An international team of surgeons has successfully given a South Korean-Canadian toddler a life-saving windpipe transplant made from plastic fibers and some of her own stem cells. Hannah Warren, 2, was born without a trachea and is now the youngest person to ever receive a bio-engineered organ,…
“Mary Tyler Moore” Rewind: It’s wonderful, current, not funny
“The Mary Tyler Moore Show” began airing in 1970, but its DNA is still all over TV. It is the progenitor of every comedy starring a woman, single, working or otherwise — “30 Rock’s” characterizations are closely modeled on “Mary Tyler Moore’s”; “Sex and the City” took “Mary Tyler Moore” story lines and made them explicit — but also every workplace sitcom, every friends-as-family sitcom, and every sitcom aimed squarely at adults. So most comedies. A book about its making is about to be released. It is all over most “best TV ever” lists. Because of “Mary Tyler Moore” costar Valerie Harper’s illness, she has been making the talk show rounds with Tyler Moore, Cloris Leachman and Betty White. Hannah Horvath recently fell asleep watching reruns. It could not be more current, except for one thing — and this is some weapon’s grade sitcom sacrilege — it’s not that funny.Continue Reading… … Read More
‘Fairness of Sweden’s rental queues is a myth’
Finding a place to live is key for immigrant families that want to integrate in Sweden, but Swedish housing policy throws a spanner in the works for even the most enterprising immigrant families, argues local Liberal Party (Folkpartiet) politician Robert Hannah. … Read More
“Girls” recap: Good-bye cruel “Girls”
I don’t know how I feel about the new Hannah-in-crisis. One of the great joys of Hannah was that even — especially — in her blundering, raw, ineptitude, she was a force that, nonetheless, moved forward. Unlike the rest of us, with our piddling one step forward, two steps back, her massive jumps of misplaced courage — “I am the voice — or at least, a voice — of my generation” — were decimated by steady, incremental self-sabotage. The best part was that, unlike us, she would have been hard-pressed to differentiate the two.So how can we make peace with this Hannah, who, after finally getting what she wants — a good (enough) job and a nice(ish) boy — gets overcome by OCD, a terribly crippling condition in real life, and possibly so in drama. A very smart commenter on Facebook recently noted that the ear-poking seems almost an act of desperation, as if Hannah were trying to dig out her neurosis with a Q-tip. It certainly does, but what about losing Adam has caused this syndrome? Is it stopping her from writing the book? Is the book stopping her from writing Adam? Was the plot stopping Dunham from writing an explanation for either of these? Hannah is poking around for answers, lost and alone. As are we.Continue Reading… … Read More
Ann Patchett on her moment of “Girls” fame: “I am so far out of it!”
Ann Patchett, call your agent.The author of books including “Bel Canto” and “State of Wonder,” who also runs a Nashville bookstore, couldn’t seem farther-removed from the world of HBO’s “Girls” — a show whose characters seem likely to read Sheila Heti or “Vice” magazine. Besides, as Patchett told Salon, she doesn’t watch TV.And yet, last night’s episode name-checked the author, when the mother of Lena Dunham’s character announces that she’s having a wonderful time at an academic conference in New York.”It has been such an awesome conference,” says Becky Ann Baker’s character, a prim middle-aged, upper-middle-class woman. “I never thought I’d meet so many other women who feel the same way I do about Ann Patchett.” The joke here, perhaps, is that Patchett is the sort of tasteful, excellent, high-mid-brow author for whom women like Hannah’s mother would, near-universally, feel a strong affinity.Patchett is flattered. “I heard about the reference this morning from an old boyfriend who called me a ‘meme,’ and then I had to ask him what a ‘meme’ was,” Patchett told Salon via email. “It’s very nice to think that someone at the show would take the trouble to put me in the cultural loop when clearly I am so far out of it.”Continue Reading… … Read More
HIV-positive baby cured with conventional drug therapy
A two and a half year old baby from Mississippi has been offmedication for over a year and with only traces of the virus’genetic material still found in the system.“This is a proof of concept that HIV can be potentiallycurable in infants,” said Dr. Deborah Persaud, a virologist atJohns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who presented the findingsat the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections inAtlanta.Apparently, the mother of the child went into labor withoutknowing that she was HIV positive. Tests only confirmed the virusduring the delivery.”I just felt like this baby was at higher-than-normal risk,and deserved our best shot,” Dr. Hannah Gay, a pediatric HIVspecialist at the University of Mississippi who treated the babysaid in an interview.To combat the virus, the medics applied accelerated and morepotent treatment than usual, assigning three-drug infusions within30 hours of birth, before tests confirmed the infant wasinfected.Usually, in similar cases doctors administer low-dose medicationin hope of preventing HIV infection.The child responded well through age 18 months at which pointthe family temporarily stopped treatment, researchers said. Whenthey returned ten months after treatment stopped only tiny amountsof virus was found in the child’s blood.The applied course of action apparently pushed the HIV out ofthe baby’s blood before it could take refuge in the body.Reservoirs of dormant cells usually rapidly attack and infectanyone who stops medication, said Dr. Deborah Persaud of JohnsHopkins Children’s Center who led the investigation into thecase.The child has been deemed as “functionally cured,”meaning in long-term remission even if all traces of the virushaven’t been completely eradicated.Next, the medics will try to examine and prove that, with moreaggressive treatment of other babies, “maybe we’ll be able toblock this reservoir seeding,” Persaud said.The scientific community praised the discovery’s announcement inAtlanta.”You could call this about as close to a cure, if not a cure,that we’ve seen,” Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutesof Health told the reporters, but cautioned against stopping theanti-AIDS drugs in infected infants even if they are aggressivelytreated at birth.The Mississippi case shows “there may be different cures fordifferent populations of HIV-infected people,” said Dr. RowenaJohnston of the Foundation for AIDS Research.”We can’t promise to cure babies who are infected. We canpromise to prevent the vast majority of transmissions if the momsare tested during every pregnancy,” Dr. Gay said.The Mississippi case is the first time a person has been curedfrom HIV using drug treatment. Earlier a man was cured using asophisticated stem cell transplant.Timothy Ray Brown was diagnosed with HIV in 1995 later todevelop leukemia while living in Germany. In 2007, a blood stemcell transplant using a donor that was naturally resistant to HIVwith a rare gene mutation was applied to Brown, transferring theresistance. It is estimated that some 300,000 children were born worldwidewith HIV in 2011, mostly in poor countries where only about 60percent of infected pregnant women get treatment that can keep themfrom passing the virus to their babies. … Read More
Onion writers angry over Wallis apology
The fallout from The Onion’s crude tweet about Oscar nominee Quvenzhané Wallis continues.The tweet, which described the nine-year-old “Beasts of the Southern Wild” star using a vulgar anatomical term in order to seemingly mock the way the media describes starlets, was deleted shortly after being published. It was, perhaps, of a piece with the satirical publication’s general tone of irreverence — which is perhaps why the apology from the newspaper’s CEO has struck such a wrong note with Onion employees.”No person should be subjected to such a senseless, humorless comment masquerading as satire,” wrote the CEO, Steve Hannah.”My reaction was, ‘It wasn’t a great joke, but big deal,’” one former Onion editor told BuzzFeed.Continue Reading… … Read More
