Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at
3:05 pm
There has been an alarming rise in new cases of the deadliest form of skin cancer in the UK, with binge tanning cited as a main reason, said a leading cancer charity.
The number of UK people diagnosed with malignant melanoma, the potentially fatal type of skin cancer. has gone over the 10,000 barrier to reach an all time high of 10,400 according to figures released earlier today by Cancer Research UK.
Experts are concerned about the dramatic rise in the numbers in recent decades and believe that binge tanning, either at home or abroad, when people take advantage of sunseeking package holidays, is the main reason.
Cancer Research UK’s director of health information, Sara Hiom, told the press the figures are very worrying.
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Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at
2:52 pm
Skin from a factory – this has long been the dream of pharmacologists, chemists and doctors. Research has an urgent need for large quantities of ‘skin models’, which can be used to determine if products such as creams and soaps, cleaning agents, medicines and adhesive bandages are compatible with skin, or if they instead will lead to irritation or allergic reactions for the consumer. Such test results are seen as more meaningful than those from animal experiments, and can even make such experiments largely superfluous.
But artificial skin is rare. “The production is complex and involves a great deal of manual work. At this time, even the market’s established international companies cannot produce more than 2,000 tiny skinpieces a month. With annual requirements of more than 6.5 million units in the EU area alone, however, the industrial demand far exceeds all currently available production capacities,” reports Jörg Saxler. Together with Prof. Heike Mertsching, he is coordinating the “Automated Tissue Engineering on Demand” project within the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.
Tissue engineering is still in its infancy. “Until now, the offer was limited predominantly to single-layer skin models that consist of a single cell type,” explains Mertsching, who heads the Cell Systems Department at the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology IGB. “Thanks to developments at our institute, the project team has access to a patent-protected skin model that consists of two layers with different cell types. This gives us an almost perfect copy of human skin, and one that provides more information than any system currently available on the market.”
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Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at
6:08 am
Personal interest depends on famous icon’s interest
Life has become very common to follow other’s life style in any aspect. However, when it comes hairstyle it is still very common to adopt other famous personalities. . Even a layman would like to have hairstyle of his favorite hero or heroine respective to the gender. A person who is strong admirer of a particular personality, then his style especially his hairstyle would be like that of the celebrity. This is because the fan is fond of his hero. Hence, he adopts the culture of him thereby losing the individuality. But the celebrity has not changed himself due to any reason, but he change his style based on his life style, circumstances, culture and country he lives in. Moreover his personal interest is best for him at any cost.
This is entirely different from his fan whose personal interest is totally absent and is interested in his icon’s interest. There are many reasons for a famous personality changes his hairstyle and among them a film star would change his hairstyle in need of the character he is going to display or a player can change his hairstyle due to the environment prevailing where he plays. Apart from criticizing a fan form doing so it is clear that an immense pleasure has been present with a layman whenever he adopts his favorite person’s hair style.
Monday, May 25th, 2009 at
3:45 pm
A new survey from the Stanford University School of Medicine suggests that a significant number of Asian Americans living in California adopt unhealthy sun-exposure behaviors as they become more westernized. The findings underscore a need for increased skin-health awareness on the part of primary care physicians, dermatologists and people of Asian ancestry, who may incorrectly assume that pigmented skin and hair protect against skin cancer.
“Skin screening and self-examination recommendations, which are often targeted more to people with fair skin, should definitely include different ethnic groups,” said dermatologist Anne Chang, MD, an instructor at the medical school, who noted that skin cancer rates have been reported to be rising significantly in Asians living in Singapore and Japan. “Asian Americans shouldn’t derive a false sense of security from the presence of skin and hair pigmentation.”
Chang and her colleagues surveyed the attitudes and behaviors of 546 Asian Americans in the study, which will be published in the May issue of the Archives of Dermatology. Study participants filled out an Internet-based questionnaire asking, among other things, about their skin type, their degree of westernization and the amount of time spent tanning outdoors or in tanning booths. More than 95 percent of the responses came from Northern California.
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Monday, May 25th, 2009 at
3:29 pm
Skin from a factory – this has long been the dream of pharmacologists, chemists and doctors. Research has an urgent need for large quantities of ‘skin models’, which can be used to determine if products such as creams and soaps, cleaning agents, medicines and adhesive bandages are compatible with skin, or if they instead will lead to irritation or allergic reactions for the consumer. Such test results are seen as more meaningful than those from animal experiments, and can even make such experiments largely superfluous.
But artificial skin is rare. “The production is complex and involves a great deal of manual work. At this time, even the market’s established international companies cannot produce more than 2,000 tiny skinpieces a month. With annual requirements of more than 6.5 million units in the EU area alone, however, the industrial demand far exceeds all currently available production capacities,” reports Jörg Saxler. Together with Prof. Heike Mertsching, he is coordinating the “Automated Tissue Engineering on Demand” project within the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.
Tissue engineering is still in its infancy. “Until now, the offer was limited predominantly to single-layer skin models that consist of a single cell type,” explains Mertsching, who heads the Cell Systems Department at the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology IGB. “Thanks to developments at our institute, the project team has access to a patent-protected skin model that consists of two layers with different cell types. This gives us an almost perfect copy of human skin, and one that provides more information than any system currently available on the market.”
Read More