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Category: health

“How healthy are clones? What about clones of clones?”

This seems like a pretty silly way to go about testing this. I’d clone like 1,000 to 10,000 mice and track them down generations to see if there was anything abnormal. Then, 1,000 cloned rats. And, finally clone 100 monkeys.

In the 1996 film Multiplicity, Michael Keaton plays an overworked construction worker who gets cloned so that he can spend more time with his family. Eventually his clone gets cloned, but this clone is defective, with a low IQ and weird personality. As might be expected, the movie was a total flop at the box office*.

Silly as it was, the movie does raise an interesting question: How healthy are clones? What about clones of clones?

Dolly the sheep, the world’s first cloned animal, died young at the age of six. This, along with other data, suggested that cloned animals may not be entirely healthy, specifically that they may have shorter lifespans. However, a follow-up study that examined 13 cloned sheep concluded that cloning had “no obvious detrimental long-term health effects.”

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“Increasingly, sophisticated and costly treatment are available to ever more limited and privileged segments of the population, and this raises questions about the sustainability of health care delivery and about what might be called a systemic tendency toward growing inequality in health care,” the pope said.

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis on Thursday urged lawmakers to ensure that health care laws protect the “common good,” decrying the fact that in many places only the privileged can afford sophisticated medical treatments.

The comments came as U.S. lawmakers in Washington, D.C., have been debating how to overhaul the nation’s health insurance laws.

In a message to a medical association meeting at the Vatican, Francis expressed dismay at what he called a tendency toward growing inequality in health care. He said in wealthier countries, health care access risks being more dependent on people’s money than on their need for treatment.

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Globally, antimicrobial resistance or AMR is becoming a core political, social and economic problem. The implications could never be more real than in Asia where, if no immediate action is taken, by 2050 about five million people are projected to die every year of conditions linked to bacterial infections resistant to antibiotics. This figure will be more than estimated cancer fatalities.

Katinka De Balogh says governments, individuals and health care professionals must all act to curb misuse before antibiotic-resistant bacteria creates a public health calamity.

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The sense of touch is often taken for granted. For someone without a limb or hand, losing that sense of touch can be devastating. While highly sophisticated prostheses with complex moving fingers and joints are available to mimic almost every hand motion, they remain frustratingly difficult and unnatural for the user. This is largely because they lack the tactile experience that guides every movement. This void in sensation results in limited use or abandonment of these very expensive artificial devices. So why not make a prosthesis that can actually “feel” its environment?

That is exactly what an interdisciplinary team of scientists from Florida Atlantic University and the University of Utah School of Medicine aims to do. They are developing a first-of-its-kind bioengineered robotic hand that will grow and adapt to its environment. This “living” robot will have its own peripheral nervous system directly linking robotic sensors and actuators. FAU’s College of Engineering and Computer Science is leading the multidisciplinary team that has received a four-year, $1.3 million grant from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering of the National Institutes of Health for a project titled “Virtual Neuroprosthesis: Restoring Autonomy to People Suffering from Neurotrauma.”

robotic hand

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L amborghini has created the world’s first self-healing sports car. The Terzo Millennio, which translates as third millennium in Italian, has the ability to detect and repair cracks in its body work.

Using sensors the car can conduct its own health check to detect any damages and self-repair itself by filling the crack with nanotubes to prevent it spreading.

The super car was created in collaboration with researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston.

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Progesterone and Oestrogen are produced by the ovaries and the amount of their production varies naturally, after the menstrual cycle. The birth-control replaces these naturally produced hormones with the synthetic versions.

Strassmann states that there is a direct connection between the contraceptive pills and the risk of breast cancer. She extracted data from 12 various studies which measure the amount of oestrogen and progesterone over the menstrual cycle in women who do not take these pills. The study is a continuation of her previous research on menstruation and reproductive biology among the Dogon people of Mali in Western Africa.

According to the Cancer research in the UK, around 1% of breast cancers in women are caused due to the oral contraceptives. Though it protects you against various other cancers such as ovarian or any health issue related to the womb, there is still a presence of increased breast cancer risk.

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ProPublica has been documenting the many ways health care dollars are being wasted. We’ve shown how hospitals throw out brand new supplies, nursing homes flush tons of unexpired medication and drug companies concoct costly combinations of cheap medication. Recently we described how arbitrary drug expiration dates cause us to toss safe and potent medicine.

Often, large swaths of the medical and pharmaceutical communities know about this waste — even about solutions to it — but do nothing. Those who end up paying the bill, in one way or another, are consumers.

The makers of cancer drugs also make vials with too much medication for many patients. The excess drugs are tossed in the trash — another reason health care costs are so high.

By Marshall Allen

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