Free Republic

An anti-meat activist group is urging owners of a minor-league baseball team to “stop glorifying bacon” via its bacon-themed uniform, merchandise and “smell the change” slogan. PCRM (Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine) has erected a billboard a mile from the Allentown Iron Pigs’ ballpark, comparing bacon to cigarettes and declaring: “Keep Kids Safe: Ban Bacon from Ballparks.” […] It also evokes the cigarette analogy: “The team would never pass out free cartons of cigarettes to the children of the LeHigh Valley, yet they are providing open access to bacon crumbles and turning a family-friendly event into a public health crisis.”...

Prostate cancer could be a sexually transmitted disease caused by a common infection passed on during intercourse, scientists are claiming. Research by the University of California found a sex infection called trichomoniasis supported cancer growth when a team of scientists tested human prostate cells in a laboratory. Trichomoniasis is the most common non-viral sexually transmitted infection and is understood to have infected an estimated 275 million people around the world. …

Russell said he and his team had engineered the virus to make it more suitable for cancer therapy. And, after just one dose of it, Erholtz’s cancer went into remission. She has been completely cleared of the disease, Russell wrote in Mayo Clinic Proceedings. Though, in this trial, the treatments were successful on only one of the two patients. And Tanios Bekaii-Saab, a researcher at James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute in Ohio, said the study must be confirmed in large randomized clinical trials — where many hopes get dashed, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported. “Unless we get to...

Stacy Erholtz, like many, has been inoculated with the measles vaccine, except she received a dose big — enough that it could have served 10 million people. No, this isn’t a precaution against the disease as more measles outbreaks become apparent, but it is actually part of an experimental trial to use the vaccine to fight cancer. Mayo Clinic researchers used this form of “virotherapy,” when you infect cancerous cells and kill them with virus while leaving normal cells untouched, to treat multiple myeloma. The idea of using a virus to destroy cancer goes back several decades, but this study...

(CNN) -- Vermont's governor on Thursday signed a bill into law that will require the labeling of genetically modified foods -- hailing it as the first such law in the nation. Under the new law, food offered for retail sale that is entirely or partially produced with genetic engineering must be labeled as such by July 2016. "Vermonters take our food and how it is produced seriously, and we believe we have a right to know what's in the food we buy," said Gov. Peter Shumlin. "More than 60 countries have already restricted or labeled these foods, and now one...

In a paper published in the journal Nature, bioengineers at The Scripps Research Institute in the San Diego neighborhood of La Jolla said they had successfully inserted two synthetic molecules into the genome of an Escherichia coli bacterium, which survived and passed on the new genetic material. In addition to the naturally occurring nucleotides adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine, which form the rungs of DNA’s double-helix structure, the bacterium carried two more base-pair partners, which study authors have dubbed d5SICS and dNaM. For more than a decade, scientists have been experimenting with so-called unnatural base pairs, or UBPs, saying they...

A new form of cancer could be triggered by a type of breast implant popular with British women, scientists are warning. At least 150 cases of the disease, called anaplastic large cell lymphoma (ALCL) of the breast, have been reported, including a handful in Britain. Nine in 10 cases of the disease – a cancer of the immune system – have been in women who have received breast implants with a textured outer shell, according to experts.

los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling is battling cancer, sources have confirmed to ESPN.com. The news was first reported by the New York Post. The Post, citing sources, reported that the 80-year-old Sterling has been battling prostate cancer for an extended period of time. Sterling was banned for life from the NBA and fined $2.5 million by commissioner Adam Silver earlier in the week after racist remarks he made were published by TMZ. Silver has urged the league's owners to force a sale of the Clippers, which they can do with approval from three-fourths of the league's 30 owners.

AURANGABAD, Maharashtra, India, April 30, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Having an abortion makes women 180 percent more likely to develop breast cancer, according to a new study produced by a fellow at Johns Hopkins. Researchers studied 220 women in the city of Aurangabad, India, and found the odds ratio (OR) for developing breast cancer significantly increased with the number of abortions a woman had. “We observed strong positive association of positive family history in first degree relatives (OR- 3.1:95%CI, 2.12-5.03), number of abortions (OR- 2.8:95%CI, 1.82-5.12) and past history of benign breast disease (OR- 1.8:95%CI, 1.-3.03) in cases of breast...

Half of patients diagnosed with cancer today will effectively be “cured” according to the authors of new research, which shows survival rates in England and Wales have doubled since the 1970s. Experts hailed the landmark findings as a “tipping point” in the war on cancer, and said dramatic improvements in diagnosis and treatment meant the disease could soon be treated as a chronic condition, instead of a death sentence. The landmark study of 7 million cancer patients suggests that 50 per cent of patients diagnosed today can expect to survive for at least 10 years - by which point their...

Doctor warns against misinformation on immunisationDubai: A vaccine that helps prevent cervical cancer in girls should also be given to boys, a gynaecologist said on Monday. Dr Britt Clausson, obstetrician and gynaecologist at Mediclinic City hospital, said that data now strongly suggests that the HPV (human papilomavirus) is also associated with cancers of male reproductive organs. The doctor said the HPV vaccine will provide immunity to both boys and girls. She said cervical cancer is certainly not low here. She said the HPV vaccine is the first ever that protects against a cancer and that in countries such as the...

A US trial of hi-tech goggles could reduce the need for secondary operations for cancer patients. Surgeons are not always able to tell if they have removed all the cancerous tissues and many patients face a follow-up operation to remove more. The goggles create an augmented reality, showing cancerous cells as glowing.

Many cancer patients who undergo chemotherapy stop responding to treatment as a result of their cancer cells developing resistance to drugs. But researchers from the University of Manchester in the UK say they have discovered a way to target these drug-resistant cells, making them more open to therapy. The research team, led by Dr. Andrew Gilmore, recently published their findings in the journal Cell Reports. To reach their discovery, the researchers first explored the mechanisms behind mitosis - a process in which cells replicate and divide. They explain that any interference in this process can lead to apoptosis, or "controlled...

He won the hearts of San Francisco five months ago, when the city morphed into Gotham City to lift the spirits of a 5-year-old battling leukemia. And Batkid still evoked strong emotions when he took the mound at the Giants home opener at AT&T Park on Tuesday against the Arizona Diamondbacks. The tiny superhero, aka Miles Scott of Siskyou County, threw the first pitch at the game, where the Giants were victorious, 7-3. An especially poignant image was when the little boy dressed all in black held hands with pitcher Matt Cain on the field. SF Morphs Into Gotham City...

<p>WASHINGTON — Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo is pushing a bill in Congress that would shift responsibility for any labeling of genetically modified foods to the hands of the federal government, potentially stopping the efforts underway in many states to mandate labels on such foods.</p>

President Obama took a victory lap on Tuesday, celebrating 7 million Obamacare enrollees. Let’s take a look at this success. President Obama and the Democrats pushed through their signature domestic policy stating the “Affordable” Care Act would cover “every American.” They have used the figure of “48 million uninsured Americans.” To date, Obamacare has then enrolled less than 2 percent of those uninsured Americans. “It’s working!” exclaimed the president. The Rand Corporation crunched the numbers and discovered only 858,000 people of the 7 million enrollees have actually paid their premiums, which is required to actually be covered.

Researchers at Stanford University have designed a new technique that may soon make this a reality. Tumours are called 'solid' or 'liquid' based on where in the body they grow. More than 80 percent of all cancers are caused by solid tumours that grow as a mass of cells in particular organ, tissue or gland. The new technique called CAPP-Seq (cancer personalised profiling by deep sequencing) is sensitive enough to detect just one molecule of tumour DNA in a sea of 10,000 healthy DNA molecules in the blood.

Australian researchers published findings this week on a newly-discovered plant compound that destroys cancer cells, but leaves healthy cells unharmed. They found it in possibly the last place you'd look for a cancer cure: the family of plants that brings us cancer's number-one culprit, tobacco.

A new report from the Medical University of Graz in Austria presents evidence that the “vegan” lifestyle is actually dangerous. The study found that purely vegetarian diets lead to poorer general health and a diminished quality of life marred by both physical and mental problems. In spite of the vegan tendency to smoke less if at all; have higher socioeconomic achievement, eat less fat, get more exercise, eat more veggies and fruits and drink less alcohol they do not have a better life style by objective standards. Vegans suffer from higher rates of cancer; are twice as likely to be...

When Maureen Burns’ 9-year-old dog, Max, started to act strangely, she worried that her beloved pet was sick. Turns out that Burns herself was ill—and Max knew it. In a video shared by BBC Earth, Burns describes the “odd signs” that Max started to exhibit. "The odd signs were when he would come up and touch my breast with his nose, and back off so desperately unhappy with such a sad look in his eyes," Burns said in the video. It turns out that Burns had a lump in her breast, undetected by her last mammogram. She then decided to...