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Drug Fights Cancer And Tumors

Nov. 29 - When breast cancer spreads to other parts of the body, it can be deadly. But now a new drug that seems to be able to stop advanced breast cancer from progressing and even reduces the size of tumors.

About 10 years ago, Karen Pike got the news. The mother of two had breast cancer.

Karen Pike, Breast cancer survivor: “I don’t have any history in my family, so at 37, it was pretty scary. Our kids are 5 and 7, and I just went numb.”

Karen’s faith - and family - helped her stay strong. She needed the strength when the cancer came back three more times.

Karen Pike: “I couldn’t have done any of this without my family. I know that I couldn’t.”

Karen has also relied on a team of doctors - and is now part of a clinical trial on a drug called sutent. In a study, the pill shrank tumors by one-third or more in 15 percent of patients - significant because they had very advanced disease and didn’t have any luck with other treatments.

Doctor George Sledge says Sutent could be used as a frontline treatment for breast cancer that has spread.

George Sledge, M.D., Oncologist: “This holds out so much promise that I think if you are a physician dealing with breast cancer research you can only be excited about this.”

Karen’s only been on the drug for a month, but the lump in her neck has already drastically gone down in size - keeping her optimistic for the future.

Karen Pike: “Seeing both of my kids graduate from college, get married, have children, live a long life and be healthy for the rest of my life.”

A simple dream she hopes will come true.

Sutent is an interesting drug. It has also shown promise in treating gastrointestinal and kidney tumors when other treatments start to fail. Right now, right now, it’s just under investigation but could become FDA approved for certain cancers in the next year.

Researchers say, this drug is part of an entirely new class of agents and is working through mechanisms that haven’t been used before.

By :ABC7

Our sex education system, at this moment, doesn’t cut it.
But it’s not for want of trying. For there are many people working hard to improve what we teach young people about sex in school across this country.
And what the educational curriculum is meant to provide is important stuff: information about puberty, STDs, birth control, feelings, etc., etc. According to the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada (SIECCAN), over two-thirds of Canadians have sexual intercourse before they’re 20.
So it makes sense that schools are the place where standardized sexual health information is taught — the one place all kids pass to adulthood. But the problem seems to be the current goals for sex education are not realistic. Why?
A document prepared last year by the information council called Sexual Health Education In The schools: Questions & Answers, gives some answers.
“Despite declines in the teen pregnancy rate, close to 40,000 teens become pregnant each year and most of these pregnancies are unintended,” it says. “Sexually transmitted infection rates among Canadian teens are unacceptably high and have been rising.”
In fact, chlamydia rates climbed 41.9 per cent between 1997 and 2002 among 15- to 19-year-old females.
So though sex education in schools is essential, it’s not getting the job done.
Ann Barrett, sex educator with Toronto Public Health for 15 years, says the sex education’s aim is multifaceted. The hope is students will have the basic knowledge and skills to deal with sexuality by grades 9 or 10 when some are likely to find themselves in harm’s way.
“The ideal thing would be, and this is assuming that each year it gets taught by a teacher who is knowledgeable and comfortable with it, we would hope that they (students) feel comfortable being able to deal with sexual health topics,” says Barrett. The Catholic school board incorporates sexual education into one of five themes within a Family Life curriculum: personhood, relationships, sexuality, living in commitment and living in the world.
“We try to give them the skills on how to make a good moral decision,” says Ralph Peter, with the Toronto Catholic board’s Religious Education and Family Life Department. Is it working?
“I would say that we provide them with the foundations for that,” Peter says.
Problem is “the foundations” are usually all there is time for.
“Let’s look at the reality,” says Barrett. “If we’re looking at the school as a source of sexual health information, a student will get anywhere from maybe three to five hours in a year. … The amount of time that goes into the sexual education, we wouldn’t expect anyone to come out with everything they need .”
But our kids these days are living in a sexually saturated world, and it takes a little bit more than three hours to help kids sort through all the messages they receive about sex.
Still sex educators aren’t kidding themselves — they know what they’re up against.
“There’s just too much stuff in the curriculum,” says Barrett. “A teacher simply can’t accomplish all of it.”
The time allotted isn’t the only issue.
Some teachers just aren’t comfortable teaching what’s asked of them.
Stephanie Mitelman is a certified sex educator based in Montreal. She’ll be in Toronto next Friday delivering a training workshop called “Understanding Adolescent Sexuality and Teaching Sex Ed” as part of a cross-country tour with her teen sexuality initiative Sexpressions.
“Unfortunately there’s not enough money funnelled into this area,” Mitelman says. “I think there are a lot of teachers who do a wonderful job at sex ed. But a lot would benefit from additional training and resources.”
With all of the talk about abstinence-only sex ed flowing up from the States, and the constant concerns over budget cuts here at home, the chance that more funding will go to sex ed isn’t good. It then falls to family and other community members to fill in the sexual-information gap and Mitelman agrees.
It makes sense to scrutinize the sex education our children are getting at school. But let’s not forget about the ongoing sex ed they should be getting from the other adults in their lives.
by: MEGAN MCCHESNEY

Sex education alone is not enough to cut pregnancies and abortions among teenagers in the UK, say experts.
A Medical Research Council study, in the British Medical Journal, examined sex education in 25 secondary schools.
It found pregnancy and abortion rates among girls taught with an enhanced sex education scheme were the same as among girls given conventional sex education.
The authors say other sexual health strategies are urgently needed to cut the UK’s teenage pregnancy rate.
Patchy provision
The rate in the UK is the highest in Western Europe.
All schools in England and Wales have to teach sex education to 11-14-year-olds as part of the science curriculum.
In Scotland, schools are not obliged to provide sex and relationship education, so provision is patchy.
England has also had a strategy for reducing teenage pregnancy rates running since 1999, with a target of halving the under-18 conception rate in England by 2010.
Pregnancy rates among under-18s are currently at their lowest for 20 years in England.
Part of the strategy is improving the provision of sex and relationship education, which has sparked mixed views.
Some believe education will help and recommend children as young as 10 should be taught about contraception.
But others say it fuels the problem, encouraging children to be promiscuous.
Investigators from the Medical Research Council evaluated the impact of an enhanced sex education programme, known as SHARE.
The main difference from conventional sex education is SHARE’s intensive teacher training and focus on developing skills using role-playing, rather than simply providing information and discussing values.
For example, teachers are trained how to teach children skills so they can negotiate sexual encounters, handle condoms and access services.
Economic factors
The study, which focused on 25 Scottish secondary schools, found SHARE did have a positive impact on sexual health knowledge and quality of relationships, and was preferred to conventional sex education by both pupils and teachers.
But it had no impact on the number of pregnancies or abortions among school girls.
Lead researcher Dr Marion Henderson said: “It is clear that economic circumstances still largely determine the likelihood of teenage pregnancy.
“To have a stronger impact, alternative interventions should be considered.”
She suggested parents should be more involved in providing guidance to their children.
Director of the fpa (Family Planning Association) in Scotland, Tim Street, said: “SHARE and other sex education programmes like it are good. But they are just one tiny piece of the jigsaw.
“There are very few areas in the UK that are doing the whole gambit of information, services and education.
“Adults are not setting the best examples for children. There is also a severe lack of funding for sexual health.”
A Department for Education and Skills spokesman said: “Sex education is only part of the story.
“High quality Personal Social Health Education is a vital part of a successful strategy which must also include easy access to advice and contraception for young people.
“Our research shows that areas which deliver their strategies in this way have seen much greater successes in bringing down rates and our latest guidance urges all local authorities and primary care trusts to work in this way.”
By: BBC News

A new text messaging service allowing patients to make appointments for treatment at a time convenient for them is to be launched at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, London in the new year.
The hospital’s Genito-Urinary Medicine (GUM) and Sexual Health clinics will use the system to provide a 24-hour appointment service connected to the hospital’s existing database. The system is intended to reduce the amount of time patients spend waiting on the phone to arrange an appointment, and also help map and plan demand for sexual health services.
Dr Daniel Ivens, lead clinician in genitourinary medicine, said: “We will be piloting this project in January 2007 in conjunction with the DH. The idea is not to guarantee an appointment using the text service, but to try and manage demand for appointments, which usually ties up our phone lines.”
The service will give patients a specific number to text when they want an appointment. When the patient replies, the system will search the appointment database and find three available appointments over a 48-hour period. It will then sends these to the patient by SMS.
The patient can then choose which appointment they want and are provided with a booking reference. Their file is identified by their mobile number, which acts as a temporary patient number.
The system operates in two modes: a manually operated 24-hour booking service, and an automated out-of-hours service. The manual service is operated by call centre and or text message, and can provide a comprehensive booking service for all future appointments. Appointments may be booked by phone call, text message or by a browser interface. Booked appointments and available slots are uploaded from the system to the clinic software each half day.
The out-of-hours service operates makes available slots over the following 48-hours period viewable by SMS booking or via a web browser. Booked appointments and available slots are uploaded from the system to the clinic software at the start and end of each working day.
The system was jointly developed by software developers Software Medical, Avanquest and Computer Communications Ltd.
A spokesperson from Avanquest told E-Health Insider: “Texting is getting more popular in the UK. Twenty-eight billion were sent in the UK last year and research suggests that 98 per cent of them were read. It makes sense to use these for hospital appointments and the trial in the sexual health department should demonstrate this.
Dennis Armstrong, chief executive officer of Computer Communications Limited, told EHI: “Using text messages to allow the patient to choose their appointment and re-confirm their appointments will help save time, making appointment booking more fast and efficient, and saving both the trust and patients money on phone bills.”
By: E-HEALTH-MEDIA LTD

FAST-track testing and treatment for sexual diseases is to be introduced across north Manchester.
A £500,000 cash boost and new testing technology will see patients with concerns about their sexual health dealt with in less than 48 hours.
The rapid treatment will become available to patients across Bury, Heywood, Middleton, Oldham and Rochdale in the New Year, thanks to a centralised booking system for four clinics and new testing procedures.

TWO tablespoonfuls of dark chocolate a day is good for your health, a new study has found.
The sweet treat has a similar biochemical effect to aspirin and can reduce the likelihood of blood clotting.
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health made the discovery when 139 people were disqualified from a larger study looking at the effects of aspirin on blood platelets.

· Scientists predict bonding with aliens and animals
· Advances in physics could finally explain big bang
A limitless supply of spare organs, hard evidence for aliens and a machine that puts you in the mind of an animal.
These are some of the predictions about the world of 2056 by a batch of the planet’s most prominent scientists, including the psychologist Steven Pinker, the philosopher Dan Dennett, the astronomer royal, Sir Martin Rees, and the architect of the Beagle 2 Mars mission, Colin Pillinger.
New Scientist magazine has assembled their thoughts to mark its 50th anniversary, and high on the list was proof that we are not alone.

A visit from little green men in flying saucers seems unlikely by 2056, but the experts are convinced the universe will soon feel a less lonely place. Freeman Dyson at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton is undeterred by our failure to find any cosmic neighbours so far. He told the magazine: “That proves life is rarer than we hoped, but does not prove that the universe is lifeless.” Once we find proof of extraterrestrials, further discoveries will follow quickly, as we will know what we are looking for, he said.
Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State University in Tempe, speculated that we may not have to look far. “There could be aliens right here, under our noses. Most life is microbial, and you can’t tell just by looking whether a microbe is ‘our’ life or alien,” he said. “The search for terrestrial aliens has only just begun. If they are here, they could be identified soon.”
“How different might alien life be?” asked Chris McKay at NASA, “It might be as different as English and Chinese.”
Life on Earth will also be transformed, scientists predict, with farms designated to grow human organs. By 2056, even the most sophisticated medicine of the 20th century will begin to look barbaric.
There will be no need to take transplant organs from dead people, according to Bruce Lahn, a human geneticist at the University of Chicago. Instead, human organs will be grown in animals such as pigs. “When a patient needs a new organ - a kidney, say - the surgeon will contact a commercial organ producer and supply them with the patient’s immunological profile … One organ that is probably off limits though is the brain.”
Another way forward is drugs to regrow lost limbs and organs. “Advances in heart regeneration are around the corner, digits will be regrown within five to 10 years, and limb regeneration will occur a few years later,” Ellen Heber-Katz at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia told the magazine. “Within 50 years whole-body replacement will be routine.”
Fertility treatment and our understanding of sexual reproduction could see science transform sex just as the invention of the pill caused a revolution for the baby-boomer generation. Carl Djerassi at Stanford University, co-inventor of the pill, predicts that women will routinely extend their reproductive lifespan by a decade or more by storing ovarian tissue or eggs extracted in their youth.
Scientists also expect major advances in the understanding of sexual pleasure and sexual health problems, according to Beverly Whipple, secretary general of the World Association for Sexual Health. She told New Scientist of her hopes to see sexual health recognised as a universal human right. “Sexual violence and abuse will be eliminated, universal access to sexual health education will be promoted, and the spread of sexually transmitted infections will be halted,” she added.
Advances in particle physics, astronomy and astrophysics may finally shed light on where life, the universe and everything came from.
Nearly 14bn years ago, the universe exploded into being and has since cooled and expanded, leaving clumps of matter we see as planets, stars and galaxies. But the cause of the big bang, what existed before it and what fills much of the universe are still mysteries. “We can say with confidence what the universe was doing one second later, but our best theories all break down at the moment of the big bang. There is good reason to hope that this will change,” said Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist at Caltech.
Sir Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, hopes we will also know whether ours was just one of a series of big bangs. “The decades to come might very well be when the human race finally figures out where it all came from,” said Dr Carroll.
As science unravels the mysteries of the universe, humans will take their first tentative steps to set up colonies away from Earth, according to J Richard Gott, an astrophysics at Princeton University. “Establishing a self-supporting colony on Mars … would provide a life insurance policy against whatever catastrophes might occur on Earth,” he told the magazine.
It might not lead to an elixir for life, but by 2056, scientists anticipate unravelling the crucial complex molecular mechanisms that govern wear and tear in our cells, causing damage that manifests as ageing. Richard Miller, professor of pathology at the University of Michigan, envisages “the first class of centenarians who are as vigorous and productive as today’s run-of-the-mill sexagenarians”.
Sticking his neck out among the future-gazers is Daniel Pauly, director of the Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia, with predictions of a device allowing humans to experience the emotions and “fleeting, inarticulate thoughts of animals”.
Rather than ushering in an era of obedient pets and happy cattle, Dr Pauly sees it as the saviour of the oceans and the demise of meat-eating humans. “It would cause, obviously, a global revulsion at eating flesh of all kinds, and we would all become vegetarians,” he told the magazine.
By : James Randerson and Ian .

The National Consortium for Monitoring Reproductive and Sexual Rights (CONDERS), an umbrella group of 570 organisations and individuals dedicated to reviewing the plan’s operation, said that the most frequent failing is the lack of awareness about the programme on the part of the population at large. Monitoring was carried out in 14 of the country’s 23 provinces. In some, provincial authorities have added to the input materials provided by the central government, but in others this has not happened.
In general, the plan is working better in the provincial capitals than in the hospitals and health centres in outlying areas of the provinces. Among the problems found, there were allegations of the sale of intrauterine devices (IUDs), which the national State distributes to be fitted free, as well as the rationing of free contraceptive pills and condoms, which means beneficiaries have to make more frequent visits to the health centres.
In addition, there were problems involving inadequate training of health centre staff, who were blocking people’s access to benefits by insisting on unnecessary requirements, and failures to provide counselling on reproductive health, as required by law. The group also found discontinuity in supplies of some birth control methods, and an almost total lack of emergency contraceptives (the “morning-after pill”), which are guaranteed by law. CONDERS considered it a shortcoming that 95 percent of all beneficiaries were women, and that only 21 percent of the total were under 20 years old.
These figures suggest that the service has no effective strategy for reaching men, and particularly teenagers of both sexes, who should be the primary targets of the programme, the experts said. “We are concerned that more teenagers are not encouraged to use the service,” Dr. Mabel Bianco told IPS. She is the head of the Foundation for Studies and Research on Women (FEIM), one of the organisations on the CONDERS coordinating committee. In Argentina, one out of every six births are to mothers aged 15 to 19, according to the United Nations Population Fund’s Report for 2005.
Experts interpret this statistic as a sign of a lack of sex education and of access to contraceptive methods. One of the goals of the National Programme of Sexual and Reproductive Health, which began to be implemented in 2003, is to lower the teen pregnancy rate. But CONDERS found that in some provinces, teenagers inquiring about contraception were required to be accompanied by an adult, a condition that is not part of the project. According to the report, in some provinces young women only approach the sexual and reproductive health service after they have become mothers.
“Teen-friendly services are needed, where they don’t have to wait too long, or have to wait alongside pregnant women,” Bianco argued. She also said that a basic step towards attracting men to use the plan was removing sexual and reproductive services from the maternal and child health care area, and relocating them as part of primary health care. This change has been carried out at the level of national agencies, but has not yet been adopted in provincial health centres. Men are unlikely to visit obstetrics and gynaecology services, Bianco said.
That is why, in her opinion, the change of service area is essential. “It’s important to involve men, because contraception is their responsibility too, and the programme also includes prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, as well as uterine and breast cancer and prostate cancer,” she pointed out.
The CONDERS report has the support of the centre-left administration of President Néstor Kirchner. “The monitoring study was excellent,” Valeria Islas, coordinator of the National Programme of Sexual and Reproductive Health at the ministry of Health, told IPS.
“There are some problems with the implementation of the plan, and we are trying to improve it through better training and better distribution of birth control methods,” she said. According to the official, rather than publicity campaigns, what is needed is specific social work to empower potential beneficiaries to “stand up for their rights” in matters of sexual and reproductive health. This approach, through community organisations, “will broaden the strategies” for attracting participants to the plan, Islas said. After years of fierce resistance by conservative sectors linked to the Catholic Church, the programme was put into effect in 2003, after the law of Sexual Health and Responsible Procreation was passed.
The law recognises sexual and reproductive rights and guarantees freedom of choice when it comes to birth control methods. The law maintains that it is the State’s obligation to inform people about reproductive health, provide contraceptive methods and offer this service to teenagers without requiring them to be accompanied by an adult. Since then the number of participants in the programme has grown 18-fold, and the number of health promoters dedicated to this service has been multiplied by 14. The ministry said that between 2003 and 2005, the total number of women who had an IUD fitted at public institutions rose from 12,200 to nearly 112,000. Women taking oral contraceptives were up from 63,000 to 1.3 million, and those using contraceptive injections also grew in number from 2,400 to nearly 223,000. And in 2003 the programme distributed 31,150 condoms, a number that climbed to 601,000 in 2005. However, CONDERS found that there was resistance among health personnel to requests for contraceptives, and that they were reluctant to recommend IUDs or emergency contraception. Patients were not always treated with the respect they deserved, waiting times for appointments were overly long, and attention was focused on methods of avoiding pregnancy and not on other sexual health issues. In many cases, the services were “centred on women of child-bearing age,” and attention for teenagers, older women, men, and sexual and ethnic minorities was “poor or insufficient,” the study added.

The UK government has spent £4million on an advertising campaign to encourage young people to carry condoms on a night out. Using pictures of men wearing underpants that read ‘I’ve got chlamydia’, and other such unsavoury images, the campaign’s aim, according to public health minister Caroline Flint, is to make ‘carrying and using a condom’ among 18- 24-year-olds ‘as familiar as carrying a mobile phone, lipstick or putting on a seat-belt’.
Well, isn’t that nice? Another few million pounds of taxpayers’ money (apparently a further £46million has been pledged to the campaign over the next two years) spent on another tawdry and fruitless campaign encouraging teenagers to treat their sexual activities with the same degree of thought and planning as the university admissions process.
Flint points out that ‘some STIs [sexually transmitted infections] like chlamydia are on the increase among 18- to 24-year-olds and it is vital that we deliver strong messages about using condoms to prevent them’. But what is the deal with chlamydia, and what exactly are the government’s ‘strong messages’ trying to say?
Chlamydia is an unpleasant, often symptomless little disease that people can carry without knowing it, and it can be transmitted through sexual intercourse. It is easily treated through a course of antibiotics. Many argue that, if left untreated, chlamydia can lead to fertility problems for women in later life – although this effect is often exaggerated, and some, such as the fertility expert Lord Robert Winston, have disputed this link altogether. Chlamydia may well be on the increase among young people, but it is hard to know how much of this is due to increased awareness of the disease, through countless government-sponsored chlamydia-awareness campaigns, and the fact that there has been a national screening programme for chlamydia in place for the past few years.
There’s nothing about chlamydia itself that makes it a public health menace. But the symbolism of chlamydia as a public health message has grown year by year.
Over the past few years there have been numerous public health campaigns seeking to achieve what the Great AIDS Panic did in the late Eighties, and popularise the notion that Casual Sex Kills. Young people soon got wise to the fact that AIDS was not going to strike down British-born heterosexual teenagers, and as the predicted epidemic failed to materialise health authorities found that they could no longer make use of those attractive tombstone leaflets and other dire warnings of doom. So they focused on chlamydia instead – something that doesn’t kill you but might, just might, make you infertile if you’re a woman and fail to use a condom, and can spread silently, without your knowledge. It’s classic disease-as-metaphor stuff – chlamydia being the metaphor for the risks of casual sex, and condoms being the metaphor for how you protect yourself against those risks.
But in boosting the metaphorical cache of chlamydia and condoms, government campaigns subvert certain realities. For example, as Ann Furedi, chief executive of the abortion and advice service bpas has pointed out, as a form of contraception condoms are relatively unreliable, and promoting the use of condoms could possibly lead to a rise in unwanted pregnancies. ‘Historically, whenever there has been a shift away from hormonal contraception like the pill, towards barrier methods like condoms, rates of unplanned pregnancy have risen as a result’, says Furedi.
Unwanted pregnancy is a more immediate problem for young women than chlamydia – it isn’t symptomless, you cannot ignore it for longer than nine months, and dealing with an unwanted pregnancy is a much bigger deal than getting treatment for a bog-standard sexually transmitted infection. In this respect, condoms are not necessarily the responsible choice – and for the government to promote this form of contraception over all others is in many ways quite irresponsible.
Does this bother the health authorities? No. Because this is not a real health campaign so much as a symbolic moral campaign. And from AIDS onwards, condoms have suited the moralism of governments much better than effective contraceptive methods like the pill. The pill retains its aura of sexual liberation, of being ready for the moment – you take it every day so that a spontaneous sexual encounter will not be a problem. Condoms, on the other hand, might sometimes be rubbish at stopping pregnancies but they are a great symbol of the need to Think Before You Act – taking them with you on a night out, stopping mid-fumble to put them on.
Furthermore, the category of ‘barrier contraceptive’ sums up the attraction of the condom for our risk-averse times. A condom is a barrier between you and your sexual partner, symbolising your suspicion that the person sharing your bed is about to infect you or somehow hurt you. If your sexual partner is not wearing underpants reading ‘I’ve got chlamydia’, the condom assumes that the message is there.
When the government talks about popularising ‘strong messages’ to prevent diseases like chlamydia, the message it is promoting is not awareness of chlamydia, but fear of intimate relationships with other people. There is a shoulder-shrugging recognition that young people today sleep around, and while nobody in authority these days has the bottle to say that casual sex is wrong, nor can they accept that casual sex is all right. So they bombard young people with grotty little ad campaigns and insidious warnings of disease and danger, in the vague hope that when people do get laid they will do it with the requisite amount of doubt and guilt.
‘Improving the nation’s sexual health is a key government priority’, says Caroline Flint. Fine, when it means access to sexual health services to treat problems like chlamydia or an unwanted pregnancy. But when a significant part of ‘improving the nation’s sexual health’ means official warnings about what might be in our partner’s underpants, we should get our knickers in a twist.

By: Jennie Bristow