The B.C. Court of Appeal has dismissed a federal government appeal, which means InSite, the Vancouver supervised safe-injection site that was the first of its kind in Canada, will remain open.

The federal government is expected to appeal Friday’s split 2-1 ruling to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson reacted by saying he strongly supports the ruling and the continued operation of InSite to improve the lives of drug addicts.

“With this second consecutive decision in favour of InSite, I hope the federal government will drop its legal efforts so that we can go back to focusing on InSite for what it is — a harm reduction facility that saves lives and improves health outcomes for those living with addictions,” the mayor said in a statement.

Read the whole article at the Vancouver Sun

The six men in the study had the virus injected directly into their tumours three weeks before they had surgery to remove the prostate gland as part of standard treatment. The tumour cells are targeted by viruses in the experimental treatment, says Dr. Don Morris of the Tom Baker Cancer Centre in Calgary.

Signs of cancer-cell death were found in the removed prostate tumour, while the normal parts of the prostate showed minimal toxicity and no viral replication, Morris said.

Although this doesn’t represent a cure for cancer (tumours were very rarely completely eliminated), it may lead to cancer becoming a much more treatable illness.

Read more at Cbc.ca.

Read a bit more at Gizmag.com, or read the entire article as published in Current Protocols in Microbiology.

Ischemic preconditioning involves using the device to interrupt blood flow in the arm, off and on over a period of 35 to 40 minutes: the cuff is inflated for five minutes, then deflated for five minutes, with the procedure being repeated consecutively four times.

Once at the hospital, the patient receives routine heart attack treatment, including cardiac angioplasty. Preconditioning using the cuff may still be going on throughout this procedure, which uses a tiny inflatable balloon to open up narrowed or blocked blood vessels to the heart.

Researchers, whose paper appears in Friday’s issue of The Lancet, found that those heart attack patients randomly assigned to have preconditioning had an overall reduction in heart muscle damage of 30 per cent, compared to those not treated with the cuff.

Read more

Beer is a rich source of a nutrient that can help prevent weak bones – but it depends what type you drink, claim researchers at University of California, Davis, today.

As one of the nation’s favourite tipples, beer is a rich source of dietary silicon, which can help cut the chance of developing diseases like osteoporosis, they conclude.

However, not all beers are the same, with those containing malted barley and hops having higher silicon content than beers made from wheat.

Some light lagers made from grains like corn have the lowest levels of silicon while beers made from hops seem to come out on top, according to the study. The research, published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, examined 100 commercial beers and their production methods.

The experts said beer was a major source of dietary silicon – roughly half of the silicon in beer can be readily absorbed by the body.

Keep reading at The Guardian.

“People who don’t wear shoes when they run have an astonishingly different strike,” says Daniel E. Lieberman, professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University and co-author of a paper appearing this week in the journal Nature. “By landing on the middle or front of the foot, barefoot runners have almost no impact collision, much less than most shod runners generate when they heel-strike. Most people today think barefoot running is dangerous and hurts, but actually you can run barefoot on the world’s hardest surfaces without the slightest discomfort and pain. All you need is a few calluses to avoid roughing up the skin of the foot. Further, it might be less injurious than the way some people run in shoes.”
Working with populations of runners in the United States and Kenya, Lieberman and his colleagues at Harvard, the University of Glasgow, and Moi University looked at the running gaits of three groups: those who had always run barefoot, those who had always worn shoes, and those who had converted to barefoot running from shod running. The researchers found a striking pattern.

Keep reading at Science Daily.

Many millions of people have considered going vegetarian at some point in their life, and millions have. (Hundreds of millions including those who do so as part of their religion.) As climate change, fisheries collapse, desertification, and other crises become less ignorable, many of us will have to consider eating less meat, if not forgoing many animal products entirely.
In my experience, there are four reasons that people go veg:

Personal Health
Weight Loss
Planetary Health
Compassion for Animals
There is a fifth reason that may remove the choice for many: Economic. Meat and animal products may simply become too costly.

Keep reading Brain’s reasons for going vegetarian.

Researchers have mapped the DNA mutations in skin and lung cancer — findings that one researcher says will change how cancer is viewed.

For lung cancer, the British team found almost 23,000 mutations — one mutation for every 15 cigarettes smoked.

“This is a fundamental moment in cancer research,” said Prof. Michael Stratton from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge. “From here on in we will think about cancers in a very different way.”

Scientists knew that smoking causes genetic mutations than can start tumours. But they didn’t expect to see evidence of the genome bearing scars of every cigarette smoked. When they catalogued the mutations, they saw how cancer-causing agents in tobacco repeatedly bombard the DNA.

Keep reading the article at the CBC.