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Well I thought I'd post some news stories that caught my intrest
Six Convicted for Infecting 426 Children With HIV
TRIPOLI (Dec. 19) - A Libyan court sentenced five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor to death on Tuesday for deliberately infecting hundreds of children with the virus that causes AIDS, provoking a chorus of Western condemnation.
The ruling, the latest episode in what experts say has been a deeply politicized case, could be a setback for Libya's efforts to improve ties with the West.
The children's families at the trial hailed the ruling as a welcome act of defiance of the West.
"Justice has been done. We are happy," said Subhy Abdullah, whose daughter Mona, 7, died from AIDS contracted at the hospital in the town of Benghazi where the medics worked.
"They should be executed quickly," Abdullah told Reuters after the guilty verdicts were announced by Judge Mahmoud Haouissa at the end of a seven-month retrial of the case.
In Bulgaria, Polina Dimitrova, a daughter of one of the nurses, Snezhana Dimitrova, told Reuters: "This is such a disgrace. I simply cannot believe such injustice can be done."
The six were accused of infecting 426 Libyan children, more than 50 of whom have since died, with HIV at a hospital in Benghazi in the late 1990s.
The medics had denied the charge and their defense lawyer said they planned to appeal against their latest conviction.
They were first found guilty in a 2004 trial and sentenced to death by firing squad. But the supreme court quashed the ruling last year, citing unspecified failings in the case, and ordered a retrial.
European Union Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini said he was shocked and disappointed by the ruling. Amnesty International condemned the decision.
Bulgarian Foreign Minister Ivailo Kalfin said: "The decision is deeply disappointing. The Libyan court did not take into consideration all the proof of the nurses' innocence."
Western analysts have said the case is embroiled in power politics and forecast a solution could take many more months.
Some analysts suspect Libya is likely to keep the six as bargaining chips until talks yield a financial payout from the international community to appease the children's families.
Haouissa did not say how the six should be executed but Libya's preferred method is a firing squad.
DEFIANCE OF THE WEST
Relatives of the children attending the hearing broke down in tears at the verdicts, shouting: "God is greatest."
Referring to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, relatives shouted: "Go ahead, our falcon, in defiance of the West."
The six sat calmly as the verdicts were announced.
"The verdicts will change nothing. we are innocent," the Palestinian doctor, Ashraf Alhajouj, told Reuters from behind the bars of the dock.
Luc Montagnier, a French doctor who first detected the HIV virus, has said the infections were first present in the Benghazi hospital in 1997, a year before the medics arrived.
The case has hampered oil producer Libya's rapprochement with the West, which moved up a gear when it abandoned its pursuit of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in 2003.
Washington backs Bulgaria and the European Union in saying the medics are innocent.
Tripoli has demanded 10 million euros ($13.11 million) in compensation for each infected child's family. Bulgaria and its allies have rejected this, saying a payout would admit guilt. But they are trying to arrange a fund for treatment at European hospitals for the children.
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has reason to free the six, analysts say, because it slows Tripoli's normalization of ties with the West after decades of being an outcast.
But freeing the defendants would put the focus on alleged negligence and poor hygiene in Libyan hospitals, which Western scientists say are the real culprits in the case.
The EU's Frattini, who has sought greater cooperation with Libya on migration control, said: "My first reaction is great disappointment. I am shocked...I strongly hope that somehow the Libyan authorities will rethink this decision."
Thats just horrible, condemming so many lives like that!
Is There a Barber in the House?
One Container Holds Shampoo, The Other Insecticide
(Dec. 19) - Attention is paid to hair.
In our culture the hair industry is huge — shampoos, conditioners, coloring, cutting, shaping, styling. For “hair-loss treatment” alone, Google conjures up 749,000 references. Some people undergo surgical procedures, sometimes uncomfortable and expensive, to implant hair.
Total hair loss is often an unfortunate and undesirable complication of the agents used to treat and cure cancer. Yet baldness — the hairless look — can for some represent spirituality and religion, or for others may suggest that they are athletic, smart, cool, reeking of testosterone.
Depending on where you are in your life, what you are doing, your age and sex, baldness is loved or hated — or just accepted. Baldness can be bought and bought off. But it is not a medical treatment, at least not since shaving the head for lice was stopped.
In one patient, however, shaving the head was life saving.
A 50-year-old woman was admitted to the hospital with complaints of severe weakness and difficulty breathing. She had been quite healthy until the afternoon of the admission, with no history of serious illnesses.
The doctors at the university hospital where she became a patient are known for using their brains. They also use their stethoscopes wisely, and observe closely how a patient looks.
On examination this one was sweaty and had pinpoint pupils, and her lungs were wheezy. But unlike physicians of centuries ago, doctors today do not regularly use their noses. (In the 18th century, doctors could make diagnoses of kidney failure, diabetes and liver disease by smelling a patient.) For this woman, the diagnosis remained obscure for the next hour as her breathing got more labored and she became comatose.
A tube was placed in her windpipe and she was attached to a breathing machine. Then an experienced nurse, with good sense and a good sense of smell, came to the rescue. The nurse noted that the patient had a peculiar odor, resembling garlic, most prominently from her hair. The unusual odor raised the suspicion of insecticide poisoning with organophosphates.
The patient was immediately treated with atropine and 2-PAM to reverse the effects of the poison, while blood was sent to the lab to verify the diagnosis. Each time she received the medications she woke and improved, but then lapsed back into a coma with increasing lung problems. Her skin was washed and her hair was shampooed several times with no lasting improvement.
Since the primary contamination seemed to be in her hair, her head was shaved. After that she improved rapidly, her medicines were tapered and she regained consciousness. Soon she was able to breathe on her own.
The lab reports verified that the nurse had been correct. The patient had been poisoned with an organophosphate insecticide. Now her doctors wondered, How did her hair become impregnated with insecticide in quantities to bring her to the brink of death? This was no casual exposure. She denied a suicide attempt — swallowing would have been more direct. Nor could it have been attempted murder — there are easier ways to administer poisons more covertly.
The answer came from the patient when she fully awakened. She remembered exactly what she had done before becoming ill: her usual activities, except that she had gotten her hair shampooed by a neighbor.
The neighbor, when contacted, was willing to bring in the shampoo. Chagrined, she showed up shortly, bringing two containers. One held shampoo. The other, a similar jug, contained an organophosphate insecticide. Both receptacles were the same size, the labels old and blurred.
I must have used the wrong one, she said, when told that her friend was just recovering from insecticide poisoning.
Organophosphates have a bad reputation, and quite correctly. They are extremely dangerous, even in small amounts, and are easily absorbed through the skin as well as the lungs. They poison an important enzyme, acetylcholine esterase, without which acetylcholine accumulates in the body, disabling muscles and nerves and important centers in the brain.
Organophosphates are frequently used in agriculture as an insecticide. Studies suggest that each year, there are 18 cases of pesticide-caused illness for every 100,000 American workers. In gaseous forms, like tabun and sarin, they can also be deadly biological weapons. Sarin was used by members of the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo in the Tokyo subway attack of 1995.
In this case, the patient recovered well, after the correct diagnosis by a nurse with a sensitive nose, proper treatment with drugs and the elimination of the insecticide by balding.
How does THAT happen?
Let It Be Whale Vomit, Not Just Sea Junk
MONTAUK, N.Y. (Dec. 1 cool — In this season of strange presents from relatives, Dorothy Ferreira got a doozy the other day from her 82-year-old sister in Waterloo, Iowa. It was ugly. It weighed four pounds. There was no receipt in the box.
Inside she found what looked like a gnarled, funky candle but could actually be a huge hunk of petrified whale vomit worth as much as $18,000.
“I called my sister and asked her, ‘What the heck did you send me?’ ” recalled Ms. Ferreira, 67, who has lived here on the eastern tip of Long Island since 1982. “She said: ‘I don’t know, but I found it on the beach in Montauk 50 years ago and just kept it around. You’re the one who lives by the ocean; ask someone out there what it is.’ ”
So Ms. Ferreira called the Town of East Hampton’s department of natural resources, which dispatched an old salt from Montauk named Walter Galcik.
Mr. Galcik, 80, concluded that the mysterious gift might be ambergris, the storied substance created in the intestines of a sperm whale and spewed into the ocean. Also called “whale’s pearl” or “floating gold,” ambergris is a rare and often valuable ingredient in fine perfumes.
“He told me, ‘Don’t let this out of your sight,’ ” Ms. Ferreira said.
She was soon summoned to show the thing at a town board meeting, after which a story in The Independent, a local newspaper, declared Ms. Ferreira the proud new owner of “heirloom whale barf.” Friends and neighbors flocked to her tchotchke-filled cottage overlooking Fort Pond Bay, the very shores where her sister, Ruth Carpenter, said she found the object in the mid-1950s.
Childless and never married, Ms. Ferreira bounced from job to job, most recently as a short-order cook at a local deli, and now lives on her Social Security income.
“If it really does have value, I’m not silly, of course I’d want to sell it,” Ms. Ferreira said as she looked out past her lace curtains and picket fence at the whitecaps on the bay. “This could be my retirement.”
After researching ambergris on the Internet, Ms. Ferreira’s neighbor, Joe Luiksic, advised, “Put it on eBay.” But endangered species legislation has made buying or selling the stuff illegal since the 1970s; a couple who found a large lump of ambergris valued at almost $300,000 on an Australian beach in January has had legal problems selling it.
“If I get locked up, will you bail me out?” Ms. Ferreira asked her friends.
Ambergris begins as a waxlike substance secreted in the intestines of some sperm whales, perhaps to protect the whale from the hard, indigestible “beaks” of giant squid it feeds upon. The whales expel the blobs, dark and foul-smelling, to float the ocean. After much seasoning by waves, wind, salt and sun, they may wash up as solid, fragrant chunks
Because ambergris varies widely in color, shape and texture, identification falls to those who have handled it before, a group that in a post-whaling age is very small. Ms. Ferreira says she has yet to find an ambergris expert.
“A hundred years ago, you would have no problem finding someone who could identify this,” said James G. Mead, curator of marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institution, who said he hears of new ambergris surfacing somewhere in the world maybe once every five or six years. “More often, you have people who think they’ve found it and they can retire, only to find out it’s a big hunk of floor wax.”
Adrienne Beuse, an ambergris dealer in New Zealand, said in a telephone interview that good-quality ambergris can be sold for up to $10 per gram, adding that for the finest grades, “the sky’s the limit.”
At $10 per gram, Ms. Ferreira’s chunk, according to a neighbor’s kitchen scale, would have a value of $18,000. “The only way to positively identify ambergris is to have experience handling and smelling it, and very few people in the world have that,” Ms. Beuse said. “Certainly, if she has it, it’s like winning a mini-lottery.”
Larry Penny, 71, director of East Hampton’s natural resources department, said he had no way of making a definite determination, because “we don’t keep a certified whale-vomit expert on staff.”
Mr. Penny, whose great-great-uncle was skipper of a whaling ship out of Sag Harbor, said he grew up searching the beach for ambergris.
“The older folks would always tell us, ‘Keep your eyes open for that whale vomit because it’ll pay your way through college,’ ” he recalled. “We used to bring home anything that we thought looked like it, but it never turned out to be ambergris. The average person today could trip over it on the beach and never know what it was.”
Ambergris has been a valued commodity for centuries, used in perfume because of its strangely alluring aroma as well as its ability to retain other fine-fragrance ingredients and “fix” a scent so it does not evaporate quickly. Its name is derived from the French “ambre gris,” or gray amber. During the Renaissance, ambergris was molded, dried, decorated and worn as jewelry. It has been an aphrodisiac, a restorative balm, and a spice for food and wine. Arabs used it as heart and brain medicine. The Chinese called it lung sien hiang, or “dragon’s spittle fragrance.” It has been the object of high-seas treachery and caused countries to enact maritime possession laws and laws banning whale hunting. Madame du Barry supposedly washed herself with it to make herself irresistible to Louis XV.
In “Paradise Regained,” Milton describes Satan tempting Christ with meat pastries steamed in ambergris. In “Moby-d**k,” Melville called it the “essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale.” Old newspapers show clippings every few years describing some whaling crew coming upon a hunk, or some vacationing family finding it on the beach and either cashing in — or discovering it was just ocean detritus.
“We always heard about it, but I don’t remember finding any,” recalled Encie Babcock, 95, of Sag Harbor, whose great-uncle Henry Babcock was captain of a whaling ship in the 1800s.
Mrs. Carpenter, Ms. Ferreira’s sister, said she was about 30 years old, beachcombing with her dog in front of the family house, when she spied the object and “and just liked the way it looked, so I kept it.” After moving with her husband to Iowa, Mrs. Carpenter kept the waxy hunk in a box in her bedroom closet.
“Anytime we had houseguests, I’d take it out and ask them if they knew what it was,” she said. “Of course they didn’t. This is Iowa.” She sent it to her sister, Mrs. Carpenter said, because “I’m not feeling too good, and I don’t have much time left.”
 Azalin · Tue Dec 19, 2006 @ 10:43pm · 0 Comments |
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