Possible cure for Prostate cancer

This is big news, especially since this is the most common type of cancer among men. A new drug, called Abiraterone, can suppress Prostate cancer quite effectively on 80% of the patients.

Prostate cancer tend to be fatal, with its victims suffering so much pain, some need morphine to ease it. Chemotherapy doesn’t always works. But now, there’s hope for these sufferers.

Also there’s possibility that this new drug can be developed into a cure for breast cancer - I believe among the most common cancer on women.

And remember that there’s also immunotherapy - killing cancer tumours completely, by using the patients’s own special white blood cells.

Hopefully these new findings can be soon mass produced / practiced, to help many who’s in suffering.

Of course the best course of action is always prevention. In case of Prostate cancer, as luck has it, having sex a lot can really help
Ladies, I’m sure you will be most happy, in this case, to help your husband to be able to avoid this murderous form of cancer. I’m positively sure about it (well, unless you have a deathwish for him, lol)

Enjoy !

Walking Fish on the Street

I thought I read the headline wrong. Turned out I got it right the first time.

Who would have thought ?

Catfish, or “Lele” in Indonesian, is a delicacy here. Lots of people love it. Heck, even my daughter likes it very much. Me? I couldn’t stand even the sight of it, brrr

But we never knew that it could survive on land, and even walk. Cool.

Wow… that’s all I could thought of when I saw the article. Friar Cesare Bonizzi has been singing heavy metals for 10 years now. His band, Fratello Metallo (Metal Brother, nice pun), has now begun to gain worldwide fame. In the Italy’s “Gods of Metal” festival, Fratello Metallo showed up along with the likes of Iron Maiden and others.

Reuters is even showing a video recording of our rockstar, singing his songs. Don’t expect loads of headbangs or jumping around the set though, remember the friar is 62 years old

However, he manages to do about 100 - 150 concerts a year. This is quite an achievement for a man of his age. Also his music is distanced from Satanism, he tried to make his lyrics to be positive. The heavy metal fans are taking this quite well - fans were shouting his name on the “Gods of Metal” festival even before he began his performance.

Quote :

“I am religious and I am a priest but I am not doing this to convert people to Christ, to faith or the Church, but for them to try to understand life, to be able to enjoy it. Nothing more.”

A unique man, indeed.

This is another big news. DNA match has been hyped up by US law officials as 100% foolproof method of identifying suspects. This is not what has been found by Kathryn Troyer, State crime lab analyst.

A full DNA set is absolutely unique for every person on Earth. But a DNA profile, a tiny sample of a person’s full DNA set, is not. Most DNA profiles are only using 13 markers.

Unfortunately, turned out that the law officials has been using the later, while giving impressions that they’re using the former.

That’s the first problem. The second problem is related to incorrect use of statistic when finding a match in the DNA database. If you think the first problem is bad enough, this second problem makes it worse.

And there’s a third problem - there have been cases where the sample DNA from the crime scene has deteriorated, so not even the 13 markers are usable. In a case, a person was (falsely) accused of a crime based on as little as 5 (!) DNA marker match.

Clearly the right action is to correct the ways the DNA database is being used. Now we have powerful computers, so using more DNA markers should be possible.

However, in this case (in USA), the law officials instead are trying to cover up the issue. Reason? I guess because this can cause old, closed, cases to be reopened again.

I say if it will serve justice, then they’ll have to bear with it.

Hopefully when we have DNA database in Indonesia, we can learn from these mistakes and avoid it. Here’s one hoping.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 8:23 and is filed under Etc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.