A Chicagoland hospital system has added something new to its patients’ annual checkups: the option to get a genetic test.
Until now, DNA tests have tended to live either in the consumer realm or through referrals to specialists when a patient brings it up.
NorthShore University HealthSystem wants to bring that conversation about genetics into every doctor’s office during annual checkups.
HIV continues to be a major global public health issue, having claimed more than 35 million lives so far, and the “cured” man is one of just 50 people currently undergoing this experimental therapy, a small percentage of the estimated 36.7 million people currently living with HIV, only 54 percent of whom know their status.
While the results of the treatment out of the UK are promising, those dormant T cells could still be lurking in the patient, so this new treatment can’t yet be considered a “cure.” However, it is another encouraging step forward on the path to one.
“We will continue with medical tests for the next five years and at the moment we are not recommending stopping Art but in the future, depending on the test results we may explore this,” said Fidlar.
Scientists identify 22 genes associated with intelligence.
British neuroscientist (file pic) Adrian Owen made it his mission to find a way to communicate with patients in a so-called persistent vegetative state.
Since 1997, I had been using hospital brain scanners to test patients in vegetative states to see if they were in fact still conscious, though trapped in their bodies.
I was working as a research fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Addenbrooke’s Hospital when I scanned my first ‘vegetative’ patient, Kate, while showing her photos of her family as she lay inside a brain-scanning machine.
LEATHERMAKING is an ancient craft. The oldest leather artefact found so far is a 5,500-year-old shoe from a cave in Armenia, but paintings in Egyptian tombs show that, 7,000 years ago, leather was being turned into all manner of things, from sandals to buckets to military equipment. It is a fair bet that the use of animal skins for shelter and clothing goes back hundreds of thousands of years at least.
Leathermaking is also, though, a nasty business. In 18th-century London the soaking of putrefying hides in urine and lime, to loosen any remaining flesh and hair, and the subsequent pounding of dog faeces into those skins to soften and preserve them, caused such a stench that the business was outlawed from the City proper and forced downwind and across the river into Bermondsey. In countries such as India and Japan, the trade tainted people as well as places and was (and often still remains) the preserve of social outcasts such as Dalits and Burakumin.
