research

This is the best article I've read on the Vaccine/Autism controversy. Some interesting points:

Research has soundly disproved the alleged connection, yet fears about vaccines continue to be a major risk to public health.

and

The CDC estimates that thanks to vaccines, we have reduced morbidity by 99 percent or more for smallpox, diphtheria, measles, polio, and rubella. Averaged over the course of the 20th century, these five diseases killed nearly 650,000 people annually. They now kill fewer than 100. That is not to say vaccines are perfectly safe; in rare cases they can cause serious, well-known adverse side effects. But what researchers consider unequivocally unsafe is to avoid them. As scientists at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health recently found while investigating whooping cough outbreaks in and around Michigan, “geographic pockets of vaccine exemptors pose a risk to the whole community.”

* I say debate with a grain of salt because there is no scientific basis for a debate

Now this would be amazing:

Scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have proposed a sweeping new theory of autism that suggests that the brains of people with autism are structurally normal but dysregulated, meaning symptoms of the disorder might be reversible

23andMe, the personal genetics company has begun a new program funded in part by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. They are now looking for at least 10,000 PD patients to provide genetic samples and answer questionnaires about their own health experiences.

23andMe takes DNA samples from individuals (people spit in a cup) and then help them read and understand the results. The information provided includes data about ancestry, inherited traits and disease risk. Because their service is web based, they can get both specific information about a person's background (phenotype) through questionnaires as well as their genetic profile (genotype) via the DNA samples. This makes them a perfect central repository for genome-wide association studies (GWAS).

By centralizing the recruitment of individuals, the lab work and the collection of phenotypic data, we believe we’ll be able to move beyond traditional hurdles and take GWAS to a whole new level that we’re calling Research 2.0. We think the study of human disease and drug response deserves the application of 21st century technology, including the use of social networking tools proving so effective in web-based sharing of information à la Facebook and YouTube.

They are working with the Michael J. Fox Foundation and the Parkinson's Institute. As a person with Parkinson's (PWP), I am happy about the study and hope it yields some interesting results. I have requested a discount code via this link at the Michael J. Fox Foundation and encourage any PWP to do the same. The cost will be $25 vs. the standard $399 rate, and you will get all of the standard ancestry, inherited traits and disease risk information as well as the ability to participate in a Parkinson's specific community on their website.

NPR science correspondent Joe Palca looks at the facts and fictions behind stem-cell science. This is a really good introduction to the debate.

Executive Order signed to reverse Bush stem cell policy:

President Barack Obama has ended former President George W. Bush's limits on using federal dollars for embryonic stem cell research, sending a clear signal, according to advisers, that science — not political ideology — will guide his administration.

Great news out of Barcelona:

Hospital Clínic, Barcelona is exploring an innovative cellular therapy that uses stem cells to treat Crohn's disease, a chronic genetic disease that affects 1% of the population in Spain and which has considerable impact on the quality of life of the patients. The procedure is based on an autologous bone-marrow transplant (when patients receive a transplant of their own stem cells) and now constitutes a treatment option to cure an intestinal disease that sometimes does not successfully respond to drugs and requires highly complex surgery that does not provide a cure.

With this therapy, in an average follow-up period of 6 years, 80% of transplant patients are in a phase of total remission of the disease and the remaining 20% have shown considerable improvement following the transplant, and are now responding favorably to drugs.

That is an amazing success rate and bodes well for Chrohn's patients.

The economic stimulus package that just passed the House and Senate includes a 34% increase in funding to 39 billion dollars for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). What is amazing is that

most of the money will go to pay for as many as 15,000 additional grants submitted by scientists at universities across the country.

Not that this will convince anyone after 10 years of scare tactics but

doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism

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One scary statistic:

Despite involving just a dozen children, the 1998 paper’s impact was extraordinary. After its publication, rates of inoculation fell from 92% to below 80%. Populations acquire “herd immunity” from measles when more than 95% of people have been vacinated.

I want to know where the peer review was for the Lancet and also what is this doctor's culpability in increasing the amount of measles outbreaks throughout the world.

More interesting work going on with stem cells. This research involves the reprogramming of adult stem cells for the study of a variety of diseases in a petri dish. The new stem cell lines will be made available to scientists. The diseases include: Parkinson's, Huntington's, Down syndrome, Type 1, or juvenile, diabetes; two types of muscular dystrophy, Gaucher disease and a rare genetic disorder known as the "bubble boy disease.".

The title says it all.

In a watershed moment for one of the most contentious areas of science and American politics, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration cleared the way for the first-ever human trial of a medical treatment derived from embryonic stem cells.

Geron Corp., a Menlo Park, Calif., biotechnology company, is expected to announce Friday that it received a green light from the agency to mount a study of its stem-cell treatment for spinal cord injuries in up to 10 patients. The announcement caps more than a decade of advances in the company's labs and comes on the cusp of a widely expected shift in U.S. policy toward support of embryonic stem-cell research after years of official opposition.

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