Breakthroughs Today

  Even a gift can get overused to its destruction.   BIBLICAL wisdom contends that any gift unused will cease to be. Clinical experience, however, observed that frequently used gifts, while they may not disappear, can be so strained that these will eventually become unusable. In fact, these can be plagued with disease of overuse, so that further use of it can be dangerous to the person’s health.   This observation has particular relevance among those who use their voice as their work instruments: singers, fitness club instructors, salespeople, telemarketing operators, receptionists, actors, teachers and more.   A more recent study on 4,495 primary and secondary school teachers in Salvador City in Brazil confirmed earlier studies that frequent use of their voice in line with their chosen professional work can lead to diseases in the vocal folds. These voice disorders usually persist (unless treated) at least 15 days to years after diagnoses, and include such conditi

The application of shellac is wide-ranging than most people think it is. And one of those applications is as glaze on fruits and vegetables sold in your fruit stands and grocery stores.   “IT'S easy for Americans,” says former US Sen. Christopher Dodd, “to forget that the food they eat doesn’t magically appear on a supermarket shelf.” That may also be true for Filipinos.   While the use of shellac in pharmaceutical products may have ebbed in the last few decades, its use in food, particularly as a protective coating for fruits and vegetables, has not. Its use has the specific advantage of extending shelf life, which is critical in ensuring that they are sold before they start to get overripe.   The previous article (“Glaze of the lac bug”) noted that shellac is a natural form of plastic. On apples, for example, this “wax” coating increases the resistance of the skin from gaseous diffusion, particularly oxygen, which speeds up the ripening process.   It was mentio

AMERICAN poet William Carlos Williams wrote: “Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze.”   Many Filipinos may not know how a snow glaze looks like; but one common glaze that Filipinos are familiar with can be seen in furniture. And we call that glaze “shellac.”   What most Filipinos, even those who have actually seen a snow glaze, may not know is this: the glaze of shellac has been fairly used in pharmaceutical products. The flakes come from the resin that the female Laccifer bug (Kerria lacca or just lac) secrete on trees in the forests of India, Thailand and Burma (now Mynmar). It takes about 100,000 lac bugs to make 500 grams of shellac flakes.   Shellac is a natural bioadhesive, chemically similar to the synthetic polymers we call “plastic.” In a sense, shellac is a natural form of plastic. And it is used as a glazing agent on tablets and capsules. It contains denatured alcohol, which dissolves the 20-51 percent shellac compo

A lot of advancements in diagnostic technology have visited our century. These new means of diagnoses have brought hope particularly to poor communities where neglected tropical diseases run amok, ignored both by the health authorities tasked by the people to protect them and the profit-oriented pharmaceuticals whose manufacturing capabilities generation of effective drugs against these disease are highly dependent. Neurocystercosis is merely one of these many neglected diseases.   WHAT happened to Cebu City Traffic Operations Management chief Sylvan “Jack” Jakosalem can be one of those few things in our lives that is a choice away, and the impact changes its direction completely.   Neurocystercosis (NCC), an infection of the central nervous system (CNS), which arises from unwittingly ingesting uncooked food that is contaminated with the larvae of tapeworm Taenia solium, can cause irreparable damage to the CNS part involved. The CNS is composed of the brain, spinal cord, and

ON JANUARY 2006, France became sole user of BCG vaccine Statens Serum Institut (SSI) for tuberculosis vaccination. Not long after, rapid increase in cases of adverse reactions (ADRs) came up; such as abscesses (in 73 percent of patients treated), around 30 percent had local reactions (lymphadenopathy of above one cm in size), while 20 patients developed suppurative lymphadenopathy.   Christelle Chol, leader of those who followed the patients for two years, found that the ADRs became consistent a year after their appearance or detection. They published their findings at the Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety (Dec 5).   BCG vaccine—or Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (named after its discoverers)—contains weakened but alive strain of Mycobacterium bovis (a strain found in pigs). Because the bacteria can still stimulate reaction from a person’s immune system (without causing disease), it prepares the body to combat and destroy tuberculosis bacteria upon exposure. Studies in 1994 to 1

  We have come to know very well the drug Phenylpropanolamine as it is a popular medication that doctors give for decongested noses. But it has a history that most people do not know, a history that supposedly have been improved but never known publicly.   SCIENTIFIC studies in 1988, 1999 and 2000 agreed that there is a risk for hemorrhagic stroke among women who used phenylpropanolamine (PPA).   The 1999 study came from the Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut). And the one in 2000 was conducted by a team that WN Kernan led and published in the December 2000 issue of the North England Journal of Medicine, a publication of the Massachusetts Medical Society. The 1988 study was a psychiatric review of 37 cases published in North America and Europe since 1960. In this study that the Lake-Masson-Quirk team published in Pharmacopsychiatry (July 1988), it was noted that ingestion of phenylpropanolamine had resulted in diagnosed cases of acute mania, paranoid schizophrenia and

FILIPINO MOLECULAR biology student Jann Adriel Sy (24) of the University of the Philippines-Diliman noticed the inadequacy in the standard dose policy currently employed by doctors in ensuring a normal metabolic response in a person in the metabolism of medications due to differences in genetic structure, such as the mutation in the protein-coding section of enzymes critical to drug metabolism.   The study has positive implications in bringing down cases of adverse effects from drugs. A person with slow metabolism for paracetamol, for example, can suffer toxic side effects, or even death, from the unmetabolized portions of a 500-mg dose.   The study was performed at the National Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology at UP Diliman. It won for Sy the 2013 BPI-DOST Best Project of the Year Award.   Source: Donna Pazzibugan: "Research on personalized medicine dosages based on genetics proclaimed best thesis," Philippine Daily Inquirer 28 January 2013 [