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Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

STEM CELLS INJECTED FOR BLINDNESS WORKS

EMBRYONIC stem cells have been used to treat human illness for the first time, improving the sight of two women with severe vision loss.

The controversial development could give hope to hundreds of thousands of people suffering macular degeneration – one of the most common forms of blindness in First World countries – and has been hailed a historic step by stem cell scientists.

In a US trial last year, two legally blind women reported sight improvements after receiving a small dose of embryonic stem cell transplantations in their eyes.

Both had different forms of macular degeneration, a group of diseases that affect the retina, causing loss of central vision.

After the transplant in July, the first woman, who suffers from dry age-related macular degeneration, went from being able to read 21 letters on a sight test chart to 28. The second woman, who has Stargardt’s disease, went from being unable to read any letters to reading five. While the scientists who conducted the study are cautious about the results, tests indicate that healthy cells have grown where the treatment was injected.

They said the patients had shown no negative reactions.

The study, reported in The Lancet this week, was led by Robert Lanza, the chief scientific officer at Advanced Cell Technology in the US – the stem cell company that funded the trial.

The research has taken place amid debate about whether the stem cells should be used because they are derived from five- to six-day-old human embryos.

The disease affects one in seven people over 50, the Macular Degeneration Foundation says.

NOW WE HAVE RED LIGHTS AND GREEN TEA AS CURE FOR ALZHEIMERS

IT MAY sound like a strange brew, but green tea and red light could provide a novel treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. Together, the two can destroy the rogue “plaques” that crowd the brains of people with the disease. The light makes it easier for the green-tea extract to get to work on the plaques.

Andrei Sommer at the University of Ulm in Germany, and colleagues, have previously used red light with a wavelength of 670 nanometres to transport cancer drugs into cells. The laser light pushes water out of the cells and when the laser is switched off, the cells “suck in” water and any other molecules, including drugs, from their surroundings.

Now, Sommer’s team have found that the same technique can be used to destroy the beta-amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s. These plaques consist of abnormally folded peptides, and are thought to disrupt communication between nerve cells, leading to loss of memory and other symptoms.

The team bathed brain cells containing beta-amyloid in epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) – a green-tea extract known to have beta-amyloid inhibiting properties – at the same time as stimulating the cells with red light. Beta-amyloid in the cells reduced by around 60 per cent. Shining the laser light alone onto cells reduced beta-amyloid by around 20 per cent (Photomedicine and Laser Surgery, DOI: 10.1089/pho.2011.3073).

It can be difficult getting drugs into the brain, but animal experiments show that the green-tea extract can penetrate the so-called blood-brain barrier when given orally together with red light. The light, which can penetrate tissue and bone, stimulates cell mitochondria to kick-start a process that increases the barrier’s permeability, says Sommer.

There is no reason why other drugs that attack beta-amyloid could not be delivered to the brain in the same way, he adds.

“This important research could form the basis of a potential treatment for Alzheimer’s, with or without complementary drug treatment,” says Mario Trelles, medical director of the Vilafortuny Medical Institute in Cambrils, Spain.

“The technique described could help to regulate and even stop the appearance of this disease,” he adds.

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ENERGY DRINKS CAN BE DANGEROUS TO YOUNG PEOPLE

Growing numbers of young people have been hospitalised with caffeine poisoning after consuming energy drinks, suffering symptoms such as hallucinations and seizures, a new study has found.

Researchers have called for the caffeine-laced drinks to be regulated by health authorities with additional labelling and warnings about the potential danger of overdosing.

Energy drinks such as Red Bull, V and Mother are popular with young people and often contain ”energising” extracts such as guarana or ginseng alongside caffeine and sugar.

Researchers Naren Gunja and Jared Brown analysed data from the  Poisons Information Centre, which fields 110,000 poison-related calls a year. They looked at 297 calls related to energy drinks over a six-year period and found the number of people seeking help for caffeine poisoning leapt from 12 in 2004 to 65 in 2010.

Nearly half of the victims – 46 per cent – had mixed their energy drinks with other substances, such as alcohol, drugs or caffeine tablets, while 43 per cent had symptoms that were serious enough to need treatment at a hospital emergency department.

Victims were often young, with a median age of 17, and more than half were men.

Most people experienced stomach trouble or anxiety but a minority, about 7 per cent, suffered severe poisoning symptoms such as hallucinations, seizures or heart problems.

”The phenomenon of mixing energy drinks with alcohol, stimulants and other co-ingestants is clearly occurring and is a serious concern,” the authors wrote.

The report, published today in the Medical Journal of Australia, said a typical can of energy drink could contain up to 300mg of caffeine.

”Consumers are likely to be unaware of the variation in chemical composition and caffeine dosage in energy drinks, and with little or no warnings on products the potential for overdose remains ever-present,” the report says.

Another concern was the 68 young children, including babies as young as seven months, who accidentally consumed the energy drinks over the period studied and suffered symptoms such as hyperactivity.

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Chinese kitchen workers die from picking,cooking & eating deathcap mushrooms

A close friend of the two victims of a deadly death cap mushroom dish wants better warnings in the ACT about the dangers of picking wild mushrooms.

Tom O’Dea wants a public health campaign that will prevent future fatalities from the poisonous death caps, which claimed the lives of chef Liu Jun, 38, and kitchenhand Tsou Hsiang, 52.

Mr Liu and Ms Tsou died from liver failure after eating the death cap mushrooms in a stir-fry Mr Liu prepared after work at the Harmonie German Club in Narrabundah on New Year’s Eve.

Speaking after a memorial service for the pair at the weekend, Mr O’Dea said, ”We’ve got to make sure this never happens again.

”The message has got to be do not pick wild mushrooms.”

Signs warning people about death cap mushrooms already exist in parts of the ACT where the world’s most deadly mushrooms are known to grow.

ACT Health issued a reminder on New Year’s Day that Canberra residents should steer clear of death caps, and runs education campaigns in schools about the dangers of wild mushrooms.

Fact sheets about the mushrooms are also available on the Health directorate’s web page, and last year were published in a Chinese publication available in Canberra.

Representatives of ACT Health, including its chief officer Paul Kelly, met with members of Canberra’s Chinese community last week to begin discussions about whether public warnings about death cap mushrooms could be improved.

At Saturday’s memorial service, Chief Minister Katy Gallagher said further meetings would determine what steps could be taken. Canberra Multicultural Community Forum chairman Sam Wong, who is part of the consultations, said the ACT Government might have to consider more focused campaigns that target new Canberra residents, recent migrants or specific age groups, such as the elderly.

He said the message about the dangers of wild mushrooms could be made clearer through new multimedia advertisements, or by changing warning signs around the ACT so they could be understood by residents and visitors who did not speak English.

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Open-source project intends to advance robotic surgery

A couple of years ago, the Willow Garage robotics company gave ten of its PR2 robots away to deserving research groups. The idea behind the project was that these groups would use the PR2s for robotics research, then share their discoveries with each other, thus advancing the field farther than would be possible if they each had to build their own unique robots from scratch. Now, a similar but unrelated project is underway, and this time the robots are designed specifically to perform surgery.

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DOES THIS INJECTION REVERSE ALZHEIMERS?

A new study pinpoints the importance of certain soluble proteins, called cytokines, in Alzheimer’s disease. The study focuses on one of these cytokines, tumor necrosis factor-alpha(TNF), a very critical component of the brain’s immune system. Normally, TNF finely regulates the transmission of neural impulses within the brain. The authors hypothesized that elevated levels of TNF in Alzheimer’s disease interacy adversely with this regulation. To reduce elevated TNF, the authors gave patients an injection of an anti-TNF therapeutic called etanercept. Excess TNF-alpha has been documented in the cerebrospinal fluid of patients with Alzheimer’s.

The new study documents a dramatic and unprecedented therapeutic effect in an Alzheimer’s patient: improvement within minutes following delivery of perispinal etanercept, which is etanercept given by injection in the spine. Etanercept (trade name Enbrel) binds and inactivates excess TNF. Etanercept is FDA approved to treat a number of immune-mediated disorders and is used off label in the study.

The use of anti-TNF therapeutics as a new treatment choice for many diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis and potentially even Alzheimer’s, was recently chosen as one of the top 10 health stories of 2007 by the Harvard Health Letter.

Similarly, the Neurotechnology Industry Organization has recently selected new treatment targets revealed by neuroimmunology (such as excess TNF) as one of the top 10 Neuroscience Trends of 2007. And the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives has chosen the pilot study using perispinal etanercept for Alzheimer’s for inclusion and discussion in their 2007 Progress Report on Brain Research.

The lead author of the study, Edward Tobinick M.D., is an assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles and director of the Institute for Neurological Research, a private medical group in Los Angeles. Hyman Gross, M.D., clinical professor of neurology at the University of Southern California, was co-author.

This study is accompanied by an extensive commentary by Sue Griffin, Ph.D., director of research at the Donald W. Reynolds Institute on Aging at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) in Little Rock Arkansaw and at the Geriatric Research and Clinical Center at the VA Hospital in Little Rock, who along with Robert Mrak, M.D., chairman of pathology at University of Toledo Medical School, are editors-in-chief of the Medical Journal of Neuroinflammation.

Griffin and Mrak are pioneers in the field of neuroinflammation. Griffin published an extensive landmark study in 1989 describing the association of cytokine overexpression in the brain and Alzheimer’s disease. Her research helped pave the way for the findings of the present study. Griffin has recently been selected for membership in the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives, a nonprofit organization of more than 200 leading neuroscientists, including ten Nobel laureates.

“It is unprecedented that we can see cognitive and behavioral improvement in a patient with established dementia within minutes of therapeutic intervention,” said Griffin. “It is imperative that the medical and scientific communities immediately undertake to further investigate and characterize the physiologic mechanisms involved. This gives all of us in Alzheimer’s research a tremendous new clue about new avenues of research, which is so exciting and so needed in the field of Alzheimer’s. Even though this report predominantly discusses a single patient, it is of significant scientific interest because of the potential insight it may give into the processes involved in the brain dysfunction of Alzheimer’s.”

While the article discusses one patient, many other patients with mild to severe Alzheimer’s received the treatment and all have shown sustained and significently marked improvement.

The new study, entitled “Rapid cognitive improvement in Alzheimer’s disease following perispinal etanercept administration,” and the accompanying commentary, entitled “Perispinal etanercept: Potential as an Alzheimer’s therapeutic,” are available on the Web site of the Journal of Neuroinflammation (http://www.jneuroinflammation.com/content/5/1/2/abstract).

Author Hyman Gross, M.D., has no competing interests. Author Edward Tobinick, M.D. owns stock in Amgen, the manufacturer of etanercept, and has multiple issued and pending patents assigned to TACT IP LLC that describe the parenteral and perispinal use of etanercept for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological disorders, including, but not limited to, U.S. patents 6015557, 6177077, 6419934, 6419944, 6537549, 6982089, 7214658 and Australian patent 758523.

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FOOD CONTAMINATION CAUSES MANY DEATHS IN THE USA

Debbie Frederick hopes that her father’s death in last September in one of the most lethal outbreaks of food-borne illness in U.S. history will force the federal government to increase the safety of the country’s food supply.

It took more than ten years, a series of deadly outbreaks tied to foods like peanuts, spinach and ground beef, as well as a coalition of odd bedfellows — victims, public health advocates and food industry reps — to push through the first major restructure of food safety laws since the 1930s.

Advocates and other experts say the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) signed by U.S. President Barack Obama last January still has shortcomings and ware concerned that it will be watered down through a lack of finances.

The United States by all account has some of the safest food in the world. Still, approximateley one in six people get sick from eating tainted food products each year, according to the  Disease Control and Prevention groups.

“The whole system was built to react to people getting sick” or to discoveries of contaminated food, said Erik Olson, the Pew Health Group’s director of food programs.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which regulates allmost all of the U.S. food supply, including melons and other produce, requires major structural changes to become primarily focused on prevention, as FSMA envisions. While lawmakers recently have given FDA more money for food programs, it still has a lot of catching up to do, Olson said.

Eighty-seven-year-old William Beach, Frederick’s father, lived in Oklahoma and was one of the 28 people killed by listeria infection after eating cantaloupe contaminated in what regulators called an “unsanitary” Jensen Farms packing plant in Colorado.

“My father was terrified … nobody should have to go like that,” said Frederick, a Phoenix aesthetician and newly minted activist who is the driving force behind her family’s lawsuit against Jensen Farms. “The system broke down. It shouldn’t have happened. This is very much a preventable thing.”

Herb Stevens, of suburban Denver, also became ill after eating tainted cantaloupe, but had survived. The World War Two veteran, 84, lived at home with his wife before falling ill and now requires full-time care.

“We’d like to see better food safety laws and more inspectors,” Jeni Exley, Stevens’ daughter, said in an interview. Her family is suing for current and future medical expenses.

THE TIGER HAS NO TEETH?

FSMA aims to be a step in the right direction.

The law requires FDA to set standards for produce safety and mandates more frequent inspections of domestic and foreign food processing facilities. It also gives FDA stronger enforcement tools, such as mandatory recall authority and the ability to cancrl the registration of a processing plant.

While inspectors from the U.S. Department of Agriculture must be present at meat and poultry plants they regulate during operating hours, FDA had no frequency mandate for inspections prior to FSMA. As a result, lapses of as long as 10 years were not uncommon.

All high-risk domestic facilities, or those that handle foods with a high potential to cause harm, must be inspected within five years of enactment and no less than every three years thereafter, according to the FDA. In addition, the law rapidly steps up the number of required inspections for foreign facilities.

Jeff Almer and Randy Napier, who lost their mothers to the salmonella outbreak blamed for killing nine people and sickening 700 others who ate contaminated products from Peanut Corporation of America (PCA) in 2008 and 2009, fought to get FSMA passed and now are pushing more FDA funding.

“The needs are substantially greater than what is covered by current funding,” said Steven Grossman, deputy executive director of the Alliance for a Stronger FDA, which said FDA’s food funding rose $52 million to $836 million in fiscal 2011.

The U.S. House of Representatives wants to cut that funding to $750 million in fiscal 2012, while the Senate is proposing increasing funding to $867 million. It is still not known where the final number will come out.

The issue is personal for Almer and Napier, who frequently work with reporters and button-hole lawmakers.

PCA, now bankrupt, is accused of knowingly shipping contaminated products in violation of federal law. The men want to see company President Stewart Parnell criminally charged & convicted.

Handing down an indictment of Parnell would “send a loud and clear message to producers of food to literally clean up their acts,” Almer said.

“We believe there is absolutely no basis for criminal prosecution,” said Parnell’s attorney Bill Gust, a partner at – Gentry Locke Rakes & Moore.

Napier said he has made at least six trips to Washington, D.C., since his mother’s death. Almer testified before Congress in 2009 and said he met with federal law enforcement representatives regarding the PCA criminal case.

MIND BENDING POTION FOR BLISSFUL HAPPINESS FROM THE AMAZON

MEDICINAL PLANT

AYAHUASCA

The mighty Amazon River holds many mysteries and secrets but you wouldn’t think of it as a place where Western visitors go to transform their lives. Along with countless natural herbal remedies, there’s the apparently magical potion known as Ayahuasca. This mind-bending drug draws people from all over the world..

Works for some people to get off alcohol addiction it is said.

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Medical experts were horrified the moment a Cesarian section performed on a sheep revealed its young had the body of an animal and the face of a human!

YOUNG LAMB CALF HAD HUMAN HEAD FEATURES

According to reports, Erhan Elibol, a 29-year-old veterinarian in Turkey, says after he delivered the brood it was dead and suffered a rare mutation that give it human features on its face, including eyes, nose and mouth–but with the ears of a sheep.

“I’ve seen mutations with cows and sheep before. I’ve seen a one-eyed calf, a two-headed calf, a five-legged calf,” he told reporters. “But when I saw this youngster I could not believe my eyes.”

It’s speculated that the mutation was caused by improper nutrition.

Another related story.

Australia, Alice Springs there was seen a puppy  in a dog pack belonging to a local aboriginal community which had a head with human features and stood out markedly from the pack. These dogs were reportedly used for sex by some males in the community and it was  suggested that  a possible mutation was created between the black dog and the black aboriginal as a result with the rogue DNA crossing the threshhold limits of the species.

This story was told to me only a few weeks ago by the 2 people who witnessed the dogs features. They are not liars nor prone to stretching the truth.

Does this then raise the possibility of breeding between species of life to create mutations?

Has anybody got similar stories to share with us for posting in this site

If so please forward to .. admin@acbocallcentre.com

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