1

Chemistry / Why do some polyurethane shoe soles fall apart?

« on: 23/12/2017 00:16:17 »

I was discussing this with friends, we have all experienced shoes/boots with crumbling soles, it happens irrespective of the amount of wear that the shoes have had. I realise that it is a chemical reaction but what is happening.

A couple of further points, when it happens it appears to be very quick, one week the shoes will be fine the next they soles will be creaking and crumbling. Is the reaction self catalysing, and if so could it spread by contact, if say someone wearing PU soled shoes was step on part of a disintegrated sole? Could it be caused by bacteria or fungi affecting the sole.
I wondered about contagious crumbling because someone said that her and her husbands walking boot soles started to disintegrate in the same week, even though one pair was a couple of years newer than the other.

2

Physiology & Medicine / Re: Studies on orphan drugs and diseases?

« on: 22/08/2017 09:10:39 »

The hospital said his pancreas was  not suitable for lithotripsy.  He asked about laser lithotripsy and was told it was not a service they offered.
I did a literature search found a possible drug treatment to dissolve the stones:
Dissolution of pancreatic stones by oral trimethadione in patients with chronic calcific pancreatitis
Noda et al  Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepacology (1994)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7827299
This study  reported complete relief of pain  in 73% of patients during the treatment. This study seems to have been forgotten, it only has 13 citations.

What my friend is looking for is a way to have this treatment instead of major surgery that would also remove his spleen and, require months of recovery and is not guaranteed to resolve his chronic pain problems. He is hoping to find somewhere willing to run a new clinical trial of this treatment.
He realises that it is rather unusual for patients to come up with proposals for clinical trials.

3

Physiology & Medicine / Studies on orphan drugs and diseases?

« on: 12/08/2017 21:30:26 »

Anyone here know of any pharma companies or research labs in the UK that are researching orphan drugs and diseases?
Particularly pharmaceutical treatments for chronic pancreatitis and pancreatic stones.

I have mentioned before a friend is suffering from this. All he is being offered is either strong opiates or surgery to remove the pancreas.
The thing is that while he is diabetic his pancreas is still producing digestive enzymes so he would need to replace those as well as having insulin if pancreas was removed.
Also he has been told that he would need his spleen removing as well which would cause some immune impairment.

We found a study from the 1990s that showed dissolution of pancreatic stones and cutting of pain in 70%+ of subjects. This was an off label use of an epilepsy medication which has now been discontinued.

He contacted the manufacturers a couple of months ago and one research person he spoke to was interested in running a trial treatment but that was cancelled by the financial side who did not think it would make enough money to be economically viable.

It may still be possible to get the drug from china but it is no longer listed on the UK national formulary.

Does anyone here have any ideas as to what to try next. The London hospital doctors he has seen were only interested in surgery, with another saying that would be too dangerous.

4

Physiology & Medicine / Are there any UK drug trials treating chronic pancreatitis or pancreatic stones?

« on: 30/07/2017 14:06:40 »

Does any one know of people researching this. A friend has chronic pancreatitis and pancreatic stones. We have found a report of a drug trial in Japan in the 1990s that showed over 70% success in dissolving and clearing pain. For a promising non surgical treatment it seems to have been forgotten about, it was an off label use for a seldom used epilepsy medication.

The drug is not available in the UK but could be bought from America, but my friend would still need a doctor in the UK to prescribe the drug and manage the treatment.

5

Complementary Medicine / Re: How does acupuncture work?

« on: 16/02/2017 12:27:53 »

Acupuncture is a form of placebo. For a fair assessment of it efficacy it would need to be tested on something that was measurable, something objective rather than subjective. Someone saying that it made them feel better should not carry any weight.

6

Cells, Microbes & Viruses / Re: Why does Aspirin taste so disgusting?

« on: 15/02/2017 16:06:44 »

 Aspirin does not taste disgusting to me.

7

Cells, Microbes & Viruses / Re: Best way to teach myself microbiology and virology?

« on: 28/05/2016 15:10:36 »

For learning virology there is a very good series of lectures on Youtube:

Also the podcasts This Week in Virology and This Week in Microbiology

There are several online courses that you may find useful.
http://study.com/articles/List_of_Free_Online_Microbiology_Courses_and_Training_Options.html

https://www.coursera.org/learn/bioinformatics

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/computational-biology

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/systems-biology

8

Cells, Microbes & Viruses / Re: Could a bee the size of a person fly?

« on: 28/05/2016 14:54:40 »

The oxygen content can't get very much higher than the current 20%, as many substances become flammable when the oxygen content of air is above 50%.

In the Carboniferous period atmospheric oxygen peaked at 35%.

9

Cells, Microbes & Viruses / Re: Is homosexuality genetic?

« on: 28/05/2016 14:43:28 »

Sex is a choice one makes in the teen years when the tools develop.

Not true, a persons sex is biological not a choice they can make.

10

Cells, Microbes & Viruses / Re: What effect do/did viruses have on human evolution?

« on: 27/05/2016 23:26:34 »

I stand correct!, however it seems the viruses with RNA  are most most dangerous?

Are viruses alive or somewhere between a living thing and nonliving?

Not sure that it is possible to say that RNA viruses are more dangerous than DNA viruses. Polio, Ebola, Hepatitis C, Measles virus and influenza viruses are RNA but papilloma viruses, pox viruses, Hepatitis B and herpes viruses are DNA.

Virus infected  cells are living but virus particles have no metabolism and are considered non living infectious agents.

11

Physiology & Medicine / Re: Are vaccinations dangerous?

« on: 05/02/2015 21:08:50 »

HPV infection can cause genital cancers in men, although these cancers are not common. HPV infection also increases the risk of some types of mouth and throat cancers in both males and females..

12

Complementary Medicine / Re: cure for cold sore

« on: 18/10/2014 00:19:41 »

A sample size of one is not enough to base opinions on.
To know if what you did is effective you would need to repeat it one more people.
 
Herpes simplex will go into a latent state in nerve cells and people can remain asymptomatic for years.

13

Complementary Medicine / Re: Are Vaccine Doubters Right After All?

« on: 17/10/2014 23:51:26 »

"his is an interesting study indicating a possible connection between early dosing with DPT and Asthma.
http://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749%2807%2902379-2/fulltext
http://download.journals.elsevierhealth.com/pdfs/journals/0091-6749/PIIS0091674907023792.pdf

Those children with the first dose of DPT after 4 months had about half the asthma rate of those before 2 months.  Keeping in mind that this last group of subjects was quite small.

They don't discuss what conditions led to the delay in vaccinations, or if there are socio-economic, urban/rural, or breastfeeding differences between the groups."

We know that respiratory infection can trigger asthma so my guess would be that the vaccine was less effective if given before four months. I would speculate that if given  too early there is a lack of immune response due to the presence of maternal antibodies, once these have declined there is a better immune reaction, giving rise to a population of memory B cells.

14

That CAN'T be true! / Re: Are Heavy Metals in Vaccines Safe ? -Metal Levels TESTED for 1st Time-

« on: 17/10/2014 23:19:34 »

What heavy metals do you imagine are in vaccines?
Toxicity is dose dependent and the amount of ethylmercury present in a influenza vaccination  is not enough to be toxic.
You are getting all excited and worked up over nothing.
It is kink of sweet that you are gullible enough to believe that mike adams has anything but negative credibility, that is, anything he says is almost certainly wrong.

15

That CAN'T be true! / Re: Was Doctor Andrew Wakefield Right Right After all?

« on: 17/10/2014 22:52:45 »

I think it unfortunate that striking Wakefield from the medical register was all that the GMC could do.
Financial fraud is a criminal offence, punishable with custodial sentences and fines.
I can see no reason why scientific fraud, as perpetrated by Wakefield should not be a criminal offence or why he should not face fines and imprisonment.

Some of the factors used by the Sentencing Guidelines Council in assessing the seriousness of  offences include:
Culpability and harm
The impact of the offence on the victim.
Harm to persons other than the direct victim
Erosion of public confidence.
Any physical harm or risk of physical harm to the direct victim
or another person.

Wakefield is guilty of causing all of those.
He should have been fined and imprisoned.

16

Cells, Microbes & Viruses / Re: Which anti-Ebola drug will effective, ZMapp monoclonal antibodies or vaccines

« on: 14/09/2014 14:40:10 »

ZMapp and vaccines work differently, ZMapp provides passive immunity  to a person already infected and vaccines are given before exposure to induce active immunity so that a person will produce their own antibodies.

17

Cells, Microbes & Viruses / Re: How do viruses cause disease

« on: 08/08/2014 14:13:09 »

How viruses cause disease is an interesting and complex topic
Viral virulence depends on many factors and you you cannot readily compare virulence of different viruses as symptoms can vary so much. For example you cannot say that rabies is more virulent than, Ebola or vice versa because the way you measure virulence in the two is  different,  attempts to say which is the most virulent virus are very
problematic.


Some viruses, enter at mucosal surfaces and  replicate in the epithelium.
Some viruses like HPV stay there and cause disease there, but others like spread
somewhere else like the CNS or the kidney where they cause disease.

One expression of viral virulence is tissue damage. Some viruses are cytopathic, they kill cells, they take over the host cell molecular processes like nucleic acid synthesis and protein synthesis that probably contributes to killing cells. Damaged cells  may undergo apoptosis or may be detected by the immune system that sends killer cells to take them out.

Some viruses lead to syncytium formation, that is multiple cell fusions resulting in
large multi-nucleated cells.


In many non-cytolytic virus infections, there is not a lot of virus induced tissue damage.
Rhinoviruses which cause around half of all the common colds, there is not much direct viral tissue damage observed, the virus really doesn't seem to kill the cells.
So the pathology of the infection is due to something else, that is your immune response to virus infection.

This is known as immunopathology, you need an immune response to clear the infection, but you pay a price in clinical symptoms, fever, tissue damage, aches, pains, nausea.
The virus itself is not damaging you so you feel pain, it's your immune response, your cytokines that cause your fever and the nausea.

One of the reasons suspected for the seriousness of avian flu is that birds have a naturally higher body temperature so the virus comes pre adapted to cope with the temperatures of our fever response, when the immune system continues to detect virus more cytokines are produced. This cytokine cascade also triggers rapidly proliferating and highly activated T-cells or natural killer (NK) cells that kill infected cells. If uncontrolled the damage produced by the immune response may be fatal.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1883518?dopt=Abstract&holding=npg
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2364437?dopt=Abstract&holding=npg
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12480361?dopt=Abstract&holding=npg
http://chemport.cas.org/cgi-bin/sdcgi?APP=ftslink&action=reflink&origin=npg&version=1.0&coi=1:STN:280:DC%2BD2Mnotlygtg%3D%3D&pissn=0818-9641&pyear=2007&md5=e1805470d7fe1b4e173c03b197df9e5d

There is a great deal more to this and it would probably take several volumes to cover it in depth.

18

Physiology & Medicine / Re: What causes spontaneous human combustion?

« on: 08/07/2014 20:39:34 »

There is no such thing as spontaneous human combustion, so it does not have a cause.
The cases are either burns caused by burning clothes or badly burned bodies where the fire has destroyed the cause of the fire.

19

Cells, Microbes & Viruses / Re: Is animal husbandry to blame for antibiotic resistance?

« on: 08/07/2014 20:15:05 »

This is not about treating sickness in animals.
From what I have heard the in America it is still common to give subtherapeutic levels of antibiotics to livestock in feed as growth promoters.
This has been banned in Europe since 2006.
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-05-1687_en.htm

http://amrls.cvm.msu.edu/pharmacology/antimicrobial-usage-in-animals/non-therapuetic-use-of-antimicrobials-in-animals/use-of-antibiotics-in-animals-for-growth-promotion

20

Cells, Microbes & Viruses / Re: Does eating your own placenta pose any health risk?

« on: 08/07/2014 19:41:31 »

"It may be little different from having a good steak. "
Never eaten placenta but the texture looks more like liver.
As has been said the mother will have been exposed to any bacteria or viruses present, and placenta eating is I think the norm for many mammals, it certainly is for cats and dogs.