Diabetes Breakthrough in Sight

In a discovery that has stunned even those behind it, scientists at a Toronto hospital say they have proof the body’s nervous system helps trigger diabetes, opening the door to a potential near-cure of the disease that affects millions of Canadians. Diabetic mice became healthy virtually overnight after researchers injected a substance to counteract the effect of malfunctioning pain neurons in the pancreas. “I couldn’t believe it,” said Dr. Michael Salter, a pain expert at the Hospital for Sick Children and one of the scientists. “Mice with diabetes suddenly didn’t have diabetes any more.”

The researchers caution they have yet to confirm their findings in people, but say they expect results from human studies within a year or so. Any treatment that may emerge to help at least some patients would likely be years away from hitting the market. But the excitement of the team from Sick Kids, whose work is being published today in the journal Cell, is almost palpable. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Dr. Hans Michael Dosch, an immunologist at the hospital and a leader of the studies. “In my career, this is unique.” Their conclusions upset conventional wisdom that Type 1 diabetes, the most serious form of the illness that typically first appears in childhood, was solely caused by auto-immune responses — the body’s immune system turning on itself.

They also conclude that there are far more similarities than previously thought between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, and that nerves likely play a role in other chronic inflammatory conditions, such as asthma and Crohn’s disease. The “paradigm-changing” study opens “a novel, exciting door to address one of the diseases with large societal impact,” said Dr. Christian Stohler, a leading U.S. pain specialist and dean of dentistry at the University of Maryland, who has reviewed the work.

Article…

HIV gene therapy ’shows promise’

Preliminary tests suggest HIV infection can be treated using a disabled version of the virus itself.

Researchers at Pennsylvania University treated five patients, who had not responded to drugs, with disabled HIV. It carried added genetic material that blocks HIV reproduction and as a result HIV levels in the patients’ blood either stabilised or decreased. The research raises the prospect that gene therapy might provide an alternative to antiretroviral drugs. The long-term effectiveness of the drugs is under threat from the growing problem of drug resistance.

Gene therapy is complex and would be a totally different strategy for HIV treatment

Roger Pebody
Terrence Higgins Trust

Researcher Dr Carl June said: “Gene therapy has long been discussed as an alternative treatment for HIV.  “The goal of this trial was safety and feasibility and the results established that.  “But the results also hint at something much more.”

The patients selected for the trial had failed to respond to at least two antiretroviral regimens of drugs.

more…

The Worlds Top Polluted Places – 2006

This website is a horrifying expose of humanities callousness towards the environment that sustains us.  Invariably a product of industrialization and man’s ever-present greed.  Particularly noteworthy is how many of these places are in Russia and China.  Lovely stuff.  Brings to mind one of my favourite childhood books, The Lorax by Dr. Suess (which was banned in the US for a time) – if you have a child, read this book to them, plant a mental seed that they may, perhaps, not be as greedy and arrogant as our generation.

Website here …

Iraq Soldiers Sick To Death of Depleted Uranium

NEW YORK — It takes at least 10 minutes and a large glass of orange juice to wash down all the pills — morphine, methadone, a muscle relaxant, an antidepressant, a stool softener. Viagra for sexual dysfunction. Valium for his nerves.

Four hours later, Herbert Reed will swallow another 15 mg of morphine to cut the pain clenching every part of his body. He will do it twice more before the day is done.

Since he left a bombed-out train depot in Iraq, his gums bleed. There is more blood in his urine, and still more in his stool. Bright light hurts his eyes. A tumor has been removed from his thyroid. Rashes erupt everywhere, itching so badly they seem to live inside his skin. Migraines cleave his skull. His joints ache, grating like door hinges in need of oil.

There is something massively wrong with Herbert Reed, though no one is sure what it is. He believes he knows the cause, but he cannot convince anyone caring for him that the military’s new favorite weapon has made him terrifyingly sick.

In the sprawling bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs, he has many caretakers. An internist, a neurologist, a pain-management specialist, a psychologist, an orthopedic surgeon and a dermatologist. He cannot function without his stupefying arsenal of medications, but they exact a high price.

“I’m just a zombie walking around,” he says.

Reed believes depleted uranium has contaminated him and his life. He now walks point in a vitriolic war over the Pentagon’s arsenal of it — thousands of shells and hundreds of tanks coated with the metal that is radioactive, chemically toxic, and nearly twice as dense as lead.

A shell coated with depleted uranium pierces a tank like a hot knife through butter, exploding on impact into a charring inferno. As tank armor, it repels artillery assaults. It also leaves behind a fine radioactive dust with a half-life of 4.5 billion years.

Depleted uranium is the garbage left from producing enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and energy plants. It is 60 percent as radioactive as natural uranium. The United States has an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of it, sitting in hazardous waste storage sites across the country. Meaning it is plentiful and cheap as well as highly effective.

more …

Authorities on alert for flesh-eating bug

Health authorities were on high alert last night after the discovery of a rare flesh-eating superbug which has already claimed three lives and left several other patients in isolation until tests come back tomorrow. An elderly patient at Christchurch’s Princess Margaret Hospital died on Friday from necrotizing fasciitis, the third death in a fortnight from what is the first outbreak in New Zealand of the streptococcal superbug. Patients and families were being informed of the issue, but the hospital said there were no plans to transfer patients to other hospitals or to rest homes.

more…

Chemotherapy Prompts Lingering Intellectual Deficit

More people survive cancer than ever before. With early detection, for example, women stricken with breast cancer are often successfully treated and go on to live long lives. But concomitant with this cheering rise in cancer survival is a worrying increase in complaints about cognitive impairment as life goes on. Some cancer survivors have trouble with concentration or fatigue. New research shows this is not just in their minds but, in fact, in their brains.

more…

When Religion Meets Stupidity

Poliomyelitis, a contagious viral disease that once crippled and killed thousands of children annually, has been eliminated in most of the Western world thanks to a vaccine invented by Jonas Salk in the 1950s, but it still survives in some of the world’s poorest countries. India seemed to be on the verge of eliminating polio last year, when it reported just 66 cases of the disease, down from 1600 in 2002. This year, however, things have gone horribly wrong with India’s polio elimination campaign; 325 cases have been reported already, and at least 23 of them have been fatal. What’s caught people’s attention is that 70% of those infected with polio this year are Muslim, even though Muslims account for only 13% of India’s population. What’s even stranger, and frightening, is the reason: some Muslims believe that the polio drops are part of a conspiracy to sterilize their children, and are refusing to let them be vaccinated.

more…

Spamihilator

I get spam, a lot of it – every day I sit and have to sift
the Viagra and penis enlargement operations from my regular email.  To say
it irritates me would be an understatement.  We have spam assassin on the
server but it still seeps through.  Outlook and Thunderbird had built in
filters but every day little stunted fu@##$%$%kers are working round the clock to ensure that their latest efforts beat them. 

Now in an effort to fight back the never-ending
deluge of rubbish and advertising I am trying a program called
Spamhilator.  It is easy to set up and configure and sits between the
server and my mail client.  So far I am impressed, we’ll see in the
morning when the spam tide rises somewhat.

Get it here: http://www.spamihilator.com/

Beaten by the Bugs

The flu has been ping ponging around the office and up till today I managed to avoid it, however in the end the microbes usually win. Wikipedia provides me with an interesting statistic – 95% of people exposed to the virus that causes the common cold will become infected, however only 75% of people show symptoms. In an office with a communal kitchen it was really only a matter of time.

Some tips that might help prevent a cold this winter:

• Keep your own mug/plate/utensils at work if you share a common communal kitchen
• wash your hands often (the mechanical action of washing removes the virus)
• fresh air – open windows, avoid closed air conditioned spaces shared with other cold sufferers
• The first 3 days of a cold is the most infectious – this is the period where the stoic will try and tough it out before secondary infection makes them feel really sick – encourage colleagues to go home and not share their germs.
• Avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth
• Take your Vitamins, especially your Vitamin C.
• Eat small healthy energising meals during your cold – there is a lot to be said for the bowl of chicken soup.
• Rest
• Drink water regularly, avoid becoming dehydrated
• Stay warm and dry

so with a throat full of razor blades I bid you adieu.

HIV Microbicides?

Hope for HIV Microbicide:

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) – Researchers are closing in on a breakthrough microbicide gel to help prevent HIV infection in women, scientists said on Monday, but a lack of funding by major pharmaceutical companies is hampering research.

“I think for many years the microbicides research field was a little bit tentative about making too much noise about the potential of this technology,” Helen Rees, executive director of South Africa’s Reproductive Health and HIV Research Unit, said on the sidelines of an international conference in Cape Town.

“At this point the microbicides research field is feeling that there might well be the possibility of having an effective microbicide in the next few years,” she told Reuters.

However Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang questioned the ethics of the trials 

Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang on Monday voiced concern about the ethics of current clinical trials on microbicides…..

Yet she throws her toys when the news questions her much touted african potatos and garlic treatment for HIV … W.T.F?

Glycemic Index and Glycemic Load

The Glycemic Index (GI) is a way of measuring the immediate effect of the breakdown of carbohydrates on blood sugar. The quicker a carbohydrate breaks down, the higher the index. A higher index means more demand on the pancreas and a consequently higher demand to secrete insulin. Carbs that break down more slowly and release glucose at a slower rate into the blood have a lower glycemic index.

The glycemic index can be roughly divided into 3 groups:

• High – GI is greater than 70
• Medium – GI between 56 and 69
• Low – GI is less than 55 (Better for your pancreas)

Pure glucose is used as a base line against which to measure these foods and has a GI of 100.

Low GI foods are better for people with diabetes or who are trying to lose weight, foods that are released slower by the body are less likely to cause the pancreas to panic and release lots of insulin. Slow release foods are also less likely to fill up the liver and muscle stores and have excess stored as fat.

Glycemic index is not a perfect indicator due to the fact that, although it tells a valuable story, it doesn’t take the whole nutritional picture into account. Primarily GI is based on the effect of a fixed portion of carbohydrate on blood sugar but fails to take into account the real life question of “how much can I eat?” Glycemic load is more complicated to understand but it looks at the effects on blood sugar taking volume into account.

A good example is a 100g piece of watermelon, it has a high glycemic index (GI: 72) because it is broken down very quickly however as it is not very dense and contains a lot of water, the glycemic load is relatively low (GL : 3.6). I prefer GL as a nutritional indicator over the GI although part of the equation for GL includes that of the GI.

There are many excellent sources of nutritional information if you'd like to know more. I would seriously recommend Patrick Holford as an author – he provides a wonderful set of books on child nutrition, recipes and the like.

One book worthy of particular praise is Optimum Nutrition for your Child’s Mind (ISBN: 0-7499-2685-6)

Useful links:

• Home of the Glycaemic Index (http://www.glycemicindex.com/) The GI database link on this page will give you a list of GI/GL values for most foods.
• Glycaemic Loads of Food (http://www.holfordhealth.com/c/tools_glycemic.asp)
• Glycaemic Load of Common Food (http://www.mentalhealthproject.com/content.asp?id_Content=1065)
• Glycaemic Index on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycaemic_index)
• Glycaemic Load on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycaemic_load)

Sugar: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

It is interesting that the majority of nutritional books start with the role sugar, or more specifically carbohydrates play in the body.

The Good:

Physiology 101:

At rest, the metabolism of the brain accounts for 15% the total metabolism of the body even though the brain weights roughly 2% the mass of the body. This means that brain metabolism is about 7.5 times higher than the average for the rest of the body. This energy glutton is satiated mainly by glucose, glucose is brain food and the brain depends on the blood supply for its constant stream of sugar. Unlike muscle cells, the brain has a very small buffer reserve of glucose, stored in the form of glycogen. Ceteris parabis (all things being equal) cut off the supply of glucose in the blood and the brain will survive for less than 2 minutes.

So the even and critical supply of glucose is supplied via the circulatory system in the blood. The blood sugar levels are directly influenced by what you eat and by how efficiently the body can shuttle the sugar too and from its internal stores. Excess sugar in the blood is transported to liver and muscle cells by a hormone known as insulin. When blood sugar gets too high, the pancreas secretes insulin and this facilitates the transport of glucose into the liver and muscle cells. If there is too much glucose and the liver and muscles stores are full, insulin then stores glucose in adipose (fat) tissue.

The liver is an Important buffer organ which initially stores up to two thirds of the glucose absorbed from the gut and then later, as glucose stores are used up and blood glucose starts to drop, it releases glucose steadily back into the blood.

The Bad:

Millions of years of natural selection have adapted our bodies to extract the most nutritional value from a variety of non-artificial food sources. The sugars in fruit are balanced with vitamins and fiber to slow the glucose absorption making for longer lasting energy foods with far greater nutritional value. In the modern world we have a huge variety of “artificial” or refined sugars that put massive strain on the body, have lasting and serious side effects and give very little back in the way of vitamins or nutrients.

Refined sugars have a very powerful shock effect on the body, especially in children where it can leave them see-sawing between highs and lows leaving them with a range of very potent psychological effects from hyperactivity to ratty, tired and unable to concentrate. This is especially noticeable in schools where children are able to buy junk foods like doughnuts, chocolates and fizzy drinks. In the United States, schools with outsourced lunch programs have noticed dramatic drops in delinquent behaviour and attention deficit problems when they switched from cheap junk foods to more nutritious and wholesome foods.

What makes refined sugars so bad?

Apart from having no nutritional value, refined sugars break down very quickly in the body leaving an excess of glucose floating around in the blood. This creates a panic situation in the body where the pancreas releases a large amount of insulin to compensate and try and store some of the glucose. Often there is overcompensation on the part of the body, glucose levels can actually drop below their baseline levels and this leaves the brain with too little glucose.

I have a five year old and have been to enough children’s parties to notice the effects of refined sugar on little kids. At first they are all tearing around like Duracell bunnies but then as the effects of the sugar wear off, they all drop like stones. By the end of the party, the initial joviality has deteriorated very often into irritability, tears, sleepiness and nausea. Parents very often downplay these symptoms seeing it more as their children having “played hard” than the damaging effects of sugar overload.

The Ugly:

The shock effect on the body from the foods we eat are having a very damaging effect on the health of our global society. Type 2 Diabetes is on the increase worldwide and many experts agree that the causal factors have much to do with poor lifestyle habits especially dietary.

How to Help The Health of Your Family:

Children are especially susceptible to the effects of refined sugars. The goal of any responsible parent is to slowly start decreasing the refined sugars in your child’s diet and replace them with nutritional sources of carbohydrates with slower releasing sugars.

Here are some practical tips around today’s topic on sugar that can have dramatic effects, both on a physical and mental level, on your child.

1. Never skip breakfast. It is not an old wives tale that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. After a period of fasting during sleep, the body needs to replenish vital glucose stocks. Breakfast is the meal that will stand as the nutritional foundation for the rest of the day. Build a poor foundation and don’t be surprised if the walls come down.
2. Eat a nutritional breakfast. Throw out the white bread and the sweetened cereals and don’t buy into the marketing hype about corn flakes or sugar coated pops (with added vitamins) being a good start to the day. This is rubbish as we will see a little later in an example case study. We will look a little later at glycaemic load of foods and what foods to avoid. For now feed your child some fresh fruit followed by any combination of the following: rolled oats porridge, fish, lightly poached or scrambled eggs (not fried!) and brown or wholewheat bread or toast.
3. Slowly replace refined sugars with better sugars. Fructose is an ideal sugar replacement and is available in most pharmacies and health shops. Fructose is a more complex molecule than glucose and although it will eventually be broken down into glucose, it will do so slowly creating a better more sustained release. Fructose, in my humble opinion, is also a far nicer sweetener than sugar. Also try and stay away from other high release sugars such as honey and syrup.
4. Lunch time and Fruit. Limit access to rubbish foods. If your child is at school and does not have the money to buy chocolates and fizzy drinks but rather has a nutritional and delicious packed lunch then that is far better. Rather than giving a jam sandwich offer a whole-wheat one with peanut butter (preferably unsweetened). Give your child fresh fruit and/or vegetables at every meal. A tip here is buying your fruit on the weekend, chop it up, add a little orange juice to preserve it and put it in the fridge. This will act as a very good and convenient source of fruit for your children and takes the preparation time hassle out of supplying the fruit.
5. Avoid artificial or sweetened drinks. Children very often prefer plain water by choice however if they are hankering for juice then provide pure 100% fruit juice half diluted with water (should be as little preservative as possible – if the expiry date says good until 2010 then it’s a no no).
6. Watch for signs of glucose imbalance. Children, especially active children do not have the reserves that adults do and as such they are often prone to nutritional dips throughout the day. If your child starts to play up and get irritable an hour or two before meals then top them up with some fruit or a slice of delicious seed bread and natural butter. Very often the bodies’ desire for glucose will leave the child asking for juice or sweets and that is a warning sign.
7. Top them up after sports. This ties in nicely with point 6, when picking your child up from sports, take a banana or sandwich along – this will help top up the reserves of glucose used up from the muscle and liver reserves and prevent a glucose imbalance related problem.

In Conclusion

Let’s take a look at a little case study. Eric is in primary school and his parents have been warned about possible concentration problems and hyperactive behaviour. The head mistress recommends that Eric’s parents consult their family physician about a possible course of Ritalin.

Examining Eric’s diet we see a disturbing pattern emerge. Eric’s parents, often in a rush to get to work on the whole provide their child with a bowl of corn-flakes (very fast releasing). To this Eric adds two or three heaped spoons of sugar and another for good measure in his tea. Eric drinks normal tea which has the stimulant caffeine as well as tannins which can block the absorption of nutrients in the gut.

This is Eric’s foundation.

The body breaks the food down very quickly and the blood stream becomes flooded with sugar. The pancreas panics and starts secreting insulin at a massive rate. The body fills up as much of is internal reserves (liver and muscle) as possible and then starts converting the excess to fat.

Halfway through the morning Eric’s blood glucose is too low. He gets a headache, gets ratty and cannot concentrate in his lessons. His behaviour now is a disruptive influence in the class room and he is not alone amongst his peers. In classrooms that swell in size every year this is a huge problem. Teachers, often in desperation, call for drugs like Ritalin to restore a little order.

Break (recess) is near and Eric’s body craves glucose. He is desperate to get his hands on that Coke and Mars bar. Eric’s parents provide him with recess money as they are in too much of a rush in the morning to make him lunch.

At recess Eric buys the hot-dog (on a white roll), the Coke or Fanta and the chocolate. Once again his system is flooded with glucose (which temporarily satiates the bodies craving). The body once again reacts in shock to control the massively elevated blood sugar levels and the cycle is repeated again.

Without flogging this example, you can now see just how detrimental refined sugars can be. As a parent it is your responsibility to take control of what your children eat. If you lead hectic work lives, prepare food the night before or on weekends. There is no excuse to send your children out on a rickety nutritional foundation.

For next time

Next time we will look at the concept of Glycaemic Load and what foods are good and what foods are bad. We will also touch briefly on how to combine your foods to better nutritional effect.

Thanks

Stuart

Nutrition for You and Your Child, Part 1

One of the few joys of being a terminal insomniac is you get to have a lot of free time on your hands. As I sit here at one in the morning, completely awake and feeling quite chipper I decided that for the next little while I am going to dedicate a lot of time on this blog to nutrition.

In the wake and pace of modern life, we salvage what little precious time remains and often unfortunately squander a lot of it to the detriment of ourselves and our children. I have heard so many times from people I know and from my patients back when I was doing clinical work that being healthy costs money and takes time. Both these facts have some elements of truth however the biggest hurdle is effort, plain and simple. After a hard days work, often the last thing we are thinking about is nutrition, the child is ratty so we bung in a pie or a TV dinner and then often collapse in a heap in front of the next in the line of many a modern day distraction … computer, TV or newspaper. Our children perform poorly at school so teachers in an effort to control the swelling classroom numbers bung them on Ritalin – at home they may be little monsters running riot or having tantrums, show signs of aggression, bed-wetting, fatigue, insomnia, poor concentration or inability to complete tasks. We are familiar with the effects various of food stuffs on the body, who doesn’t know some story of eczema or allergy clearing up after removing an offending type of food (such as dairy or wheat) from the child’s diet?

The psychological effect of food is less well understood, and often as parents we are left feeling powerless, hoping that negative psychological traits or learning disabilities might be a phase the child will outgrow yet never guessing that modern investigations point the finger almost squarely at poor nutrition. Let me at the outset clarify what I mean by the word poor here. Many children suffer from deficiency related problems yet are often over fed. An increase in convenience, processed and refined foods mean that although we are eating more than enough in quantity, the nutritional effects of that food are marginal and often these types of foods lead to undesirable side effects such as weight gain and physiological reactions such as chronic rhinitis or eczema. It might be better to term the phrase wrong or undesirable foods. In this vein when we get going and start looking at the different food groups, additives and food combinations I will introduce a rating system to help you see what foods are good, what foods are OK and what foods to forever banish from your home.

So over the next few weeks I want to explore the consequences of our nutritional actions on our children and ways (yes with a little effort and cost) to combat all the negative aspects mentioned above, improve learning and concentration and restore a little balance to an otherwise out of kilter lifestyle. I hope to unravel some of the scientific geek speak when it comes to terms like glycaemic index and glycaemic load and offer some practical tips and recipes to help get you and your child back to a healthy way of eating that won’t cost you an arm and a leg.

If you have any questions relating to any of the postings, leave your question in the comments and I will answer them there – in this way we can all learn a little together.

God and Temporal Lobe Epiliepsy

Two of my friends claim direct divine intervention in their lives, the main religion in question being Buddhism this time however I don’t believe religious denomination in this case matters.  Both people have temporal lobe epilepsy and one of the more common symptoms of this type of epilepsy, along with auditory or visual auras, is hyper-religiosity.

Here is a good description of what T.L.E. is like for a sufferer.

Here’s a typical story: “I get the strangest feeling—most of it can’t be put into words. The whole world suddenly seems more real at first. It’s as though everything becomes crystal clear. Then I feel as if I’m here but not here, kind of like being in a dream. It’s as if I’ve lived through this exact moment many times before. I hear what people say, but they don’t make sense. I know not to talk during the episode, since I just say foolish things. Sometimes I think I’m talking but later people tell me that I didn’t say anything. The whole thing lasts a minute or two.”

The features of seizures beginning in the temporal lobe can be extremely varied, but certain patterns are common. There may be a mixture of different feelings, emotions, thoughts, and experiences, which may be familiar or completely foreign. In some cases, a series of old memories resurfaces. In others, the person may feel as if everything—including home and family—appears strange. Hallucinations of voices, music, people, smells, or tastes may occur. These features are called “auras” or “warnings.” They may last for just a few seconds, or may continue as long as a minute or two.

Experiences during temporal lobe seizures vary in intensity and quality. Sometimes the seizures are so mild that the person barely notices. In other cases, the person may be consumed with fright, intellectual fascination, or even pleasure.

The current work of Michael Persinger (a neuro-psychologist at Canada’s Laurentian University in Ontario) is the artificial stimulation of the temporal lobe – his theory that the sensations of “having a religious experience” is a side effect of brain activity.  He believes that the stimulation of the temporal lobe may be responsible for other “supernatural” feelings, those for example lying behind phenomenon such as alien abductions and near death experiences.

In the case of my friend with temporal lobe epilepsy, he is aware of the problems and refuses to take medication for the problem saying that rather than the religious experience being an effect of random synaptic firings, his karma allowed him to be born with the necessary equipment  to have these type of experiences (a blessing in this case).

I guess it is an old case which came first, the chicken or the egg. 

I think I just got an idea for a masters project

A Shower a Day Keeps the AIDS away

Perhaps we should also remember our minister of health's view that the african potato and garlic are effective treatments for AIDS.

I'd laugh if it wasn't so sad!

The Face of Decline

3quarksdaily: ran in interesting piece on William Utermohlen, an alzheimer's patient who documented the progress of his disease with self- portraits helping neurologists understand the progress of the disease.

The Continued Use of Thalidomide

Thalidomide was once toted as the safest sedative in the world and sold in 46 countries as a sleeping pill. Then the deformities started, 12,000 infants born with tiny flipper like appendages in place of hands and feet before the drug was withdrawn. Thalidomide changed the mindset of Americans and Europeans about the safety of medicines and led to a reform and far more stringent drug testing. This is the image of Thalidomide, ones of horrific deformities, that has stuck in my mind – yet I was surprised to learn that it is still toted as a wonder drug and apparently for very good reason.

Extensive testing of Thalidomide has, been tried in more than 130 human diseases and has at least 30 different actions on the human body. It is used to cure leprosy, treat cancer, leukemia and has an astounding effect on the immune system. A substitute drug called Revlimid has recently received FDA approval for human use, being more potent than Thalidomide and safer with no untoward teratogenic effects.

Rock Brynner talks about his treatment with Thalidomide, a very interesting read.

And if bird flu hits Africa?

This is a real concern for everyone living in Africa. The WHO says that that African countries need to strengthen their laboratory facilities….WTF – we are talking about countries without bare minium food or shelter requirements, people at the base of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in fact there is no pyramid just an empty dusty hole in the ground. Is WHO really that out of touch with reality and if so will they prove effective should the coming pandemic hit?

As avian influenza continues to spread from poultry to humans in Asia and Europe, the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that Africa is at great risk of a pandemic, and urgently needs to strengthen its laboratory facilities to identify avian influenza in humans and animals.

International experts, including the UN’s avian flu coordinator David Nabarro, have expressed concern in recent days that migratory birds or travellers may carry the virus to Africa from Turkey or other affected areas.

Given these risks, UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) deputy director-general David Harcharik said this week that African nations deserve special attention when it comes to improving preparedness for a pandemic. “In Turkey, the virus has already reached the crossroads of Asia, Europe and Africa, and there is a real risk of further spread,” he said at a meeting in Beijing.

The Scientist : And if bird flu hits Africa.

India to lose 10 million women

This article follows in the wake of a story on Boing Boing entitled “They Burn Themselves” where Layla Ali, ZEEN program director describes Kurdish woman setting themselves on fire to highlight the awful violence inflicted on Kurdish women by men.

Here new scientist looks at how, over 20 years, 10 million females have been lost to India because of ultrasound techniques. It saddens me when life saving technology gets misused and twisted into some perverted scion of its former potential. Can anyone say “Manhattan Project”?

This bias and brutality leveled towards woman has to stop – at some point sanity must prevail.