Sep 08 2008
Sep 07 2008
Idenix Pharmaceuticals Announces Completion Of Proof-of-Concept Study For IDX899 In Treatment-Naive HIV-Infected Patients
Sep 07 2008
Sexual Activities Other Than Intercourse Carry Risk Of STIs, Study Finds
Aug 27 2008
Suit helps the paralysed walk
Haifa
(Israel): Paralyzed for the past 20 years, former Israeli paratrooper Radi Kaiof
now walks down the street with a dim mechanical
hum.
That is the sound of an
electronic exoskeleton moving the 41-year-old’s legs and propelling him forward
- with a proud expression on his face - as passersby stare in
surprise.
“I never dreamed I
would walk again. After I was wounded, I forgot what it’s like,” said Kaiof, who
was injured while serving in the Israeli military in
1988.
“Only when standing up
can I feel how tall I really am and speak to people eye to eye, not from
below.”
The device, called
ReWalk, is the brainchild of engineer Amit Goffer, founder of Argo Medical
Technologies, a small Israeli high-tech
company.
Something of a mix
between the exoskeleton of a crustacean and the suit worn by comic hero Iron
Man, ReWalk helps paraplegics - people paralyzed below the waist - to stand,
walk and climb stairs.
Goffer
himself was paralyzed in an accident in 1997 but he cannot use his own invention
because he does not have full function of his
arms.
The system, which
requires crutches to help with balance, consists of motorized leg supports, body
sensors and a back pack containing a computerized control box and rechargeable
batteries.
The user picks a
setting with a remote control wrist band - stand, sit, walk, descend or climb -
and then leans forward, activating the body sensors and setting the robotic legs
in motion.
“It raises people
out of their wheelchair and lets them stand up straight,” Goffer said. “It’s not
just about health, it’s also about
dignity.”
Kate Parkin, director
of physical and occupational therapy at NYU Medical Centre, said it has the
potential to improve a user’s health in two
ways.
“Physically, the body
works differently when upright. You can challenge different muscles and allow
full expansion of the lungs,” Parkin said. “Psychologically, it lets people live
at the upright level and make eye
contact.”
Iuly Treger, deputy
director of Israel’s Loewenstein Rehabilitation Centre, said: “It may be a
burdensome device, but it will be very helpful and important for those who
choose to use it.”
The product,
slated for commercial sale in 2010, will cost as much as the more sophisticated
wheelchairs on the market, which sell for about $20,000, the company
said.
The ReWalk is now in
clinical trials in Tel Aviv’s Sheba Medical Centre and Goffer said it will soon
be used in trials at the Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute in Pennsylvania.
Competing technologies use
electrical stimulation to restore function to injured muscle, but Argo’s chief
operating officer Oren Tamari said they will not offer practical alternatives to
wheelchairs in the foreseeable future.
More info
Aug 23 2008
Underground Abortions Are Still Reality
While many may believe that the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that overturned laws restricting abortion put an end to improvised abortions, the medical community worries there will still may be a problem.
In a similar case in July, police in Galena Park, Texas, dug up an entire backyard looking for a fetus after a 16-year-old told relatives her mother had forced her to take pills to induce a miscarriage.
And this month, a former volleyball player at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pa., was arrested in a similar situation, with more serious charges. Teri Rhodes, of Commerce, Mich., pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter after she gave birth to a full-term baby in her dorm room and then smothered it. On her computer, police found Internet searches of “alternative methods of ending pregnancy,” “what can kill a fetus” and “herbal abortion techniques.”
Normally a Quiet Tale
Despite Roe v. Wade and the Food and Drug Administration’s 2000 approval of mifepristone, the so-called abortion pill, some doctors have seen cases that have caused them to worry that the phenomenon of underground abortions is still a reality.
Before coming to Ibis Reproductive Health and St. Luke’s Hospital in San Francisco a few years ago, Dr. Daniel Grossman lived and worked in Mexico.
“A few months after I was back, I had a case where I was called to the hospital,” said Grossman.
When he got there, he saw a situation eerily similar to what he thought he’d left behind. That day, a 33-year-old immigrant woman came to the emergency room bleeding and pregnant.
More info
Aug 22 2008
‘Face transplants to become routine’
LONDON: Transplanting faces may seem
like science fiction, but doctors say the experimental surgeries could one day
become routine.
In papers from two of the world’s three teams that
have performed partial face transplants, experts said their techniques were
surprisingly effective, though complications exist and more work is still
needed.
The research was published Friday in British medical journal
The Lancet.
“There is no reason to think these face transplants would
not be as common as kidney or liver transplants one day,” said Dr. Laurent
Lantieri, a plastic surgeon at the Henri Mondor-Albert Chenevier Hospital in
France and one of the doctors who operated on a man severely disfigured by a
genetic disease.
In this week’s Lancet, Lantieri and colleagues
reported on their patient’s status one year after the transplant. Chinese
doctors also reported on their patient, two years after his
surgery.
In 2007, Lantieri and colleagues operated on a 29-year-old
man with tumors that blurred his features in a face that looked almost
monstrous. They transplanted a new lower face from a donor, giving the patient
recognizable cheeks, a nose and mouth. Six months later, he could smile and
blink.
The Chinese patient had part of his face ripped off by a bear.
Surgeons gave him a new nose, upper lip and cheek from a donor. After a few
months, he could eat, drink and talk normally, and returned home to Yunnan
province.
In both cases, the patients’ faces rejected the
transplanted tissue more than once. Their doctors solved the problem by juggling
their medications.
The French patient now takes three pills a day to
prevent rejection. “That’s less than most people with diabetes,” Lantieri
said.
Other doctors were reassured by the results. “To be able to
wean down the dosage of the medication in small amounts and relatively quickly,
that is encouraging,” said Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, a plastic surgeon at the Brigham
and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Pomahac has permission to do a face
transplant in the US, and was not involved in either the French or Chinese
operations.
Experts have worried that if patients take lifelong
anti-rejection drugs after a transplant, their cancer risk will jump. Some also
predicted that rejection would destroy the face within a few years. Those fears
seem to have been allayed, Pomahac said.
He added that partial face
transplants could become relatively common in the future, but that more people
would probably need new kidneys or livers rather than a new
face.
With three successful partial face transplants so far,
including the world’s first, of a woman whose face was bitten off by a dog in
France, doctors say that some of the surgery’s initial uncertainties, like how
functional the new face would be, are being answered.
For example,
Lantieri’s patient’s face was paralyzed for more than a decade. He and his team
weren’t sure if nerves could grow after the transplant. But they discovered
later their patient could blink, proving the brain was able to restore
long-forgotten facial nerve connections.
Not everyone is convinced
that face transplants are so revolutionary.
Dr. Patrick Warnke, a
plastic surgeon at the University of Kiel in Germany, calls them a “dead-end
road” because he doesn’t think the rejection problem can be solved in the long
term. Instead, he hopes to re-grow tissue from patients’ own stem
cells.
Still, the biggest obstacle to more face transplants may not
be scientific, but social.
“When kidney transplants first began,
people were reluctant to donate because there were a lot of cultural, social and
religious issues,” Pomahac said. “This is exactly the same scenario
now.”
Doctors plan to do more face transplants, but are having a hard
time finding donors.
“Everyone says they would accept a face
transplant if they were disfigured,” Lantieri said. “The real question is,
would you be a donor, or would you allow your family member to donate their
face?” he asked. “That is the answer we need to change.”
More info
Aug 19 2008
Blockbuster diabetes drug developed
SYDNEY: Australian researchers on
Monday said they had developed a drug which could potentially spell an end to a
life-threatening condition caused by diabetes, heart disease and other
illnesses.
Scientists from the University of Melbourne and the city’s
St Vincent’s Hospital said the drug had been shown in animal trials to prevent
fibrosis, the build-up of irreversible scarring on internal
organs.
There are currently no treatments on the market for fibrosis
and the new drug, called FT-11, could be as important a discovery as blood
pressure drugs if effective, said Professor Darren Kelly of the University of
Melbourne.
“It would be an enormous blockbuster drug with an initial
market of around 2.0 billion dollars,” he said.
Kelly said while the
drug would not prevent diabetes — a chronic illness in which the body fails to
produce enough of the hormone insulin to process sugar — it could prevent
complications such as kidney or heart disease.
“We are hoping to
delay or prevent those complications which would basically keep those patients
off dialysis — which would have a huge benefit for their lifestyle,” Kelly
said.
The drug, expected to be tested in clinical trials within 12
months, could be used to prevent diabetic kidney disease, heart disease and
potentially other health problems such as liver and lung fibrosis, he
said.
Speaking to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Kelly said
about 45 per cent of diseases in the developed world could be associated with
some sort of pathological fibrosis.
“We know at the moment in rat
studies that our compound inhibited the development of fibrosis, and the
interesting thing in the future would be to see whether we can actually reverse
fibrosis,” he said.
More info
Aug 16 2008
Regina woman infected with West Nile
Saskatchewan has recorded its first case of the West Nile virus this year.
It’s been confirmed in the Regina Qu’Appelle Health Region, the Saskatchewan Health Ministry
Aug 14 2008
Laser weapon to leave target clueless
LONDON: The US air force is planning
to mount on a Hercules aircraft an airborne laser weapon called the “long-range
blowtorch’, which can shoot a target without going away any fragments of
munitions.
The Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) will enable the US to
convincingly deny any participation with the destruction it causes, a benefit that
the air force experts have dubbed “plausible deniability”.
“The
target would never know what come to them. Further, there would be no munition
fragments that could be secondhand to identify the source of the strike,” New
Scientist magazine quoted John Pike, an psychoanalyst with the Virginia-based defense
think-tank Global Security, as saying.
Depending on conditions, an
ATL can deliver the heat of a blowlamp with a range of 20 kilometres.
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