Medical Weirdness

In a "stimulus package" of their own devising, Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer have announced they are going to provide 70 drugs, including Viagra, free to America's recently dis-employed. Sadly, what might have been cure for those recession blues is limited to people who had already been prescribed one of the drugs prior to being laid off (New Scientist).

And ladies, with all that free Viagra about to hit the streets, now would be a good time to look your best. So what better way to rejuvenate your skin and cast off unsightly wrinkles than though injections of a compound derived from babies' foreskins. In what is, amazingly, not a joke, a British company has developed, and received UK approval for, a treatment called "Vavelta" that contains live fibroblasts harvested from the bits of baby boys left over after a circumcision. Each vial of the drug is only enough to revive less than a square inch of skin, and costs $1000. But you'll have to travel to get it, the FDA have yet to approve its use in the US (Scientific American).

Of course, it's not just your looks that needs tending as you get older, your mind needs attention too. Fortunately researchers have just announced that increased vitamin D is just the thing to keep us thinking flawlessly. Vitamin D, you will remember, comes to us mainly through eating oily fish and from exposure to the sun. So start saving for that Miami condo now (Telegraph).

Meanwhile, in a case of medical irony, one little spoken of casualty of the strategic arms treaties and test bans has been the availability of medicinal isotopes such as those used in radiography and some cancer treatments. Today, all isotopes for the Americas are supplied by just one facility, the MAPLE facility in Ontario, also the world's oldest operating nuclear reactor. Only now, it's shutting down over safety concerns, and there's no replacement ready (National Post).

Finally, as an irony supplement, researchers have discovered that Down syndrome, a genetic condition that causes a host of physical and mental problems, also protects against some forms of cancer. Down syndrome is caused by having an extra copy of one chromosome, and it is through having an additional copy of one of the genes on that chromosome, which interferes with the formation of blood vessels, that sufferers from DS are less susceptible to many 'solid tumor' cancers. It's hoped that this discovery might lead to better ways to fight cancer in the future (Science).