RE-ENGINEERING NIPPLE DEVICE TO AVOID INFANT HIV

RE-ENGINEERING NIPPLE DEVICE TO AVOID INFANT HIV

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

Breastfeeding by a healthy mother can yield enormous health and adaptability benefits for the fragile infant. However, an AIDS infected mother is a different story altogether, in that breastfeeding brings HIV harm directly to the infant.

Researchers are therefore challenged to innovate on a nipple device that can cut the infant infection by the mother’s HIV/AIDS condition. Time seems running out on the project, as 400,000 babies are infected with HIV across the planet every year.

A very interesting news about the subject is shown below.

[Philippines, 17 March 2012]

Source: http://www.scidev.net/en/health/news/nipple-device-could-deliver-drugs-to-babies.html

Nipple device could deliver drugs to babies

Karen McColl

27 February 2012

A simple nipple shield could help breastfeeding mothers cut the risk of HIV infection from breast milk, say researchers.

Nipple shields are often used by mothers who have difficulty breastfeeding, and a modified version of the shield has been developed by a team of young engineers with a view to reducing mother-to-child HIV transmission.

The tip contains a removable insert, which can be impregnated with a microbicide designed to inactivate the HIV virus. The drug would be flushed out by breast milk as the baby feeds.

More recently, the team has been exploring whether a similar device could deliver antiretroviral drugs to breastfeeding babies, in light of changing advice from the WHO. The WHO now recommends that babies born to HIV-positive mothers be breastfed and simultaneously receive antiretroviral drugs, unless conditions are safe for formula feeding.

Globally, about 400,000 children a year are infected with HIV, nearly all acquiring the virus from their mothers. The risk of transmission is significantly increased by breastfeeding.

The only way to eliminate this risk is not to breastfeed, but formula feeding is often unsafe, expensive and impractical, especially in developing countries, where formula-fed babies face a higher risk of malnutrition, diarrhoea and other infections. This is particularly the case in Sub-Saharan Africa, where more than 90 per cent of mothers infected with HIV live.

A project to develop the modified shield, called JustMilk, was launched at the International Development Design Summit in 2008. The researchers say it may also be possible to produce inserts containing other medications or nutritional supplements.

The project has attracted much attention, including a US$100,000 Grand Challenges Exploration research grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2009.

But Stephen Gerrard, a JustMilk researcher at the University of Cambridge in United Kingdom said more research is needed.

"We have to prove without a doubt that if this device is used by a mother, the volume of milk consumed does not change," he said.

Gerrard told SciDev.Net that trials to test this principle are expected to take place within the next year.

"I'm optimistic that we can do good with this device once we are sure that it does not impede breastfeeding and would not create any stigma," he added.

Andrew Tomkins, at the Institute of Child Health in London, said: "The potential problem with a nipple shield device will be making sure that the dose is adequate for the baby."

APOLOGIA & CURRENT TIDBITS

Erle Frayne Argonza

Good morning from Manila! Magandang umaga sa inyong lahat!

First of all, my apology for the quite long dormancy or near-absence in my own sites. A long story this is. Last January and February my family went on a mourning over the death of my father's 2nd wife. My Dad is now all alone, so I decided to join him in his Antipolo City suburban home, but in the process cutting off my DSL account in my old home (rented). I then decided to go on a contemplative couples of months to recollect my life journey and rechart my next steps. That now done, I am back in my blogs, though I had to be constrained by the fact that I'm doing this in commercial netcafes.

Many events have since passed, from the time I rested from my writing. Let me just cite two (2) events that raged the world as most noting:

• Manny Pacquiao's great victory over his Brit competitor. My own kabayan Manny is now indubitably the best boxer in the world, and is for me indubitably among the world's greatest boxers. He is still moving up the scale of talents, and is reputedly improving yet by the day, which makes him truly a monster in the ring. The Manny fight is the best story to blast the planet so far, as far as culture & leisure is concerned. Well, it seems that it is in the culture sphere anyway where the positive news are churned out, thus reducing effectively the dreariness of a dreadful world getting more mad each day.

• HIN1 Virus on the loose. Coming straight from Dostoevskian and Malthusian hells, this pandemic suddenly burst forth into the public mind in a rather unexpected manner. Well, pandemics are as unexpected as they can be, unpredictable in their onslaughts, so here we all are waiting for the manna from heaven (i.e. antivirus serum) that could take this virus down once and for all and spare us all the stress and storm that is raging the planet economically.

That said, let me say, I am so glad to be back. Please stand by for exciting notes I'd be sharing afresh to you all.

Carpe diem!

ANTHRAX SCARE: SPIN DOCTORS, ROUGE FORCES

Bro. Erle Frayne Argonza

News came out recently about the suicide by a biodefense researcher who may have something to do with the anthrax scare weeks after the 9/11 event in the USA. I was in the USA at that time, and I witnessed the anxiety and trauma done by that sordid event.

My own theory then was that rouge forces within the USA were the ones behind the 9/11. The series of scare tactics and bombing hoax that followed could have been part of that overall agenda. The grand levels of fears could have been used to justify more police state intervention, at the worst leading to a declaration of Martial Law in the whole USA.

The bad thing, I think, is that the biodefense researcher’s death cut up the opportunity to find out who were the real people behind that anthrax scare. The rouge forces connects to Establishment, this is most likely, so the researcher’s death will bury forever that channel of command between this researcher and the real manipulators behind the screen.

The news report below reflects the update news about the researcher’s death.

[02 July 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila. Thanks to MSN database news.]
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By LARA JAKES JORDAN and DAVID DISHNEAU, Associated Press Writers Fri Aug 1, 3:57 AM ET

WASHINGTON - A top U.S. biodefense researcher apparently committed suicide just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him in the anthrax mailings that traumatized the nation in the weeks following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to a published report.

The scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who worked for the past 18 years at the government's biodefense labs at Fort Detrick, Md., had been told about the impending prosecution, the Los Angeles Times reported for Friday editions. The laboratory has been at the center of the FBI's investigation of the anthrax attacks, which killed five people.

Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital in Maryland. The Times, quoting an unidentified colleague, said the scientist had taken a massive dose of a prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine.

Tom Ivins, a brother of the scientist, told The Associated Press that another of his brothers, Charles, told him Bruce had committed suicide.

A woman who answered the phone at Charles Ivins' home in Etowah, N.C., refused to wake him and declined to comment on his death. "This is a grieving time," she said.

A woman who answered the phone at Bruce Ivins' home in Frederick declined to comment.

Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr and FBI Assistant Director John Miller declined to comment on the report.

Henry S. Heine, a scientist who had worked with Ivins on inhalation anthrax research at Fort Detrick, said he and others on their team have testified before a federal grand jury in Washington that has been investigating the anthrax mailings for more than a year.

Heine declined to comment on Ivins' death.

Norman Covert, a retired Fort Detrick spokesman who served with Ivins on an animal-care and protocol committee, said Ivins was "a very intent guy" at their meetings.
Ivins was the co-author of numerous anthrax studies, including one on a treatment for inhalation anthrax published in the July 7 issue of the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.

Just last month, the government exonerated another scientist at the Fort Detrick lab, Steven Hatfill, who had been identified by the FBI as a "person of interest" in the anthrax attacks. The government paid Hatfill $5.82 million to settle a lawsuit he filed against the Justice Department in which he claimed the department violated his privacy rights by speaking with reporters about the case.

The Times said federal investigators moved away from Hatfill and concluded Ivins was the culprit after FBI Director Robert Mueller changed leadership of the investigation in 2006. The new investigators instructed agents to re-examine leads and reconsider potential suspects. In the meantime, investigators made progress in analyzing anthrax powder recovered from letters addressed to two U.S. senators, according to the report.

Besides the five deaths, 17 people were sickened by anthrax that was mailed to lawmakers on Capitol Hill and members of the news media in New York and Florida just weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The victims included postal workers and others who came into contact with the anthrax.

In the six months following the anthrax mailings, Ivins conducted unauthorized testing for anthrax spores outside containment areas at USAMRIID — the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick — and found some, according to an internal report by the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, which oversees the lab.

In December 2001, after conducting tests triggered by a technician's fears that she had been exposed, Ivins found evidence of anthrax and decontaminated the woman's desk, computer, keypad and monitor, but didn't notify his superiors, according to the report.

The report says Ivins performed more unauthorized sampling on April 15, 2002, and found anthrax spores in his office, in a passbox used for moving materials in and out of labs, and in a room where male workers changed from civilian clothing into laboratory garb.

Ivins told Army investigators he conducted unauthorized tests because he was worried that the powdered anthrax in letters that had been sent to USAMRIID for analysis might not have been adequately contained.

In January 2002, the FBI doubled the reward for helping solve the case to $2.5 million, and by June officials said the agency was scrutinizing 20 to 30 scientists who might have had the knowledge and opportunity to send the anthrax letters.

After the government's settlement with Hatfill was announced in late June, Ivins started showing signs of strain, the Times said. It quoted a longtime colleague as saying Ivins was being treated for depression and indicated to a therapist that he was considering suicide. Family members and local police escorted Ivins away from the Army lab, and his access to sensitive areas was curtailed, the colleague told the newspaper. He said Ivins was facing a forced retirement in September.

The colleague declined to be identified out of concern that he would be harassed by the FBI, the report said.

Ivins was one of the nation's leading biodefense researchers.

In 2003, Ivins and two of his colleagues at the USAMRIID received the highest honor given to Defense Department civilian employees for helping solve technical problems in the manufacture of anthrax vaccine.

In 1997, U.S. military personnel began receiving the vaccine to protect against a possible biological attack. Within months, a number of vaccine lots failed a potency test required by federal regulators, causing a shortage of vaccine and eventually halting the immunization program. The USAMRIID team's work led to the reapproval of the vaccine for human use.

The Times said Ivins was the son of a Princeton-educated pharmacist who was born and raised in Lebanon, Ohio. He received undergraduate and graduate degrees, including a Ph.D. in microbiology, from the University of Cincinnati.

He and his wife, Diane, owned a home just outside the main gate to Fort Detrick. …

DEPOPULATION, GENOCIDE: GLOBAL OLIGARCHY’S POPULATION AGENDA

Bro. Erle Frayne Argonza

Good morning from Manila!

Those more aware fellows on Earth may be reflecting right now about the long-term agenda of the global oligarchy regarding population. We note the rise of the neo-Malthusians within and outside the UN and international bodies from the 70s onwards, their position buttressing the toxic ‘greenies’ demonization of humans as the cause of the planet’s predicament.

The greenies’ and Malthusian’s causes do tie up, as they are among the paid Pied Pipers of the global oligarchy for the long-term agenda of depopulating the planet. The global elite’s disdain of masses of humans, who they refer to as ‘useless Eaters’, do make sense when we reflect about the wars, pandemics, induced cyclones and earthquakes, and many more phenomena that tend to reduce the populations en masse at any given instance.

Below is a summary of the said long-term agenda, culled from the database of the Executive Intelligence Review. See also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylIoU_Hnt4k

[28 July 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila]

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WORLD DEPOPULATION IS TOP NSA AGENDA: CLUB OF ROME
A Timely Repost:

The Haig-Kissinger depopulation policy by Lonnie Wolfe

Special Report EIR (Executive Intelligence Review) March 10, 1981

Investigations by EIR have uncovered a planning apparatus operating outside the control of the White House whose sole purpose is to reduce the world's population by 2 billion people through war, famine, disease and any other means necessary. This apparatus, which includes various levels of the government is determining U.S. foreign policy. In every political hotspot -- El Salvador, the so-called arc of crisis in the Persian Gulf, Latin America, Southeast Asia and in Africa- the goal of U.S. foreign policy is population reduction. The targeting agency for the operation is the National Security Council's Ad Hoc Group on Population Policy. Its policy-planning group is in the U.S. State Department's Office of Population Affairs, established in 1975 by Henry Kissinger. This group drafted the Carter administration's Global 2000 document, which calls for global population reduction, and the same apparatus is conducting the civil war in El Salvador as a conscious depopulation project.

"There is a single theme behind all our work-we must reduce population levels," said Thomas Ferguson, the Latin American case officer for the State Department's Office of Population Affairs (OPA). "Either they [governments] do it our way, through nice clean methods or they will get the kind of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran, or in Beirut. Population is a political problem. Once population is out of control it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it "The professionals," said Ferguson, "aren't interested in lowering population for humanitarian reasons.

That sounds nice. We look at resources and environmental constraints. We look at our strategic needs, and we say that this country must lower its population-or else we will have trouble. So steps are taken. El Salvador is an example where our failure to lower population by simple means has created the basis for a national security crisis. The government of El Salvador failed to use our programs to lower their population. Now they get a civil war because of it.... There will be dislocation and food shortages. They still have too many people there." Civil wars are somewhat drawn-out ways to reduce population, the OPA official added. "The quickest way to reduce population is through famine, like in Africa or through disease like the Black Death," all of which might occur in El Salvador. Ferguson's OPA monitors populations in the Third World and maps strategies to reduce them. Its budget for FY 1980 was $190 million; for FY 198l, it will be $220 million. The Global 2000 report calls for doubling that figure. The sphere of Kissinger In 1975, OPA was brought under a reorganized State Department Bureau of Oceans, International Environmental, and Scientific Affairs-- a body created by Henry Kissinger. The agency was assigned to carry out the directives of the NSC Ad Hoc Group. According to an NSC spokesman, Kissinger initiated both groups after discussion with leaders of the Club of Rome during the 1974 population conferences in Bucharest and Rome. The Club of Rome, controlled by Europe's black nobility, is the primary promotion agency for the genocidal reduction of world population levels. The Ad Hoc Group was given "high priority" by the Carter administration, through the intervention of National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and Secretaries of State Cyrus Vance and Edmund Muskie. According to OPA expert Ferguson, Kissinger initiated a full about-face on U.S. development policy toward the Third World. "For a long time," Ferguson stated, "people here were timid" They listened to arguments from Third World leaders that said that the best contraceptive was economic reform and development. So we pushed development programs, and we helped create a population time bomb. "We are letting people breed like flies without allowing for natural causes to keep population down. We raised the birth survival rates, extended life-spans by lowering death rates, and did nothing about lowering birth rates. That policy is finished. We are saying with Global 2000 and in real policy that you must lower population rates. Population reduction and control is now our primary policy objective- then you can have some development."Accordingly, the Bureau of Oceans, International Environmental, and Scientific Affairs has consistently blocked industrialization policies in the Third World, denying developing nations access to nuclear energy technology--the policies that would enable countries to sustain a growing population. According to State Department sources, and Ferguson himself, Alexander Haig is a "firm believer" in population control. "We will go into a country," said Ferguson, "and say, here is your goddamn development plan. Throw it out the window. Start looking at the size of your population and figure out what must be done to reduce it."If you don't like that, if you don't want to choose to do it through planning, then you'll have an El Salvador or an Iran, or worse, a Cambodia."According to an NSC spokesman, the United States now shares the view of former World Bank President Robert McNamara that the "population crisis" is a greater threat to U.S. national security interests than "nuclear annihilation." "Every hot spot in the world corresponds to a population crisis point," said Ferguson who would rename Brzezinski's arc of crisis doctrine the "arc of population crisis." This is corroborated by statements in the NSC Ad Hoc Group's April 1980 report. There is "an increased potential for social unrest, economic and political instability, mass migration and possible international conflicts over control of land and resources," says the NSC report. It then cites "demographic pressures" as key to understanding "examples of recent warfare in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, El Salvador. Honduras, and Ethiopia, and the growing potential forinstability in such places as Turkey, the Philippines, Central America, Iran, and Pakistan." Through extraordinary efforts, the Ad Hoc Group and OPA estimate that they may be able to keep a billion people from being born through contraceptive programs. But as the Ad Hoc Group's report states, the best efforts of the Shah of Iran to institute "clean programs" of birth control failed to make a significant dent in the country's birth rate. The promise of jobs, through an ambitious industrialization program, encouraged migration toward "overcrowded cities" like Teheran. Now under Ayatollah Khomeini, the "clean programs" have been dismantled. The government may make progress because it has a program "to induce up to half of Teheran's 6 million residents to relocate, as well as possible measures to keep rural migrants from moving to the cities." Behind the back of the President Ferguson and others involved with the OPA and NSC group maintain that the United States will continue a foreign policy based on a genocidal reduction of the world's population. "We have a network in place of cothinkers in the government," said the OPA case officer. "We keep going, no matter who is in the White House." But Ferguson reports that the "White House" does not really understand what they are saying and that the President "thinks that population policy means how do we speed up population increase. "As long as no one says differently," said Ferguson, "we will continue to do our jobs. "