Category: Health

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Google wants to flood your body with tiny magnets to search for disease | The Verge

Nice. Hope this becomes reality!
 

Google’s ambition to cure death is beginning to take shape in a new product from its Google X division. Andrew Conrad, the head of the company’s life sciences division, today announced the details of an effort that would use nanotechnology to identify signs of disease. The project would employ tiny magnetic nanoparticles, said to be one-thousandth the width of a red blood cell, to bind themselves to various molecules and identify them as trouble spots.
Google’s nanotechnology project, which would also involve a wearable magnetic device that tracks the particles, is said to be at least five years off, according to an accompanying report in the Wall Street Journal. The company is still figuring out how many nanoparticles are necessary to identify markers of disease, and scientists will have to develop coatings for the particles that will let them bind to targeted cells. One idea is to deliver the nanoparticles via a pill that you would swallow.
“FUNDAMENTALLY, OUR FOE IS DEATH.”
More than 100 Googlers are now working on the project. “We’re trying to stave off death by preventing disease,” Conrad said on stage at WSJD Live. “Fundamentally, our foe is death. Our foe is unnecessary death. Because we have the technology to intervene, and we should expend more energy and effort on it.
via Google wants to flood your body with tiny magnets to search for disease | The Verge.

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TED: Hans Rosling on the HIV Epidemic

Hans Rosling’s TED talk on the HIV epidemic scared me. If the steady state of HIV infection is about 1 % of population then we are going to see about 1 million probably more because before steady state it gets worse fast and after society adjust to the HIV epidemic then we slowly stop getting worse.  People stop unprotected sex.
Watch this ted talk if you are curious

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rePost::The Fear That Killed Eight Ebola Workers – The Daily Beast

Why we need more information on Ebola, To prevent stuff like this from happening here!!
 

The Fear That Killed Eight Ebola Workers
They were sent in to help educate villagers about how to ward off the lethal virus. Then fear took over and the machetes came out.
At the time of Wednesday’s announcement out of Guinea that seven of nine missing Ebola workers had been found dead, we knew little. Men with knives had abducted members of a group sent there to spread awareness about the disease. Two relief workers were missing; the rest, dead. Six suspects were in custody.
By Friday morning, we knew more. These details, the stuff of horror films. A local government group of relief workers—a mix of doctors, religious leaders, and journalists—had arrived Monday to educate the remote southeastern village of Womey about Ebola. Just 24 hours after their arrival, violence broke out, allegedly sparked by the false belief that a disinfectant being sprayed was actually the disease itself. An angry mob brandishing machetes, stones, and knives lashed out.
Some of the relief workers were lucky enough to escape to nearby villages. At least nine were not. Three had their throats slashed. By then, villagers themselves began to flee. Those still in Womey cut down trees and fashioned makeshift blockades so no one else could get inside the village. Two days later, when authorities did, they found eight bodies in the latrine system of the local school. Among the dead, three local radio journalists, two medical officers, and a preacher.
via The Fear That Killed Eight Ebola Workers – The Daily Beast.