People I would like to introduce to each other

[Plane]

Dr. Esteban Gonzalez Burchard, I would like to introduce you to Jasper Lawrence.

Puerto Rico baffled by high asthma rate

"What's a challenge is that Puerto Ricans are not all the same," said Dr. Esteban Gonzalez Burchard, director of the Center for Genes, Environments & Health at the University of California, San Francisco. "(They) are racially mixed."

Those with European ancestry are likely most at risk of developing asthma, he said.

No one knows for certain why Puerto Ricans suffer so much from asthma, despite decades of research.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101226/ap_on_he_me/cb_puerto_rico_asthma_enigma

"Asthma is huge in Puerto Rico," Gonzalez said. "Compared to other populations, it's extremely high."

Puerto Ricans, even when living in the same environmental conditions as other ethnic groups, still show higher rates of asthma, he said, which suggests that genes are at least partly to blame.
..........
Puerto Rico is a U.S. Caribbean territory where children are nearly 300 percent more likely to have the respiratory ailment than white non-Hispanic children in the continental United States. And this year, Puerto Rico has seen a jump in asthma cases, which health officials suspect might be linked to the heavy rains that have unleashed millions of spores
.......
Children with uncontrolled asthma can miss more than two weeks of school a year, often forcing single parents to forgo work. Even when children go to school, teachers have no training or resources to deal with an asthma attack, said Dr. Alberto Rivera Rentas, who researched the effect of fungi on asthma in Puerto Rico and works for the U.S. National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

People with asthma often feel like they are being suffocated and have a heavy weight on their chest. Some describe an attack as trying to breathe quickly through a very narrow straw. Jayyco says it's as if his throat is tightening but he doesn't say much more about it. "It bothers me," he says with a shrug.

In the absence of any concrete explanations for the high asthma rate, health officials in the capital of San Juan are bolstering an education program that aims to reduce the number of emergency room visits by teaching patients how to manage the chronic disease.

http://www.jasper-lawrence.com/

helminthic therapy, is a technique for treating the modern diseases that increasingly afflict the populations of developed or developing countries and which are rare or unknown in populations living in the kinds of conitions in which humans evolved.

Disease like allergies and asthma, Crohn's disease and multiple sclerosis, ulcerative colitis, psoriasis, and Sjögren's Syndrome, are almost unknown in the developing world, largely it is now believed by the hundreds of scientists working in Europe, the United States, Japan and Australia, on this subject because helminth infection, usually with multiple helminths, is still so common. Helminths, to prevent their destruction by our immune system, have evolved ways to turn our immune systems down. Because helminth infection, with multiple helminths, used to universal throughout our evolutionary history, our immune systems have evolved to account for their anti-inflammatory effect. Remove helminths, or worms, and their affect on our immune systems, and the result is an out-of-control immune system much more prone to chronic inflammatory reactions, causing allergies, asthma, Crohn's disease, multiple sclerosis, etc., etc., etc.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2009/07/22/are-hookworms-the-next-claritin/

Jasper Lawrence isn’t the typical salesman: He sells parasites for $2,999. People can purchase worms through his company, Autoimmune Therapies, where customers have the choice of swallowing “a dose of whipworm, or [applying] a Band-Aide of hookworms to penetrate the skin.”

Here’s how his wormy idea developed: Lawrence had been suffering from asthma and allergies, and after years of taking prednisone he decided to try hookworms instead. He got the idea from a documentary about a researcher who became infected with hookworm during a study of why people with the parasite never seemed to suffer from asthma and allergies. Lawrence subsequently traveled to Africa and walked around barefoot until his feet were infected.
Within a few months, Lawrence said his asthma and allergy symptoms dissipated. He stopped prednisone. He started to exercise without worrying about an attack and, as a result, he said he lost 40 pounds.

Seeing an untapped treatment, Lawrence decided to go into business selling parasitic worms to people hoping to temper autoimmune conditions such as asthma, allergies, Crohn’s disease, colitis and inflammatory bowel disease. He even has competition. At least one other online business offers patients worm therapy—all without monitoring by the Food and Drug Administration.

Perhaps the supply of clean food and water available in industrial countries has upset the balance that humans had established with parasites for millions of years. And now, without parasites around, scientists have suggested that our immune system can no longer fully develop, which might explain why we’ve become such an allergy-ridden nation.

[Plane]

 garin Says:
June 16th, 2008 at 5:32 am
Some species of tapeworm secrete a molecule that is phosphorylated by the human TGF-beta type I receptor. TGF-beta activates foxp3 in human T cells which has been suspected in the transformation to regulatory T cells (Tregs). Cannot help but speculate that is how some tapeworms evades the host immune system. And since the lack of Tregs is suspected in a handful of human diseases, one wonders if the lack of tapeworms could be partially responsible for some of those diseases.

The murine model of chemically induced colitis is reversed by inoculation with a murine tapeworm. This mechanism is block by neutralizing IL-10. Tregs secrete lots of Il-10.

http://www.jimmunol.org/cgi/content/full/174/11/7368

There are several phase II trials testing hookworm and pig whipworm for the treatment of human colitis, asthma and multiple sclerosis. Doubt anyone will ever conduct a tapeworm trial. Seems there is no getting over the “ick” factor with this one…

Poor Dr. Fujita.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2007/02/19/build-me-a-tapeworm/




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(Here’s a digression but a good one: some monogeneans give birth to offspring without releasing them from their bodies. Their offspring mature inside them and give birth as well. Like a hideous Russian doll, a monogenean may contain twenty generations of descendents inside its body! ["Kids, it's time you found a place of your own..."])

[Xavier_Onassis]

Plane, we can always count on you for some interesting and weird posts.

[Plane]

Plane, we can always count on you for some interesting and weird posts.

Thank you , I aim to please.

Or get your goat , whichever seems appropriate at the time.

[Plane]

Jerusha Stewart, I would like you to meet Hugh Hefner


http://yahoo.match.com/y/article.aspx?articleid=6057&TrackingID=526103&BannerID=722004

5. Give him his space
Sometimes, girlfriends just go MIA for awhile. They get so busy at work that they don’t return your emails. Do we give them flack for it? Nothing serious. But for some reason, the rules change for guys: We rail on them for not promptly returning phone calls, take offense if they want a guy’s night out. But remember, achieving a balance between “me” time and “we” time will make the time you do spend together even better. Bridget Cunningham found her relationship got so much mellower once she stopped stressing about where her boyfriend was every hour. “I don’t hold it against him when he wants to have his own time,” she says. “You don’t cut your friends off when they do things with other people, so why shouldn’t it be the same with the person you love? Meanwhile I’m free to go running off with my girlfriend and blab about girl stuff. We meet afterwards for coffee, and we’re both feeling refreshed and fulfilled by spending time apart…and that much happier to be spending time together again.”

Jerusha Stewart, a.k.a. The Last Single Girl in the World, reveals how to be singularly sensational in her book, The Single Girl’s Manifesta.

http://omg.yahoo.com/news/hugh-hefner-84-engaged-to-playmate-24/53006?nc

   The Playboy founder, 84, is engaged to Crystal Harris, his 24-year-old girlfriend and Playmate, a Playboy rep confirms to UsMagazine.com.

   It will be the third marriage for famous bachelor Hefner. He wed first wife Mildred in 1949 (they have grown children Christie, 58, and David, 55) before divorcing in 1959. In 1989, he walked down the aisle with Playmate of the Year Kimberley Conrad, and they went on to have sons Marston, 10, and Cooper, 9. The duo's divorce was finalized last year.

[Plane]

 Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf ,I would like for you to meet William Gibson.

Rauf said he hopes to see interfaith centers like the one he plans to include inside the downtown Manhattan Islamic center built all over the world. Each would be dedicated to fighting extremism and promoting better relations between people of different faiths and cultures.

Already, he said, he is exploring opening facilities in other American cities, as well as in Indonesia and Kosovo.

"We went to the brink, in a certain way," he said of last summer's tumult. But he added, "This crisis showed us what was possible. ... It showed us that there is actually hope. Hope for a better relationship between America and the Muslim world, both domestically and internationally."

Whether there is hope for the proposed center two blocks from the site of the World Trade Center attacks is unclear.

The superheated rhetoric of August and early September has died down, aside from the occasional downtown demonstration, and there appear to be no major governmental obstacles, but the $150 million project still remains on a slow track to construction.

The developer of the site has said groundbreaking is probably three years away. The nonprofit group that would run the center is still being established. A fundraising campaign has yet to begin. Developer Sharif El-Gamal has said he plans to borrow most of the money needed to build by selling a type of bond common in Islamic banking.

The timetable will give Rauf and his wife, the activist Daisy Khan, more time to make their case that a Muslim institution belongs at ground zero. They envision a 13- to 15-story facility with space for a health club, a day care center and playground, an auditorium for cultural events, art studios and galleries, a 9/11 memorial and a two-level prayer room with seating for a congregation of 2,000.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101209/ap_on_bi_ge/us_nyc_mosque_imam_5

[/quote]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism

The mass media will, on occasion, censor organizations involved in terrorism (through self-restraint or regulation) to discourage further terrorism. However, this may encourage organizations to perform more extreme acts of terrorism to be shown in the mass media. Conversely James F. Pastor explains the significant relationship between terrorism and the media, and the underlying benefit each receives from the other.
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There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is innately media-related.

—Novelist William Gibson