One of the holy grails of modern medicine is the development of a vaccine against HIV, the virus that causes AIDs. An obstacle to attaining this goal has been the difficulty in stimulating the immune system to make it produce the right kinds of antibodies. A recent finding in Science describes a gene that controls production of these antibodies and...
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Posted on September 27, 2008 1:03 PM • 0 Comments •
PubMed is an on-line database at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) that contains information from scientific literature. Most of the information is related to medical research. To search PubMed, you use a program called Entrez. You go to the NCBI, select PubMed from the menu, type words into the text box, and start the search. Sometimes that's all...
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Posted on September 3, 2008 8:11 AM • 7 Comments •
Mumps was a common childhood disease when I was a child. We grew up learning that it was better to get mumps as a child because getting it as an adult would make you sterile. No doubt that idea arose from symptoms like swollen glands, swollen testicles, etc. When I looked in PubMed though, I couldn't find much data on...
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Posted on August 28, 2008 11:35 AM • 7 Comments •
Sometimes faith isn't enough.
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Posted on August 27, 2008 3:00 PM • 9 Comments •
Vaccines work by stimulating the immune system to respond to a specific thing. Most of the vaccines we use are designed to prime the immune system so that it's ready to fight off some kind of disease, like whooping cough, polio, or influenza. Some vaccines can have more specialized functions, like stimulating the body to attack cancer cells, kill rogue...
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Posted on August 15, 2008 3:38 PM • 2 Comments •
A long time ago, I saw a movie called "The Other Side of the Mountain." The movie told the story of Jill Kinmont, a ski racer who contracted polio and lost the use of her legs. I was sad for days for afterward, but also relieved to know that Jill Kinmont's fate wasn't going to be mine. I wasn't going...
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Posted on August 14, 2008 2:18 PM • 9 Comments •
Vaccines protect wild animals, pets, and agricultural animals.
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Posted on August 14, 2008 9:00 AM • 6 Comments •