Green Options

Animals Asia successfully rescued 13 Asian black bears (moon bears) from bile farms in the past month. This is a small step in a continuing fight, as an estimated 7,000-10,000 moon bears still suffer in bile farms across China.

Dogs have long been accepted as man’s best friend. But nosy ones have provided inspiration to a laser research team working on early cancer detection methods to devise a breathalyzer-type tool that could significantly improve survival rates for suffering millions.

Researchers at University of Oklahoma are reportedly working to create a sensor to detect bio-marker gases exhaled in the breath of a person with cancer, picking up on earlier studies showing that dogs can detect cancer by sniffing the exhaled breath of cancer patients.

In a study published two years ago, it was found that dogs identified breast and lung cancer patients with accuracies of 88% and 97%, respectively by smelling breath samples.

It has been proven elsewhere that gas-phase molecules are uniquely associated with cancer but the team will use nanotechnology to improve laser performance and shrink laser systems, which would allow battery-powered operation of a hand held sensor device.

The average man living in forest-prone areas and who depends on meat from endangered apes and other wildlife for his proteins plays the role of a carrying agent for the hundreds of infectious diseases that humanity is suffering from.

Now experts are warning of the danger to humanity this lifestyle may be posing. Most of these diseases, identified in medical terms as zoonotic because of their ability to jump from animal to man, have been labeled as “emerging infectious diseases” or EIDs.

Over 60 percent of the 1,415 infectious diseases currently known to modern medicine are capable of infecting both humans and animals. Most of these diseases originated in animals and now infect people and include viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoa and helminths, with 175 pathogenic species associated with diseases considered to be ‘emerging’.

To most African communities, facing the knife is akin to being a “real man”. Male circumcision is an important rite of passage that moves the young man that undergoes it a notch higher towards marriage and earns him a respectable position in society. But to a few African tribes, like the Zulu warrior nation in South Africa and the Luo in Kenya, male circumcision is not in the books. But this may soon change.

Recent extensive medical research and studies on the prevalence of HIV/Aids in Africa indicate that male circumcision could help reduce the spread of the disease on the continent and elsewhere. A massive roll out of free male circumcision programs in Swaziland, Rwanda, Zambia and Kenya is underway and experts hope results will reflect the 60% reduction in new infection rates documented in the studies.

You know what isn’t sustainable, at least for me? Successfully treating a poison ivy outbreak.

My grandmother could never have made this connection in a million lifetimes. But she would have cursed me for suggesting that the menacing elephants that occasionally come to our dusty village somewhere in remote Africa to pillage on our crops and the geckos that roam the village paths could have a connection with her lying on her death bed and needing the knife of a surgeon for her perennial ulcers.

But two separate scientific studies and discoveries in very different settings in Africa and the US can easily make the connection, if you may.

Connecting the Elephant and the Gecko
The pounding feet of the 15,000 pound African Bush Elephant make protective crevices in the savanna grasslands that help the geckos hide from their predators and the hot, penetrating African sun, according to Robert Pringle, an ecologist and conservation biologist at Stanford University in California, who conducted his research at the Mpala Research Center in Kenya. Significant numbers of geckos have been reported in the aftermath of an elephant’s feeding - the vertebrates often finding breeding space and security in fallen tree limbs and stripped barks. This makes the Elephant a change agent of habitat creation at the patch scale for small species that seem insignificant.

Connecting You and the Gecko
The gecko is a small to average sized lizard belonging to the family Gekkonidae that come in 1,196 different species and which are found in warm climates throughout the world.

Many species have specialized toe pads that enable them to climb smooth vertical surfaces and even cross indoor ceilings with ease. Some species like the house lizard are entirely harmless and feed on irritant house insects, which is good. But that is not all.

Featured article from the San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper by Janette D. Sherman, M.D.

How do you work to prevent and treat HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria without power? “With great difficulty,” answers Dr. Kobina Atobrah, who is working with colleagues to provide dependable and reliable power to run clinics in remote areas.

Originally from Ghana, Dr. Atobrah holds degrees from Princeton University and is a systems engineer and chairman of Geomatric Technology Corp. in Asburn, Va. He works with Charles Bigelow, who holds a degree in nuclear physics and is president of Light Speed Power of Boyce, Va. Bigelow has been working on support of medical facilities utilizing solar and wind power in Papua New Guinea. Previously, the team coordinated telecommunications development for Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., and solar and wind power for other facilities.

Providing light and refrigeration is just part of the problem. Without clean water, communication and records maintenance, much effort is either not available or becomes lost.

If we’ve heard it once, we’ve heard a thousand times: Eat Your Vegetables! From the day we moved onto solid foods until we moved out of the house, we heard this culinary command at least three times a day. Yet at some point, we tuned it out.

A new study American Journal of Preventive Medicine confirms this: Americans are eating fewer vegetables than ever. Researchers evaluated data from two large national health surveys

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You clean out your medicine cabinet and oops, expired. Even though we usually receive prescription drugs for exactly the amount we need, we always wind up with something that didn't get finished and now it is unwanted or expired. So what do we do with it?