Fw: Arsenic in Drinking Water Could Be Cause of Cancer, and much more.....

[Guest guest]

This has been in my drafts for some time, but I thought it was still important

enough to send it along it's way.

" High arsenic exposure can lead to CANCER, and chronic exposure to even

moderately elevated levels has been linked to high blood pressure and type 2

diabetes. But the possible health effects of such modestly increased exposures

are not yet fully clear. The EPA has set the maximum allowable level of arsenic

in drinking water at 10 micrograms per liter (or 10 parts per billion).

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 80 percent of

U.S. drinking-water supplies have an arsenic level below 2 parts per billion

(ppb), but 2 percent exceed 20 ppb. For the new study, researchers looked at

whether variations in arsenic levels in Michigan's water supplies were related

to residents' risk of being hospitalized for STROKE.

" The links between arsenic and high blood pressure and diabetes make it

plausible that drinking-water arsenic could contribute to strokes, lead

researcher Dr. Lynda D. beth, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor,

told Reuters Health in an e-mail. It's also possible, she said, that chronic,

low-level arsenic exposure could accelerate atherosclerosis, a hardening and

narrowing of the arteries that can lead to heart attacks and stroke. "

http://tinyurl.com/2evefds

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Dear Group, I am interested in kidney cancer because I recently lost my brother

to it, my father had bladder cancer when he died, and my sister was born with

only 1 kidney. I had an ultrasound done on my kidneys while I was at MDACC

before Christmas and they found I had one kidney larger than the other. As for

myself, I am also aware that I am in acute renal failure, so this subject is of

a familial nature. Is my problem due to genetics or medicine? An article in the

New England Journal of Medicine states:

" Seventy-one parents and 40 siblings of 41 index patients with bilateral renal

agenesis, bilateral severe dysgenesis, or agenesis of one kidney and dysgenesis

of the other were evaluated by gray-scale ultrasonography for genitourinary

malformations. Nine per cent (10 of 111) had asymptomatic renal malformations,

most often unilateral renal agenesis (4.5 per cent — a frequency that was

significantly higher than the frequency of 0.3 per cent among 682 adults). "

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Do Cancer cells talk to one another?????

A class of drugs thought to kill cancer cells may in fact block " cross talk "

between the cancer cell and normal immune cells, resulting in reduced cancer

growth and spread - a discovery that could significantly alter the way cancer

drugs are evaluated in the future.

Researchers at the University of Colorado Cancer Center demonstrated the

discovery in bladder cancer, the fifth most common cancer in the United States.

Bladder cancer will kill about 14,000 Americans this year, most of whom will die

as a result of the disease's spread to other organs in a process called

metastasis.

The scientists showed that endothelin-A receptor antagonist drugs are only

effective at blocking the start of cancer spread to other organs, not treating

large, established primary-or distant-site tumors. The study was published

online in the Journal A class of drugs thought to kill cancer cells may in fact

block " cross talk " between the cancer cell and normal immune cells, resulting in

reduced cancer growth and spread - a discovery that could significantly alter

the way cancer drugs are evaluated in the future.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/212411.php

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It's common for school-aged children to pop on a pair of headphones to listen to

their favorite music. Could prolonged use of headphones eventually cause hearing

damage? To learn the answer, the authors of a study in the January print issue

of Pediatrics examined the results of hearing tests of 4,310 adolescents ages 12

to 19 taken as part of National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys.

The study, " Prevalence of Noise-Induced Hearing-Threshold Shifts and Hearing

Loss Among U.S. Youths, " published online Dec. 27, found that exposure to loud

noise or music through headphones increased from 19.8 percent in 1988-1994 to

34.8 percent in 2005-2006. Overall rates of hearing loss did not change

significantly between the two time periods, except for one type of hearing loss

among adolescent females. In 1988-1994, 11.6 percent of teen girls had

noise-induced threshold shift, a type of hearing loss caused by exposure to loud

noise. In 2005-2006, the rate had increased to 16.7 percent.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/212603.php

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A new study shows that vitamin D deficiency could be linked to the development

and severity of certain autoimmune lung diseases. These findings are being

reported in the Jan. 4 edition of the journal Chest. Brent Kinder, MD, UC Health

pulmonologist, director of the Interstitial Lung Disease Center at the

University of Cincinnati and lead investigator on the study, says vitamin D

deficiencies have been found to affect the development of other autoimmune

diseases, like lupus and type 1 diabetes.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/212685.php

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Merck, has signed a worldwide research and development agreement with

sanofi-aventis U.S. Inc., under which Merck Serono and sanofi-aventis U.S. Inc.

will collaboratively investigate novel experimental combinations of agents that

could block specific pathways in cancer cells. This collaboration could deliver

novel targeted oncology treatments with high therapeutic potential.

MSC1936369B is an experimental selective inhibitor of protein kinases MEK1 and

MEK2 (MAP/ERK kinase 1 and 2) effectively blocking downstream protein signaling.

It is in early clinical development as monotherapy and in combination with

standard of care. At the 2010 annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical

Oncology (ASCO) first results have been presented from the on-going Phase I

safety, pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic study of MSC1936369B in advanced

solid tumors, where first signs for anti-tumor activity were observed.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/211964.php

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FYI,

Lottie Duthu