Categories
Cardiovascular
Diagnostics
Endocrinology
Health Insurance
Medical Devices
Mental Health
Nutrition
Oncology
Public Health
Sexual Health
Popular Articles

Black Men's Notion Of Masculinity Leads To Avoidance Of Health-Related Behaviors
African American men could be putting their health at risk by avoiding disease screening, in the belief that the results might threaten their masculinity. Because they prove their masculinity through their sexuality and sexual performance, seeking medical advice including HIV/AIDS testing goes against their notion of masculinity. Waverly Duck, a Post Doctoral Associate from the Department of Sociology at Yale University in the US, argues that current leading theories of gender and masculinity and health behavior models are not relevant enough to African American men and their distinctive notion of masculinity. His results1 are published online in Springer"s Journal of African American Studies.

Classifying Antiabortion-Rights Crimes As 'Terrorism' Unnecessary, USA Today Opinion Piece States
Scott Roeder, who is charged with the murder of abortion provider George Tiller, and James von Brunn, who is charged with last week"s shooting death of a Holocaust Memorial Museum guard, "appear to be murderers, not terrorists," Jonathan Turley, a professor of public interest law at George Washington University, writes in a USA Today opinion piece. Although "liberals denounced" the tendency of conservatives to call "every possible crime an act of terrorism" while former President George W. Bush was in office, now that there are antiabortion-rights and anti-Semetic suspects, "there is an insistence that these crimes must be treated as terrorism -- as if to call them "murder" or "hate crimes" would diminish their significance," Turley states. Many people who "kill strangers out of hate for their race or religion or some other association" are "loners or rogue operators who seek to satisfy a blood lust against different groups," Turley contends, noting that classifying a crime as an act of terrorism allows for a different types of prosecution, investigation and punishment. According to Turley, the "term "terrorism" once had a clear meaning before it was used as a point of emphasis to evaluate or distinguish certain crimes." The Bush administration"s broadening of the definition to include "any prosecution that disrupts a "potential" terrorism threat" served to further divert the term from its historical definition, he adds. Now, "many want to see terrorism investigations targeting antiabortion activists and other groups that use violent speech," Turley writes."We do not advance our efforts by classifying every hate crime as terrorism," Turley continues, adding that it would be "the terrorists who will benefit from our lack of focus" in the definition. According to Turley, the "fact is that even an authoritarian nation can do little to stop a determined rogue operator from walking into a church and killing someone like Dr. Tiller." Referring to "someone such as Roeder as a murderer does not diminish the crime or the victim" because "we do not have to call murder "terrorism" to take the crime or its causes seriously," Turley writes (Turley, USA Today, 6/17).
News of the day
Quantification Of Perfusion & Permeability In Prostate Using Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced MRI With Inversion-Prepared Dual-Contrast Sequence
UroToday.com - The dynamic contrast-enhanced dynamic susceptibility contrast magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-DSC-MRI) technique presented in the article(1) is based on a novel dual-contrast sequence. The sequence is a gradient echo sequence that uses a single inversion pulse and subsequent acquisition of two contrasts/echoes with different inversion and echo times. Inversion preparation increases the signal-to-noise ratio in comparison to other gradient echo sequences. The blood volume in the prostate is relatively small, i.e., approximately one percent, while the interstitial contrast-agent-enhancing volume is approximately 20 percent. Therefore, conventional imaging sequences fail to separate the low contrast agent signal originating from the blood from that originating from interstitial tissue. The first contrast/echo is acquired with a short echo time and is T1-weighted, allowing quantification of the total signal contribution while failing to separate the blood signal from the interstitial contrast agent signal.
Diagnostics

Animal TB "Tracker" To Speed Drug And Vaccine Studies

Johns Hopkins researchers have developed a novel way to monitor in real time the behavior of the TB bacterium in mouse lungs noninvasively pinpointing the exact location of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The new monitoring system is expected to speed up what is currently a slow and cumbersome process to test the safety and efficacy of various TB drug regimens and vaccines in animals. Plans are already under way for developing a similar system to monitor TB disease in humans. A report on the system appears in the July 16 issue of the online journal Public Library of Science (PLoS One). "Worldwide there are some 9.2 million new infections with TB each year, and new drug combinations are needed fast to treat increasingly resistant strains of the bacterium," says senior investigator Sanjay Jain, M.D., an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins Children"s Center and director of the Center for Infection and Inflammation Imaging Research in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Hopkins. "Because virtually all drugs are tested in animals first, the TB tracker will play a critical role in such preclinical studies." "This new way to locate and study the disease and its behavior in animals should speed studies of TB"s response to experimental vaccines, to new drugs and old ones and should accelerate our assessment of whether a treatment is working or not," Jain added. TB treatment in humans and animals takes much longer than treating other bacterial infections, so compliance with lengthy and complicated regimens can often be problematic. Also, some strains are already resistant to all drugs currently available, so finding clues to how the bacterium responds to drug treatment is essential. In mice, the tracker works by infecting them with a "designer" strain of TB, developed by the Hopkins team to absorb radio-tracing chemicals. The chemicals light up the germ and any infected tissues in the lung, permitting an image captured by CT, PET and SPECT scanners. Because the new system tracks disease progression over time within the same group of live animals, fewer animals are needed than in conventional animal testing protocols. The tracker will be useful for studying TB in larger animals, including rabbits, guinea pigs and nonhuman primates, whose TB infection mimics human disease much more closely than infection in mice. Co-investigators include: Stephanie Davis, Nicholas Be, Gyanu Lamichhane, Sridhar Nimmagadda, Martin Pomper and William Bishai, all of Hopkins. Primary funding for the study came from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with additional support from the National Institutes of Health. Johns Hopkins Medicine


Add your comment:
Name:
Site address: http://
Your message:
Enter today\\\\'s date, 2 digits
(spam protection):

© Copyright 2009