medicalcondition:leukemia

This Man’s Immune System Got a Cancer-killing Update - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/this-mans-immune-system-got-a-cancer_killing-update

http://static.nautil.us/12789_8b73f6e0233d36b602d3380b92c24767.jpg

William Ludwig was almost dead when he became Patient Number One in a radical new cancer treatment, one that’s just won the endorsement of F.D.A. advisors.Photograph by sebastianosecondi / ShutterstockWilliam Ludwig was a 64-year-old retired corrections officer living in Bridgeton, New Jersey, in 2010, when he received a near-hopeless cancer prognosis. The Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania had run out of chemotherapeutic options, and Ludwig was disqualified from most clinical trials since he had three cancers at once—leukemia, lymphoma, and squamous cell skin cancer. In a later interview, the scientist Carl June described Ludwig’s condition as “Almost dead.” Alison Loren, an oncologist at Penn, had been taking care of Ludwig for five painful years. If chemotherapy is (...)

New color-coding tool sheds light on blood disorders, cancers by tracking clonal stem cells
News Medical Life Sciences
▻http://www.news-medical.net/news/20161122/New-color-coding-tool-sheds-light-on-blood-disorders-cancers-by-tracki

A new color-coding tool is enabling scientists to better track live blood stem cells over time, a key part of understanding how blood disorders and cancers like leukemia arise, report researchers in Boston Children’s Hospital’s Stem Cell Research Program.

In Nature Cell Biology they describe the use of their tool in zebrafish to track blood stem cells the fish are born with, the clones (copies) these cells make of themselves and the types of specialized blood cells they give rise to (red cells, white cells and platelets). Leonard Zon, MD, director of the Stem Cell Research Program and a senior author on the paper, believes the tool has many implications for hematology and cancer medicine since zebrafish are surprisingly similar to humans genetically.
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“It’s like an RGB television set, where red, blue and green give you the whole spectrum of colors,” explains Zon. “In our system, the enzyme cuts out different parts —blue, for example, or green and blue — so the stem cell will end up a different shade of color. In this way, we were able to mark each stem cell being born with a different color, and then follow the colors through development and see how many stem cells of each color were present in the adult fish.”

Other scientists have developed tracking systems based on genetic “barcodes.” But these require dissecting the cells, so cannot analyze living, circulating cell populations.

a very strange fact about drug prices: They do not really exist

▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/this-drug-is-defying-a-rare-form-of-leukemia--and-it-keeps-getting-pricier/2016/03/09/4fff8102-c571-11e5-a4aa-f25866ba0dc6_story.html

This drug is defying a rare form of leukemia — and it keeps getting pricier - The Washington Post

List prices are nothing more than a starting point for bargaining between drugmakers and the companies that provide prescription drug benefits. The cost for patients varies widely, influenced by discounts and rebates developed behind closed doors and applied in #secret.

To track how Gleevec became a multibillion-dollar drug, The Washington Post used the median amount paid by privately insured patients and their health plans before discounts and rebates, an analysis prepared by health services researcher Stacie Dusetzina of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill using data from Truven Health Analytics.

https://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_1484w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2016/03/09/Health-Environment-Science/Graphics/2300-drugcost01xx-3drugs.jpg?uuid=XTQl0OY8EeWpzmgQVcegXw

#pharma #prix #santé #cancer

“They really don’t want this out”: The biggest Iraq War scandal that nobody’s talking about - Salon.com
▻http://www.salon.com/2016/02/16/burn_pits

Thousands of soldiers have suffered similar fates since serving in the vicinity of the more than 250 military burn pits that operated at bases throughout Iraq and Afghanistan. Many who haven’t succumbed to their illnesses yet have passed along the legacy of their poisoning to their children. “The rate of having a child with birth defects is three times higher for service members who served in those countries,” according to the book.

The impact on local civilian populations is even more widespread. Although collecting data in these war-ravaged areas is extremely difficult, the studies that have been conducted reveal sharp increases in cancer and leukemia rates and skyrocketing numbers of birth defects. The toxic legacies of these burn pits will likely continue to devastate these regions for decades.

So what are the “burn pits”? When the U.S. military set up a base in Iraq or Afghanistan, instead of building incinerators to dispose of the thousands of pounds of waste produced each day, they burned the garbage in big holes in the ground. The garbage they constantly burned included “every type of waste imaginable” including “tires, lithium batteries, asbestos insulation, pesticide containers, Styrofoam, metals, paints, plastic, medical waste and even human corpses.”

Here’s where the story gets even more infuriating. As a result of the privatization of many aspects of military operations, the burn pits were operated by Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR), a former subsidiary of #Halliburton, the company where Dick #Cheney was CEO before ascending to the White House. During the Bush administration, Halliburton made nearly $40 billion from lucrative government contracts (despite many corruption scandals), Dick Cheney and his corporate allies got incredibly rich, and the soldiers whose lives have likely been destroyed by this reckless operation… are pretty much screwed.

#fosses_de_brulage #crimes #états-unis #Irak

Cancer Cluster Strikes Chinese #iPhone Factory

#Apple is taking “very seriously” what may be a cancer cluster at its main iPhone production facility in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, across the border from Hong Kong. Thirteen workers, ranging from 19 to 24 have been diagnosed with leukemia; five of the cases proved fatal.

▻http://www.chinatopix.com/articles/10338/20140913/cancer-cluster-strikes-chinese-iphone-factory.htm

#travail #santé #maladie #cancer #smartphone #leucémie #santé_au_travail