ITP. Girls Must Receive MMR Vaccination Against Their Wishes, Judge Rules. Two girls must be given the MMR jab, against their own wishes and the wishes of their mother, a High Court judge has ruled in a landmark verdict. A 15-year-old girl and her 11-year-old sister should receive the MMR vaccination, because it is in their best interests, Mrs Justice Theis concluded after a hearing in the Family Division of the High Court in London. The judge said the children cannot be identified. She made the ruling on September 5, after a private hearing on July 31, and it was published today on a legal website after the BBC learned of the case and reported the result. An MP who campaigns for improvements in the family justice system criticised Mrs Justice Theis for failing to publish the ruling earlier. Mrs Justice Theis said the girls' father - who is separated from their mother - asked the court to order the vaccination.
The couple were married in 1996 but this had broken down in 2009 and they separated in 2011, the judge said. Also on HuffPost: Michael Douglas’ Cancer Caused by an STD That Can Easily Be Prevented - In the News. Michael Douglas’ Cancer Caused by an STD That Can Easily Be Prevented Posted on Jun 4, 2013 The movie star rejected embarrassment to say this week that his throat cancer was caused by HPV, a sexually transmitted disease that only 1 percent of boys are vaccinated against.
Douglas announced his cancer on David Letterman’s show in 2010 at a time when he was severely ill (stage IV) and possibly near death. This week he told The Guardian that his cancer is gone and unlikely to return. He also revealed that his cancer was caused, ultimately, by sex: “[W]ithout wanting to get too specific, this particular cancer is caused by HPV [human papillomavirus], which actually comes about from cunnilingus.”
Bloomberg editorializes that “Michael Douglas may have done more for awareness about human papillomavirus than all the education programs health advocates have ever sponsored.” There are vaccines available to prevent the spread of the cancer-causing virus, however adoption has been slow. Use Only as Directed. During the last decade, more than 1,500 Americans died after accidentally taking too much of a drug renowned for its safety: acetaminophen, one of the nation’s most popular pain relievers. Acetaminophen – the active ingredient in Tylenol – is considered safe when taken at recommended doses. Tens of millions of people use it weekly with no ill effect.
But in larger amounts, especially in combination with alcohol, the drug can damage or even destroy the liver. Major Takeaways 1 About 150 Americans die a year by accidentally taking too much acetaminophen [20], the active ingredient in Tylenol, federal data from the CDC shows. 2 Acetaminophen has a narrow safety margin: the dose that helps is close to the dose that can cause serious harm [20], according to the FDA. 3 The FDA has long been aware of studies showing the risks of acetaminophen. [20] So has the maker of Tylenol, McNeil Consumer Healthcare, a division of Johnson & Johnson.
The toll does not have to be so high. The U.S. Safety Delay. Chocolate craving comes from total sensory pleasure. Faster, simpler diagnosis for fibromyalgia may be on the horizon. Researchers have developed a reliable way to use a finger-stick blood sample to detect fibromyalgia syndrome, a complicated pain disorder that often is difficult to diagnose. If it were someday made available to primary care physicians, the test could knock up to five years off of the wait for a diagnosis, researchers predict.
In a pilot study, the scientists used a high-powered and specialized microscope to detect the presence of small molecules in blood-spot samples from patients known to have fibromyalgia. By "training" the equipment to recognize that molecular pattern, the researchers then showed that the microscope could tell the difference between fibromyalgia and two types of arthritis that share some of the same symptoms. Though more analysis is needed to identify exactly which molecules are related to development of the disorder itself, the researchers say their pilot data are promising.
The study is published in the Aug. 21, 2013, issue of the journal Analyst. Natural pest control protein effective against hookworm: A billion could benefit. A benign crystal protein, produced naturally by bacteria and used as an organic pesticide, could be a safe, inexpensive treatment for parasitic worms in humans and provide effective relief to over a billion people around the world. Researchers from the University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, report on this potentially promising solution in a study published ahead of print in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
Hookworms, and other intestinal parasites known as helminths infect more than 1 billion people in poverty-stricken, tropical nations, sucking the vitality from the body, and leaving hundreds of millions of children physically and mentally stunted. Current drugs are insufficiently effective, and resistance is rising, but little effort has been made to develop better drugs because the relevant populations do not represent a profitable market for drug companies. Vulnerabilities of the deadly Ebola virus identified. Disabling a protein in Ebola virus cells can stop the virus from replicating and infecting the host, according to researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
The data are published in July in the journal Cell Host and Microbe. Ebola viruses cause severe disease in humans because they can deactivate the innate immune system. Christopher Basler, PhD, Associate Professor of Microbiology at Mount Sinai and his team have studied how Ebola viruses evade the immune system, and discovered that a viral protein called VP35 is critical to deactivating the immune system. They found that when VP35 interacts with an important cellular protein called PACT, it blocks PACT from activating the immune system, allowing the virus to spread. "Ebola viruses are extremely lethal, and are a great threat to human health as a bioweapon," said Dr.
With the help of collaborators at the University of Texas with access to special high containment facilities, Dr. Armed with this discovery, Dr. Solution to Vaccine Mystery Starts to Crystallize. All Opinions Are Local - The myth of the black Confederates. Posted at 6:39 PM ET, 10/30/2010 By washingtonpost.com editors By Bruce Levine Next year, the country will begin observing the sesquicentennial of the bloodiest war in U.S. history -- the Civil War. But the question of how to remember that war sometimes seems as contentious as the war itself was. She thereby helped propagate one of the most pernicious and energetically propagated myths about the Civil War.
As a matter of fact, one of Jefferson Davis's generals did advise him to emancipate and arm slaves at the start of the war. And the Confederacy's policy of excluding blacks from its armed forces was effective. Why were the leaders so stubborn on this point? Finally, approaching military defeat forced Jefferson Davis to reverse course and support the black troops idea at the end of 1864. After months of heated debate, a severely watered-down version of this proposal became Confederate law in March of 1865.
The Middle East Plague Goes Global - By Laurie Garrett and Maxine Builder. When the Black Death exploded in Arabia in the 14th century, killing an estimated third of the population, it spread across the Islamic world via infected religious pilgrims. Today, the Middle East is threatened with a new plague, one eponymously if not ominously named the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS-CoV, or MERS for short). This novel coronavirus was discovered in Jordan in March 2012, and as of June 26, there have been 77 laboratory-confirmed infections, 62 of which have been in Saudi Arabia; 34 of these Saudi patients have died. Although the numbers -- so far -- are small, the disease is raising anxiety throughout the region.
But officials in Saudi Arabia are particularly concerned. This fall, millions of devout Muslims will descend upon Mecca, Medina, and Saudi Arabia's holy sites in one of the largest annual migrations in human history. The disease is still mysterious. Controlling the spread of the virus is only half the battle. But that's only a stopgap solution.