It's Finally Friday!

Free again...I always think of that song on Fridays. Tonight I'm covering the football game for my high school. I'm not sure if it's going to make or not due to the weather. If it does, I'll let you know how it turns out.

I still need to clean up my trauma shears from the last game. I was too tired to clean them up last week. I also have duty this weekend, more fun.

School dinner kids healthier than packed lunch kids, UK

"Researchers from St George's University of London examined the eating habits of one thousand secondary schoolchildren in England and Wales and came to the conclusion that school dinners offer better nutritional value than most packed lunches. The researchers said the nutritional problem may be more in the home than at school."

Apparently this is only in the UK. Here in America, I seriously doubt that there is anything more unhealthy than the school lunch. It's preserved in grease (not that grease is bad, it adds flavor.)

Drug can reduce risk of death, heart attack, and stroke in patients with diabetes

"A diabetes drug called pioglitazone can reduce the risk of death, heart attack, and stroke in high-risk patients with type 2 diabetes, concludes an article in this week's issue of The Lancet. Patients with diabetes have a two to four-fold increased risk of a cardiovascular event compared with non-diabetics. Until now there has only been indirect evidence suggesting that pioglitazone could reduce cardiovascular-related deaths and illness in diabetics."

Neural stem cells are long-lived

"New studies in mice have shown that immature stem cells that proliferate to form brain tissues can function for at least a year -- most of the life span of a mouse -- and give rise to multiple types of neural cells, not just neurons. The discovery may bode well for the use of these neural stem cells to regenerate brain tissue lost to injury or disease. Alexandra L. Joyner, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at New York University School of Medicine, and her former postdoctoral fellow, Sohyun Ahn, who is now at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, published their findings in the October 6, 2005, issue of the journal Nature. They said the technique they used to trace the fate of stem cells could also be used to understand the roles of stem cells in tissue repair and cancer progression."

Genomes of more than 200 human flu strains reveal a dynamic virus

"In the first large-scale effort of its kind, researchers have determined the full genetic sequence of more than 200 distinct strains of human influenza virus. The information, being made available in a publicly accessible database, is expected to help scientists better understand how flu viruses evolve, spread and cause disease. The genomic data already has enabled scientists to determine why the 2003-4 annual influenza vaccine did not fully protect individuals against the flu that season. The new genomes are the initial results of the Influenza Genome Sequencing Project, a joint effort of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and multiple partners including NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), the Wadsworth Center of the New York State Department of Health in Albany, NY, and The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, MD. The report was published online in the journal Nature on October 5."

I would've thought that the several centuries of information that we have on the flu virus would've been enough to show that it was a dynamic virus.

Valete omnes,
Bravo.

And have a safe Friday night.