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Dogs Detect Early Lung Cancer Through Smell

Cancer Detector
© redOrbit

New research claims that dogs are able to reliably detect early lung cancer by sniffing samples of patients' breath.

The researchers found that trained animals correctly identified 71 percent of people who had the disease and correctly dismissed 93 percent of those who were healthy.

According to the study, the dogs were able to distinguish between people who had tumors and those who had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which is a separate condition also linked to smoking.

Scientists at Schillerhoehe Hospital in Germany say dogs are able to use their sensitive noses to detect chemicals known to volatile organic compounds that are present in cancer sufferers and exhaled in their breath.

Thorsten Walles, the study author, said in a press release: "In the breath of patients with lung cancer, there are likely to be different chemicals to normal breath samples and the dogs' keen sense of smell can detect this difference at an early stage of the disease. Our results confirm the presence of a stable marker for lung cancer.

"This is a big step forward in the diagnosis of lung cancer, but we still need to precisely identify the compounds observed in the exhaled breath of patients. It is unfortunate that dogs cannot communicate the biochemistry of the scent of cancer!"

Attention

US, Virginia: 'Brain-Eating Amoeba' Claims Second Victim This Month


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© ABC NewsChristian Alexander Strickland, 9, died Aug. 5, 2011, from amoebic meningoencephalitis, a deadly parasitic infection that attacks the brain and spine, after attending a fishing camp.
A second child died this month from a deadly parasite that grows in stagnant waters, health officials confirmed Tuesday.

Bonnie Strickland, the aunt of 9-year-old Christian Alexander Strickland, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that her nephew died Aug. 5 from amoebic meningoencephalitis, a deadly parasitic infection that attacks the brain and spine, after attending a fishing camp.

"The doctor described it to us as such a slight chance that they didn't even think it would be possible," Strickland told the newspaper.

"Sadly, we have had a Naegleria infection in Virginia this summer," Dr. Keri Hall, state epidemiologist at the Virginia Department of Health, said in a statement. "It's important that people be aware of...safe swimming messages."

A week after Christian's fishing camp, he began experiencing the telltale symptoms of the parasitic infection-turned-meningitis: headache, stiffness, fever and nausea.

Attention

Best of the Web: Children of the Corn: GMOs Don't Qualify As Food

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© Salem-News.orgIf GMOs are highly associated with infertility and spontaneous abortions in animals, is a similar rate of infertility (20%) occurring in people and are there increases in spontaneous abortion?
Antibodies from women with a rare condition known as immune infertility are used in the creation of GMO food

There has been a concerted national effort by citizens to have the US government label GMOs. Opposing it are government intent not only to keep them unlabeled in the US but efforts at the international level by the US government to remove all labeling of GMOs through Codex. The problem is that Codex applies to food, and GMOs don't qualify.

William Engdahl wrote in March of 2010 about a USDA funded project to create a GM corn that sterilizes people.

Alarm Clock

Flashback FDA Says You Have No Right to Real Food Unless They Give You Permission First

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© drmercola.com
The FDA has finally made its food-rights policy crystal clear. Here's the agency's position, made evident in their response to a lawsuit filed by the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund:
  • They believe you have no absolute right to any raw unprocessed food, unless the FDA says it's okay
  • They believe you have no right to good health, except as approved by the FDA
  • They believe that there is no right for citizens to contract privately for their food
The Complete Patient reports:
"More Americans appear to be getting the message ... Over the past six months, we've had the popular push in Wisconsin, a state where the regulators have gone bonkers to eliminate raw milk, to pressure legislators to approve making it available from the farm ... [and] a firestorm building in Massachusetts over a ... decision by a regulator to restrict consumer access to milk."
Source

The Complete Patient April 30, 2010

Magic Wand

Wonder what it's like to have no sense of smell? It stinks!

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© Ocean/CorbisIn anosmia - no sense of smell, the olfactory nerves are damaged or die
As I was sitting in the office one day, a colleague at a desk 3ft away looked up with a curious expression. She glanced around searchingly until her gaze settled on me.

'My dear,' she said in her customary grand manner, 'are you wearing perfume?'

I nodded, replying: 'Do you like it?' She smiled at me graciously.

'It's simply frightful,' she announced at a volume akin to the average loudhailer, adding: 'So cheap!'

Choosing perfume by guesswork is just one of the pitfalls of my life as an anosmic - a person with no sense of smell.

From the fragrance of roses to the smell of burning, I'm oblivious to them all.

I am among the one in 5,000 people born anosmic - others lose their sense of smell through head trauma (Tottenham manager Harry Redknapp lost his after a car crash) or as the result of a simple flu or cold virus.

Info

Fat Can Be Healthy: Some Obese People Live Long Lives

OverWeight
© Benis Arapovic | Dreamstime

Not everyone who is obese needs to lose weight - it's possible to carry extra pounds and still be healthy, a new study says.

Although obesity brings an increased risk of many health complications, the new study shows that people who are obese but do not have such complications might live as long as normal weight individuals.

"This illustrates that you can't have one sweeping brush to categorize all obese individuals," said study researcher Jennifer Kuk, an assistant professor at York University in Toronto. People need to look at whether they have additional risk factors indicating poor health to determine whether they should lose weight, Kuk said.

In fact, the results suggest that "yo-yo dieting," in which individuals lose weight but gain it back later, might be more unhealthful for some obese people than simply maintaining their weight, Kuk said. Participants in the study who lost the most weight over their lifetime, but hadn't necessarily kept the weight off, were more likely to have additional health complications from their obesity than those who lost less weight.

The researchers are working to develop a scaling system that could help physicians determine which obese patients would benefit from weight loss. The study was published today (Aug. 15) in the journal Applied Physiology, Nutrition and Metabolism.

Health

Magnesium, Leptin and Obesity

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© blog.imva.info
One would think that eating too much would result in an abundance of nutritional support for cells. But being overweight and undernourished at the same time is a reality that is just beginning to be understood. It is quite strange to say to people that the more they eat, the more malnourished they are destined to be.

Overweight people more often than not suffer from gross malnutrition because the nutritional values of the basic foods available to us have been steadily dropping for the last 50 years even as toxic exposures increase. Obese people tend to eat too many processed white foods with the fiber removed along with many of the vitamins and minerals. Not enough fiber is another common problem with the obese.

Excessive calorie intake is the fast track to leptin resistance. Since it's hard to eat excess of the so-called "clean" foods, excess calories usually come from junk foods as do magnesium deficiencies.

Jennifer Welsh, a LiveScience staff writer explains that when dieters starve themselves of calories, they starve their brain cells as well. New research finds that these hungry brain cells then release "feed me" signals, which drive up hunger, slow down metabolism and thus cause diets to fail. Neurons sense nutrients in the body and tell the body when it's time to eat and time to stop eating. The point is that dieters are not just starving themselves of calories, they are starving themselves of vital minerals and this comes on top of already existing mineral deficiencies that are characteristic of overweight and obese populations.

Magnify

A No-Nonsense Look at Toxins and How Your Body Deals with Them

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© revolutionp.com
The world wide web is overflowing with information on toxins and countless programs and products that are touted to cleanse your body of them. I hope that this post provides you with a clear understanding of what toxins are, how they can affect your health, and a sensible approach to preventing accumulation of toxins in your body.

First, let's differentiate between the two main types of toxins that you're exposed to on a day-to-day basis.

Comment: For more information about toxins in the body and their negative effects on human health read Detoxify or Die By Sherry A. Rogers, M.D.:
We are all a toxic cesspool of the lifetime accumulation of chemicals from our air, food, and water. U.S. EPA studies of chemicals stored in the fat of humans show that 100% of people had dioxins, PCBs, dichlorobenzene, and xylene while another analysis of the exhaled breath of humans showed carcinogenic benzene in 89% and perchloroethylene in 93%. And these chemicals are just the tip of the iceberg. For now we have the proof that it is the steady silent accumulation over a lifetime that produces most diseases, including cancer. But medicine merely sees every disease as a deficiency of some drug or surgery, or tells us there is no known cause or cure.

There is now no question that these accumulated toxins are behind nearly every disease, symptom, injury and malfunction of the body. But get ready for the greatest medical discovery of the decade. If we get these ubiquitously unavoidable toxic chemicals out of the body, we can reverse and even cure the most hopeless diseases.

It no longer matters what you call your disease. The label your doctor gives you is meaningless. What matters is what caused it. Learn how to find the underlying causes and get rid of them with the only proven way to reverse disease and slow down aging.



Attention

Drug Waste Harms Fish

Contaminated Fishes
© D. GonseauGudgeon downstream of a wastewater-processing plant had swollen abdomens and other abnormalities.

Consumers who flush unwanted contraceptives down the drain have long been blamed for giving fish more than their fair share of sex organs. Drugs excreted by patients can also taint rivers, even after passing through wastewater-processing facilities.

But evidence is accumulating that the effluent coming from pharmaceutical factories could also be carrying drugs into rivers. Many ecotoxicologists had assumed that water-quality standards, along with companies' desire to avoid wasting valuable pharmaceuticals, would minimize the extent of bioactive compounds released by factories into wastewater, and ultimately into rivers.

A string of studies suggest otherwise. In 2009, for example, researchers1,2 reported very high levels of pharmaceutical ingredients in treated effluent coming from a plant that processes wastewater from factories near Hyderabad, India. The following year, a similar discovery was made at two wastewater-treatment plants in New York, both of which received discharges from drug-production plants.3

Now, researchers have provided the first evidence of similar problems in Europe,4 and have linked it to sex disruption in wild fish populations found in the Dore River in France. "People thought this could not happen in a country that has high environmental standards and good manufacturing practices," says Patrick Phillips, head of the National Water-Quality Assessment Program at the US Geological Survey in Troy, New York, and lead author of the US study. "The evidence from the United States and now from France shows that this is not the case."

Question

Can The Spanish Flu Devastate Us Again?

Spanish Flu
© redOrbit

TAU researchers work to determine how H1N1 becomes pandemic.

The last century has seen two major pandemics caused by the H1N1 virus - the Spanish Flu in 1918 and 2009's Swine Flu scare, which had thousands travelling with surgical masks and clamoring for vaccination. But scientists did not know what distinguished the Swine Flu from ordinary influenza in pigs or seasonal outbreaks in humans, giving it the power to travel extensively and infect large populations.

Until now. Prof. Nir Ben-Tal of Tel Aviv University's Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and his graduate student Daphna Meroz, in collaboration with Dr. Tomer Hertz of Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, have developed a unique computational method to address this question. Published in the journal PNAS, the research presents a valuable tool for identifying viral mutation strategies, tracking various virus strains and developing vaccinations and anti-virals which can protect the population. It may also lead to more precisely designed vaccines to combat these viral mutations.

Their method reveals that mutations in the virus' amino acids in specific positions, such as antigenic receptor sites, may explain how the new strain successfully spread throughout the population in 2009. These alterations allowed the strain to evade both existing vaccines and the immune system's defenses.