That's Sick...Oh Wait That's Me

      For starters I have probably the worst flu I've had in years. I've been down for two full days now and a third looks inevitable. I've had triple digit temperatures pushing 105F and that's really not fun at all. My dad got sick on Monday and is still out of it, I started feeling really bad Thursday afternoon and I’m doing better than he is. I can at least function and may possibly go for a quick run tonight to get some serious fresh air into my system. I’ve still got a fever over 100F but feel pretty good nonetheless. I’ve also been instructed by my mom that I cannot go to church tomorrow morning since I’ll still be contagious.
      In other medical news of national importance, scientists at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute think they have discovered an enzyme called SPL (sphingosine phosphate lyase) that inhibits cancer cells from growing. They are not sure which specific forms of cancer are affected by this, so clinical trials are expected to follow soon. Read the whole story from Mercury News here.
      Not to be outdone, Canadian scientists have decided that inhibiting cancer growth is lame and that there are better ways to deal with cancer. So they discovered that dichloroacetate, or DCA, which is used to treat some metabolic disorders not only inhibits cancer growth but in many cases shrinks and kills the cancer cells. For sure it is known to kill brain, lung, breast, and is believed to work its magic on most human forms of cancer. The best part is that it is that DCA is really cheap to make. The worst part is that because it’s so cheap no pharmaceutical company is going to mass-produce it or run enough human lab tests to get it certified as a cancer drug by the FDA since there’s not enough money to be made from it to make it worth their investment. The side effects of such a chemical are nasty for most people, but not nearly as bad as chemo, plus there’s no evidence that it damages healthy tissue while killing the cancerous tissue. You can find links to it here and here and even here. Supposedly you can buy the stuff at most chemical supply stores but is not recommended and is probably dangerous as dosage isn't known.
      Any other medical news? Lets see...Flu...Check!...Cancer...Check!...Guess that's it on that front.
      In other news, the House wasted the whole week debating if they were going to officially say that they don’t like idea of keeping troops in Iraq. I wish I could do so little in a work week. But thankfully we all know that the government that governs least governs best. They really didn’t get anything else done and we can thank them for it. The casualty numbers keep climbing in Iraq too (3,133 as of 17/02/2007); our total number of killed troops across all branches of the military is now almost 1% of what our Army alone lost in WW2. That’s also almost 5.5% of the 57,200 soldiers we lost during the D-Day invasion. That’s probably less than the number of US citizens killed in the past year by illegal immigrants, but I haven’t written a paper on that so I don’t have national statistics for the immigration status of criminals.

Random Quote of the moment:
    He’s definitely not the brightest fish in the cookie jar.