disease (Page 7)

When big business mixes with medicine and/or public policy, the results can be good?or disastrous. In two recent cases, having to do with breast cancer in women and AIDS in men, it has been both.

In 2003, breast cancer incidence in the United States dropped sharply, and researchers now think that this decline may largely be due to the fact that millions of older women stopped using hormone replacement therapy (HRT) in 2002. Another study has been stopped early due to preliminary results indicating that medical circumcision of men reduces their risk of acquiring HIV during heterosexual intercourse by 53%.
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In everything from neurology to medicine, the West is now starting to listen to wisdom from the East. A major drug company is using Chinese medicine, which relies on natural ingredients, in its search for new medicines.

He describes how Chinese botanist Shen Jingui is searching for a tiny flower called the snow lotus, that has been used in Chinese medicine for centuries. For the last 30 years, he has been traveling across China in order to locate the rare plants and herbs that are used in traditional medicine. He then sells these to the giant Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, which is spending millions of dollars to finance the work of Chinese botanists who are searching out these plants throughout China.
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Scientists now think it was tuberculosis that killed off the herds of mastodons in prehistoric times. Researchers who have examined the skeletons of these gigantic beasts have found a type of bone damage that is unique to TB. What about TB in humans today? Public health officials are concerned about drug-resistant strains of TB that have arrived here from other countries. Like bird flu (if it becomes an epidemic in the future), the solution may be travel restrictions.
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A little over a year ago, we reported that the dangerous Marburg virus had spread to Europe. Researchers have long searched for the source of this incurable disease, which caused an epidemic in Africa in 1998?2000. They’ve been looking for a host, which will be an animal that spreads the disease to humans that come into contact with it, but which is not affected by the disease itself. Now they think they may have finally found it in a bat cave in the Congo.
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