Adventure Ausrama Blog

Ebola is still a world crisis. Though the overall rate of infected people has slowed, some pockets in Africa have increased infections. It could still spread to Europe, Asia and the US.  If it does spread this wide, control will be virtually impossible. Some form of effective treatment has to be found - fast. The blood of survivors has been seen has the most probable source of a vaccine. However, any form of treatment should be examined for its usefulness. In Australia a vaccine tested on monkeys holds out great hope. The Kunjin treatment has been created from engineering the Ebola virus protein. Monkeys were given the vaccine and they showed significant protection from the disease. Seventy five per cent of the monkeys kept their resistance. Much research was based on tests on rodents. Success on them did not mean that vaccines would work on humans, so tests on primates is beginning. Scientists must get a move on to create a successful vaccine. Ninety per cen

Have you ever seen a nurse cussing because she cannot find a suitable vein to insert a drip in the arm of a patient? These are daily problems that the medical fraternity must face. However, technology has come to the fore. There is a new scanner that pinpoints veins that are large enough to insert a cannula. The new device beams light just out of the infrared light range into the arm. It is absorbed by  deoxygenated haemoglobin in the veins. Thus, the veins light up and show the way. It makes life much easier for medical staff and is quicker. There are a lot of things just waiting to be applied to human activity. Technology is already available and it is a case of thinking of new procedures and making them real. Get a move on developers. The public is waiting! ✴ Technology by Ty Buchanan ✴ http://www.adventure--australia.blogspot.com/ http://www.tysaustralia.blogspot.com/ http://adventure--australia.blogspot.com/atom.xml . . . . . . . . . . . .

The government intends to ruin Australia's private medical insurance system. With privatization Medibank Private Health Insurance will become like all the other funds. The Commonwealth bank was once owned by the government. it is now just another bank. At the moment Medibank has two "branches". One (Medicare) refunds part of the fee charged by specialists, blood tests and various bills from hospitals. The other is a private health insurance fund. There is a problem here, however. Medibank and Medibank Private are both registered names held by the federal government. How can a public company and a private company use the same business name? One of these will have to change its name. People are being offered shares in Medibank Private. How long can this be allowed to continue? Isn't it illegal? Future shareholders must be told what will be done about this. A change in name will have a disastrous affect on the value of shares. There is no doubt that Medi

Australia is a lucky country. Its citizens have become much wealthier over the past 30 years. We have to thank the politicians for this. What? We most certainly do not owe it to politicians. Australia is richer because China has become richer and Australia is the main source of the minerals China needs to make all the exports which have been leaving that country in increasing amounts, by the year. The Labor Government had the money from tax collections horded by the Howard Government to bail Australia out of the impending recession. We don't have to thank Howard for this. The money should have been spent on hospitals and schools. The Coalition Government held the economy back even though it was doing very well. And Labor should not take all the credit for Australia not going into recession. The money was there and it spent it. The Coalition somehow lost the plot of governing. It most definitely should not have kept on blaming the states for the hospital crisis. The Coalition sp

Over recent years there has been a host of controversial claims about fish oil, calcium and glucosamine. The questions are do these supplements do any good and do they all have to be taken? Some doctors say take them and other GPs say claims about them are nonsense. Some tests have been done. It has still not been proven that taking calcium prevents deterioration of bones in old age. And there is no proof that glucosamine gets into joints thus reducing pain. Tests on fish oil offer some hope of benefit. During research into omega 3 (which is in fish oil) on young children a potential benefit came to light. It seems that premature birth is delayed when fish oil is taken. Omega 3 prolongs pregnancy. Subjects who took the supplement also had larger babies. Their birth date was later than predicted. Of course, this brings up another question: Are heavier babies healthier? As the cause of premature birth is unknown perhaps this benefit overrides the perceived consequences of la

Corneal transplants (grafts) are assumed to be very successful, but until now the procedure has not been fully examined. A survey of nearly five thousand patients, 4499 to be precise, was done. After a year 92 per cent of transplants were deemed to be successful. An astonishing 1,395 patients had failed results after seven years. Plain rejection was the major detrimental cause in a third of failed operations. Infection impacted on 18 per cent, with glaucoma affecting 9 per cent. A worrying point is that 10 per cent of recipients did not have any improvement in vision and only a fifth of these experienced rejection. Indeed, some had poorer vision. It seems too much time is spent on lessening rejection and not enough time is targeted at improving overall patient outcomes. Having to do the operation again is a real tragedy for a patient. He/she would not be in a positive frame of mind after a failure the first time. http://www.adventure--australia.blogspot.com/ http://www.tysau

An old joke: Do you want a new heart? Then get one from a gorilla - "grunt!" This is not a joke any longer. Australia has just given the go ahead for animal-to-human transplants. This is a turn around from the outright banning of such transplants in 2004. There are two conditions: one, a monitoring system must be in place: and two, there must be a patient register. New Zealand allowed transplants in 2005. The first "transplant" involved implanting insulin producing pig cells into volunteer diabetics. This change has happened when direct research on animals such as chimpanzees is being reduced because tests can more effectively be done in a test tube. Results in many instances are quite different for chimpanzees, for example. This was discovered in AIDs research when chimpanzees didn't get AIDs. They became carriers of the disease. Animals are proving more useful when material at a cellular level is transplanted. Using animals as hosts is far more beneficial

The medical community has just noticed a fact that many have known for years - Waiting a long time for an operation can lead to opioid addiction. It is easy to get opiates from GPs just by telling them that you are in excruciating pain and an operation is a long way off. Shane Jackson president of the Tasmanian Pharmaceutical Society says money should be spent on more pain management specialist. This is a waste considering they only tell patients to take paracetamol that does not stop strong pain. Setting up a data base will only lead to patients being denied opiates so they experience more pain and suffering. Blame the patients has always been easy to do. A data base will stop people getting morphine derivatives from all GPs. This creates an added problem. The solution is more medical staff and facilities to do more operations. Reducing the risk of opiate addiction can be solved by denying patients access to such drugs, Though they may turn up in the hospital emergency departme

What a cop out, medical "professionals" are now saying chronic pain is caused by a mixed-up brain. This cannot be the case when you have an open wound and it really hurts. They are saying we should not feel any pain at all. People with leprosy feel no pain and look what damage they do to themselves. Pain is functional. It stops one using a limb when there is damage to it. Otherwise, it wouldn't heal properly. Most back pain is caused by damage to the spine that cannot be detected with current technology and knowledge. Those "in the know" are now saying the brain rewires itself when there is an injury so that when the damage is repaired pain still continues. If this is the case then it is very selective. Why doesn't this happen when you cut your finger? We know if a limb is lost pain can continue, but saying the brain rewires itself after an injury is far too simplistic. http://www.adventure--australia.blogspot.com/ http://www.tysaustralia.blogspo

Superman or indeed cyberman could soon be with us. Artificial muscles that can hold thousands of times their own weight have been invented. The breakthrough has been made by a team from four nations: Australia, Canada, the US and Korea. Carbon nanotubes were first wound into yarn in Australia. This super strong material far exceeds the flexibility of other artificial muscles. This is not strictly new. It was done several years ago but now work is under way to apply the technology. The yarn is does not yet have enough mass to be used for arm or leg muscles. Ideally, better heart valves, pumps, and positioners could be developed. The yarn has an interesting property: it can be made into a helical structure that will rotate right or left. Applying an electric charge causes it to spin. This makes it easy to propel a tiny object along in the bloodstream for example. This new discovery could revolutionize medicine. http://www.adventure--australia.blogspot.com/ http://www.tysaustral

Kidney transplants could soon be a thing of the past. It will soon be possible to take kidney cells from a patient, reprogram them, then put the rejuvenated cells back in. Sharon Ricardo of Monash University has taken cells from a person's kidney and made them into progenitors that will develop into healthy kidney cells. In China kidney cells have been isolated in urine. These cells are perfectly okay for reprogramming. The process is called induced pluripotency. Transplanting the new healthy cells will also enable further study into the causes of kidney disease. Kidney transplantation is a drain on health resources worldwide. This new treatment will save millions of dollars. Success in treating kidney disease will lead to similar applications for other diseases. This could impact on health treatment in the future, revolutionizing health care. http://www.adventure--australia.blogspot.com/ http://www.tysaustralia.blogspot.com/ http://www.feeds.feedburner.com/AdventureAustral

What is a chimera? You can be a chimera and not know it. A chimera is the product of two embryos in one individual. A person with this "complaint" is absolutely normal and can live most of their lives without knowing they are "afflicted". They are usually diagnosed in a medical examination. A case in point was a woman who was found not to be the mother of one of her sons. Tests indicated that genetically the child was not hers. Further test, however, showed that she a chimera and the child was hers. Human chimeras are not common. In some species they are more the norm. In dahlia anemones, for example, it was noticed that their larvae were fused together like conjoined twins. Out of a batch of 27,169 young, 120 were visibly chimeric. Most of these died. The true chimeras live don undetected. It is believed that 90 per cent of young can be affected There may an evolutionary benefit from this. It appears that chimeras grow faster and are more aggressive than

It seems we can't win. New findings show if you are underweight or overweight dementia is on the horizon. Being skinny or fat from the age of 40 gives a high risk of dementia after the age of 60. The very high danger group are the obese. Considering most people in the West are overweight wouldn't this finding seem logical? If arteries can become clogged with fatty cholesterol so can the blood vessels in the brain. Obviously, hardly anyone in the scientific community has made this observation. No medical literature has ever made this bold statement. "Hey stop eating that jam donut you'll lose your mind!" Let's be rational. Medical research is good. It can highlight changes that people should make to their lives, but adding 2 and 3 to make 5 does not always show a causal relationship. http://www.adventure--australia.blogspot.com/ http://www.tysaustralia.blogspot.com/ http://www.feeds.feedburner.com/AdventureAustralia http://www.technorati.com/blogs/http://advent

Major medical advances are a long time coming. Development of a reliable blood sugar level monitoring method for type 1 diabetes is a case in point. It has been claimed as a revolutionary achievement. It consists of a monitor connected to an insulin pump. With all the money being poured into research this should have been done years ago. Heart surgery hasn't moved much further forward than the first transplant in South Africa decades ago. Stents are still the primary treatment. The number of heart transplant recipients remains very small indeed. Artificial hearts are still not safe enough for general use. Cancer shrinking techniques have been identified but they have not been perfected. DNA treatment is a long way down the track. Much hope had been raise over stem cell research. This has slowed right down. Surgical "tricks' have been done in one-off procedures. Getting them into general hospital systems is not happening though. Drug companies are pushing very expensive med

"Don't worry. The operation will be over in a jiff." http://vistacomputersolutions.blogspot.com/ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .