Environmental Medicine News

The News Review:

- Research Suggests Cause Of Neurodegeneration In Huntington’s…
- New pathways for autoimmune treatment identified
- Gun Safety in Homes
- Dallas Morning News | News for Dallas, Texas | Robert Miller |…
- Nutrition: Eating our Way In and Out of Symptoms
- Researchers Open Door To Potential Treatments For Type 2 Diabetes

Research Suggests Cause Of Neurodegeneration In Huntington’s…
Science Daily - Science Daily (press release) - May 30, 2006
Li, first discovered the protein HAP1 as a postdoctoral fellow in 1995. In previous articles, he has identified the importance of HAP1 to the normal functioning of the hypothalamus, a region of the brain that acts as a central switchboard to regulate feeding and other body functions. Earlier this year, Dr. Li’s group published an article identifying HAP1’s role connecting insulin to the hypothalamus in the journal Nature Medicine. "This protein is very important," says Dr. "When an animal does not have HAP1 it dies after birth.

New pathways for autoimmune treatment identified
innovations report - May 30, 2006
Delovitch and his colleagues at Canada’s Robarts Research Institute, including Dr. Mi, reported in Nature Medicine that using alpha-GalCer to boost iNKT cells and re-establish a healthy balance of good and bad immune cells prevented development of type 1 diabetes in an animal model for the disease. Mi and She say new iNKT boosters likely are needed because the action of alpha-GalCer somehow depends on individual genetic architecture as well as other factors. Under certain conditions, the drug can help or worsen an autoimmune disease by producing good or bad cytokines.

Gun Safety in Homes
Washington Post - May 30, 2006
ET to discuss gun safety in families’ homes. He also fielded questions and comments about the study. Miller, a physician with training in internal medicine, medical oncology and medical ethics, has been the Associate Director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center since the year 2000. Miller has conducted extensive empirical research in injury and violence prevention and is the author of more than 35 articles and book chapters on fatal and non-fatal violent injuries, including homicide, suicide, and other topics. Recent projects include analyses of the relationship between physical illness and suicide among elderly Americans, the connection between recent changes in rates of homicide and suicide among African American youth, the relative risk of suicide and suicidal behavior among users of different classes of antidepressants, the effects of firearm legislation on rates of suicide and homicide, factors influencing public opinion about the inevitability of suicide, and the association between rates of household firearm ownership and rates of violent death… If parents take the message of our paper seriously, they should reconsider the costs and benefits of having a gun in their home and, if they decide on balance they want to keep guns in their home, they should get a gun safe, keep the guns in the locked safe separate from locked away ammunition, and keep the ONLY key to the safe on their person at all times. Trust your children to be children — and protect them by assuming full responsibility for their welfare. Children should not be asked to betray their nature when we are talking about the difference between life and death. _______________________Washington, D. : This topic is a sensitive one for me: When my brother was 8 years old, in the early 80s, he accidentally shot himself with a police revolver my father had borrowed from a friend. The gun was kept in the top of our hall closet, in plain view and with no locking mechanism whatsoever.

Dallas Morning News | News for Dallas, Texas | Robert Miller |…
Dallas Morning News - Dallas Morning News (subscription) - May 30, 2006
Clair Kilby of Dallas, the Nobel laureate in physics in 2000, you may recall that Dr. Barry Marshall was a Kilby Laureate in medicine in 1994. In 2005, he won a Nobel Prize in medicine. Marshall an invitation to Dallas, where he will be toasted at a champagne reception Wednesday at the Meadows Museum on the Southern Methodist University campus. His Nobel resulted from his role in the discovery of Helicobacter Pylori, a bacterium that causes ulcer-like symptoms… It could be subtitled Awesome. It opened last Saturday at the former Science Place in Fair Park and will run through Aug. 20, introducing the new Dallas Museum of Nature and Science, the merger of the Science Place and the Dallas Museum of Natural History. Sponsored locally by Citi Cards, Einstein was organized by the American Museum of Natural History, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, a century after Albert Einstein’s annus mirabilis – his "miracle year" of 1905," says Monica Contreras, museum spokeswoman. The exhibition features facsimiles of Einstein’s scientific manuscripts, including pages from the 1916 manuscript of the General Theory of Relativity that are on public display for the first time in the United States. There are also letters and other documents from the Albert Einstein Archives at Hebrew University.

Nutrition: Eating our Way In and Out of Symptoms
RunnersWeb - May 30, 2006
Reprinted with kind permission from Colleen Huber. Visit her site and sign up for a free informative e-newsletter. Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food. - HippocratesWe truly live at a strange crossroads in human history. Over the last few decades, the human species has been hypnotized by the temptations offered by the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. The 1950s ushered in the “better living through chemicals” age. And we believed, and we bought and swallowed and injected and are still consuming them in massive amounts, and, most recklessly, injecting such chemicals as ethyl mercury, ethylene glycol (antifreeze), aluminum and formaldehyde into our babies as part of vaccines, without any prior safety testing… But the allopathic profession will be the slowest to catch on, just as most physicians of the early 20th century refused to believe that absence of certain nutrients could bring on such horrible diseases as scurvy, pellagra and beriberi. Then as now, allopaths were eager to lay blame for these diseases on microbes, until–surprise, surprise–limes cured the “limey” British sailors of their scurvy, and we saw that Vitamin B3 prevented pellagra, while Vitamin B1 prevented beriberi and Vitamin D prevented rickets. As usual, allopathy corrects itself long after the natural physicians are already healing patients. In fact, evidence now shows that even bubonic plague, which allopathy still attributes to bacteria known as Yersinia pestis, was more likely to strike those with low Vitamin C intakes. But what would possess a person to think that food could possibly be medicine?The first clue is the structure of our intestines. Whatever comes into the mouth later travels through miles of efficient tubing that extracts certain molecules from the food we eat, then converts them to one common molecule, Acetyl Co-A, from which the building blocks of the body are then made:Protein Glucose Healthy fats The intestines are great little machines, but not omnipotent. That is, they can convert food molecules to Acetyl Co-A, because food has familiar and malleable combinations of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen.

Researchers Open Door To Potential Treatments For Type 2 Diabetes
Science Daily - Science Daily (press release) - May 30, 2006
The researchers already knew that SHP-1 played a role in regulating the immune system. However, no one had previously taken the time to verify if this protein was involved in the regulation of metabolism. This is precisely what this team of Canadian and American researchers did, thanks to a series of mutant or genetically modified mice producing little or no SHP-1. "Our results indicate that these mice are extremely sensitive to insulin and, consequently, they are very effective in metabolising glucose at the level of the liver and the muscles," notes André Marette.