Last summer, while watching a news program about a possible AIDS vaccine, Zach Barnett had a “Eureka!” moment. The show was describing a Texas scientist’s unorthodox approach to vaccine-making, a strategy that involved superantigens and covalent bonds and a lot of other words that weren’t in Barnett’s vocabulary. That didn’t matter; the science turned him on anyway. “It was just so cool,” he says. “I was like, ‘lightbulb!’ “
For years, Barnett, a fashion publicist, had been trying to get involved in AIDS activism, but mainstream organizations had told him there wasn’t much for him to do, save passing out brochures. “That was a waste of my talent,” he says. Here he saw a use for his skills. He wrote to the scientist, Dr. Sudhir Paul of the University of Texas, to tell him that “if what he was saying was true, he was doing a bad job of publicizing it.” To show he was serious, he offered Paul $50 out of his own pocket to support the research. More:
Mumbai: An Indian doctor claims to be able to beat a variety of incurable or terminal illnesses using embryonic stem cells — and is charging as much as £30,000 for a single course of treatment.
Medical researchers are deeply sceptical of Geeta Shroff’s claims, and brand many rogue stem-cell physicians dangerous quacks offering expensive, unproven and potentially dangerous treatments that are banned in Britain.
Some of her patients, however, insist that they are getting better.
Dr Shroff says she has treated 700 people, including several Britons, since 2002, by injecting them with embryonic stem cells capable of replicating themselves and of giving rise to almost any specialised cell type. She says all the cells she uses are derived from a single unwanted embryo left over from an IVF treatment.
The results, she claims, have been remarkable. More:
Dr. Sudhir Paul is a scientist at the very forefront of HIV research. A graduate of AIIMS, Delhi, he is currently Professor and Director of the Chemical Immunology Research Center at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston. Click here to link to an article that describes his research:
Scientists working to develop a vaccine for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) report they have created the first antigen that induces protective antibodies capable of blocking infection of human cells by genetically-diverse strains of HIV. The new antigen differs from previously-tested vaccines by virtue of its chemically-activated property that enables close sharing of electrons and produces strong covalent bonding.
In Bangladesh, thanks to Dr Ron Hines, cosmetic surgery is rebuilding lives. Rachel Shields from Dhaka From the Independent:
Ayesha Siddique refused to be sold by her husband. Photo Kiron/MAP in the Independent
It is about as far away from the nips and tucks of TV makeover shows and celebrity magazines as you can imagine, but then Dr Ronald Hiles has never had any interest in helping pampered princesses take inches off their thighs or years off their faces.
As he speaks from a clinic on the edge of the sprawling slums of Dhaka, his description of what he has achieved in 25 years of pioneering work is modest, to say the least: “Lying on a beach isn’t my idea of a holiday. I prefer to do something useful.”
And so, while many of his contemporaries are happy whiling away their summers on the Côte d’Azur, the former president of the British Association of Plastic Surgeons has spent his holidays for the past two decades helping Bangladeshi burns victims to rebuild their lives. More:
An Indian girl born with eight limbs beats all the odds to live a normal life. Dean Nelson in the Sunday Times:
“It’s a miracle!” says Poonam Tatma, beaming proudly at her daughter Lakshmi. Her little girl laughs and runs around in the grounds of the school for the disabled in Jodhpur where she lives with her family. She seems like any normal toddler – but only a year ago Lakshmi’s parents faced the likelihood that their daughter would never live a normal life. Born with eight limbs, she was the result of a rare condition in which a foetus is joined at the pelvis to a “parasitic” twin who has stopped developing in the mother’s womb. In Lakshmi’s case, she was born having absorbed the limbs and other body parts of her undeveloped sibling.
Twinkle Dwivedi, 13, has a strange disorder which means she loses blood through her skin without being cut or scratched. She has even undergone transfusions after pints of it seeped through her eyes, nose, hairline, neck and the soles of her feet.
Sometimes her condition is so bad she wakes up with her entire body covered in dried blood.
Villagers near her home in Uttar Pradesh, India, believe she must be cursed and shout cruel things in the street. Her frantic family have sought help from numerous doctors as well as preachers from many different religions without success.
Doctors at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi believe she has Type 2 Platelet Disorder, a rare condition where blood is dangerously low in clotting particles, but they cannot find a treatment to make it thicker.
But Dr. Drew Provan, a consultant hematologist with Barts Hospital in London, told the Telegraph the girl may have Type II von Willebrand disease. Click here to read the full story:
According the Web site of the National Hemophilia Association, “von Willebrand Disease is a bleeding disorder caused by a defect or deficiency of a blood clotting protein, called von Willebrand Factor. The disease is estimated to occur in 1% to 2% of the population. The disease was first described by Erik von Willebrand, a Finnish physician who reported a new type of bleeding disorder among island people in Sweden and Finland.”
The world’s first polypill, a multiple-product pill for heart ailments, has been developed by Indian pharmaceutical company, Dr. Reddy’s. The four-in-one tablet called the Red Heart pill aims to cut heart attack and stroke risk and could be sold for just $1 a month. It will enter human trials this week in London. A report in The Guardian:
The once-a-day polypill has been the dream of doctors for many years, but because the drugs it contains, including aspirin, are cheap, there has been no financial incentive for the pharmaceutical industry to get involved.
Now, however, international teams of researchers, with the backing in the UK of the Wellcome Trust and the British Heart Foundation, are just a few years away from making the polypill an accessible reality.
Difficulties in combining four drugs in one tablet have been overcome and the Red Heart pill, as it has been christened, has been manufactured by the Indian generic drug company Dr Reddy’s. Volunteers are now being recruited for a 12-week pilot trial which will involve up to 700 people in six countries. If all goes well, the main trial with 5,000 to 7,000 volunteers will begin at the end of next year.
A new program in Goa, India, trains laypeople to identify and treat depression and anxiety and send them to community health clinics. David Kohn reports from Siolim, India, in The New York Times:
At the faded one-story medical clinic in this fishing and farming village, people with depression and anxiety typically got little or no attention. Busy doctors and nurses focused on physical ailments – children with diarrhea, laborers with injuries, old people with heart trouble. Patients, fearful of the stigma connected to mental illness, were reluctant to bring up emotional problems.
Last year, two new workers arrived. Their sole task was to identify and treat patients suffering depression and anxiety. The workers found themselves busy. Almost every day, several new patients appeared. Depressed and anxious people now make up “a sizable crowd” at the clinic, said the doctor in charge, Anil Umraskar.
The patients talk about all sorts of troubles. “Financial difficulties are there,” said one of the new counselors, Medha Upadhye, 29. “Interpersonal conflicts are there. Unemployment. Alcoholism is a major problem.”
In The New York Times, Vincent Lam, a physician, on Sandeep Jauhar’s book “Intern: A Doctor’s Initiation”
Becoming a doctor, I hoped, would bring me back into the real world,” Sandeep Jauhar writes in “Intern,” his fine memoir of his training in a New York City hospital. “It would make me into a man.” The story he tells here is antiheroic, full of uncertainty, doubt and frank disgust, aimed at both himself and, sometimes, his patients. “Intern” succeeds as an unusually transparent portrait of an imperfect human being trying to do his best at a tough job.
Jauhar’s journey into medicine is driven by a swirling mix of half-reasons. Disillusioned with graduate studies in particle physics, jarred by the illness of a girlfriend and seeking a profession of tangible purpose, he entered medical school in his mid-20s with considerable ambivalence. Jauhar had always eyed doctoring suspiciously, as a “cookbook” discipline, “with little room for creativity.” His father, a plant geneticist from India who felt his own advancement was stifled by racism, had derided medicine as intellectually inferior to pure science even as he encouraged both his sons to become doctors for the sake of income and prestige.
Reproductive outsourcing is a new but rapidly expanding enterprise in India. Amelia Gentleman reports from Mumbai in International Herald tribune:
Yonatan Gher and his male partner plan eventually to tell their child that it was made in India, in the womb of a woman they never met, with the egg of a Mumbai housewife they picked out from an Internet line-up of candidates.
The embryo was formed in January in an Indian fertility clinic about 4,000 kilometers, or 2,500 miles, from Gher’s home in Tel Aviv, nurtured by a team of doctors who have begun specializing in surrogacy services for couples from around the world.
As they waited to see if the fertilization process had been successful, Gher, 29, and his partner sped around the streets of Mumbai in the back of an autorickshaw, drinking in scenes of a country they had never previously visited, staring at the unfamiliar faces of Indian women and children and “trying to imagine our child,” he said.
(Photo: Surrogate mothers at the Kaival Hospital at Anand, in the western Indian state of Gujarat in February 2006. AP)
