UK… Oregon… hospitals burn aborted babies for ‘green’ fuel

Photo via Wikimedia  -  Addenbrooke's Hospital, with its incinerator chimney on the left.

Abortion -  By Daniel James Devine  -  Posted March 24, 2014, 02:20 p.m. -  World

Government-run hospitals in the United Kingdom have been burning the bodies of hundreds of aborted and miscarried babies in incinerators designed to heat their facilities. The practice of including fetal remains among trash dumped into “waste-to-energy” furnaces has gone on for several years, and was uncovered in a Channel 4 Dispatches television news investigation that will air Monday night.

The UK Department of Health on Sunday proclaimed an immediate ban on the fetal incineration practice, according to The Telegraph. A department health official and member of parliament, Daniel Poulter, called the practice “totally unacceptable.”

Ten medical facilities operated under the National Health Service admitted they burned fetal remains along with trash, and two hospitals used the bodies in waste-to-energy incinerators. The Telegraph said Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge incinerated 797 babies under 13 weeks of gestation at its waste-to-energy plant, and told the mothers the bodies had been “cremated.”

The Addenbrooke’s incinerator is part of the hospital’s “Think Green” program to reduce waste and cut carbon emissions. According to the hospital’s website, the ash from the incinerator was scheduled to be used as a concrete additive beginning in July 2013. Addenbrooke’s previously provoked criticism in 2006 after news broke that the hospital was saving money by cremating babies in the same incinerator used for trash.

Another hospital, Ipswich, in the county of Suffolk, incinerated 1,101 bodies in its own energy plant. The hospital said the fetal remains had been brought from other medical facilities by a private contractor. Ipswich cremates the remains of babies from its own facility, but does not incinerate them for energy, a spokeswoman said.

“While the vast majority of hospitals are acting in the appropriate way, that must be the case for all hospitals and the Human Tissue Authority has now been asked to ensure that it acts on this issue without delay,” Poulter told The Telegraph.

Channel 4 found that 27 UK medical facilities have incinerated at least 15,500 fetal remains following abortions or miscarriages in the past two years, either for cremation or fuel purposes.

The disposal of fetal tissue following abortions is a secretive practice in the United States as well. Medical waste companies often collect and dispose of the babies’ remains. In other cases, abortion center staffers may bag and dump the bodies into waste bins—or FedEx them overnight to processing centers where the tissue is sold or given to researchers, as WORLD reported in 2011.   

What has this world come to? First Flavor enhancers… now fuel? 

Aborted fetuses from Canada were burned at waste facility to power Oregon homes

Horrifying: Bodies of Aborted Babies Burned to Power Homes ...

Video: Oregon commission orders stop on using dead babies to generate power 

Boycott PepsiCo… Here Is Why and Why You Should Be Concerned For More Than One Reason! 

Senomyx: Pepsi Ignores Criticism on Use of Aborted Cells in Research

Technorati Tags: Hospitals,UK,Britain,Fetuses Atrocities,Babies,Abortions,Greenies,Green Fuel,Oregon,Flavor Enhancers,PepsiCo,China,Senomyx,Wake-Up,Watch the Other Hand,Stand-Up

Second-Hand Smoke Proven Harmless -- Again

EIB/RUSH: James Delingpole writing in I don't know what.  I did not print out.  But I've heard the name Delingpole, and I know he's got credibility.  The bottom line is that passive smoking, i.e., for those of you in Rio Linda, secondhand smoke, does not give you lung cancer. 

Now, this is something that I, El Rushbo, have known instinctively my whole life.  Ever since the anti-smoking zealots got geared up, they have tried to pass off this silly idea that secondhand smoke can cause cancer as well, and it's always been laughable. The tiniest bit of common sense will tell you it couldn't.  But there were enough people scared about it, that believed it, but there's a new report publicized by -- are you ready? -- the American Cancer Institute.  (gasping)  Which will come as no surprise to anyone with a shred of integrity, decency, or intelligence, who's looked into the origins of the environmental tobacco smoke crisis. 

"It was a decade ago that the British Medical Journal, published the results of a massive, long-term survey into the effects of second-hand tobacco smoke."  Do you remember we had that survey and it got buried?  We publicized it.  UN, any number, there was no danger whatsoever attached to secondhand smoke.  Might not like it, might make you uncomfortable.  It was not and did not and could not make you sick.  And it got buried. 

"Between 1959 and 1989 two American researchers named James Enstrom and Geoffrey Kabat surveyed no few than 118,094 Californians. Fierce anti-smoking campaigners themselves, they began the research because they wanted to prove once and for all what a pernicious, socially damaging habit smoking was. Their research was initiated by the American Cancer Society and supported by the anti-smoking Tobacco Related Disease Research Program.

"At least it was at first. But then something rather embarrassing happened. Much to their surprise, Kabat and Enstrom discovered that exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (i.e. passive smoking), no matter how intense or prolonged, creates no significantly increased risk of heart disease or lung cancer."

Now, again, it's important to remember that the two guys who started this research were fervent anti-smoking zealots, and they were out to prove that secondhand smoke killed.  It didn't take 'em long to find out that not only did it not kill anybody, it didn't matter.  It didn't make anybody sick.  It didn't matter.  And then similar conclusions were reached by the World Health Organization, which concluded in 1998 after a seven-year study that the correlation between secondhand smoking and lung cancer was not statistically significant. 

That got buried, but we have always kept it available.  We can bring it back to life any time we want at RushLimbaugh.com.  So now we've got three different studies proving that there is no cancer risk, no heart disease risk to secondhand smoke.  Now, you might be saying, "So what, Rush? If people still don't like it, what, are you grassroots to bring back smoking in public?"  No, no. I'm not that unrealistic. 

Again, the lesson here is that you were lied to by a bunch of leftist busybodies. You were lied to in order to be forced to live your life the way they wanted you to.  You were being denied freedom.  You were being lied to and manipulated into believing something that wasn't true so as to impact the way you and everybody else lives, and you were converted into a member of the army of the anti-smoking who would go out and harass anybody else who smoked.  You were lied to, to further the lies of a bunch of zealots. 

That's the important point here, and who are these people?  They're leftists.  I don't care whether you're Phil Robertson or whoever. They will try, they will do whatever, they will lie to you. But their attempt, their effort is to control the way you live and what you think.  Now there's medical news today. I kid you not.  "Apple-a-Day as Effective as Statins" for whatever statins do.  What are statins for, cholesterol? Yeah, an apple.  Medical research.

I got the news. It's a news story.  An apple a day is far more effective than whatever prescription medicine you're taking.  But apples don't come with prescriptions and doctors can't be paid to tell you to eat one.  Well, I guess they could.  But who's gonna do it?  And you can't eat apples 'cause Meryl Streep said they're putting Alar on 'em, which is killing our kids. It was a big story on 60 Minutes. 

This stuff, I don't know, it's a bugaboo with me, folks. Because the left is made up of busybodies, or worse. Do you realize how many people are going through life believing things that aren't true, and it's affecting their enjoyment of life? It's affecting the way they raise their kids. It's affecting the way they live themselves.  It's so unnecessary.  That's what bugs me about it. 

Gotta take a break.  Well, that's for another day. 

I was gonna talk about cigars and cigar smoking, but I'm not gonna make this personal.

Related:

• UK Telegraph: Passive Smoking - Another Of The Nanny State's Big Lies
• RushLimbaugh.com: EIB Excerpt: Passive Smoking Doesn't Cause Cancer. UK Telegraph 03.08.1998
• RushLimbaugh.com: In Flip, World Health Organization Claims Secondhand Smoke Kills - 11.29.12

Sheep-eating plant to bloom for first time in 15 years

The national botanic garden in Wales has been cultivating a horrid, sheep-eating plant for 11 years, and now it's finally about to bloom.

Newsmax/Cross-Posted at Just One More Pet: It is not exactly Audrey II from the Broadway play "Little Shop of Horrors," but English horticulturalists say for the first time that a Chilean "sheep-eating" plant is ready to bloom in the Royal Horticultural Society garden greenhouse in Wisley, south of London.

The gardening charity told the BBC that very few specimens of the Puya chilensis were known to have flowered in the United Kingdom. Puya chilensis are known for using their sharp spines to snare and trap sheep and other small animals, which slowly starve to death.

The animals then decay at the base of the plant, acting as fertilizer. The horticultural society officials told the BBC it opted for liquid fertilizer to feed its Puy chilensis in the greenhouse.

The National Botanic Garden of Wales waited 11 years for its plant to bloom, though clumps bloom every April in the open on Tresco in the Isles of Scilly.

"I’m really pleased that we’ve finally coaxed our Puya chilensis into flower,"  horticulturalist Cara Smith told the UK's Metro.

"We keep it well fed with liquid fertilizer as feeding it on its natural diet might prove a bit problematic."

Smith told Metro just to make sure the plant behaved, horticulturalists are raising it in a remote portion of the greenhouse so it can remain out of reach of children. The plant has bright, greeny-yellow flowers on tall spikes above the razor-sharp spines.

"It’s well worth a visit but parents coming along with small children don’t need to worry about the plant devouring their little ones," Smith said in a news release by the horticultural society.

The society said the "blossoms are gigantic with each individual bloom measuring around five centimeters across and containing enough nectar for a person to drink. The plant’s taste for sheep has also proved its undoing in its native habitat where shepherds will go in search of the plants and set fire to them to protect their flocks."

Puy chiliensis can be commonly found in the arid coastal mountain region of central and north Chile, according to The Lost World Nursery. The plants are drought tolerant and can grow as tall as 10 feet, according the Lost World Nursery.

Technorati Tags: sheep,Chile,flesh-eating plants,Puy Chiliensis,JOMP,Just One More Pet,Scilily,National Botanic Garden of Wales,Royal Horticultural Society,sheep-eating plant,THITW

Obamacare's secret plan: Destroy and 'rescue'

Exclusive: Dr. Lee Hieb explains how health bill creates disaster – on purpose

WND: The real name of Obamacare – a name known only to a few policy wonks and politically correct medical students – Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or PPACA. With a name like that, who could object to it? Who would be against “patient protection” or “affordable” when it comes to a government-funded program such as Medicare? Really, who would want “unaffordable,” though that’s generally what we get in government spending programs? But what does “Affordable Care” really mean?

Although Obamacare is fluid, being rewritten hourly, as of this moment, the plan is to create “accountable care organizations,” or ACOs. These will be defined by geographic areas that contain a certain number of patients. Currently, for example, a pilot ACO blankets a large area of northwestern Iowa.

You the patient, at first, won’t know that you “belong” to the ACO. But the government has assigned you, if you are a Medicare recipient, to a specific ACO. The ACOs will then be held responsible for quality – as defined by government – and for cost containment.

I recently attended a pie-in-the-sky, rah-rah session given by the CFO of one of the new pilot ACOs. He went into great detail about the good deal awaiting those hospital systems that play the game well. The details, as he admitted, are somewhat lacking, as the rules continue to be written. But I got the big picture. The big picture is: This is a three-step shell game to bring about the death of private practice medicine in America.

Here is how it will work.

Step one: America will be sliced up geographically into ACOs, which will gather all sorts of patient-care data for the feds and will be paid a fee for service at Medicare rates. The ACOs will be lauded as the saviors of medicine and given bonuses for quality and cost containment. Currently, they are being offered a 50-percent cash rebate for any savings they bring about. Patients can choose to go anywhere for care, in or out of the ACO. Private practitioners outside the system will be “allowed” to keep practicing, they will not be forced to join the ACOs – that would be un-American – but these small practices will be unable to survive the regulatory burden of Obamacare. So, these doctors will retire early, or close up shop or simply go to work for the ACOs, where they will do better financially.

Step two: Once private practitioners are squeezed out of existence, there will be no competition. The ACOs will be the only show in town and totally under the thumb of the federal government. At this point, the bonus money will go away, and the feds will squeeze down payment to doctors and hospitals. (The CFO who spoke at our meeting may think the federal government is willing to leave free money on the table for him to pick up, but that only is doled out to favored political donors, not to producers. The bonus is simply another bribe historically given to businesses by government in order to make them vassals of the state … and businesses never seem to learn.) Small hospitals will have to consolidate under big ones or go out of business. At this point, to prepare for the final step, rumblings of problems in the ACOs will start.

Step three: As government reimbursements diminish and there is no private option, the system will fail to deliver adequate care. Patients won’t be able to get appointments or timely surgery, doctors will complain, hospital staffs will strike and in general the system will implode. Government, always ready to leap into the breach (and reminiscent of the precedent of the Reichstag fire), will declare a national crisis and push through emergency legislation – that is already in the system – to nationalize health care. Hospitals will be taken over by the feds, doctors and nurses and all necessary personnel will have no choice but to be government employees, and at this point patients will be assigned to the ACOs without any choice in the matter. At the stroke of a pen health insurance will cease to exist, and perhaps the companies who sold insurance will be placed in charge of administrating these ACOs. (This road is already being paved as big companies like Blue Cross are given government contracts to administer Medicare.)

Think this can’t happen? Even some of the ACO administrators admit they are being set up to fail. But fail to what end? To the goal which has been the goal all along: establish a national health service ala Canada or England or Sweden. This is not a medical or societal evolution; this is programmed incremental revolution, and we – like the Russians and French and Cubans – will pay the price, because when free market medicine goes, so goes freedom. The power that brings about this government takeover will not limit itself to medicine. It will consume every facet of the social and economic life of America.

Libertatem requiescant in pace.

Technorati Tags: Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,PPACA,Affordable Care Act,ObamaCare,WND,ACO,ObamaCare Surprises,ObamaCare secrets,socialized medicine,Britain,Canada,Sweden,health insurance

Will Sick Babies Be Starved to Death Under Obamacare?

Doctor describes “horror” of Britain’s socialist healthcare system

Paul Joseph Watson  -  Infowars.com  -  November 30, 2012

A physician has told the British Medical Journal about the “unique horror” of watching a newborn baby shrivel up and die under a cost-cutting system of socialized healthcare that withdraws feeding tubes from sick and disabled babies, a method that could be replicated in the United States under Obamacare.

After speaking with doctors who have blown the whistle on how babies are being starved and dehydrated to death in British hospitals, an investigation by the Daily Mail has revealed that the controversial Liverpool Care Pathway end of life regime is being used to kill disabled newborns and young children. It was previously thought that the method was only being used on elderly and terminally ill adult patients.

The method has been criticized as a form of euthanasia because its primary purpose is to kill off patients quicker so as to free up more hospital beds and resources.

One physician spoke of how parents who gave permission for their babies to be put on the ‘pathway to death’ were making the decision without properly considering the abhorrent reality of what dehydration and starvation does to the human body.

“I know, as they cannot, the unique horror of witnessing a child become smaller and shrunken, as the only route out of a life that has become excruciating to the patient or to the parents who love their baby,” the doctor writes. “I reflect on how sanitised this experience seems within the literature about making this decision.”

The doctor also dismissed the myth that the baby does not suffer during the process.

“Survival is often much longer than most physicians think…..Parents and care teams are unprepared for the sometimes severe changes that they will witness in the child’s physical appearance as severe dehydration ensues,” he wrote.

“Some say withdrawing medically provided hydration and nutrition is akin to withdrawing any other form of life support. Maybe, but that is not how it feels,” he wrote, describing the mixture of “compassion, revulsion, and pain” the care team had to experience in watching the baby slowly die.

Bernadette Lloyd, a hospice paediatric nurse, also revealed how parents are being coerced into agreeing to put their children on the LCP, and that she “Witnessed a 14 year-old boy with cancer die with his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth when doctors refused to give him liquids by tube. His death was agonising for him, and for us nurses to watch. This is euthanasia by the backdoor.”

“I have also seen children die in terrible thirst because fluids are withdrawn from them until they die,” added Lloyd.

Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), now under independent investigation by order of government ministers, is a process whereby a doctor identifies a patient who is likely to die and that patient is then heavily sedated while treatment is withdrawn, “including the provision of water and nourishment by tube.”

The investigation into LCP will “look at whether cash payments to hospitals to hit death pathway targets have influenced doctors’ decisions” to put patients on the ‘pathway to death’.

In a recent exposé, Patrick Pullicino, a consultant neurologist for East Kent Hospitals and professor of clinical neurosciences at the University of Kent, revealed that of the 450,000 patients who die annually under the care of the NHS, 130,000 of them were on the Liverpool Care Pathway.

“If we accept the Liverpool Care Pathway we accept that euthanasia is part of the standard way of dying as it is now associated with 29 per cent of NHS deaths,” Pullicino said.

The Telegraph’s Gerald Warner notes that LCP represents “euthanasia by the back door.” Other doctors such as Dr. Peter Hargreaves have highlighted the fact that patients taken off LCP have gone on to live for “significant amounts of time.”

Because death occurs on average within 33 hours of a patient being put on LCP, the cost difference between two days of morphine and treatment of a condition for months or even years means the NHS is literally euthanising people to save money.

“In fact, Hargreaves noted, some patients may exhibit signs of dying when their bodies are merely reacting to sedation combined with dehydration and then “be wrongly put on the pathway.” Once a patient is sedated under the LCP, University of London geriatrics professor P.H. Millard told the Telegraph, “it is much harder to see that a patient is getting better.”

“Pullicino echoed many of these sentiments, saying that “patients are frequently put on the pathway without a proper analysis of their condition,” that “predicting death” at a specific time “is not possible scientifically,” and that, as a result, “very likely many patients who could live substantially longer are being killed by the LCP.”

Could a similar system of euthanasia become commonplace in America under Obamacare?

President Obama has repeatedly expressed his support for the Medicare Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), a group of doctors that would make decisions on cost cutting measures under Obamacare. Opponents of government-run healthcare have dubbed this a system of “death panels” that would have the power to refuse treatment to the elderly or severely ill patients, a de-facto form of mandatory euthanasia.

Last month, Obama adviser Steven Rattner acknowledged that rationed healthcare would be part of Obamacare, brazenly stating, “We need death panels.”

The idea that “death panels” would be introduced through Obamacare as a means of rationing healthcare was also discussed during an Aspen Institute conference in 2010 when Obama supporter Bill Gates argued that money should not be spent on treating the elderly.

During a question and answer session, Gates implied that elderly patients undergoing expensive health care treatments should be killed and the money spent elsewhere.

Gates said there was a “lack of willingness” to consider the question of choosing between “spending a million dollars on that last three months of life for that patient” or laying off ten teachers.

“But that’s called the death panel and you’re not supposed to have that discussion,” added Gates.

This eugenicist mindset was also evident in a paper published earlier this year in the Journal of Medical Ethics by Alberto Giubilini of Monash University in Melbourne and Francesca Minerva at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne which argued that abortion should be extended to make the killing of newborn babies permissible, even if the baby is perfectly healthy.

Allowing patients to die via the horrifically slow and painful method of dehydration and starvation is not just restricted to the elderly and sick or disabled babies.

In a series of best-selling books, author and bioethics expert Wesley J. Smith has exposed how adults in the United States who regain consciousness after being comatose and are able to exhibit physical and emotional responses are also being starved and dehydrated to death.

If America mimics Britain’s notoriously bad socialized healthcare system, thousands upon thousands of sick babies will likely be left to die excruciatingly painful deaths in the name of cost-cutting measures that amount to nothing less than a cruel and inhumane death sentence.

*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News.

1. Related:
2. Elderly To Be Euthanized Under Obamacare?
3. Top UK doctor’s chilling claim: The NHS kills off 130,000 elderly patients every year
4. Elderly Woman Left to Die Under Britain’s Death Care System
5. Why My Doctor Hates Obamacare
6. Death on wheels: Dutch to send mobile clinics to euthanize people
7. Sick babies denied treatment due to corp. patent on gene
8. GlaxoSmithKline Fined Over Illegal Vaccine Experiments Killing 14 Babies
9. Sentenced to death on the NHS
10. Brit doctors admit practicing ‘slow euthanasia’ on terminally-ill patients
11. Using ultrasounds to determine gestational age could result in baby’s death
12. Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Obamacare
13. Doctors Agree: Their Jobs Suck, and the Government is Largely To Blame
14. Obama Embraces 'Death Panel' Concept in Medicare Rule
15. On the Road to Death Panels
16. ObamaCare for Seniors: Sorry, You're Just Not Worth It
17. “Death Panel” Three Years Later
18. Meet the ObamaCare Mandate Committee
19. Obamacare rationing panels an ‘immediate danger to seniors’: former AMA president
20. “Death Panel” Three Years Later
21. The Bilderberg Group’s Connection To Everything In The World – Updated
22. People of Faith
23. Obama Regulation Czar, Cass Sunstein, Advocated Removing People’s Organs Without Explicit Consent
24. Obama’s "Science Czar" Advocates De-Developing the US to World of Zero Growth
25. Video: More Scary Stuff From Obama’s Science Czar
26. Holdren Says Constitution Backs Compulsory Abortion
27. Holdren: Seize Babies Born to Unwed Women
28. List of Obama’s Czars Plus Two – Updated: 8.18.09 – Remember when the Czars were the hot topic… but they overwhelmed us and forgot them to do they scary dirty jobs…
29. Science Czar John P. Holdren – Updated 9.2.09
30. Meet Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel: Deny Coverage to Elderly an Disabled for the Greater Good – But don’t forget… Sarah Palin was crazy…
31. Complete Lives System by Ezekial Emanuel
32. ObamaCare… the Kiss of Death - Collection of OBAMA SCARE - Articles U CAN NOT MISS!
33. Obama Embraces 'Death Panel' Concept in Medicare Rule
34. Obamacare to Herd Disabled Seniors to Bare-Bones Medicaid Plans
35. "People 70 and over will not be treated under Obamacare… and you thought DEATH PANELS were gone"– Updated
36. Soylent Green Anyone???
37. Great Grandmother Mary Allen Hardison: 101-Year-Old Woman Breaks Guinness World Record... Oldest Female to Paraglide Tandem
38. Go Granny Go!!
39. Seniors Left Behind?
40. The 'kill granny' bill
41. The Return of Mediscare
42. Checkout: ObamaCare Survival Guide

Technorati Tags: ObamaCare,death panels,Sarah Palin was right,watch the other hand,Big Brother,repeal and replace ObamaCare,Socialized Medicine,Britain,babies,sick babies,seniors,elderly,special needs

The NHS Rationing Crisis

Any liberal who, during the ObamaCare debate, extolled the virtues of a single payer system like the NHS has reason to be discomfited with the newest development in British public health care. In a bid to save money, hip replacements, cataract surgery and tonsillectomies are all being rationed by the NHS.

More specifically, according to The Independent:

* Hip and knee replacements only being allowed where patients are in severe pain. Overweight patients will be made to lose weight before being considered for an operation.

* Cataract operations being withheld from patients until their sight problems "substantially" affect their ability to work.

* Patients with varicose veins only being operated on if they are suffering "chronic continuous pain", ulceration or bleeding.

* Tonsillectomy (removing tonsils) only to be carried out in children if they have had seven bouts of tonsillitis in the previous year.

* Grommets to improve hearing in children only being inserted in "exceptional circumstances" and after monitoring for six months.

Some ObamaCare proponents hope and believe it's an intermediate step to imposing a single payer health care system on the United States.  To the extent that's true, the NHS disaster is a a valuable reminder that, after Republicans set about trying to fix the Obama economy, its top priority should be fixing the looming disaster that is ObamaCare.

By Carol Platt Liebau - an attorney, political commentator and guest radio talk show host based near Los Angeles. Author of Prude

Source:  TownHall

Related:  Uproar Over ObamaCare’s ‘Rationing Panels’ Intensifies 

*Age 78 will be the cutoff for many types of surgeries or procedures, no matter how healthy the person is otherwise, if ObamaCare is not repealed!

Rare Syndrome Causes British Teen to Sleep for Days at a Time

Two years ago, a bizarre ordeal unfolded for Louisa Ball and her family. The then 15-year-old girl initially came down with flu-like symptoms. While it seemed like a normal occurrence (after all, everyone gets sick from time to time), Ball subsequently contracted a rare syndrome called “Sleeping Beauty Sickness” (Kleine-Levin Syndrome). As a result of the affliction, the young girl sleeps — very literally — for days at a time. MSNBC has more:

Doctors don’t know what causes it or how to cure it — only that it strikes teenagers and goes away by itself after eight to 12 years…

…victims worldwide may number no more than 1,000. The victims live normally for weeks or months at a time, with normal sleep patterns and normal energy levels. Then, with little warning, they’ll go to sleep for days or weeks at a time. So far, Louisa’s longest bout in bed has been 13 days.

KLS stumps modern medicine and has yet to be successfully treated. Researchers claim that the disorder effects the hypothalamus, which is the part of the brain responsible for regulating appetite, sleep and libido. Thus, the disorder triggers sleep, aggressiveness and hyper sexuality.According to ABC News:

Mood stabilizers like lithium and hormone therapies help those with KLS around the edges, but they don’t ward off the extreme sleep.

“[When I wake up] I’m always confused as to what day it is, because I don‘t know how long I’ve slept for,” Louisa said. “And then when I realize, I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s a long time!’”

While some outlets first began to report on Ball’s ordeal back in early 2010, ABC’s Nightline covered the medical dilemma this week. Watch the fascinating report, below:

Video:  Sleeping Beauty Disorder  - 17-Year-Old Sleeps for a week at a time

This bizarre illness certainly impedes the young girl’s life, as she regularly sleeps through exams, family vacations and other important moments that most teenagers typically treasure. She and her family anxiously await the day when KLS no longer causes such saddening disruptions.

Source:  The Blaze

New MRSA Strain That Eludes Usual Tests Found in Cow’s Milk

British scientists have discovered a new strain of the drug-resistant germ known as MRSA in cow’s milk and some evidence that the animals could be a source of the infection in humans.

University of Cambridge researchers were led to the discovery while studying an infection of the animals’ udders, according to an article published today in the U.K journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases.Tests showed that people in Scotland, England and Denmark carried the new variant of MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, and that the bacteria can elude the usual means of detection.

Tests that search for the mecA gene, which enables the bacteria to resist treatment with some antibiotics, can miss the new, genetically different strain, researchers said. Relying solely on gene testing can lead doctors to prescribe medicines that are powerless against MRSA, the researchers said.

“It’s important that any of the MRSA testing that is based on detection of the mecA gene be upgraded to ensure that the tests detect the new gene found in the new MRSA,” said Mark Holmes, the lead researcher, in a statement.

While the new strain can cause disease in people, the risk of becoming infected is low, the scientists said. Further study is planned to determine how prevalent the new strain is and where it’s coming from, the researchers said.

Molecular Testing

Standard molecular screening for MRSA searches for the mecA gene. The new strain has a mecA gene that’s only 60 percent similar to the original version, leading to a false negative result when tested, the study found.

Testing should be updated to identify the genetic change, researchers said. The majority of testing in British hospitals is performed by seeing if the bacteria will grow in the presence of antibiotics, Holmes said.

“Even though this new strain isn’t picked up by the current molecular tests, they do still remain effective for the detection of over 99 percent of MRSAs,” said Angela Kearns, head of the U.K. Health Protection Agency’s Staphylococcus Reference Laboratory, in a statement.

The researchers also found evidence that cattle could be a key reservoir of the new strain of MRSA. The samples found in humans were either of a strain thought to be unique to animals or other types detected in cattle, the study said. In England, the researchers found a geographical association between human and animal isolates of MRSA. Pasteurization of milk will prevent infection, they said.

Staphylococcus aureas bacteria live on the skin and in nasal passages. Of the people with the bacteria present, about 1 percent have MRSA, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. MRSA causes infection when germs enters the body through a cut, a sore, a catheter or a breathing tube, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

MRSA Infections

MRSA infections can occur in hospitals or in otherwise healthy people who come into contact with the bacteria in settings such as locker rooms or daycare centers, the NIH said. Infections cause a red, painful, swollen area on the skin, and symptoms of severe cases include chest pain, chills, fatigue, fever and shortness of breath.

Serious MRSA infections acquired while in the hospital may be treated with medicines including Cubist Pharmaceuticals Inc. (CBST)’s Cubicin, Pfizer Inc.’s Zyvox and generic drugs such as doxycycline and tetracycline, according to NIH.

To contact the reporter on this story: Kristen Hallam in London at khallam@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Phil Serafino at pserafino@bloomberg.net

Dogs Being Trained to Sniff Out Diabetes

A canine's hyper-sensitive nose can detect tiny changes in blood sugar

AYLESBURY, England - Dogs are being trained in Britain as potential life-savers to warn diabetic owners when their blood sugar levels fall to dangerously low levels.

Man's best friend already has been shown capable of sniffing out certain cancer cells, and dogs have long been put to work in the hunt for illegal drugs and explosives.

Their new front-line role in diabetes care follows recent evidence suggesting a dog's hyper-sensitive nose can detect tiny changes that occur when a person is about to have a hypoglycemic attack.

A survey last December by researchers at Queen's University Belfast found 65 percent of 212 people with insulin-dependent diabetes reported that when they had a hypoglycemic episode their pets had reacted by whining, barking, licking or some other display.

At the Cancer and Bio-Detection Dogs research center in Aylesbury, southern England, animal trainers are putting that finding into practice and honing dogs' innate skills.

The charity has 17 rescue dogs at various stages of training that will be paired up with diabetic owners, many of them children.

"Dogs have been trained to detect certain odors down to parts per trillion, so we are talking tiny, tiny amounts. Their world is really very different to ours," Chief Executive Claire Guest told Reuters TV.

The center was started five years ago by orthopedic surgeon Dr John Hunt, who wanted to investigate curious anecdotes about dogs pestering their owners repeatedly on parts of their body that were later found to be cancerous.

At around the same time, the first hard evidence was being gathered by researchers down the road at Amersham Hospital that dogs could identify bladder cancer from chemicals in urine.

The move into diabetes followed the case of Paul Jackson, who told Guest and her team about his dog Tinker who warns him when his sugar levels get too low and he is in danger of collapsing.

"It's generally licking my face, panting beside me. It depends how far I have gone before he realizes," Jackson said.

Tinker has now been trained by the Aylesbury center and is a fully qualified Diabetic Hypo-Alert dog, complete with red jacket to announce himself as a working assistance animal.

Source: Just One More Pet

Posted: True Health Is True Wealth

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