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Distribution of Nets Splits Malaria Fighters
By REUBEN KYAMA and DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, October 9, 2007
MAENDELEO, Kenya — Veronica Njeri, 45, says she has “never healed” since losing two of her six children to malaria 20 years ago, and she still feels vulnerable. While her oldest are adults or teenagers, and have presumably built up immunity to the disease, she worries about her youngest, Anthony, who is 4.
But since hundreds of free mosquito nets came to Maendeleo, her rice-farming village in west-central Kenya, “malaria epidemics have become rare,” she said happily, even though the village sits amid stagnant paddies where swarms of mosquitoes breed.
Villages like Maendeleo are at the center of a debate that has split malaria fighters: how to distribute mosquito nets.
( Read More )
Essay: In a Lifetime of Sickle Cell, the Evolution of a Disease
By BARRON H. LERNER, M.D., The New York Times, October 9, 2007
Most sickle cell anemia patients do not live long enough to span generations of doctors. But Gladys Jacobs was around when I was a medical resident in the 1980s, and she is around now.
Her career — as a patient and an activist — demonstrates how the understanding of sickle cell disease has changed.
Gladys’s condition was initially misdiagnosed, as was all too common for sickle cell cases in the early ’60s. It was not until then, as the historian Keith Wailoo writes in “Dying in the City of the Blues” (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), that the disease “found its way into the public consciousness.”
When Gladys went to doctors complaining of joint aches, which were the common painful crises characteristic of sickle cell disease, she was met with skepticism. Doctors, she recalls, called her a faker.
( Read More )
In the Battle Against Cancer, Researchers Find Hope in a Toxic Wasteland
By CHRISTOPHER MAAG, The New York Times, October 9, 2007
BUTTE, Mont. — Death sits on the east side of this city, a 40-billion-gallon pit filled with corrosive water the color of a scab. On the opposite side sits the small laboratory of Don and Andrea Stierle, whose stacks of plastic Petri dishes are smeared with organisms pulled from the pit. Early tests indicate that some of those organisms may help produce the next generation of cancer drugs.
( Read More )
In NASA’s Sterile Areas, Plenty of Robust Bacteria
By WARREN E. LEARY, The New York Times, October 9, 2007
WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 — Researchers have found a surprising diversity of hardy bacteria in a seemingly unlikely place — the so-called sterile clean rooms where NASA assembles its spacecraft and prepares them for launching.
Samples of air and surfaces in the clean rooms at three National Aeronautics and Space Administration centers revealed surprising numbers and types of robust bacteria that appear to resist normal sterilization procedures, according to a newly published study.
( Read More )
By REUBEN KYAMA and DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, October 9, 2007
MAENDELEO, Kenya — Veronica Njeri, 45, says she has “never healed” since losing two of her six children to malaria 20 years ago, and she still feels vulnerable. While her oldest are adults or teenagers, and have presumably built up immunity to the disease, she worries about her youngest, Anthony, who is 4.
But since hundreds of free mosquito nets came to Maendeleo, her rice-farming village in west-central Kenya, “malaria epidemics have become rare,” she said happily, even though the village sits amid stagnant paddies where swarms of mosquitoes breed.
Villages like Maendeleo are at the center of a debate that has split malaria fighters: how to distribute mosquito nets.
( Read More )
Essay: In a Lifetime of Sickle Cell, the Evolution of a Disease
By BARRON H. LERNER, M.D., The New York Times, October 9, 2007
Most sickle cell anemia patients do not live long enough to span generations of doctors. But Gladys Jacobs was around when I was a medical resident in the 1980s, and she is around now.
Her career — as a patient and an activist — demonstrates how the understanding of sickle cell disease has changed.
Gladys’s condition was initially misdiagnosed, as was all too common for sickle cell cases in the early ’60s. It was not until then, as the historian Keith Wailoo writes in “Dying in the City of the Blues” (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), that the disease “found its way into the public consciousness.”
When Gladys went to doctors complaining of joint aches, which were the common painful crises characteristic of sickle cell disease, she was met with skepticism. Doctors, she recalls, called her a faker.
( Read More )
In the Battle Against Cancer, Researchers Find Hope in a Toxic Wasteland
By CHRISTOPHER MAAG, The New York Times, October 9, 2007
BUTTE, Mont. — Death sits on the east side of this city, a 40-billion-gallon pit filled with corrosive water the color of a scab. On the opposite side sits the small laboratory of Don and Andrea Stierle, whose stacks of plastic Petri dishes are smeared with organisms pulled from the pit. Early tests indicate that some of those organisms may help produce the next generation of cancer drugs.
( Read More )
In NASA’s Sterile Areas, Plenty of Robust Bacteria
By WARREN E. LEARY, The New York Times, October 9, 2007
WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 — Researchers have found a surprising diversity of hardy bacteria in a seemingly unlikely place — the so-called sterile clean rooms where NASA assembles its spacecraft and prepares them for launching.
Samples of air and surfaces in the clean rooms at three National Aeronautics and Space Administration centers revealed surprising numbers and types of robust bacteria that appear to resist normal sterilization procedures, according to a newly published study.
( Read More )
