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The United Nations World Victuals Programme warned today that
thousands of Chadians are continual out of food in the eastern border tract
with Sudan and face a desperate struggle to outlive unless different donations
meet the needs of a rising tide of people driven from their homes.

WFP had planned to feed 50,000 displaced Chadians, but it now estimates
that an additional 80,000 displaced people are in urgent need of assistance
in the East. The additional requirement for the next six months is 7,500
metric tons of food at a cost of US$7.5 million.

“These people were stilted to leave their homes with nothing but the clothes
on their backs,” said WFP Chad Country Kingpin Felix Bamezon. “They are
barrel dependent on announcer communities who can just feed themselves,
and their living conditions are going from bad to worse.”

Continuing conflict and instability in the region bordering on Darfur in
western Sudan has caused tens of thousands of bucolic Chadians to make off their
homes closed the times gone by several months. A recent WFP-led assessment found
approaching 130,000 displaced people living in makeshift shelters on the
outskirts of villages – almost three times the number expected. Nearly
half of these families were institute to be sternly prog insecure and in
actual sine qua non of assistance.

WFP is racing against time to pre-attitude as much nourishment as possible before
the rainy season, which is expected to start in past due June, making most
roads in eastern Chad impassable.

The vast majority of displaced live in makeshift shelters patched together
from straw or millet stalks, which will not survive the seasonal rains. One
in five families does not imperturbable bear a roof. Some have access to potable
bath-water or latrines, and resident health services are not able to manoeuvre the
unexpected satiety of new patients.

Nor are the supplemental arrivals the only ones suffering. With so varied new mouths
to feed, local host communities are being stilted to kill off their
livestock, and WFP fears that in the near future seed stores will start to be consumed as
itch and rising cereal prices take their toll.

“This is not a sustainable location,” said Bamezon. “Life in eastern Chad
has forever been precarious, but now tens of thousands of Chadians are being
pushed to the breaking particular. There is simply not tolerably food to go
around.”

More than 2,000 Chadian refugees and Sudanese returnees crossed the
Sudanese border from Chad into West Darfur in December 2006 and January
2007, highlighting how the calamity in Darfur since 2003 is now displacing
people from Chad — as indeed as in the northwest of the Central African
Republic.

WFP in Chad responds to the immediate needs of many displaced Chadians and
body communities through general comestibles distributions and supplying
agricultural tools. Seed shelter and nutriment-through despite-work projects are also
planned to helpers back up the livelihoods of the poorest towns and villages
in the region.

WFP feeds 225,000 Sudanese refugees in 12 camps in eastern Chad, and more
than 45,000 Central African refugees in four camps in the south. This most
recent displacement is part of a cycle of violence that has grown to
encompass Darfur, Chad and the Prime African Republic.

Before the latest augment in the numbers of displaced needing food, WFP’s
US$85 million Emergency Affair to assist Sudanese refugees, internally
displaced people, host communities and runaway-affected local people in
eastern Chad from January 2007 until June 2008 had received US$39 million,
leaving a shortfall of US$46 million or 54 percent.

Contributions incorporate the In agreement States (US$26.8 million); Canada (US$3.4
million); Netherlands (US$2.7 million); UN Central Emergency Response Stock
(US$1 million — CERF get a load of: ochaonline.un.org); Finland (US$922,000);
Switzerland (US$820,000); Turkey (US$400,000); France (US$256,000); private
(US$100,000) and multilateral (US$40,000).

WFP is the world’s largest humanitarian power: each year, we give food to
an average of 90 million poor people to meet their nutritional needs,
including 58 million hungry children, in at least 80 of the world’s poorest
countries. WFP — We Provide for People.

WFP Global Shape Feeding Campaign – For legitimate 19 US cents a date, you can
resist WFP give children in poor countries a vigorous carry to extremes at school – a ability
of fancy for a brighter days. www.wfp.org

The Healthiness Keeping Agency’s emission protection experts together with colleagues from research laboratories in the USA have published a paper in the Memoir of Radiological Protection 1 on how polonium-210 acts as a poison in the body.

Although the unfortunate death of Mr Litvinenko in London last year stimulated this work, the paper does not examine the particular circumstances of his death. Instead the authors review published scientific evidence accumulated over decades about the biological behaviour of polonium-210 and its deleterious effects at high doses, and they estimate how much would have to be consumed to give a lethal dose.

The authors conclude that polonium-210 ingestion of 1-3 GBq or more is likely to lead to death within a few weeks, assuming 10% absorption to blood (0.1 – 0.3 GBq). On reaching the bloodstream, it would be rapidly deposited in major organs and tissues including the liver, kidneys and bone marrow. The intense alpha radiation within these tissues would result in massive destruction of living cells, leading to a rapid decline in health. Anyone receiving such doses would show symptoms of acute radiation sickness syndrome, and death would eventually result from multiple organ failure. Remedial medical treatment strategies are unlikely to be successful once significant amounts of polonium-210 have entered the blood stream and deposited in tissues, within a few hours of ingestion.

This conclusion arises primarily from an expert assessment of available experimental data, supported by human data on the biological behaviour of polonium-210 and on effects of external radiation. There is only limited information on effects of polonium-210 in humans; the data from the Litvinenko case are not currently available because they are part of a criminal investigation.

Dr Roger Cox, Director of the Agency’s Centre for Radiation, Chemical and Environmental Hazards said, “The tragic death of Mr Litvinenko in London brought the attention of the world to polonium-210. Although it is widespread in the environment in minute quantities and is familiar to most radiation scientists, the use of polonium-210 as a poison is unprecedented in our experience. This paper is an expert review of the available scientific data on polonium-210 and estimates what is a lethal quantityâ€?.;

http://www.hpa.org.uk/  

A Canadian study has confirmed what parents have long suspected: dating, sexual function and riches use seem to promulgate teens sense older than they truly are. And, as adolescents get older, the interruption between their chronological age and their self-perceived age widens.

Researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, with assistance from the University of Victoria, surveyed a casually sample of nearly 700 adolescents from a contrivance-sized North American megalopolis and asked them questions relating to dating, sexual experience, smoking, rot-gut and antidepressant use. The participants, males and females between 12 to 19 years of age, were also asked how old they felt compared to their anyhow-copulation peers. Assess results indicated that, as is typical for teens, the sample felt older than their chronological maturity.

Kelly Arbeau, a doctoral follower in luny at the University of Alberta and co-author of the study, explained that she and her fellow researchers number out to find what’s behind the discrepancy between how old teens feel and how old they really are.

“We found that specific behaviors do clothed an effect on adolescents’ self-perceived majority,” said Arbeau. “For warning, having an older dating partner seems to give a teen a higher self-serving be familiar with of age.”

Sensual activity, first starting at an earlier mature, was found to have an important relationship to teens’ subjective ordeal of length of existence (SEA). “Sexual encounter is unequivocally the realm of of age behavior,” Arbeau explained. “So, when teens are having sex and their peers aren’t, it can make them manipulate more matured, more knowledgeable than their non-master counterparts.”

Smoking (in boys), higher liquor use and higher hypnotic use were also tied up to an older OCEAN. These results suggest an increasing gap between SEA and chronological age across the teen years as uninitiated people experience the normative changes associated with adolescence. People in their 20s guess fro the age they are or slightly older, but after age 30 and into old age, the regular person has an SEA that is younger than his or her chronological time eon. Adolescence is the only speck in the lifespan during which individuals consistently sensation older than they are chronologically.

As for the stock wisdom that girls aged earlier than boys, the results of the deliberate over seem to support that, with girls more reasonable to suffer older than are boys. This may shed some light on why companies are more likely to target teen girls than teen boys with products as soon as considered barely for adults.

The study appears in the June 2007 issue of the Weekly of Adolescence.

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Article adapted by Medical Communication Today from original press freeing.
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Friend: Isabela Varela

University of Alberta

Integrating the drink of drugs targeted to severe cancer proteins into current chemotherapy regimens to redeem the efficacy of systemic treatment is an important clinical goal at Fox Pursuit Cancer Center.

Fox Chase research presented during the 97th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Los Angeles has found that a new chemical agent, MCP110, has a synergistic effect both in vitro and in vivo when used with current chemotherapy drugs such as taxanes (Taxol and Taxotere) and vinca-alkaloid compounds such as vincristine.

This synergistic effect—in which the effect of two agents is greater than the sum of their individual effects—appeared when using the combination of MCP110 and Taxol on laboratory cell cultures of human Kaposi’s sarcoma and mouse models carrying human lung and colon cancer cells.

“Together, these findings indicate that MCP compounds have potential to be effective in combination with other anticancer agents,� the authors concluded.
Vladimir Khazak, Ph.D., now director of biology at NexusPharma, Inc., in Langhorne, Pa., and formerly a postdoctoral associate in the Fox Chase laboratory of molecular biologist Erica A. Golemis, Ph.D., presented the research in an AACR poster session. The work also appears in the March 1 issue of the AACR journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics (“In vitro and in vivo synergy of MCP compounds with mitogen-activated protein kinase pathway—and microtubule-targeting inhibitors�).

The work builds on prior findings published by the team in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which first identified MCP compounds, and demonstrated that MCP compounds have the ability to inhibit the growth of cultured cancer cells that depend on interactions of the Ras and Raf oncogenes—growth-promoting genes that can transform cells to cancerous ones if the oncogene is activated inappropriately.

The growth signals sent by these oncogenes use a well-traveled enzyme pathway called MAPK (mitogen-activated protein kinase). This pathway is responsible for cell response to various growth factors and is involved in the action of many cancer-causing genes.

A number of new cancer drugs in development such as MCP110 target this pathway to inhibit one or more steps in the growth signaling process. However, many established cancer chemotherapy drugs are cytotoxic—cell-killing—drugs that work in different ways, such as damaging their DNA or attacking the cells’ architecture. Several widely used drugs, including paclitaxel (Taxol), docetaxel (Taxotere) and long-time standby vincristine, take the latter approach, targeting important cell components called microtubules.

“Very few clinical agents are as successful by themselves as they are in combination,â€? Golemis pointed out. “Combination chemotherapies may use two drugs that either have the same target or two different targets. Another approach—the one we’ve taken here—is to combine a pathway-targeted drug with conventional chemotherapy.

“We’ve found that MCP110 synergizes both with other small molecules targeting the MAPK pathway and with multiple cytotoxic drugs. These studies predict that MCP110 is a potentially useful treatment agent for combination chemotherapy.â€?

In addition to Khazak and Golemis, co-authors include Fox Chase visiting scientist Natalia Skobeleva, Ph.D., of St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, NexusPharma chemistry director Sanjay Menon, Ph.D.(formerly associated with NexusPharma and now at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc.,), and NexusPharma executive director Lutz Weber, Ph.D.
NexusPharma, Inc., has entered into general agreements and has licensed intellectual property from Fox Chase that are providing the basis for its protein interaction technology and enabling the discovery and development of novel therapies by modulating protein-protein interactions with small molecules to advance the treatment of cancer through approaches based on non-cytotoxic mechanisms. In addition, the company has entered into a collaborative research agreement with Fox Chase enabling access to its renowned scientific expertise and first-rate research facilities.

A grant from the Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Pennsylvania supports this research along with the cancer-center support grant from the National Institutes of Health and an appropriation from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to Fox Chase Cancer Center.

http://www.fccc.edu/ 

Scientists at Albert Einstein College of Prescription of Yeshiva University have identified a small intracellular protein that helps cells commit suicide.

The finding, reported as the “paper of the week” in the January 16th print issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry , could lead to drugs for combating cancer and other diseases characterized by overproduction of cells. The research was led by the late Dennis Shields, Ph.D., a professor in Einstein’s Department of Developmental and Molecular Biology for 30 years, who died unexpectedly in December.

In response to stress or as a natural part of aging, many cells undergo programmed suicide, also known as apoptosis. Cancer cells often become immortal and dangerous by developing the ability to suppress apoptosis.

A decade ago apoptosis was thought to be directed solely by the nucleus and mitochondria of cells. Dr. Shields’ laboratory was the first to show that a cellular organelle known as the Golgi apparatus also plays a role in apoptosis.

The Golgi package proteins and other substances made by cells and direct them to their destination within the cell. A protein called p115 is vital for maintaining the structure of the Golgi. In earlier research, Dr. Shields’ group demonstrated that the Golgi’s p115 protein splits into two pieces early in apoptosis and that the smaller of these protein fragments-205 amino acids in length-helps to maintain the cell-suicide process.

In the present study, the Einstein researchers identified the smallest region of this p115 protein fragment that is required for apoptosis: a peptide of just 26 amino acids in length that exerts its apoptotic action by traveling to the nucleus.

“Dennis Shields was one of our most outstanding scientists,” says E. Richard Stanley, Ph.D., chairman of developmental and molecular biology at Einstein. “His efforts to uncover fundamental mechanisms governing how cells work has led to new ways of thinking about apoptosis, in particular, how the Golgi regulates this process.”

The paper, by Shaeri Mukherjee and Dennis Shields, is titled “Nuclear Import is Required for the Pro-apoptotic Function of the Golgi Protein p115″ and appeared in JBC Papers in Press on November 21, 2008 and in the January 16, 2009 print issue. Additionally, the journal chose the image from the paper for the cover and spotlighted the study’s first author, Shaeri Mukherjee, Ph.D., a former student in the laboratory of Dr. Shields.

http://www.aecom.yu.edu/home/default.asp