NEW CURES INFO » SKIN CONDITIONS

GIVING YOUR SKIN TO MAKE MORE BLOOD FOR YOU USING STEM CELLS

Editor — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 01:56:39 +0000

Making blood from human skin

By Grant Banks

03:48 November 14, 2010

Blood transfusions may one day come from blood produced from a patient’s skin

A new technique that allows blood to be made directly from skin cells has been discovered. The pioneering approach by Canadian researchers uses human skin stem cells to create blood stem cells without an intermediate step that previously was thought necessary.

Until now to make blood stem cells, the building blocks for a variety human cells (called pluripotent stem cells) have been used as a steppingstone a process. This has proven largely inefficient, but research led by Mick Bhatia, scientific director ofMcMaster’s Stem Cell and Cancer Research Instituteat the Michael G DeGroote School of Medicine, has shown that making blood from skin can be achieved in a one step process.

Cynthia Dunbar, head of the molecular hematopoiesis at the U.S National Institutes of Health said: “Bhatia’s approach detours around the pluripotent stem cell stage and thus avoids many safety issues, increases efficiency, and also has the major benefit of producing adult-type l blood cells instead of fetal blood cells, a major advantage compared to the thus far disappointing attempts to produce blood cells from human embryonic stem cells or induced pluripotent stem cells.”

The discovery was replicated several times over two years using human skin from both the young and the elderly to prove it works for any age of person.

The approach could be used for creating blood for surgery or treating conditions like anemia from a patch of the patient’s skin. Other potential applications include generating bone marrow and improved treatment of leukaemia and other types of cancer, including solid tumors.

“We have shown this works using human skin. We know how it works and believe we can even improve on the process,” Bhatia said. “We’ll now go on to work on developing other types of human cell types from skin, as we already have encouraging evidence.”

“This finding will no doubt be met with excitement in the research and medical communities,” said Michael Rudnicki, director of The Stem Cell Network. “It’s been nearly 50 years since blood stem cells were first identified here in Canada and it’s fitting that this incredible new discovery should have happened here as well.”

The research was published in Nature on November 7.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

BEST HOME REMEDIES FOR HEAD & BODY LICE

Editor — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 12:15:13 +0000

Head Lice -

Louse Home Remedies -

Suggested remedies for Head Lice

Drown the lice by covering your skin in olive oil for several hours.

Head Lice Remedies

For head lice problems rinse your hair with vinegar. Vinegar helps in killing all the lice nits in a matter of days.

Coconut oil for massaging hair scalp after helps.

For head lice use Listerine (original flavor): Another remedy for treating head lice is rubbing listerine mouth wash on your head. This will kill all the lice.

Massage your head with mayonnaise and comb it after 2 hours. This will kill all the lice and their eggs. Apply a mixture of lemon and butter on your head, wait for 15 seconds and then rinse your head.

An anti-lice oil can be mixed with coconut (or mustard) oil and 0.2 per cent lindane (BHC) or 0.1 per cent pyrethrum essence. This oil can be rubbed well into the scalp to kill lice. (Ingredients can be purchased from a chemical dealer).

Mix talcum powder with 0.2 per cent prethrum dust in it (or add 10 per cent DDT). Sprinkle this powder on the hair before going to bed and rub it vigorously so that it reaches the roots. Cover your mouth, nose and eyes to protect them from the powder.

Anti-louse lotion, either gammabenzene hexachloride lotion or cream (Lorexane, Gammaexane) or Malathion (Prioderma) will kill the eggs which can be removed by a comb with very fine teeth. One treatment is enough but all the family who are infested should be treated and the hair examined regularly for a while. You may consult a doctor for the treatment.

To remove head lice and their nits. put any common lotion on your skin generously and then comb your hair out with a regular comb to get any knots out then comb out with a fine tooth comb.

Some people swear by using a common cheap hair gel put on generously & left on under a shower cap for several hours or overnight to smother the bugs etc

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

ARE LOVE BITES THE KISS OF DEATH?

Editor — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 06:17:17 +0000

Love bite

partially paralyses woman

January 21, 2011 – 10:49AM

A woman was partially paralysed by a love bite from her amorous partner, a New Zealand doctor has reported.

Teddy Wu said he believed it was the first time someone had been admitted to hospital as a result of a “hickey”.

An article on the case has appeared in the New Zealand Medical Journal.

Advertisement: Story continues below

Dr Wu said he saw the woman over a year ago while he was working in Middlemore Hospital in Auckland.

The 44-year-old Maori woman went to the emergency department after experiencing loss of movement in her left arm.

It happened while she was sitting watching television.

Her only injury was a love bite on the right of her neck near an artery.

“Because it was a love bite there would be a lot of suction, said Dr Wu, who now works in the neurology department at Christchurch Hospital.

“Because of the physical trauma it had made a bit of bruising inside the vessel.

“There was a clot in the artery underneath where the hickey was.”

The clot had gone into the woman’s heart and caused a minor stroke that led to the loss of movement, he said.

She was treated with warfarin, an anticoagulant.

That treatment made the clot disappear almost entirely within a week, he said.

“We looked around the medical literature and that example of having a love bite causing something like that hasn’t been described before,” he said.

If it had not been treated quickly the woman could have suffered more strokes.

“Strokes have different levels of severity. But possibly patients can become paralysed.”

The woman was fine at a one-month follow-up appointment, the Journal reported.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

TOMATO & SALT TREATMENT FOR SPLINTERS

Editor — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 12:46:23 +0000

For really stubborn splinters,
Sprinkle salt on your finger and get a tomato. ! No more splinter — and no more torture with needles or tweezers! Experiment & see it work.
Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

A ‘SUPERGLUE’ THAT MAKES SCARS DISSAPEAR

Editor — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 12:07:51 +0000

Whale Medicine Makes Scars disappear

Veterinarians And Microbiologists

Develop Antimicrobial Agent

That Works Under Water

September 1, 2008 — Veterinarians added a bioadhesive to an existing antimicrobial agent in order to make it an effective protective agent for aquatic animals such as whales. The adhesive was originally developed to treat burns on humans, but the adhesive helps it stay in place underwater, providing protection from infection and allowing animals’ natural defenses work to heal wounds.

Anytime you cut yourself or get a burn, one of the biggest roadblocks to healing is infection. That’s especially true for burn patients and those with extremely sensitive skin.

Now, there may be a new weapon in the war against infections — even against dangerous germs like MRSA, Super-Staph and other drug-resistant bacteria; and humans aren’t the only ones who stand to benefit Beluga whales, native to the arctic, are some of the Georgia Aquarium’s most popular and talkative residents.

John Widgery is a firefighter of more than 20 years. In an unusual trial, man and beluga became the first test patients for a new kind of anti-microbial compound that enhances the effectiveness of antibiotics to fight dangerous infections.

“We can take even the most drug-resistant bacteria and make them susceptible to very low concentrations of what we call low-class antibiotics; things that aren’t really considered to work anymore,” says Branson Ritchie, D.V.M., Ph.D., a professor at the University of Georgia’s College of Veterinary Medicine. “We can take those very drug-resistant bacteria and kill them.”

Widgery became one of the first human patients to be treated with the compound after an explosion left him with first- and second-degree burns on his face and arms. “When I stood up, I thought my hair was in my face,” says Widgery. “I wiped my face and found out it was my skin that was hanging in my eyes and my mustache. I reached for it and it was gone. My eyebrows were gone.”

After 12 days of treatment with the experimental anti-microbial, the results were astounding. Widgery’s skin is now back to normal. Meanwhile, University of Georgia veterinarians found they could adapt the same experimental compound to protect beluga whales from dangerous infections by adding a bioadhesive that makes the compound stay on underwater.

“The bioadhesive will stick to those lesions, keep them protected from their aquatic environment and let their bodies do the natural defense that they need to do while protecting it from the environment,” Dr. Ritchie says. It’s disease-fighting research for animals — and people. Widgery is grateful he was part of it.

“I am not a person that cares what I look like, but I am so thankful that I don’t have those scars,” Widgery says. The whales aren’t complaining either.

The human anti-microbial Silvion has now received FDA marketing approval and is available to treat everything from skin cuts to burn injuries. The animal version, Tricide, is being used to treat animals at zoos and aquariums to prevent infection and promote healing.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

ARE SOAPS SAFE FROM TOXIC CHEMICALS

Editor — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 09:29:05 +0000

Toxic ingredients in common soaps

Common antimicrobial soap ingredients can kill sperm and damage the female babymaking equipment – and now, a lawsuit-happy environmental group is suing the feds over it.

After all, they first proposed regulating these antimicrobial chemicals – triclosan and triclocarban – 30 years ago. They promised to act once they completed a study… but I’ll bet you can guess what happened next. They never bothered to study it.

That’s your government (not) at work.

So they ‘washed’ their hands of it, and today these completely unregulated toxic chemicals are free to go to town on your endocrine system, reproductive system, and more every single time you lather up.

As I’ve told you before, triclosan is actually a pesticide — not a soap. And when it gets in the water, fish die. With a chemical that powerful, your poor little sperm never even have a chance.

The group that filed the suit, the National Resources Defense Council, is the same organization that recently sued the feds over their lack of regulations on BPA. The FDA’s bureaucrats may do a whole lot of nothing, but the agency’s lawyers sure are keeping busy.

Don’t wait for the lawyers, bureaucrats, and environmental groups to sort this one out, because while these things might be bad news for people, fish and sperm, they’re not exactly terrorizing bacteria. Studies have found that antimicrobial soaps are actually no better at killing germs than the plain old soap – and the FDA has even admitted as much.

What’s more, the overuse of these soaps is helping to create drug-resistant superbugs… and boy do we overuse them: Triclosan residue is believed to be on 75 percent of Americans over the age of 6.

So do yourself and the rest of us a favor: Keep clean… but stick to plain old soap.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

MAN EATEN ALIVE WHILE SLEEPING

Editor — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:12:27 +0000

Disabled man eaten to death

by maggots

July 28, 2010 11:19PM

A DISABLED Austrian man was eaten to death by maggots in his bed while his partner slept beside him.

The 61-year-old retiree died in an ambulance on his way to hospital in Vienna on Tuesday with the maggots having partly devoured his back.

Paramedics notified police after discovering the shocking state of hygiene in the man’s home, and his 34-year-old partner was questioned over his condition.

“The man had not wanted to be washed for a long time,” a police spokesman said.

According to police, the couple had been together for around a decade, and the victim’s partner had slept in the same bed right up until his death.

The dead man had been paralysed for several years following a stroke.

Some types of maggots found on corpses can be of great use to forensic scientists. By their stage of development, these maggots can be used to give an indication of the time elapsed since death, as well as the place the organism died. Some maggots are leaf miners. Maggots are bred commercially, as a popular bait in angling, and a food for carnivourous pets such as reptiles or birds. Some maggots which eat dead, but not living, flesh have been used medically, being introduced into wounds to clean them. Other maggots, such as the screwworm, eat live flesh. In the early days of medicine, maggot infestations of wounds (myiasis) were inevitable. The wounds that were infested tended to be less life-threatening than wounds without the infestation, so until the development of antibiotics it was common practice to leave the maggots. After antibiotics, the presence of maggots became viewed as unhygienic

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

SALTY SEA WATER IN WOUND COULD KILL YOU

Editor — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 08:04:44 +0000

Officials warn of ocean bacteria

MIAMI (UPI) — Wading in the ocean to let salt water heal cuts and scrapes is not always a good idea, health experts say, as bacteria can proliferate in summer months.

A little known, deadly bacteria called Vibrio vulnificus can infect open wounds of beach goers and cause a life-threatening illness in those with weakened immune systems, The Miami Herald reported Friday.

he bacteria, which occur naturally in warm coastal waters, infected 138 people in Florida between 2005 and 2009 and 31 of them died, the Florida Department of Health said.

“The high mortality rate makes it a big deal,” Juan A. Suarez, an epidemiologist for FDH, said.

The bacteria proliferate in waters where temperature and salinity are increasing, particularly between the months of April and November, Suarez said.

“It’s a particularly difficult organism because it doesn’t affect everyone.” he said. “Most healthy people will not respond to the organism. They are probably not at risk.”

But he advised all people to heal their cuts and scrapes through other means, not ocean water.

“It’s probably not a good idea, even if you’re healthy, to go into the water with an open wound,” Suarez said.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

SKIN CANCER TREATED SUCCESSFULLY WITH THIS NEW DRUG

Editor — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 06:39:41 +0000

Associated Press

Drug boosts survival

in major skin cancer study

CHICAGO — Researchers have scored the first big win against melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. An experimental drug significantly improved survival in a major study of people with very advanced disease.

The results, reported Saturday at a cancer conference, left doctors elated.

“We have not had any therapy that has prolonged survival” until now, said Dr. Lynn Schuchter of the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania, a skin cancer specialist with no role in the study or ties to the drug’s maker.

The drug, ipilimumab, (ip-ee-LIM-uh-mab), works by helping the immune system fight tumors. The federal Food and Drug Administration has pledged a quick review, and doctors think the drug could be available by the end of this year.

“People are going to have a lot of hope and want this drug, and it’s not on their doctors’ shelves,” although some may be able to get it through special programs directly from its maker, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. ( BMY – news – people ), Schuchter said.

Melanoma is the most serious form of skin cancer. Last year in the United States, there were about 68,720 new cases and 8,650 deaths from the disease. Worldwide, more than 50,000 people die of melanoma each year.

“The incidence is rising faster than any other cancer,” said one of the study’s leaders, Dr. Stephen Hodi of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. “When it spreads to vital organs, it’s almost always fatal.”

Doctors also reported Saturday at the conference that an experimental drug for lung cancer patients with a certain gene showed extraordinary promise in early testing. The drug, Pfizer Inc. ( PFE – news – people )’s crizotinib, (crih-ZAH-tin-ib) targets a gene that promotes tumor growth and is found in about 4 percent of lung cancers, especially among younger, non-smokers.

Nearly 220,000 new cases of lung cancer are diagnosed each year in the United States alone, and it is the world’s top cancer killer. Two other gene-targeted treatments, Tarceva and Iressa, help about 20,000 lung cancer patients annually in the U.S.

The skin cancer study involved 676 people around the world with advanced, inoperable melanoma who had already tried other treatments – a very grim situation. They were given one of three treatments: ipilimumab by itself, with another immune-stimulating treatment, or the immune-stimulating treatment alone.

After two years, 24 percent of those given the drug alone or in combination were alive, versus 14 percent of those given just the immune-stimulating treatment.

Average survival was 10 months with ipilimumab versus just more than six months for the others, which worked out to a 67 percent improvement in survival for those on the drug, said one of the study’s leaders, Dr. Steven O’Day of the Angeles Clinic and Research Institute in Los Angeles.

Doctors hope the drug can provide more benefit if given earlier in the course of the disease and to less sick patients.

Ten percent to 15 percent of patients on ipilimumab had serious side effects related to the drug’s actions on the immune system. Most were treatable with high doses of steroids, but 14 deaths were thought to be related to the treatment. That’s still far fewer than deaths due to the cancer.

The study was funded by Bristol-Myers and Medarex Inc. ( MEDX – news – people ), a company that co-developed the drug and was bought by Bristol-Myers last year. A spokeswoman said Bristol-Myers has not yet set a price for the drug, but similar treatments for other cancers cost several thousand dollars a month or more.

Results were reported at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual conference in Chicago and published online by the New England Journal of Medicine.

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 7th June 2010

SKIN CANCERS CURED AND PREVENTED WITH THIS VACCINE

Editor — Thu, 27 May 2010 20:24:55 +0000

Vaccine Hope for Skin Cancer Sufferers

The skin

The skin:

protects us from injury
cools us when we get too hot
prevents us from becoming dehydrated.

The skin has two main layers.

Epidermis: The top or outer layer.

Contains three different kinds of cells:

1. basal cells
2. squamous cells
3. melanocytes – produce a dark pigment called melanin, the substance that gives skin its colour.

Dermis: The layer underneath the epidermis.

Contains the roots of hairs, glands that make sweat, blood and lymph vessels and nerves.

Skin cancer

Skin cancer develops when a cell in the skin goes through a series of changes that make it a cancer cell.

Exposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation in sunlight is the main factor that causes skin cancer cells to become cancer cells.

Skin cancers are named after the type of cell they start from. These are:

basal cell cancer
squamous cell cancer
melanoma.

Melanoma is the least common type of cancer, but it is the most serious type. It can be successfully treated if caught early.

Science (May 27, 2010) — Nottingham scientists have been given the green light to test a vaccine which they hope could reverse, and even cure malignant melanoma, the most deadly type of skin cancer.

Scancell Holdings plc, led by Professor Lindy Durrant of the University’s Division of Clinical Oncology within the School of Molecular Medical Sciences, believes the new vaccine, which targets tumour cells without damaging healthy tissue, could be successful in treating patients with malignant melanoma.

Incidences of malignant melanoma have more than quadrupled over the past 30 years and in the last 25 years rates of malignant melanoma have risen faster than for any other cancer. It is now the most common cancer in younger adults aged 15 to 34, which may be linked to risky associated behaviour such as exposure to the sun on foreign beach holidays and the use of tanning booths. Every year, most of the 2,000 skin cancer deaths result from malignant melanoma.

Professor Durrant said: “Up until now, early diagnosis has been a crucial factor in the successful treatment of this disease. In the early stages it can be cured by completely removing the skin melanoma by surgery. However, in cases where it has not been picked up until further down the line, we have found that chemotherapy and radiotherapy simply do not work, although new compounds are being tested.

“It is still at a very early stage and impossible to predict the outcome of the clinical trial but if our results from the lab are replicated in patients I think we have a good chance of dramatically improving the chances of successful treatment — we are hoping that the vaccine will cure between 10 and 20 per cent of patients with malignant melanoma.”

Testing for the new SCIB1 vaccine has been given approval by the Gene Therapy Advisory Committee and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency and clinical trials are due to start shortly at Nottingham City Hospital and centres in Manchester and Newcastle.

It will initially be given to patients who are suffering from advanced malignant melanoma which has spread to other parts of the body.

The new vaccine works by activating the body’s own natural defence systems — it contains DNA and genetic material from tumours meaning it ‘switches’ on the specific immune cells that target melanoma. This means that it targets only the cancer and not the surrounding healthy tissue.

The team of scientists believe that, in principle, new vaccines based upon the same principle could also be used to target other types of cancer tumours, such as breast and prostate.

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 28th May 2010