Mursing Blog

Medicine’s dream of growing new human hearts and other organs to repair or replace damaged ones received a significant boost on Sunday when University of Minnesota researchers reported success in creating a beating rat heart in a laboratory.

Another excellent milestone on the road to creating viable organs, coupling this with the ability to revert skin cells to stem cells and you just might have the biggest two medical advances that I can think of.

When you can dramatically extend life expectancy at high cost, and have the rich living three or four times longer than the poor, you also get some very interesting ethical and moral issues, not to mention social issues.

It happens already between countries (take the U.S.As 78.2 year life expectancy and compare it to Swazilands 39.6, for example), but if it starts happening within countries and along such strict castes (rich people get new organs, poor people don’t), I wonder what implications that might have.

Well, another study has just come back destroying the idea that thimerosal, which contains mercury, is causing Autism, which I’m sure is no surprise to the sane people out there, but I have no doubt it will be ignored by the rabid anti-vaccination crowd.

In short, it’s been seven years since thimerosal was removed from routine childhood vaccinations, and the rate of Autism hasn’t decreased, which would be the expected outcome if it was indeed the causative agent, it has in fact risen, a clear indicator that Thimerosal is, how do you say it, not the cause.

Some more evidence if you ever have to debate with a “Thimerosal == Autism!” person. Good luck.

JAMA and Archives Journals. “Autism: Removing Thimerosal From Vaccines Did Not Reduce Autism Cases In California, Report Finds.” ScienceDaily 8 January 2008. 10 January 2008 <http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2008/01/080107181551.htm>.

In the January offer round you have been offered:

And I haven’t been updating this. Why? No idea. No one reads, so no motivation, but then no new content so no one reads, it’s a bad thing.

And because nothing has been happening.

I’ve finished my course, that’s done, I’ll be heading to get enrolled sometime this month, and then tomorrow night I find out where I study for the next two years. Sort of nervous, I’ve banked everything on getting into QUT, and while I should (I have the marks) I’m still pretty freaked out.

I’ve been reading “Emergency & Trauma Nursing” which was reccomended by Ian over at impactEDnurse and it’s a great book, even though I’ve not started my RN course it’s given me a lot of new information. Booktopia had some dramas getting the book in from their supplier, so I had to keep on top of them, but they sorted that out. Highly recommended book if you’re interested in that sort of thing, and it certainly helps pad out your textbook shelf.