Thursday 02-16-12

GROW YOUR OWN MUSCLE TO MEND DAMAGED HEART

A REMARKABLE medical breakthrough has seen heart attack patients have their damaged heart muscle repaired with a stem cell injection.

The simple procedure that literally mends broken hearts brings the prospect of “science fiction” regenerative treatments for heart attacks a step closer.

The pioneering technique uses patients’ own cells to regrow muscle damaged by the heart attack.

It not only halved the amount of scarring on the heart, which is normally permanent following an attack, but it also led to the growth of new muscle.

The revolutionary trial results could transform the lives of millions of people suffering the devastating after-effects of an attack.

There are around 124,000 in the UK each year, and once heart muscle is damaged or weakened by an attack, the result can be heart failure which now blights the lives of 750,000 in Britain. The trials on patients who had all suffered recent attacks showed injecting them with stem cells from healthy tissue from their own hearts brought huge improvements to the damage done.

Professor Eduardo Marban, director of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles, who led the US team, said: “The effects are substantial, and surprisingly larger in humans than they were in animal tests.

“This discovery challenges the conventional wisdom that, once established, scar is permanent and that, once lost, healthy heart muscle cannot be restored.”

The study, which was chiefly conducted to evaluate safety, is published in an online edition of The Lancet medical journal. It follows a similar trial at Harvard Medical School and the University of Louisville whose findings were reported in The Lancet last year.

Future work will examine whether stem cell treatment can help heart attack patients who later suffer heart failure, when a weakened heart is not strong enough to pump sufficient blood round the body, causing breathlessness and exhaustion

Dr Shlomo Melmed, a colleague of Dr Marban’s, said: “This study shows there is a regenerative therapy that may actually reverse the damage caused by a heart attack.”

Professor Jeremy Pearson of the British Heart Foundation said: “It’s early days, and this research will certainly need following up, but it could be great news for heart attack patients who face the debilitating symptoms of heart failure.”

The BHF’s Mending Broken Hearts appeal aims to raise £50million for research into such regenerative heart treatments.

Stem cells have the ability to become virtually any type of cell within the body.

They can be harvested from mature cells in bone marrow or elsewhere, then transplanted back into a patient without fear of rejection.

‘We’re edging closer to the holy grail‘


PROFESSOR Peter Weissberg, medical director at the British Heart Foundation, said: “If you go back 20 years the thought of the heart repairing itself after being damaged by a heart attack was unthinkable.


“It was completely out of reach for the brightest minds working in labs around the world.

“Then, a decade ago, scientists in America discovered that a few cells in your heart, about one in 1,000, could divide. It was an exciting discovery because it offered hope that the heart might have the capacity to repair itself.

“If we fast-forward to the present day we’re edging closer to the holy grail of mending broken hearts.

“It’s apt that during National Heart Month we hear about a small clinical trial in which scientists appear to have reduced heart damage following a heart attack by injecting cells taken from a healthy part of the heart back into the damaged hearts.

“This is the most promising of a series of studies on the effects of cell therapy to improve the function of damaged hearts.”

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/302028/Grow-your-own-muscle-to-mend-damaged-heart

Preschooler’s Homemade Lunch Replaced with Cafeteria “Nuggets”
State agent inspects sack lunches, forces preschoolers to purchase cafeteria food instead

RAEFORD — A preschooler at West Hoke Elementary School ate three chicken nuggets for lunch Jan. 30 because the school told her the lunch her mother packed was not nutritious.

The girl’s turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, according to the interpretation of the person who was inspecting all lunch boxes in the More at Four classroom that day.

The Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs - including in-home day care centers - to meet USDA guidelines. That means lunches must consist of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home.

When home-packed lunches do not include all of the required items, child care providers must supplement them with the missing ones.

The girl's mother - who said she wishes to remain anonymous to protect her daughter from retaliation - said she received a note from the school stating that students who did not bring a "healthy lunch" would be offered the missing portions, which could result in a fee from the cafeteria, in her case $1.25.

"I don't feel that I should pay for a cafeteria lunch when I provide lunch for her from home," the mother wrote in a complaint to her state representative, Republican G.L. Pridgen of Robeson County.

The girl's grandmother, who sometimes helps pack her lunch, told Carolina Journal that she is a petite, picky 4-year-old who eats white whole wheat bread and is not big on vegetables.

"What got me so mad is, number one, don't tell my kid I'm not packing her lunch box properly," the girl's mother told CJ. "I pack her lunchbox according to what she eats. It always consists of a fruit. It never consists of a vegetable. She eats vegetables at home because I have to watch her because she doesn't really care for vegetables."

When the girl came home with her lunch untouched, her mother wanted to know what she ate instead. Three chicken nuggets, the girl answered. Everything else on her cafeteria tray went to waste.

"She came home with her whole sandwich I had packed, because she chose to eat the nuggets on the lunch tray, because they put it in front of her," her mother said. "You're telling a 4-year-old. 'oh. your lunch isn't right,' and she's thinking there's something wrong with her food."

While the mother and grandmother thought the potato chips and lack of vegetable were what disqualified the lunch, a spokeswoman for the Division of Child Development said that should not have been a problem.

"With a turkey sandwich, that covers your protein, your grain, and if it had cheese on it, that's the dairy," said Jani Kozlowski, the fiscal and statutory policy manager for the division. "It sounds like the lunch itself would've met all of the standard." The lunch has to include a fruit or vegetable, but not both, she said.

There are no clear restrictions about what additional items - like potato chips - can be included in preschoolers' lunch boxes.

"If a parent sends their child with a Coke and a Twinkie, the child care provider is going to need to provide a balanced lunch for the child," Kozlowski said.

Ultimately, the child care provider can't take the Coke and Twinkie away from the child, but Kozlowski said she "would think the Pre-K provider would talk with the parent about that not being a healthy choice for their child."

It is unclear whether the school was allowed to charge for the cafeteria lunches they gave to every preschooler in the class that day.

The state regulation reads:

"Sites must provide breakfast and/or snacks and lunch meeting USDA requirements during the regular school day. The partial/full cost of meals may be charged when families do not qualify for free/reduced price meals.

"When children bring their own food for meals and snacks to the center, if the food does not meet the specified nutritional requirements, the center must provide additional food necessary to meet those requirements."

Still, Kozlowski said, the parents shouldn't have been charged.

"The school may have interpreted [the rule] to mean they felt like the lunch wasn't meeting the nutritional requirements and so they wanted the child to have the school lunch and then charged the parent," she said. "It sounds like maybe a technical assistance need for that school."

The school principal, Jackie Samuels, said he didn't "know anything about" parents being charged for the meals that day. "I know they eat in the cafeteria. Whether they pay or not, they eat in the cafeteria."

Pridgen's office is looking into the issue

http://www.carolinajournal.com/exclusives/homemade-lunch-replaced-with-cafeteria-nuggets.html

Female Passengers Say They’re Targeted By TSA

DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) - Women passengers complain that TSA agents are targeting them for extra screening.

The Transportation Security Administration has a policy to randomly select people for extra screening, but some female passengers are complaining. They believe there is nothing “random” about the way they were picked.

A Dallas woman says TSA agents repeatedly asked her to step back into a body scanning machine at DFW International Airport. “I feel like I was totally exposed,” said Ellen Terrell, who is a wife and mother. “They wanted a nice good look.”

When Ellen Terrell and her husband, Charlie, flew out of DFW Airport several months ago, Terrell says she was surprised by a question a female TSA agent asked her. “She says to me, ‘Do you play tennis?’ And I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘You just have such a cute figure.’”

Terrell says she walked into the body scanner which creates an image that a TSA agent in another room reviews. Terrell says she tried to leave, but the female agent stopped her. “She says, ‘Wait, we didn’t get it,’” recalls Terrell, who claims the TSA agent sent her back a second time and even a third. But that wasn’t good enough.

After the third time, Terrell says even the agent seemed frustrated with her co-workers in the other room. “She’s talking into her microphone and she says, ‘Guys, it is not blurry, I’m letting her go. Come on out.’”

When TSA agents do a pat down on a traveler, only female agents are allowed to touch female passengers. But the TSA allows male agents to view the images of female passengers.

Ellen and Charlie Terrell are convinced that the extra screenings were unnecessary, possibly even voyeuristic. “I think it’s sexual harassment if you’re run through there a third or fourth time,“ responded Texas State Representative Lon Burnam of Fort Worth. “And this is not the first time I have heard about it,” said Burnam, who adds that a number of his constituents have voiced concerns about privacy.

CBS 11 News dug through more than 500 records of TSA complaints and found a pattern of women who believe that there was nothing random about the way they were selected for extra screening. TSA redacted the names of the passengers who complained, but here are quotations from several complaints.

•“I feel I was targeted by the TSA employee to go through the see-you-naked machine because I am a semi-attractive female.”
•“The screener appeared to enjoy the process of picking someone rather than doing true random screening. I felt this was inappropriate. A woman behind me was also “randomly selected.”
•“TSA staff ‘trolling’ the lines looking for people to pull out was unprofessional.”
•“After that, I saw him going to the private room where x-rays are, to speak to the guy on that room.”
•“I know he went to that room to see my naked body through the machine with the other guy.”
•“When I looked around, I saw that there were only women that were “told” to go through this machine. There were no men.”
•“Maklng American citizens unwilling victims of a peep show by TSA employees using full body imaging devices is an over-the-top invasion of privacy to which I strenuously object.”
CBS 11 News first contacted the TSA in mid-January to request a one-on-one interview on camera. A TSA spokesperson told us that no one was available for that kind of interview. The TSA held a news conference the following week. “Privacy issues is the main point,” said Amy Williams, Federal Security Director for Dallas Love Field.

At the news conference, the TSA announced that DFW and Love Field airports now have all-new scanning machines. The updated technology shows a only a generic-body outline which highlights potential threats. “With the old technology, we had to have an image room that was separate from the equipment,” says Williams. The older scanners, which create more detailed individual x-ray like images, are still used in 39 airports across the country.

“It just makes me wonder what’s going on. Are they doing this all over the country? They’re missing their focus,” said Charlie Terrell.

“You just feel like your privacy has been violated,” says Ellen Terrell.

Ellen Terrell told CBS 11 News that she did not file a complaint because she did not realize that she had that option. Passengers may not be aware that they also can opt out of the scanner by requesting a pat-down screening instead.

The TSA provided CBS 11 News with the following statement in response to our investigation.

“TSA does not profile passengers. All of our millimeter wave technology units including those in Dallas have been upgraded with additional privacy enhancements that no longer display passenger-specific images. Even prior to this upgrade, officers reviewing the images were located in a separate room and would have never seen the passenger being screened. To further ensure passenger privacy and anonymity, a privacy filter was applied to blur all images. The technology remains optional to all passengers.” — Kristin Lee, Assistant Administrator, Office of Strategic Communications & Public Affairs, Transportation Security Administration

A TSA spokesperson told CBS 11 News that it is not protocol to send a passenger back into a scanner more than once. He said the agency takes all complaints seriously and urges consumers to file complaints if they have a problem. He said airports store video of checkpoints for at least 30 days and complaints filed within that timeframe may be reviewed using the video. He added that passengers can notify a TSA supervisor on location to make a complaint.

http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2012/02/03/female-passengers-say-theyre-targeted-by-tsa/