There’s a guy, Dr. Kieffer, at UBC who has headed up a number of research projects related to Type 1 Diabetes. This time around he is driving the bus on the culmination of a lot of pointy head work from around the world. He was part of the Edmonton protocol and I met him a few years back on a tour of his facility at UBC. At that time he was showing off mice who’d been living for a year without a pancreas or insulin injections. Yeah, I know, but wait, it gets better.
His current project involves the use of live insulin-producing cells contained in an implantable device dubbed a ‘tea bag’. It is contained in a semi-permeable membrane (here’s where the pointy head stuff comes in) that allows circulating fluid to bring nutrients inside to the cells and take insulin produced by the cells back out into the blood stream.
The cells are from the patients own stem cells (magic) which is good on so many levels, like no need for nasty broad spectrum immune suppressant drugs. And the tea bag blocks the big autoimmune antibodies that killed the insulin producing beta cells in the pancreas in the first place. Serious magic-happens-here stuff.
AND (yes, there is more) in order to proceed to human testing it is necessary to prove this wee bio-device is safe should a rupture occur. So if these little cells find themselves on the outside of the membrane but still inside the body (hold on, more ‘magic happens here’ stuff) these cells either self-destruct or they have a marker for targeting by hunter cell (I don’t remember which because my brain froze up back at ‘tea bag’)…Either way seriously cool.
This is important on so many levels. Not only does it tick all the boxes in terms of Type 1 diabetes, the marked cell coding has huge treatment implications for cancer, tuberculosis, MS and the rest of the bio-medical bad news alphabet.
You are now free to get some fresh air and perform the happy dance.
There is currently a video circulating about those curly flourescent light bulbs, the energy efficient saviors of the planet. Well, apparently they give off electro-magnetic radiation. Yes, I’ll pause for the shock and horror to pass and the question, ‘what the heck is electro-magnetic radiation?’ to pop into the conversation. Well, I can’t explain it very well other than to plug in the definition from the Britanncia Concise Dictionary:
“Energy propagated through free space or through a material medium in the form of electromagnetic waves. Examples include radio waves, infrared radiation, visible light, ultraviolet radiation, X rays, and gamma rays. Electromagnetic radiation exhibits wavelike properties such as reflection, refraction, diffraction, and interference, but also exhibits particlelike properties in that its energy occurs in discrete packets, or quanta. Though all types of electromagnetic radiation travel at the same speed, they vary in frequency and wavelength, and interact with matter differently. A vacuum is the only perfectly transparent medium; all others absorb some frequencies of electromagnetic radiation.”
Breaking that down it means if it runs on electricity, it gives off electromagnetic radiation.
Remember the warnings about microwave ovens affecting pacemakers? Or last year’s menace of cell phones causing brain tumuors? In those cases as well as your mother saying you are sitting to close to the television, the culprit is electromagnetic radiation and what is now known as the EMF — add “Field” to EM and you’ve got a new stick to herd a fearful public into that hell-bound basket.
watch your step
There may well be problems with the energy efficient light bulb but this sort of fear mongering is not the way to deal with it. Showing a meter leap from 61 to 815 tells me nothing unless I know what the meter actually measures, what the units mean in terms of relative volume (1,000 milliliters vs 1,000 decaliters makes a big difference if it’s in your basement) and what is the total amount I may safely be exposed to over a given period of time.
There is 1 baseline given: the only device operating in the entire house is the fridge but what if the reporter gets a hankering for a little microwave popcorn? Or her producer calls on her cell phone. Turn on the radio, television and maybe play a round or two of Wii tennis. Now, what are the EMF readings, what device contributed to the biggest jump and how do those readings compare to what is given off by that coiled serpent humming under a lampshade?
The laptop I’m working on may well give off 3 times that amount of EMF…I’m not saying it does, I’m just saying it might.
So, what does this have to do with Diabetes? Well, there was a single researcher on this clip talking about a single study of one individual who had diabetes whose blood sugars were adversely affected by sitting in a room where a curly light bulb was turned on…Yeah. I’m not even going to start on this one because I should hope to hell you have enough sense to be asking the questions yourself before running around the room brandishing a pitchfork at every light bulb you can find.
When my daughter was diagnosed as having Type 1, we were subjected to a variety of well meant advice about vitamins that would reverse this disease. We were also asked what we had done to cause our daughter’s pancreas to crap out. And more than a few folk, not knowing the difference between Type 1, Type 2 and, well, a light bulb, suggested we’d given her too much candy…
So, when someone tries to tell you what you should or shouldn’t be doing to make your family member better; has just read a book about a breakthrough YOUR DOCTOR DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW or knows a chiropractor who can stimulate your child’s pancreas through manipulation, take a deep breath and go for a walk in the fresh air. Just remember to wear sunglasses and a hat ’cause you don’t want to get skin damage from all that electromagnetic energy the sun gives off.
It’s World Diabetes Day. Our local JDRF Chapter is lighting up the Johnston Street Bridge…but here, for those of you that are still in the dark, here’s the newsletter we sent out about the whole thing – I’m hoping I can upload it with links intact…
blue-hoop-day-november-141 Okay, not exactly what I wanted but click on it and there’s a link to the WDD website… I think it’s all pretty cool ….
1. CVN-78 Gerald R. Ford – first of new class of super-aircraft carrier “Ford Class” – hull laid 2007 – $8 billion (not including $5 billion R&D) will carry >75 fixed wing jets. powered by 2-AIB nuclear reactors.
2. F-35 Lightning II fighter jet under development – cost per jet (in 2006) $83 million.
3. Queen Elizabeth Class carrier – Royal Navy – to replace the Invincible-class light carriers – will be equivalent to US Nimitz class carriers and carry 36 F-35’s. Current estimate on cost of carrier ?3.7 billion – not nuclear powered.
Estimate of JDRF Canada in a request to the Government of Canada of research funding sufficient to bring about a cure for Type 1 diabetes = $125 million.
So next time you see a picture of an aircraft carrier or a fighter jet or even a tank (M1A2 Abrams = $4.3 million) remember it represents money that didn’t cure diabetes or cancer or cystic fibrosis or Alzeheimers or…or….or…
It’s another reason to sniffle when you see a kid selling lemonade to raise money for JDRF
Now I realize we need these advanced weapon systems to protect ourselves from all those other advanced weapons systems out there the bad guys bought at a clearance sale from the people who are designing even newer ones for us but, gee whiz, maybe if we all stopped…Of course, that is just silly, fuzzy headed idealist stinkin thinkin. But maybe if we diverted just a little of the money we spend on thinking up new ways to blow people up better, faster and from further away…?
The JDRF walk in Victoria is over for this year and all the fund raising pressure at the family level is off for a few months. It isn’t fair, actually, to imply we are pressured to raise money – after all, what kind of parents would we be if we didn’t do whatever we could to help cure our children? The biggest benefit of the walk for a newly diagnosed family is to see just how many other people there are affected by the illness.
That’s one of the other things that never gets listed, just how isolating the experience is at first. You spend days with doctors and nurses, cloistered in a hospital and then spend months sleep deprived, working days in a twilight of worry while you spend nights waking every few hours to test blood sugars and calculating adjustments for insulin doses. Even when you go out, you are huddled with your child in the bathroom, trying to remember the current ratio of short acting and long acting insulins and getting the injections ready. People come in, people go out, they cast quick glances over at mother or father and child, the needles, cartridges, glucometer and can’t figure out what’s happening. The sight of the syringe is usually enough to drive the strangers away. They don’t want to know.
Then, after a few weeks or months of this you walk into a park filled with balloons, music, people dressed up, whole groups of people wearing the same coloured t-shirts declaring “Tommy’s Team” or “Mary’s Minders” or “Team Turbo Tess”…and different companies who have joined in the effort sponsoring tents giving away food or balloons or whatever they think kids would like. It’s a freaking festival in the middle of one of the crappiest moments in a parent’s life!
And you feel safe. You feel part of something rather than walled away from the world. I don’t know of many people who can get through the first hour of that walk without fogging up or crying outright. The demons of guilt, fear, “dear-God-why-me? I-hate-you. Please-don’t-let-my-baby-die-while-I-sleep-in-the-next-room” are chased away by realization there is a future; these people have survived those first horrible weeks and now you will too. After that the idea of raising money doesn’t seem such a bad thing.
And every year when we get our group together and show up it is the same feeling – that rush of finally finding something positive in all this, of not being the only one, of not being alone.
Even people of faith give thanks for a glimpse at God’s plan at some point during the morning. It’s a gift. And when the demons come back – because they will – you have something to cradle in your hand, hold to your heart and cling to in the dark, long nights ahead.
There’s a guy, Dr. Kieffer, at UBC who has headed up a number of research projects related to Type 1 Diabetes. This time around he is driving the bus on the culmination of a lot of pointy head work from around the world. He was part of the Edmonton protocol and I met him a few years back on a tour of his facility at UBC. At that time he was showing off mice who’d been living for a year without a pancreas or insulin injections. Yeah, I know, but wait, it gets better.
comes in) that allows circulating fluid to bring nutrients inside to the cells and take insulin produced by the cells back out into the blood stream.
because my brain froze up back at ‘tea bag’)…Either way seriously cool.
