year “millions of farmed salmon escape, outcompeting wild populations for resources and straining ecosystems.” Regarding GE salmon, CFS continues: “Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences notes that a release of just sixty GE salmon into a wild population of 60,000 would lead to the extinction of the wild population in less than 40 fish generations.” FDA totally ignores this scenario and its vast implications for our aquatic ecosystems.

Animal Welfare

Animal welfare is the one area where we might expect NADA to do a passable job because the process is supposed to guarantee drug safety in the target animal. Sadly, FDA ignored animal welfare in its decision to recommend approval of GE meat, perhaps because it considers the GE animals to be drugs, not animals. In 2010, the American Anti-Vivisection Society and Farm Sanctuary detailed more than a dozen concerns with the AquAdvantage salmon, any one of which should have precluded approval. Yet, in its proposal, FDA ignored animal welfare concerns entirely.

Here are just a few of our concerns, none of which were addressed in FDA’s proposal:

1. Although AquaBounty supplied limited animal welfare data, its own application indicates that it engaged in “extensive culling” of deformed, diseased, dying, and dead fish from its analysis. This would be like studying smoking’s impact only on long-distance runners who had shown no signs of cancer or heart disease.
2. All aquaculture causes physical deformities and makes fish sick; nevertheless (and even after culling the sickest animals), the limited data supplied by AquaBounty indicates that AquAdvantage fish are even sicker and more prone to abnormalities and death losses than other farmed fish
3. Even within these parameters, there were problems with the studies. For example, sample sizes provided were tiny and included limited data, and all analysis was done by the company (do you recall how this worked out with the tobacco companies?).
4. Salmon in the wild are remarkable animals, swimming thousands of miles, including up streams and waterfalls; and of course, they feel pain and have similar cognitive, emotional, and behavioral complexity to other animals. AquAdvantage salmon will be crammed into tanks in grossly unnatural conditions, and slaughter will be completely unregulated (see video below). Imagine living your entire life, day and night, in an elevator with 20 other people — you can’t even stand up; you live in a pile of everyone else’s limbs and excrement. That’s aquaculture.

Brave New World

The scariest thing about approving GE animals through NADA is that once a type of technological drug advance is approved (here, genetic animal engineering), future approvals become much easier and much less transparent: the process that protects corporate drug development secrets will protect the GE process, resulting in reduced scrutiny and no transparency at all for future approvals. The American public will probably not even find out about future GE animals until after they’re approved for sale. As Friends of the Earth notes, FDA’s approval “will open the floodgates for other genetically engineered animals, including pigs and cows, to enter the food supply.”

Conclusion

FDA’s process for approving genetically engineered meat is rotten to the core, and the effects of such a bad process on human health, our environment, and animals cannot be overstated. In the 2010 process, FDA received more than 400,000 comments and letters from more than 300 health, consumer advocacy, environmental, animal protection, and other organizations. All were ignored. We have one more chance before litigation becomes necessary. Click here to take action.

<!–

–>

Related articles

• Obama Moves Forward with GE Salmon Approval (foodfreedomgroup.com)
• Frankenfish: genetically engineered salmon close to winning FDA approval (vineoflife.net)
• Genetically-Engineered Meat Isn’t Tested for Human Safety (globalresearch.ca)
• Salmon Fishing in Test Tubes (leanonlife.com)

Genetically engineered virus kills cancer

Genetically engineered virus kills cancer

Sixteen patients given a high dose of the therapy survived for 14.1 months on average, compared to 6.7 months for the 14 who got the low dose.

“For the first time in medical history we have shown that a genetically engineered virus can improve survival of cancer patients,” study co-author David Kirn told AFP.

The four-week trial with the vaccine Pexa-Vec or JX-594, reported in the journal Nature Medicine, may hold promise for the treatment of advanced solid tumours.

“Despite advances in cancer treatment over the past 30 years with chemotherapy and biologics, the majority of solid tumours remain incurable once they are metastatic (have spread to other organs),” the authors wrote.

There was a need for the development of “more potent active immunotherapies”, they noted.

Pexa-Vec “is designed to multiply in and subsequently destroy cancer cells, while at the same time making the patients’ own immune defence system attack cancer cells also”, said Kirn from California-based biotherapy company Jennerex.

“The results demonstrated that Pexa-Vec treatment at both doses resulted in a reduction of tumour size and decreased blood flow to tumours,” said a Jennerex statement.

“The data further demonstrates that Pexa-Vec treatment induced an immune response against the tumour.”

Pexa-Vec has been engineered from the vaccinia virus, which has been used as a vaccine for decades, including in the eradication of smallpox.

The trial showed Pexa-Vec to be well tolerated both at high and low doses, with flu-like symptoms lasting a day or two in all patients and severe nausea and vomiting in one.

The authors said a larger trial has to confirm the results. A follow-up phase with about 120 patients is already under way.

Pexa-Vec is also being tested in other types of cancer tumours.

A patient undergoes a scanner as radiology technicians look at the exam on a screen, on February 6, 2013, at a medical unit specialised in cancer treatment in France. A genetically-engineered virus tested in 30 terminally-ill liver cancer patients significantly prolonged their lives, killing tumours and inhibiting the growth of new ones, scientists reported on Sunday.

Related articles

• A capsule that suppresses cancer cells (indiavision.com)
• Herpes modified to block cancer (arabtimesonline.com)
• Trojan horse ‘eliminates’ cancer (bbc.co.uk)
• Mass cancer mapping centre opens (bbc.co.uk)
• Cancer hope as tumour DNA is tracked (independent.ie)
• Two medical pioneers aim to trial a cancer-killing virus. I aim to help out | Alexander Masters (guardian.co.uk)
• Genetically modified version of herpes virus ‘can block spread of ovarian and breast cancer’ (dailymail.co.uk)
• Colon cancer exhibits a corresponding epigenetic pattern in mice and humans (medicalxpress.com)
• New cancer treatment used for first time in UK (confused.com)
• FDA Approves 1st GMO Flu Vaccine Containing Reprogrammed Insect Virus (toolwielder.wordpress.com)

Mystery Brain Disease Strikes Women in US

Doctors have been wrestling with a newly discovered illness that attacks mainly young women and looks a lot like psychosis. In Philadelphia, hospitalized women appeared possessed, crying or laughing hysterically one moment and turning catatonic the next. One had seizures and left her arms stuck out in front of her. Finally doctors realized they weren’t crazy—they were suffering from an auto immune disease known as Anti-NMDA Receptor Encephalitis, reports CBS Philadelphia.

Discovered six years ago, the illness strikes the brain with antibodies and causes it to swell—as one doctor explained to two nervous parents: “He told them her brain is on fire,” says a woman who was hospitalized for weeks. “He used those words: ‘Her brain is on fire.'” A spinal fluid test can spot the disease and immunotherapy can treat it, but there is no cure; all patients face possible relapses. Now a former patient is trying to get the word out, explaining that “there could be people in comas right now or people stuck in psych wards that have this disease and aren’t being treated properly.”

Related articles

• Lupus and the Nervous System (arthritis.answers.com)
• Bingo! – Differential Diagnosis of Psychotic Symptoms (recoverynetworktoronto.wordpress.com)
• Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan (theselittlewords.com)
• Mysterious Disease Leaving Philadelphia Women ‘Possessed,’ Catatonic (blacklistednews.com)
• Mysterious disease discovered locally, strikes mainly young women (sott.net)
• Mysterious Disease Discovered Locally, Strikes Mainly Young Women (lunaticoutpost.com)
• Health: Mysterious Disease Discovered Locally, Strikes Mainly Young Women (philadelphia.cbslocal.com)
• Newly diagnosed brain disease may be misdiagnosed as psychological disorder (cbsnews.com)
• Mysterious Disease Leaving Philadelphia Women ‘Possessed,’ Catatonic (dprogram.net)
• Mystery Brain Disease Strikes Women in US (newser.com)

Antioxidants May Actually Be Causing Cancer

James Watson Says Antioxidants May Actually Be Causing Cancer

Annalee Newitz

Celebrated geneticist James Watson, one of several researchers who won the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA, has just published what can only be called a cancer manifesto in Open Biology. It’s full of fairly harsh criticisms for current cancer researchers, but also suggests several ways forward in the “war on cancer.” Among other claims, Watson asserts that antioxidants like vitamin C — often recommended as cancer-prevention supplements — could be causing some forms of cancer. He also has harsh words for personalized medicine, and the laziness of cancer researchers.

Watson, now in his 80s, has spent a great deal of his life raising money to fund cancer research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he’s served as director since the late 1960s. Clearly anticipating his own mortality, he mourns the lack of good leadership in cancer research:

That we now have no General of influence, much less power, say an Eisenhower or even better a Patton, leading our country’s War on Cancer says everything. Needed soon is a leader that has our cancer drug development world working every day and all through the night.

He suggests that the problem is researchers are slacking, only putting in “never frantic, largely five-day working week[s].”

He goes on to say that the current craze for “personalized medicine” that will treat cancer is just not going to work. But the main problem comes from government money being misspent:

The now much-touted genome-based personal cancer therapies may turn out to be much less important tools for future medicine than the newspapers of today lead us to hope. Sending more government cancer monies towards innovative, anti-metastatic drug development to appropriate high-quality academic institutions would better use National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) monies than the large sums spent now testing drugs for which we have little hope of true breakthroughs. The biggest obstacle today to moving forward effectively towards a true war against cancer may, in fact, come from the inherently conservative nature of today’s cancer research establishments.

Full size

He goes on to say that conventional thinking about cancer is all wrong. Antioxidants may be undermining cancer therapies and even causing cancer:

In light of the recent data strongly hinting that much of late-stage cancer’s untreatability may arise from its possession of too many antioxidants, the time has come to seriously ask whether antioxidant use much more likely causes than prevents cancer.

All in all, the by now vast number of nutritional intervention trials using the antioxidants β-carotene, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E and selenium have shown no obvious effectiveness in preventing gastrointestinal cancer nor in lengthening mortality. In fact, they seem to slightly shorten the lives of those who take them. Future data may, in fact, show that antioxidant use, particularly that of vitamin E, leads to a small number of cancers that would not have come into existence but for antioxidant supplementation. Blueberries best be eaten because they taste good, not because their consumption will lead to less cancer.

It is thought that antioxidants can prevent damage to DNA from oxygen radicals. But, argues Watson, we want oxygen radicals in cancer cells because this can cause the cells to die. Taking antioxidants might be preventing cancer drugs from destroying cancer cells. Instead, he recommends patients combine anti-antioxidants with cancer drugs.

Watson also recommends an area of research, into a class of proteins called RNAi, which can be used to shut down the activity of genes. He claims that we need less than a billion dollars to win the war on cancer if we focus on RNAi research:

The total sum of money required for RNAi methodologies to reveal the remaining major molecular targets for future anti-cancer drug development need not be more than 500–1000 million dollars. Unfortunately, the NCI now is unlikely to take on still one more big science project when it is so hard-pressed to fund currently funded cancer programmes … Further financial backing, allowing many more cancer-focused academic institutions to also go big using RNAi-based target discovery as well as to let them go on to the early stages of subsequent drug discovery, is not beyond the might of the world’s major government research funding bodies nor that of our world’s many, many super billionaires. The main factor holding us back from overcoming most of metastatic cancer over the next decade may soon no longer be lack of knowledge but our world’s increasing failure to intelligently direct its ‘monetary might’ towards more human-society-benefiting directions.

Watson also wants researchers to focus on a protein called Myc, which is believed to regulate the activity of 15% of our genes. Its activity is also linked to many kinds of cancer. Using RNAi methods, it’s possible we could figure out a way to control Myc, and thus shut down pathways to cancer.

Further Reading:

Watson’s manifesto, “Oxidants, antioxidants, and the current incurability of metastatic cancers,” in Open Biology

Reuters’ Sharon Begley has a good report on what other cancer researchers think about Watson’s comments.

Related articles

• Nobel laureate says ‘superfoods’ may cause cancer (vancouverdesi.com)
• The antioxidant myth is too easy to swallow | Henry Scowcroft (guardian.co.uk)
• “Antioxidant” is not synonym for “healthy” (doubtfulnews.com)
• Cancer victims could be hindering treatment by taking multivitamins (telegraph.co.uk)
• DNA pioneer James Watson takes aim at ‘cancer establishments’ (news.yahoo.com)
• Multivitamins, Blueberries Could Complicate Late-Stage Cancer Treatment (webpronews.com)
• James Watson Says Antioxidants May Actually Be Causing Cancer (myscienceacademy.org)
• James Watson Says Antioxidants May Actually Be Causing Cancer (io9.com)

SCIENCE NEWS

•  Latest SCIENCE NEWS
• 
  BIRTHMARK Newborns carrying the ε4 version of the ApoE gene had decreased brain volume (blue) in the medial temporal lobe of the brain compared with newborns who carried a different version. Other brain areas showed an increase in brain volume (yellow). more >>
  R. Knickmeyer et al.

Latest News

• News in Brief: Glaciers carve path for future buildup

  Previously sculpted landscapes accumulate ice more quickly than steep valleys 01.11.13 | more >>

• Newborns’ brains bear signs of adult illnesses

  At birth, some infants are already saddled with brains that carry features of Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia. Newborns who carry certain versions of genes already show brain shrinkage reminiscent of that in adults with brain illnesses, a study of 272 newborn babies reveals. 01.10.13 | more >>

• New clock revolves around an atom’s mass

  It’s part clock, part scale: A newly developed atomic clock measures time based on the mass of a single atom. The research, published online January 10 in Science, is controversial but could provide scientists with more precise methods of measuring both time and mass. 01.10.13 | more >>

• Pruney digits help people get a grip

  Scientists have an answer to the pressing question of why hands and feet get wrinkled after too much time in the bath: Pruniness may have evolved to make it easier to handle wet objects. 01.09.13 | more >>

• News in Brief: Wrist bones said to distinguish hobbits

  New fossils enter debate over tiny humanlike species that lived in Indonesia 01.09.13 | more >>

• Updated Pap smear detects ovarian, uterine cancers

  A multipurpose version of a Pap smear can detect genetic signs of ovarian or uterine cancer in women, researchers report. When applied to the cervical swabs, the experimental analysis spotted genetic mutations in every sample from uterine cancer patients and in many from those with ovarian cancer. 01.09.13 | more >>

• Quakes may bring nearby rocks closer to rupture

  Some geologic faults suffer from a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality: Sections considered resistant to powerful earthquakes can sometimes produce enormous temblors. New research shows how a quake on one fault segment can weaken a neighboring section, allowing a once-steady segment to suddenly slip. 01.09.13 | more >>

• City lights create sexual early birds

  SAN FRANCISCO — City lights can deliver male birds into reproductive readiness weeks ahead of schedule. 01.08.13 | more >>

• News in Brief: Corals beat heat by being prepared

  Once waters begin to warm, a study finds, it’s too late to adapt 01.07.13 | more >>

• Long space missions may be hazardous to your sleep

  Astronauts on a months-long mission to Mars and back will have more to contend with than boredom and a lack of gourmet cuisine: Disrupted sleep may be a serious side effect of extended space flight, potentially changing crew dynamics and affecting performance on high-pressure tasks. 01.07.13 | more >>

• Language learning may begin before birth

  Babies may start to learn their mother tongues even before seeing their mothers’ faces. Newborns react differently to native and foreign vowel sounds, suggesting that language learning begins in the womb, researchers say. 01.07.13 | more >>

• Hottest temperature ever measured is a negative one

  Coaxing a gas to a negative temperature on the kelvin scale has produced, paradoxically, the hottest temperature ever measured. The study, published in the Jan. 4 Science, will help physicists learn about quantum phenomena and perhaps even the strange form of energy that dominates the universe. 01.04.13 | more >>

• New Martian meteorite is one of a kind

  A recently found Martian meteorite contains substantially more water than any previously found, and chemically the rock appears to be in a class by itself. 01.03.13 | more >>

• Inactivated virus shows promise against HIV

  Patients with HIV who get vaccinated with a disabled version of the virus can, in many cases, fight the real one to a draw.  A new study shows that injecting heat-inactivated HIV can awaken immune protection in some patients, limiting their need for drugs for weeks or months. While the effects appear temporary, the approach might eventually lead to a way to control HIV over the long-term. 01.03.13 | more >>

• Planets and their sun grow together

  Some 450 light-years from Earth, embryonic planets may be feeding tendrils of gas to the newborn star they orbit. The discovery helps explain how a young star can grow even as budding planets suck up much of the gas and dust around it. Without the tendrils replenishing it, the star’s supply of gas would disappear in less than a year. 01.02.13 | more >>

• News in Brief: International Conference on Complex Sciences

  Researchers at the meeting, held December 5-7 in Santa Fe, N.M., offer insight into spam blocking and sick leave. 12.28.12 | more >>

• Antarctic subglacial drilling effort suspended

  One of three major efforts to drill into buried Antarctic lakes has ended without success. A British-led project to plumb the subglacial Lake Ellsworth ground to a halt on Christmas Eve, after the team could not properly connect two portions of the drilling system. 12.27.12 | more >>

• West Antarctica warming fast

  While the Arctic melts apace with rising global temperatures, Antarctica is often seen as the literal polar opposite — frigid, unyielding, impervious to change. But a spot in the heart of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is one of the fastest-warming places on Earth, a new study shows. 12.21.12 | more >>

• Hitting streaks in baseball may be contagious

  Like a popular politician with long “coattails,” a baseball player on a hitting streak seems to lift the performance of those around him. Teammates who play regularly with a streaking player hit at a pace above their own average during those games, a mathematical analysis shows. 12.21.12 | more >>

• Victorian zoological map redrawn

  With a new planetwide analysis of vertebrate life, an international team has used 21st century science to update an iconic 1876 map of Earth’s zoological regions. 12.20.12 | more >>

• California meteorite a scientific gold mine

  A meteorite that fell where California’s gold rush began has triggered a similar gold rush for scientists: to study one of the freshest, most unusual space rocks around. 12.20.12 | more >>

More News >>

Related articles

• Potential for whole genome sequencing to revolutionize Cancer Treatment (grosenfeld.wordpress.com)
• Scientists Work On New Test For Ovarian, Endometrial Cancers (wibw.com)
• Pap smears could help detect ovarian cancer (abc.net.au)

Christ-Psychosis

Christ-Psychosis

There is a point where a committed believer becomes so caught up in their religious narrative that they seem to be under a spell and incapable of functioning in the “reality-based community.” The great majority of believers thrive in the real world, where religious belief is encouraged, and it often helps in every facet of life. But beyond that point where the young zealot and older convert often tread lies madness, albeit a (hopefully) temporary state.

I crossed into that abyss a few times as a believer, but luckily I got back out each time. That place does play a sweet siren’s call to a doctrinaire’s ears, promising a full surrender to one’s fantasies of belief.

But it is a dreadful hallucination, inviting the organically healthy into the schizoid’s dream. Isolated, it can be a refuge for the believer, but once foisted on another, the believer either is revealed his folly, or not, and for the latter case, it presents just as psychosis.

Beware not to take your faith too seriously.

Related articles

• Surveying religious belief needs social science not hard science | Linda Woodhead (guardian.co.uk)
• Does Analytic Thinking Decrease Religious Belief? (str.typepad.com)
• The world’s least understood concepts #3 – The nature of Atheism (Christmas addition) (thatoneguyblog.wordpress.com)
• LETTER – Liberty doesn’t mean employers can impose their religious beliefs (hollandsentinel.com)
• LETTER: Religious beliefs are fair game (courierpress.com)
• Bryan Fischer Is Proof That Fundi Xtian Religion Causes Psychosis (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)

Gun Control: Don’t Fall for the ‘Mental Health’ Diversion

Gun Control: Don’t Fall for the ‘Mental Health’ Diversion

Mental illness is not a significant factor in gun crime

Posted by Charles Johnson

Take a look around the right wing blogs and news sites, and watch Fox News, and you may notice that there are suddenly a lot of conservatives arguing that the real problem that leads to gun violence is mental illness — and that the solution is “better mental health care.”

While it’s true that the US does need better mental health care, your first clue that this is a dishonest diversionary tactic instead of a real argument is that the right wingers parroting it are the very same people normally vehemently opposed to any and all government involvement in health care.

There’s a reason why so many right wingers are using the “mental health” excuse – to distract attention away from the real problem: there are more than 290 MILLION guns in America, almost one for every single man, woman, and child. The right is so in love with gun culture that they’ll even make dishonest arguments that contradict their own values, to pull attention away from this issue.

There is no real evidence that mentally ill people are more likely to commit gun crimes. Columbia University psychiatrist Paul Appelbaum has found that less than 3-5% of American crimes are perpetrated by mentally ill people, and for crimes involving guns the percentages are even lower.

In fact, the mentally ill are far more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators: Focus on Mental Illness in Gun Debate Is Misleading.

Research by John Brekke and Cathy Prindle at the University of Southern California shows that individuals with schizophrenia are more likely to be assaulted by others than to commit violent crimes themselves, Metzl said.

By blaming people who have mental disorders for violent crime, the threats posed to society by a much larger population – the sane – are overlooked.”The focus on so-called mentally ill crime obfuscates awareness of a far more important set of risk predictors of gun violence: substance abuse and past history of violence,” said Metzl, a professor of psychiatry and sociology. “By blaming people who have mental disorders for violent crime, the threats posed to society by a much larger population – the sane – are overlooked.”

One possible explanation for the tendency to blame mental illness for violent crimes is the fact that the debate around gun control has become so politicized that bringing up mental illness is one of the few ways to even talk about the issue, Metzl said.

For the right, this has become a way to confuse and obfuscate the issue, in order to hang on to their precious, precious guns.

Related articles

• Redefining Mental Illness (time.com)
• “Curiously, during the period before deinstitutionalization, the mentally ill seem to have been less likely to be arrested for serious crimes than the general population.” (althouse.blogspot.com)

EXPOSED! What the Beef Industry Pumps Into Your Dinner!

Revealed: What the Beef Industry Pumps Into Your Dinner

A common industry practice puts consumers at higher risks for eating food contaminated by deadly pathogens — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Photo Credit: © Lisovskaya Natalia/ Shutterstock.com

 If acclaimed authors Upton Sinclair (The Jungle), Jeremy Rifkin (Beyond Beef) and John Robbins (Diet for a New America) haven’t given you enough reasons over the last century to be wary of the meat industry, then a year-long investigation by the Kansas City Star may do the trick.

Mike McGraw kicks off the KC Star’s investigative series by introducing Margaret Lamkin, who has been forced to wear a colostomy bag for the rest of her life, after a medium-rare steak she ordered three years ago at Applebee’s was contaminated with a pathogen. The resulting illness destroyed her colon.

Of course we already know about E. coli and other food-borne pathogens; people have gotten sick from everything from spinach to peanut butter. But the news here is that what sickened Lamkin wasn’t just the meat, but a process the industry uses to tenderize it. McGraw explains:

The Kansas City Star investigated what the industry calls “bladed” or “needled” beef, and found the process exposes Americans to a higher risk of E. coli poisoning than cuts of meat that have not been tenderized.

… Although blading and injecting marinades into meat add value for the beef industry, that also can drive pathogens — including the E. coli O157:H7 that destroyed Lamkin’s colon — deeper into the meat.

By using this process (which according to the story, 90 percent of processors will use, depending on the cut), people are at a greater risk of exposure to life-threatening illness. And consumers have no way of knowing whether their meat has undergone this process.

Ending up with a fecal-contaminated burger is bad, but it’s just the beginning of what the investigation uncovered. Here are the other key findings, as McGraw writes:

•  Large beef plants, based on volume alone, contribute disproportionately to the incidence of meat-borne pathogens.

•  Big Beef and other processors are co-mingling ground beef from many different cattle, some from outside the United States, adding to the difficulty health officials have tracking contaminated products to their source. The industry also has resisted labeling some products, including mechanically tenderized meat, to warn consumers and restaurants to cook it thoroughly.

•  Big Beef is injecting millions of dollars of growth hormones and antibiotics into cattle, partly to fatten them quickly for market. Many experts believe that years of overuse and misuse of such drugs contributes to antibiotic-resistant pathogens in humans, meaning illnesses once treated with a regimen of antibiotics are much harder to control.

•  Big Beef is using its political pull, public relations campaigns and the supportive science it sponsors to influence federal dietary guidelines and recast steaks and burgers as “health foods” people should eat every day. It even persuaded the American Heart Association to certify beef as “heart healthy.”

Read the full investigation, and think about how this scenario fits into the larger picture of what we deem acceptable as a food system. Just last month Consumer Reports shared frightening findings about pork.

And there is a ray of good news. Ocean Robbins wrote today:

People are taking an increasing interest in the way that the animals raised for food are treated. In fact, a poll conducted by Lake Research partners found that 94 percent of Americans agree that animals raised for food on farms deserve to be free from cruelty. Nine U.S. states have now joined the entire European Union in banning gestational crates for pigs, and Australia’s two largest supermarket chains now sell only cage-free eggs in their house brands.

The demand is growing for food that is organic, sustainable, fair trade, GMO-free, humane, and healthy. In cities around the world, we’re seeing more and more farmer’s markets (a nearly three-fold increase in the last decade), and more young people getting back into farming. Grocery stores (even big national chains) are displaying local, natural and organic foods with pride. The movements for healthy food are growing fast, and starting to become a political force.

Investigations like the one done by the Kansas City Star are crucial for public education, as is support for the growing food movement that needs help in turning purchasing power at the market into political power that can affect decisions about food safety and industry practices.

“Big agribusiness would probably like us all to sit alone in the dark, munching on highly processed, genetically engineered, chemical-laden, pesticide-contaminated pseudo-foods,” Robbins writes. “But the tide of history is turning, and regardless of how much they spend attempting to maintain their hold on our food systems, more and more people are saying NO to foods that lead to illness, and YES to foods that help us heal.”

Related articles

• Big Beef: Beef’s raw edges (mcclatchydc.com)
• Big Beef: Beef’s raw edges (sacbee.com)
• Newspaper: Beef Industry Using Risky Procedures (stlouis.cbslocal.com)
• This Report May Make You Give Up Rare Steak For The Rest Of Your Life (businessinsider.com)
• Disgusting Meat Datapoint Of The Day (timzimmermann.com)

Schizophrenia | The Disease of the Christian Mind

Schizophrenia: The Disease of the Christian Mind?

Posted by Fed Up American

People diagnosed with schizophrenia suffer from problems with their thought processes. These lead to hallucinations, delusions, disordered thinking, and unusual speech or behavior. Symptoms affect the ability to interact with others, and often people with schizophrenia withdraw from the outside world.

Q. What’s the difference between a Christian and a schizophrenic?

A. One person hears voices and is convinced their thoughts and actions are known to some outside power.

They think the world was designed and created for them and that they are central to everything that goes on and they are sure they are part of a special divine mission.

They believe that ordinary everyday events have some special transcendent meaning visible only to them, sometimes speaking in babbling incoherent voices, and they believe supernatural forces are at work to influence their actions.

And the other one, of course, is a schizophrenic.

The Bible is filled with reports of people hearing voices and seeing visions. In the pre-psychiatric world that Jesus allegedly walked upon, these “miracles” were attributed to their God. Combine a superstitious person, which most of the day were, with a psychiatric disorder as serious as schizophrenia and you have a very volatile and dangerous situation.

A dangerous situation that has morphed itself into a monster centuries later. The Christian of the modern day, especially the devout Christian that believes that the voices and visions mentioned in the Bible are real, have accepted the schizophrenia and superstitions of the people of Jesus era.

They even go as far as to sing praises to this fairy tale God of theirs, with arms raised and vacant, glassy stares to the heavens, believing that there is a magical, mystical being that is looking down, approvingly at them.

There is a very big problem with Christian delusions accompanied by auditory and visual hallucinations. They live in a world of make believe that is responsible for centuries of fear, guilt, death and destruction of families. Christian atrocities throughout history include the crusades, the Salem witch trials and various episodes of torture all in the name of the Christian God and mass hallucinations and religious belief.

Politicians have been heavily influenced in basing their legislative decisions, ignoring the separation of church and state, on their religious beliefs and insurance companies have been using the “act of God” clause to get out of paying claims. People have been accepting these things for centuries and need to finally wake up and face reality.

Schizophrenia is a lifelong illness and will require medication for the rest of the patient’s life. They find comfort in church services and fellow Christians that share their same hallucinations and delusions, by their beliefs in things that can never be proven as real. This is a problem because they will revolve their entire lives around a make believe story. They will even go as far as believing that they are superior compared to a non-believer because they feel as though they are chosen or more enlightened.

Schizophrenia is a treatable mental illness and will undoubtedly get worse the longer it goes untreated. Trying to convince a Christian that they are suffering the symptoms is the problem. They don’t believe that they are sick and need medical treatment.

Look at it this way. Let’s suppose that I came to you one day and said that I was enlightened last night by an angel that told me that I will have “life everlasting” by simply believing so. The only condition is that I must always believe, even when evidence points to the contrary, or I will lose my life everlasting “gift.” The belief would be that I discovered that a story of Humpty Dumpty, complete with all the kings’ horses and all the kings’ men, was based on real accounts of a story by Mother Goose. I found these stories to be as real as the story Mother Mary and will not be told anything to the contrary.

Would you not find me as being a mental case?

Related articles

• Seeing Things? Hearing Things? Many of Us Do (nytimes.com)
• Work and the Mentally Ill : An All Too Common Problem (bipolarlessons.com)
• Coping With Schizophrenic Hallucinations and Delusions (everydayhealth.com)
• Could poor sleep contribute to symptoms of schizophrenia? (scienceblog.com)
• Cannabis Use May Lead To Schizophrenia (medicalnewstoday.com)

Follow German Court’s Lead And Ban Circumcision, Israeli Child Advocate Says

Eran Sadeh, the founder of the Protect the Child website, argues that Israel should follow a German court’s lead and ban infant circumcision.

Eran Sadeh, the founder of the Protect the Child website, argues in Ynet that Israel should follow a German court’s lead and ban infant circumcision.

Sadeh gives eight reasons why he believes that infant circumcision should be banned:

The following are eight reasons why the circumcision ritual should be abolished:

1. A whole member is more natural. Males and females are born with foreskin.

2. A whole member is more pleasurable. The foreskin is the most sexually sensitive part of the penis. Like the tips of the fingers and the lips, the foreskin contains a high concentration of blood cells and sensory nerve endings. The foreskin protects the glans and keeps its surface soft, moist, and sensitive.

3. A whole member is more protected. During infancy, the foreskin protects the glans of the penis and the urethra from irritation and infections. When the foreskin is removed, the glans and urethra are exposed to abrasion that can eventually cause scarring and urination problems. Ten out of every 100 circumcised children will have to undergo surgery to expand the opening of the urethra.

4. A whole penis is more common throughout the world. Some 80% of men are not circumcised (close to 100% in Europe, not including Jews and Muslims). In Israel, more and more parents are leaving their children’s members whole due to the massive amount of information that is available on the Internet on the subject.

5. A whole penis is more humane. Parents who do not circumcise their child spare him of a host of painful experiences: The pain of the knife cutting through the flesh and the pain of an open, bleeding wound which takes 7-10 days to heal. The trauma of the pain is etched in the infant’s mind and affects the way he reacts to pain in the future.

6. A whole penis is safer. Each year hundreds of babies are rushed to the emergency room due to various complications related to the removal of the foreskin: Constant hemorrhaging that requires surgical intervention or an infusion due to the massive loss of blood; dangerous infections; a distortion of the penis; pain during erection and more.

7. Parents who leave their baby’s penis whole are respecting their child’s basic right to grow up with a whole body, with the whole penis he was born with. Due to the availability of information on the subject, more and more men are aware of the irreversible emotional damage circumcision has caused them and feel violated.

8. A whole member is more ethical. A surgical procedure is considered justifiable – from a medical standpoint – when it meets two conditions: A – It is performed to treat a medical condition, disease or injury. B – It is the least invasive treatment available. Obviously, circumcision does not meet either requirement, as the procedure is performed on healthy babies.

I think point number three is demonstrably false. Point number six needs a comparison between the number of uncircumcised babies who get urinary tract infections and the number of circumcised babies who are damaged from the circumcision. Point number eight would be true if circumcision did not lower certain disease transmission risks and lower the incident rate of urinary tract infections and penile cancer.

This is a sloppy, poorly written, poorly supported piece – which is sad, because, agree with it or not,  a good argument can be made to ban infant circumcision.

Unfortunately, Sadeh lacks the tools, it seems, to make it.

Related articles

• “10 out of 10 babies oppose circumcision” (offoxesandhedgehogs.wordpress.com)
• The Circumcision Conspiracy (lunaticoutpost.com)
• In Israel, Some Rebel Against Circumcision (salem-news.com)
• In some Israeli families, circumcision gets the cut (reuters.com)
• German legislators propose law barring circumcision under age 14 (jta.org)
• ‘Circumcised radio host: It is Pure Torture’ (justasnip.wordpress.com)
• Intactivists Push for State, Federal Bans on Infant Circumcision (prweb.com)
• B.C. dad who circumcised son on the kitchen floor loses high court appeal (vancouversun.com)

SCIENCE HAS SURPASSED SCRIPTURE | Sam Harris

SCIENCE HAS SURPASSED SCRIPTURE

 I mean just think of how good a book would be if it were authored by an omniscient deity. I mean, there is not a single line in the bible or the koran that could not have been authored by a first century person. There is not one reference to anything – there are pages and pages about how to sacrifice animals, and keep slaves, and who to kill and why. There’s nothing about electricity, there’s nothing about DNA, there’s nothing about infectious disease, the principles of infectious disease. There’s nothing particularly useful, and there’s a lot of iron age barbarism in there, and superstition. This is not a candidate book.

Related articles

• New Vaccine May Give Lifelong Protection From Flu (newscientist.com)
• How Aging Reduces Immune System Function (extremelongevity.net)
• Doctors take aim at ‘vaccine objectors’ (abc.net.au)
• Emerging vector-borne diseases create public health challenge (rdmag.com)
• Researchers suggest some emerging infectious diseases may have been around a long time (medicalxpress.com)

Frank Zappa On Religion

Frank Zappa On Religion

Or to put it in terms on Bill & Ted – “Be excellent to each other!”

Related articles

• Stupidity (alterenglishextra.wordpress.com)
• Album Cover of the Week: Frank Zappa, Over-Nite Sensation (grayflannelsuit.net)
• Frank Zappa – Strictly Genteel (milkandcookies.com)
• Gail Zappa: Regarding Frank Zappa (huffingtonpost.com)

Science News

• 
  MALIGNANT GROWTH A glioblastoma tumor (green) formed in a mouse’s brain after scientists tweaked two cancer-related genes in a small number of brain cells called astrocytes (red). more >>
  Image courtesy of Eric Bushong

Latest News

• Fasting hormone helps mice live longer

  New work suggests that a hormone that makes the body think it’s starving could prolong life about as long as severely cutting calories does but without the denial. 10.19.12 | more >>

• Genetic mutations may explain a brain cancer’s tenacity

  New work could help explain why a deadly type of brain cancer recurs easily even after surgery, radiation and chemotherapy have apparently banished it. Fully developed brain cells, not just stem cells, may take on new identities to evade therapy and come back later, the study suggests. 10.18.12 | more >>

• Years after big quake, Turkish fault still slip-sliding

  Keeping an eye on geological faults can be useful even long after they convulse in a great earthquake. By watching a Turkish fault after a deadly 1999 quake, geologists have pieced together a detailed picture of creeping fault movement after a big shake-up. 10.18.12 | more >>

• News in Brief: Body & Brain

  Blood pressure decreases with apnea treatment, vitamins fail to protect against colorectal cancer, and more news from this week’s medical journals 10.18.12 | more >>

• Drug helps put bad memories to rest

  NEW ORLEANS — Fearful associations can be knocked back during sleep, research in mice shows. After receiving an injection of a drug, a nasty link between a scent and a painful foot shock faded as the mice slumbered. 10.18.12 | more >>

• Delaying gratification is about worldview as much as willpower

  Willpower alone doesn’t explain why some children forgo a marshmallow in hand for the prospect of getting two gooey treats later. Kids’ beliefs about the reliability of the people around them, such as the trustworthiness of an experimenter, can dramatically shape their willingness to wait for a sweeter payoff, a new study finds. 10.17.12 | more >>

• The alien next door

  Astronomers searching for Earthlike worlds need look no further than Alpha Centauri, the stellar system next door. 10.16.12 | more >>

• Elevated carbon dioxide may impair reasoning

  Carbon dioxide has been vilified for decades as a driver of global warming. A new study finds signs that CO2, exhaled in every breath, can exert an equally worrisome threat — impaired cognition — in nearly every energy-efficient classroom, meeting hall or office space. 10.16.12 | more >>

• Living longer comes easier

  Despite what the fashion magazines tell you, 40 isn’t the new 30. Seventy is. 10.15.12 | more >>

• Teens can keep their cool to win rewards

  The oft-maligned teenage brain is getting some reputation rehab. When offered the incentive of a modest reward in a recent experiment, teens took more time than adults to make a thoughtful, reasoned decision. 10.15.12 | more >>

• Supersolidity loses its luster

  One of the most exciting physics discoveries in recent years may not be a discovery after all. Reports of “supersolidity,” in which solid helium flows through itself without friction, may turn out be something far more ordinary: the everyday stiffening of a material. 10.12.12 | more >>

• Scientists probe fresh Martian meteorite 

  A meteorite that streaked to Earth in a blazing fireball over the Moroccan desert is one of the freshest samples of the Red Planet’s surface and atmosphere that scientists have ever seen. 10.11.12 | more >>

• Tomato compound might prevent some strokes

  Men with high blood levels of lycopene — the compound that makes tomatoes red — are about half as likely to have a stroke as those low on lycopene, researchers in Finland report October 9 in Neurology. 10.11.12 | more >>

• Thyroid in a dish

  Genetically engineered embryonic stem cells in the lab turn on a developmental program similar to the one thyroid glands go through in the body, Francesco Antonica of the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium and colleagues report online October 10 in Nature. Cells following this thyroid development program form hollow, hormone-producing spheres like those found in a normal thyroid gland. 10.11.12 | more >>

• Early arthropod had a fancy brain

  Rusty red stains on the head of a fossilized segmented creature found in southwestern China are a paleontological record-breaker: They are the remains of the oldest arthropod brain ever found. The imprint of the 520-million-year-old critter’s three-part brain indicates that complex nervous systems evolved fairly early in animal evolution, among the ancestors of insects, centipedes and crustaceans. 10.10.12 | more >>

• Depths hold clues to dearth of xenon in air

  As detective stories go, the Mystery of the Missing Xenon may not have the catchiest title. But scientists in Germany say they might have cracked this long-standing enigma. 10.10.12 | more >>

• Research in cell communication system wins 2012 chemistry Nobel

  Robert Lefkowitz of Duke University in Durham, N.C., and Brian Kobilka of Stanford University will share the 2012 Nobel Prize in chemistry for work on molecules that help cells communicate with the outside world. 10.10.12 | more >>

• Cancer cells executed by magnet

  Evil geniuses, commence drooling. Scientists have figured out how to remotely control a cell’s self-destruction. Magnets that guide the behavior of tiny metal beads can be used to flip on a cell’s death switch, kick-starting the cell’s demolition. The approach might one day be used to kill cancer cells or orchestrate other cellular events without drugs or incisions. 10.09.12 | more >>

• Pulsing blob makes memories sans brain

  A dollop of living yellow ooze has aced a test of navigation, showing that you don’t really need a mind to make spatial memories. 10.09.12 | more >>

• 2012 physics Nobel recognizes experiments probing quantum world

  Two scientists have won the 2012 Nobel Prize in physics for their pioneering work in quantum optics, a field that manipulates light and matter to measure very precise properties of single particles. 10.09.12 | more >>

• Fish in mom’s diet may alter kids’ behavior

  For pregnant women, diets rich in fish can offer their babies protection against  developing behaviors associated with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, a new study finds. Yet for most Americans, fish consumption is the leading source of exposure to mercury — a potent neurotoxic pollutant that has been linked to a host of health problems, including delays in neural development. 10.08.12 | more >>

Related articles

• Brain Cancer Radiation Therapy, Treatment & Side Effects (cancercenter.com)
• Colorful But Deadly: Images of Brain Cancer (livescience.com)
• A Superbug Hops from Hospitals to Rabbits; Beam Me Up, Science (theatlanticwire.com)
• Genetic mutations may explain a brain cancer’s tenacity (sciencenews.org)

Woman Grows Ear on Arm

US woman grows new ear on arm

Alys Francis, ninemsn

Sherrie Walter grew a new ear on her arm.

US doctors have grown a new ear for a woman on her arm after she lost her original ear during a battle with skin cancer.

Sherrie Walter had to have most of her left ear removed, along with parts of her skull and ear canal, in 2010 after she was diagnosed with a basal cell carcinoma, The Baltimore Sun reports.

The 42-year-old mother-of-two, from California, was left disfigured until doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Maryland told her about a groundbreaking new procedure that would enable her to grow a new ear.

The ear was made using cartilage from Ms Walter’s ribs and arteries and from other parts of her body — the structure was then placed under the skin on her arm for four months to grow before it was transferred to her head.

Doctors said the entire process took close to 20 months and it is believed to be the most complicated ear reconstruction completed in North America.

Surgeons performed Ms Walter’s final major surgery last week, fashioning an earlobe and shaping the ear to look more natural.

Speaking before the operation, Ms Walter said: “I am one step closer to the end, to looking normal again.”

Ms Walter first noticed her skin cancer in 2008 when a scab on her ear would not heal.

After drastic surgery to remove the cancer and weeks of radiation, Ms Walter said she became self-conscious of her appearance and grew her hair long to try and hide her face.

She could not wear a clip-on prosthetic ear because parts of her skull had also been removed.

But Dr Patrick Byrne, who led Ms Walter’s surgical team, assured her there were other options and suggested she try the procedure to grow a new ear.

“It seemed a little strange but I was willing to try it,” she said.

Dr Byrne said the new ear should last for years to come.

US scientists are helping pioneer efforts to grow ears, bones and skin in laboratories, with doctors planning to use cutting-edge reconstructive techniques for wounded troops.

Sources: The Baltimore Sun
Author: Alys Francis. Approving editor: Emily O’Keefe

Related articles

• Doctors Grow New Ear on Arm (abcnews.go.com)
• Hopkins Doctors Give Woman A New Ear (baltimore.cbslocal.com)
• Eve’s Rib: Woman Successfully Grows Ear from Arm (medicaldaily.com)
• Doctors grow ear on woman’s arm for reconstructive surgery (cbsnews.com)
• Hopkins surgeon makes new ear using tissue from other parts of woman’s body (sacbee.com)

Alzheimer’s Epidemic Looms | Medical Mystery

Alzheimer’s remains medical mystery as epidemic looms

by Mariette le Roux

Agençe France-Presse

As the population ages, finding a cure for Alzheimer’s disease is increasingly imperative – but there will be a number of hurdles to overcome along the way.

---

Alzheimer’s disease causes two-thirds of dementia cases and instances are expected to increase as the population ages.

Credit: iStockphoto

More than 100 years after it was first caught in the act of decaying a patient’s brain, Alzheimer’s disease remains one of medicine’s greatest challenges as it robs ever more people of their memory and independence.

Researchers make halting progress, reporting small steps forward along with many frustrating setbacks.

And while care for Alzheimer’s sufferers has improved since former U.S. president Ronald Reagan and British fantasy author Terry Pratchett helped lift the stigma, the key workings of the illness remain a riddle.

Alzheimer’s disease causes two-thirds of dementia cases – attacking one in 200 people – and finding a cure has never been more pressing as the world’s population grows and ages.

“There is going to be a tsunami in terms of [cost] burden,” Dean Hartley, director of science initiatives at the U.S. Alzheimer’s Association, said ahead of World Alzheimer’s Day on September 21.

A door to hope slammed last month when drug giants Eli Lilly, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson stopped tests of eagerly anticipated therapies that failed in clinical trials.

On September 6, French researchers announced plant extract gingko biloba, widely marketed as a natural Alzheimer’s remedy, did not actually prevent dementia.

Blaming insufficient funding, at least in part, researchers say they still do not know quite what to make of the plaques and tangles that German doctor Alois Alzheimer first spotted in the brain of a dementia patient who died in 1906.

Little follow-up work was done until the 1960s, partly because fewer people were then living to an age when the disease shows up.

Today, the sole drugs shut in our arsenal treat some symptoms but are powerless to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s.

“People are absolutely desperate for medicines – people suffering from the disease, and people close to them,” said Eric Karran, research director at Alzheimer’s Research UK.

“Where we are at the moment is a critical period for this disease,” he added.

“The pharmaceutical industry has had a range of very, very expensive failures. I worry they might be thinking: ‘this is very difficult and we will just have to wait until the science is more evolved’.”

Hartley and Karran said Alzheimer’s received a fraction of the money governments spend on disease research despite being one of the costliest illnesses in terms of suffering and spending.

Costs and complexity

Alzheimer’s Disease International (ADI) projects the number of people with dementia will rise from 35.6 million in 2010 to 65.7 million by 2030 and 115.4 million by 2050.

The cost, including hospital and home care, drugs and clinic visits, is expected to soar some 85% by 2030 from about US$600 billion in 2010 – roughly the GDP of Switzerland.

But money is not the only problem.

The disease is a particularly complicated one to crack, not least because its effect on humans is nigh impossible to replicate in lab animals.

Its slow progression is an added hurdle.

“The disease seems to be present in people’s brains maybe 15 years prior to … suffering symptoms,” said Karran.

Alzheimer’s normally becomes apparent around the age of 70, when family members observe a loved-one becoming forgetful and confused.

“When patients are available to be studied in clinical trials, you are actually looking at a disease that has been going on for 15 years,” by which stage neurons would already have died, said Karran.

Scientists disagree on the respective roles of beta amyloid plaque build-ups and of a protein called tau, which forms tangles inside these brain cells.

Most test therapies have targeted beta amyloids, but some now suggest it is actually tau killing the brain cells.

“We still do not understand the relation between the structural damage and cognitive symptoms exactly,” Dutch neurophysiology PhD student Willem de Haan said.

Researchers are aiming for a treatment that will halt the disease at an early stage – even before the onset of symptoms.

And while they have not succeeded, their work is throwing up some valuable clues along the way.

Already known is that a small percentage of people, more women than men, are genetically predisposed to developing Alzheimer’s. A family history of the disease boosts the risk.

Some studies suggest healthy living may reduce the chances of those people who do not carry Alzheimer’s-related genes of developing the disease.

Diagnostics, too, are improving: new research shows that a simple eye-tracking test and sleep disruption may be early indicators, helping victims make lifestyle choices before the disease steps into higher gear.

The experts believe that if governments, researchers and drug companies work together efficiently, a treatment may be available within 20 years.

But they also warn against giving false hope to desperate people.

“Finding a medicine for a chronic disease is far, far more complicated than, say, putting a man on the Moon,” said Karran

Related articles

• Sleep quality linked to early signs of Alzheimer’s (time4sleep.com)
• Many mysteries remain as Alzheimer’s epidemic looms (rawstory.com)
• Melatonin and exercise work against Alzheimer’s in mice (eurekalert.org)
• Physical Exercise cuts dementia risk (foodconsumer.org)

Silences — E.E. Cummings

Silences

“Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star…” – E.E. Cummings

Related articles

• This is the Truth: Silence (closertolola.com)

Christianity Synonymous With Ignorance | American Xtian Teens Most Ignorant on Sex and Contraception

Why Are American Teens So Ignorant About Sex and Birth Control?

A new survey reveals just how ignorant young people are about contraception and pregnancy.

Photo Credit: pedrosimoes7

 When it comes to sex and reproduction, even the most mind-numbingly intuitive conclusions can be politicized or disbelieved. So they bear repeating and resubstantiation. Take this recent Guttmacher study on contraceptive knowledge. Surveying 1,800 men and women ages 18–29, the authors “found that the lower the level of contraceptive knowledge among young women, the greater the likelihood that they expected to have unprotected sex in the next three months, behavior that puts them at risk for an unplanned pregnancy.” In other words, access to factual information helps prevent risky behavior.

I’m holding myself back from saying “duh” here, but this still has to be reiterated at a time when abstinence-only education that doesn’t provide detailed information about contraceptive use, except occasionally to emphasize its limits, not only persists but recently got a federal stamp of approval. As an Advocates for Youth report on the impact of abstinence-only education noted, “Proponents of abstinence-only programs believe that providing information about the health benefits of condoms or contraception contradicts their message of abstinence-only and undermines its impact. As such, abstinence-only programs provide no information about contraception beyond failure rates.” That’s how you get terrifying statistics like this one from the Guttmacher report: In the survey, “60 percent underestimated the effectiveness of oral contraceptives and 40 percent held the fatalistic view that using birth control does not matter.” Overall, “more than half of young men and a quarter of young women received low scores on contraceptive knowledge.” It’s also how you get figures like the one from the CDC that found that 31.4 percent of pregnant teens didn’t use contraception because they “thought they could not get pregnant at the time.”

There are two reasons to be optimistic that some dent can be made in these depressing figures, and they both have to do with provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Much has been made of the mandate that insurance policies cover all FDA-approved contraceptive methods, but there’s another aspect that’s been relatively overlooked: the fact that the same provision includes free education and counseling about sex and contraception, at least for the insured. The second reason for optimism is that the mandate will make it far easier for women to get longer-acting and more effective forms of contraception like the IUD — which are also more expensive and which studies have shown women would be interested in if they could afford them. Incidentally, the recent Guttmacher study found that women who were using long-acting or regular hormonal contraception tended to score higher on overall knowledge.

It will be awhile before we know if these changes will move the needle on the nation’s unparalleled rate of unintended pregnancy. The women’s health provisions only go into effect for new plans in August 2012, and older plans will be initially grandfathered and eventually phased out. And of course, there’s another big fat if – whether the Supreme Court overturns all or part of the Affordable Care Act. The Obama campaign and its allies are keen to point out how such a move — or, perhaps, a legislative repeal down the line — will hurt women above all. The Center for American Progress recently released a report on “Women and Obamacare” (the campaign having officially embraced the derisively intended term). It declares Obamacare “the greatest legislative advancement for women’s health in a generation,” which may be true for reasons more depressing than inspiring: There have been very few advancements partly because there has been so much political defense played.

In addition to the reproductive health benefits, the report points to preventive care recommendations for which cost-sharing has already been cut: mammograms, pap smears, prenatal care and so on. According to the report, “close to 9 million women will gain coverage for maternity care in the individual market starting in 2014,” currently not covered in 78 percent of plans sold on the individual market. It notes that women are more frequent users of healthcare services than men, that they’re likelier to make the household decisions on healthcare and that they’re more vulnerable to losing coverage because they’re likelier to be listed as dependents on a partner’s plan. The Affordable Care Act also makes it illegal to engage in “gender rating” – charging women $1 billion more than men on the individual market – and bans states from discriminating on the basis of gender identity in their insurance exchanges.

The report does acknowledge two ways in which Obamacare falls short for women who were “left out of the law — undocumented and recent immigrant women and women who need abortion services.” It claims that “political compromises on abortion coverage were necessary to ensure passage of the Affordable Care Act” – still a bitter loss to reproductive rights groups, who memorably described women as having been “thrown under the bus” by Democrats – “but the work to obtain abortion coverage for all women continues.” The last part is particularly debatable, at least when it comes to any momentum on the funding issue from national Democrats, while Republicans in the states and federally have spent considerable energy trying to limit abortion coverage on even private insurance plans.

Still, if the Affordable Care Act is allowed to stand, the magnitude of having an actual, proactive reproductive health access policy shouldn’t be underplayed. Maybe we’ll get closer to a saner republic where hearing “birth control doesn’t matter” from people who don’t want to get pregnant is a quaint memory.

Related articles

• “Birth control doesn’t matter” (salon.com)
• Why Are American Teens So Ignorant About Sex and Birth Control? (alternet.org)
• Because Of Abstinence Education, 60 Percent Of Young Adults Are Misinformed About Birth Control’s Effectiveness (thinkprogress.org)
• “Abstinence Isn’t Working” (dgsmith.org)
• Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer Signs Legislation Permitting Employers to Interrogate Female Employees About Contraception Use (kaystreet.wordpress.com)
• Sex Education Delays Teen Sex, Study Finds (livescience.com)
• US election: Barack Obama urges women to fight for their right to contraception (telegraph.co.uk)
• 40 Percent Of Young Adults Think Birth Control ‘Doesn’t Matter’ (huffingtonpost.com)
• States with ‘abstinence-only’ sex ed programs rank highest in teen pregnancies (rawstory.com)

Jewish Prayerbooks Full Of Crap – Literally!

Kotel Prayerbooks Full Of Crap, Study Finds

An examination of communal prayer books in the Western Wall shows large numbers of fecal bacteria, a contamination that far exceeds the normal rate.

Contamination found in Kotel prayer books
Public Health Association discovers bacteria contamination in samples from Western Wall prayer books. Site’s Rabbi: Cause is women’s crying
Dr. Itay Gal • Ynet

A recent examination of communal prayer books in the Western Wall shows large numbers of fecal bacteria, a contamination that far exceeds the normal rate.

The contamination was found in books both from the women’s section and the men’s section. Still, the Western Wall’s rabbi argues that the blame is solely on the women that tend to hold the books close to their faces and shed tears.

The test comprised of samples taken from prayer books from both sides of the partition. The samples revealed extremely large numbers of fecal bacteria colonies including E. coli and other coliform bacteria.

One sample had 460,000 colonies (1000 being the normal rate) and another had 540,000 colonies of bacteria, in addition to high concentration of mold.

High concentration of bacteria can lead to inflammatory bowel, abdominal pain, diarrhea, fever, and sometimes even to life threatening infections.

Although the books are used by men and women alike, the holy site’s rabbi, Shmuel Rabinovitch placed the blame solely on the women. He claimed that hundreds of women cry every day into the books, causing contamination.

The rabbi added that the power of women’s prayer is often stronger than men’s thanks to their tears, excitement and spiritual transcendence.

The rabbi said that the prayer books in the site are frequently replaced, but reaffirmed that following the conclusions of the examination the books will be replaced more often.

Israel’s Association of Public Health saluted Rabbi Rabinovitch for his cooperation and quick response.

Related articles

• Women’s Tears Contaminating Western Wall’s Prayer Books (desertpeace.wordpress.com)

Years After Acid Attack Horror, Suicide Stirs Pakistan

Declan Walsh in the New York Times:

Fakhra Younas went under the surgeon’s knife 38 times, hoping to repair the gruesome damage inflicted by a vengeful Pakistani man who had doused her face in acid a decade earlier, virtually melting her mouth, nose and ears.

The painful medical marathon took place in Rome, a distant city that offered Ms. Younas refuge, the generosity of strangers and a modicum of healing. She found an outlet in writing a memoir and making fearless public appearances.

But while Italian doctors worked on her facial scars, some wounds refused to close.

On March 17, after a decade of pining for Pakistan, a country she loved even though its justice system had failed her terribly, Ms. Younas climbed to the sixth-floor balcony of her apartment building in the southern suburbs of Rome and jumped. She was reported to be 33 years old.

More here.

Related articles

• Acid is the preferred weapon of vindictive men against women accused of disloyalty or disobedience. (nycnyc.wordpress.com)
• Prominent Pakistani acid victim commits suicide (sacbee.com)
• So Sad! Acid Attack Victim Commits Suicide (perezhilton.com)
• Fakhra Younis Commits Suicide (towleroad.com)
• Pakistani Acid Attack Victim Commits Suicide Because ‘There Was No Justice Available To Her’ (thinkprogress.org)
• Pakistan acid attack victim commits suicide (telegraph.co.uk)
• Prominent Pakistani acid victim commits suicide (washingtontimes.com)