Bacon Shown To Increase Cancer Risk By 19%
Yet another item to scratch off the menu (and the same goes for other processed meats, to perhaps no disinformation reader’s surprise). From the Press Association via The Guardian:
Eating two rashers of bacon a day can increase the risk of pancreatic cancer by 19% and the risk goes up if a person eats more, experts have said.
Eating 50g of processed meat every day – the equivalent to one sausage or two rashers of bacon – increases the risk by 19%, compared to people who do not eat processed meat at all.
For people consuming double this amount of processed meat (100g), the increased risk jumps to 38%, and is 57% for those eating 150g a day. But experts cautioned that the overall risk of pancreatic cancer was relatively low – in the UK, the lifetime risk of developing the disease is one in 77 for men and one in 79 for…
Smart Contact Lenses To Monitor Your Health And Treat Disease
This is so Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol! From CBS Pittsburgh:
Forty-million Americans wear contact lenses. In the not so distant future, contacts may do a lot more than just help you see.
What if the lenses could look inside of you to diagnose, monitor and even treat disease? Sound far-fetched? Well, it may not be too far away.
The new generation of contact lenses is being called “smart lenses,” and they are packed with circuits, sensors and wireless technology – all designed to keep an eye on your health.
“There’s a possibility to develop a really, really important new tool for medicine,” said Babak Parviz, PH.D., the developer of the Smart Lens.
A team of researchers at the University of Washington built and are testing the smart lens. They believe it could one day replace the standard blood test…
[continues at CBS Pittsburgh]
Why Placebos Work
Shirley S. Wang reports on the increasing clinical use of placebos for the Wall Street Journal:
Say “placebo effect” and most people think of the boost they may get from a sugar pill simply because they believe it will work. But more and more research suggests there is more than a fleeting boost to be gained from placebos.
A particular mind-set or belief about one’s body or health may lead to improvements in disease symptoms as well as changes in appetite, brain chemicals and even vision, several recent studies have found, highlighting how fundamentally the mind and body are connected.
It doesn’t seem to matter whether people know they are getting a placebo and not a “real” treatment. One study demonstrated a strong placebo effect in subjects who were told they were getting a sugar pill with no active ingredient.
Placebo treatments are sometimes used in some clinical practices. In a 2008 survey of…
Gene Found That Controls Chronic Pain
Popping pain killers may not be the answer, not if you can isolate and alter the gene which regulates chronic pain. Via Reuters:
British scientists have identified a gene responsible for regulating chronic pain, called HCN2, and say their discovery should help drug researchers in their search for more effective, targeted pain-killing medicines.
“Our research lays the groundwork for the development of new drugs to treat chronic pain by blocking HCN2.”
Scientists from Cambridge University said that if drugs could be designed to block the protein produced by the gene, they could treat a type of pain known as neuropathic pain, which is linked to nerve damage and often very difficult to control with currently available drugs.
“Individuals suffering from neuropathic pain often have little or no respite because of the lack of effective medications,” said Peter McNaughton of Cambridge’s pharmacology department, who led the study.
If Exercise Were A Cancer Drug, It Would Be A Blockbuster
But we all know that Big Pharma won’t let doctors prescribe exercise for their very profitable customers patients. Report from Medical News Today:
If exercise were a cancer drug, it would be a blockbuster, appears to be the conclusion of a new review on the benefits of physical activity to people surviving and living beyond cancer. In a report released today, 8 August, the leading UK charity Macmillan Cancer Support, firmly sweeps aside the tradition that cancer patients should “rest up” and “take it easy”, and urges doctors and nurses to prescribe physical activity to patients “at all stages of cancer from initial diagnosis through to the later stages”. However, despite the emergence of this evidence, many health professionals are failing to tell their cancer patients about the benefits of exercise, they added.
Ciaran Devane, Chief Executive of Macmillan Cancer Support, told the press that the evidence in the report, whose short title…
Dolphins May Teach Humans How To Heal
Photo: Mark Interrante (CC)
Maureen Langlois reports on the amazing healing powers of dolphins, for NPR:
Dr. Michael Zasloff, a surgeon and researcher at Georgetown University, is famous for discovering compounds in the skin of frogs and sharks that can fight disease in humans.
Now, he’s tapping another animal to mine the secrets of its immune system. It turns out dolphins have a remarkable ability to heal quickly—and seemingly painlessly—from severe shark bites. Zasloff hopes that learning how dolphins resist infection and use stem cells to rebuild missing tissue will provide some insight into how to help injured humans.
To do this research, Zasloff reviewed the “clinical histories” of a few dolphins who recently succumbed to shark bites. He also interviewed all the dolphin experts he could find. His results appeared in a letter in the online version of the Journal of Investigative Dermatology.
Shots caught up with Zasloff last week to learn more about his adventures in…
Mathematicians Reach Breakthrough In HIV Research
Here’s a great real world example of why math is important kids! From the Wall Street Journal:
Scientists using a powerful mathematical tool previously applied to the stock market have identified an Achilles heel in HIV that could be a prime target for AIDS vaccines or drugs.
The research adds weight to a provocative hypothesis—that an HIV vaccine should avoid a broadside attack and instead home in on a few targets…
WSJ: Sex As Good For Your Health As Vitamin D And Broccoli
SexStub.svg by Econt (CC)
Good news for all you broccoli haters out there! Melinda Beck reports for the Wall Street Journal:
Is sex good for your health—or is that just a fantasy?
A flurry of small studies suggest that sex is as good for your health as vitamin D and broccoli. It not only relieves stress, improves sleep and burns calories, it can also reduce pain, ease depression, strengthen blood vessels, boost the immune system and lower the risk of prostate and breast cancer.
But many of those studies rely on people to remember and report their sexual activity honestly and many can’t distinguish between cause and effect. That is, does sex make people healthier or do healthier people have more sex?
More research is needed to evaluate all these claims. “If I told you we have randomized double-blind placebo-controlled multi-center trials on these questions, there is no such a thing,” says Irwin Goldstein, a…
French Doctors Announced Lung Cancer ‘Breakthrough’
This may be a breakthrough in the treatment of lung cancer, but it doesn’t mean you should pick up smoking just yet. BBC reports:
French doctors say they have made a significant breakthrough in the treatment of lung cancer.
A medical team at Bobigny hospital in Paris removed a patient’s cancerous growth, and then gave him an artificial airway, or bronchus.
The bronchus was made from reconstituted aorta, the body’s largest artery.
The pioneering treatment in October 2009 avoided the complete removal of the patient’s lung.
In the later stages of lung cancer, only a third of patients survive a year.
The Paris patient, 78, is said be fit and well, some 16 months after surgery.
[Continues at BBC]
Horrific Medical Experiments On Prisoners And Mental Patients In U.S.
Dr. Jonas Salk, who led one of the studies.
You really want to believe that America would be above this sort of thing, but I suppose for a nation that imported human vivisection experts from Nazi Germany after WW2, trying out dubious medical procedures on its own citizens should not be too much of a surprise. The broad scope of the experiments might be though: Mike Stobbe reports on a review by AP of over 40 medical “studies”:
Shocking as it may seem, U.S. government doctors once thought it was fine to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates. Such experiments included giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland, and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital.
Much of this horrific history is 40 to 80 years old, but it is the backdrop for a meeting in…
Dr. Russell Blaylock Explains Fluoride’s Deadly Secret
Dr. Russell Blaylock M.D. is a retired neurosurgeon and author whose trailblazing research has tirelessly documented the fact that there is an epidemic of neurological disorders in the western world which are directly connected to toxins in our environment.
Doctor Who Linked Autism and Vaccines Is A ‘Fraud,’ Says British Medical Journal
Jenny McCarthy take note: Britain’s leading medical journal has declared that Andrew Wakefield’s discredited 1998 autism study was not merely riddled with errors, but was a case of deliberate, “elaborate fraud.” CNN reports:
A now-retracted British study that linked autism to childhood vaccines was an “elaborate fraud” that has done long-lasting damage to public health, a leading medical publication reported Wednesday.
An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study’s author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study — and that there was “no doubt” Wakefield was responsible.
“It’s one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors,” Fiona Godlee, BMJ’s editor-in-chief, told CNN. “But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a…
Daily Pill Helps Prevent HIV Infection
While this pill would be an amazing achievement helping to reduce the spread of HIV, even the volunteers in the trial couldn’t remember to take it everyday. The best prevention of HIV is the knowledge of how it is transmitted and how ways to prevent it. From BBC News:
A daily pill to prevent HIV infection would be a significant development. A trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that an established treatment for HIV infection is also powerful in protecting gay men from catching the virus.
This is not, however, the answer to the nearly 30 year epidemic of HIV and AIDS. Since it is just one trial, many more studies will need to follow. But according to the Terrence Higgins Trust (THT) it is “potentially very significant and could change the HIV landscape in the future”.
Some brief facts about the trial: it involved about 2,500 men at…
2010 Ig Nobel Prizes: Whale Snot, Socks Over Shoes, And Scientists’ Beards
The 2010 Ig Nobel Prize winners (like the Nobels but better) have been announced in various categories of science. These amazing discoveries are the reason we are living in the most exciting of times. ABC News reports the results:
ENGINEERING: Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, Agnes Rocha-Gosselin and Diane Gendron for developing a method to collect whale snot using a remote control helicopter.
TRANSPORTATION PLANNING: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Atsushi Tero, Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, Kentaro Ito, Kenji Yumiki, Ryo Kobayashi, Dan Bebber, Mark Fricker for using slime mold to determine the optimal routes for railroad tracks.
PHYSICS: Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams and Patricia Priest for demonstrating that wearing socks on the outside of your shoes helps prevent slipping on ice.
PEACE: Richard Stephens, John Atkins and Andrew Kingston for confirming that swearing helps relieve pain.
PUBLIC HEALTH: Manuel Barbeito, Charles Mathews and Larry Taylor for determining that microbes cling to bearded scientists.
MANAGEMENT: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda and Cesare Garofalo for…
U.S. Purposely Infected Hundreds Of Guatemalans With STDs In Secret Medical Experiments
Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius have apologized for horrific medical experiments conducted in Guatemala during the 1940s. While they were at it, maybe they could have thrown in a few words of regret regarding the CIA’s overthrowing the elected government a couple of years later. MSNBC reports:
U.S. government medical researchers intentionally infected hundreds of people in Guatemala, including institutionalized mental patients, with gonorrhea and syphilis without their knowledge or permission more than 60 years ago.
Many of those infected were encouraged to pass the infection onto others as part of the study.
About one third of those who were infected never got adequate treatment.
On Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius offered extensive apologies for actions taken by the U.S. Public Health Service.
“The sexually transmitted disease inoculation study conducted from 1946-1948 in Guatemala was clearly unethical,” according to the joint statement…
Cancer Diagnosis Through Breath Tests
Not only can a breath test tell you how much you’ve had to drink, now it can tell you if you have cancer! Ok, not exactly the same thing, but it’s pretty interesting what your breath can tell. Medical News Today details:
US scientists have developed and tested a prototype breath test to detect lung cancer
The results of the test is published in the international journal of respiratory medicine Thorax.
In tests, the colour testing device, which is about the size of a coin and is not expensive, had a 75 per cent success rate in detecting people with cancer.
It can also detect people with early stages of lung cancer.
However, in testing the device also showed false positives – it picked out people without lung cancer.
Using a technique called a “colorimetric sensor array”, the test picks up the chemical fingerprint of the breath of people with lung cancer.
Lung cancer tumours, like other cancers,…
Discover of New Antibody Takes Step Forward Towards AIDS Vaccine
The progress made recently in HIV and AIDS research seems to have taken the media by storm. With advancements such as earlier treatment in HIV and AIDS patients, and a vaginal gel found to decrease the risk of infection, it appears we’re a step closer towards vaccination. The most recent breakthrough with the discovery of three new HIV antibodies gives hope to scientists that a vaccine will be found. Drew Halley of SingularityHub reports:
Will HIV eventually go the way of smallpox and polio? Earlier this month, scientists at the National Institute of Health (NIH) announced their discovery of three new HIV antibodies, the most powerful of which neutralizes 91% of all HIV strains. These are the strongest antibodies yet found, and they could hold the key to developing a vaccine to AIDS.
HIV antibodies themselves aren’t rare, and scientists regularly find ones that are effective against a few different strains. But until last year, the most powerful…
