Speaking at a London girls’ school, Michelle Obama makes a passionate, personal case for each student to take education seriously. It is this new, brilliant generation, she says, that will close the gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be.
A very inspiring talk with the message that “everything is possible with education and hard work.”
Poliomyelitis is a deadly disease which may affect the central nervous system leading to irreversible flaccid paralysis of the legs. Since it strikes children at a very young age, affected children are paralyzed for their entire life.
Google’s philanthropic arm - Google.org is about to release a movie titled “The Final Inch” to document the historic effort to eradicate this disease from the planet. Once we succeed this will be second disease after small pox to be found only in history books (and/or some covert lab, somewhere in the world).
The Final Inch is a 38-minute film about the historic global effort to eradicate polio. Here, the story told is as much about the messengers as the message. You’ll meet Munzareen Fatima, one of the thousands of community “foot soldiers” across India working to sway reluctant families to vaccinate their children, and Dr. Ashfaq Bhat, who travels into the backwaters of India’s Ganges Basin by boat and foot to detect emerging cases of polio. Martha Mason and Mikail Davenport bring us into their lives and describe the paralyzing challenges of childhood polio, reminding us how endemic polio once was in the United States.
Filmed in high-definition (HD) in cinematic style — wide open shots to give a strong sense of place — The Final Inch captures their stories, and we hope it is both a tribute and an inspiration of hope. With a final push, this is a disease that can, and should, be eradicated finally.
The movie airs on HBO in 2009. Check out the film trailer:
Scientists have a discovered a gene called Npas4 that keeps brain activity in check. Targeting this gene may one day lead to drugs that can help autistic children.
Scientists say they have pinpointed a gene in the brain that can calm nerve cells that become too jumpy, potentially paving the way for new therapies to treat autism and other neurological disorders.
The brain is continually trying to strike a balance between too much and too little nerve cell activity. Neurologists believe that when the balance tips, disorders such as autism and schizophrenia may occur. They are not sure why neurons (nerve cells) go berserk. But Greenberg (Neurobiologist at Harvard Medical School) says he and his colleagues located a gene in mice and rats that helps keep neural activity in check—and may one day be manipulated to prevent or reverse neurological problems.
(Photo taken from Volunteer Boston)
Video: Autism Symptoms
Video: IAN Projects Video for Parents “If I could do one more thing”
Reference: Scientific American, Nature
Promote junk food, raise cholesterol levels and then prescribe cholesterol lowering drugs.
This is capitalism at its best. Can we fight it?
So if everybody hates the idea of giving statins to kids…..why don’t we restrict marketing junk food to children, improve the quality of nutrition at school, promote physical activity at school and increase funding for obesity prevention and treatment?
Your Child’s Lunch Box
What’s next?
Hamburger with a topping of statins!
Cheese fortified with statins!
Statin Water!…………..
Video: Reinventing the school lunch
Speaking at the 2007 EG conference, “renegade lunch lady” Ann Cooper talks about the coming revolution in the way kids eat at school — local, sustainable, seasonal and even educational food.
Reference: WSJ Health Blog, NEJM, Pediatrics Journal
In contrast to my earlier post, Measles vaccine is very effective and should be given to each and every child. Failure to vaccinate children is leading to to measles outbreaks which will increase in the future. Furthermore, the risk of contracting measles (with its attendant complications) far outweigh the risk of developing autism.
More people had measles infections in the first seven months of this year than during any comparable period since 1996, and public health officials blamed growing numbers of parents who refuse to vaccinate their children.
Many of these parents say they believe vaccines cause autism, even though multiple studies have found no reputable evidence to support such a claim.
Reference: New York Times, Center for Disease Control (CDC)
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