| Are med devices safe?
If you care about your own health and the health of family members, keep reading. The good news is that scientists and physicians are working tirelessly to develop new treatments to prevent and cure a wide range of diseases. But, new treatments usually come with risks, and the bad news is that scientific concerns about those risks are being ignored by the very people we depend on to keep us safe. After a three-year investigation of the FDA, our research center has found that the FDA makes it shockingly easy for companies to get their medical products approved. While the greatest public attention has focused on prescription drug disasters such as Vioxx, the most outrageous FDA shortcomings are for products known as medical devices - contact lens solution, heart valves, stents, implants, LASIK devices, and facial injections to make us look young again.
Join Sidney Lions Club in sight campaign
Everyone does it. We all take it for granted - sight. When you picked up the newspaper today, did it even occur to you that you may not be able to see the words, let alone read them? Probably not.The facts speak for themselves: One out of every 35 older adult is visually impaired; more than 150 million people need corrective eyewear to compensate for their refractive error; more than 9 million people over the age of 40 suffer from age-related diseases, including diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma or macular degeneration; and one child somewhere in the world will go blind every minute. Experts say that the world's blind population could double from 37 million to 74 million by 2020!Lions Clubs across the world know the challenges ahead, and because of this have coordinated Campaign SightFirst II, a worldwide fundraising effort involving Lions in more than 45,000 clubs to raise $150 million.
Over 600 hospitalized as opposition appeals for medical assistance
In a sign of the deteriorating situation the opposition has sent out an appeal for urgent medical supplies and funds to help meet escalating medical costs, food and legal assistance. The appeal from the MDC comes in the wake of what the party terms a vicious crackdown on its members since the planned prayer rally in March that was crushed by the police. According to hospital figures over 500 people in Harare alone are said to have been beaten up or tortured and the country's hospitals are said to struggling to cope with the numbers. Over 600 activists countrywide are thought to have been hospitalized.
Some of the injuries include eye damage, deep lacerations, severe blunt-force trauma to the abdomen, ruptured bowels, fractured limbs and skulls, broken ribs, shattered joints, gunshot wounds and extensive damage from blows to the back, shoulders, buttocks and thighs.
Genetic Enhancements Make Mice See Red
BALTIMORE, Md., March 23, 2007 -- Researchers have transformed the limited color vision of mice by introducing a single human gene into a mouse chromosome. The gene codes for a light sensor that mice do not normally possess, and its insertion allowed the mice to see colors as never before, a sign that the brain can adapt far more rapidly to new sensory information than anticipated. The work, by scientists at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and their colleagues, also suggests that when the first ancestral primate inherited a new type of photoreceptor more than 40 million years ago, it probably experienced immediate color enhancement, which may have allowed the trait to spread quickly.In research conducted by scientists at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, colored lights were used to show that the brains of genetically altered mice could efficiently process sensory information from new photoreceptors in their eyes.
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