Kiss Steals the Life of Peanut-Allergied Canadian Teen Girl

I first time heard such deadly power of peanut! Emma Price's article on Earthtimes.Org is noteworthy of paying much attention.



Christina Desforges, a Canadian teenager allergic to peanuts actually lost her life after she stole a kiss with her boyfriend who had just consumed a peanut-based snack. The allergy that affects just over a percent of the population caused the 15-year old to go into anaphylactic shock despite an immediately administered adrenalin shot. The girl eventually died four days after the lethal kiss of respiratory failure.

A resident of Saguenay lying to the north of Quebec, the girl was known to be allergic to peanuts among family and relatives. However it appears that her boyfriend was not aware of the seriousness of this problem and as a result became instrumental in Desforges death. Despite an adrenalin dose and rushing her to a Quebec hospital, the allergic reaction was far too strong for doctors to treat. Dr. Nina Verreault of Chicoutimi Hospital in Saguenay who was to perform an autopsy on Desforges body suggested her case as being “very rare and worrisome”.

Food related allergies have been on the rise in recent years with peanut allergies being particularly high. In America at least 1.5 million suffer adverse reactions to traces of peanut that appear in their bloodstream through food or cosmetic lotions, with anywhere between 50 and 100 dying as a result yearly. Though the reasons for this rise are unclear, one study has pointed to a link between the use of baby creams and lotions with a peanut oil content in early childhood and allergies that arise later.

The symptoms of food allergies range from minor reactions such as rashes, vomiting and diarrhea to more severe reactions like swelling of the face, throat or body, gasping and falling blood pressure. The reactions are usually dependent on the quantity of the allergen ingested and the person's own history of reactions to casual contact. Karen Sigman, a paediatric allergist suggests that even traces of peanut on the tongue and lips are sufficient to cause such a reaction in a person who is severely allergic. She stressed that in such cases it is of paramount importance, "They (allergic youngsters) tell the people they are close to make sure they are not in contact with nuts or peanuts".

In most cases of allergy, an immediate adrenaline shot is the standard tool to treat anaphylactic shock while hospitalization serves to monitor the patient's progress or control recurrent attacks. The Montreal Children's Hospital peanut allergist, Rhoda Kagan citing instances of severe reactions to peanut dust said, “Some people have an extremely low threshold (which) varies greatly from person to person and is highly unpredictable”. For now it appears that Christina Desforges' death is a case of a severe allergy and a failure to take it seriously by letting people close to her know and help her steer clear of peanuts.

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The Most Generous Philanthropists

Gordon and Betty Moore
2001-05 Total Gifts and Pledges: $7.046 billion


With charitable gifts totaling well above $7 billion dollars, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore and wife Betty have given the equivalent of nearly $4 million per day for half a decade. In 2001, the couple gave $5 billion to the Moore Foundation, based in an eco-friendly "Green Building" where they coordinate global conservation initiatives. The Moores also fund scientific and medical institutions in the San Francisco Bay area.



Bill and Melinda Gates
2001-05 Total Gifts and Pledges: $5.458 billion


The world's richest couple, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda, have turned their financial clout into a philanthropic powerhouse. Last year, the couple pledged $3.35 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, topping their endowment at a staggering $29 billion. Now on a crusade against malaria, the Gateses fund world disease research and treatment. They also back K-12 education initiatives.



More information available at Businessweek!

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Sound of Music Gives Feel for Language

A good artice By Susan Brown for those parents who want to cultivate their children to genius.
Source: Science NOW Daily News 17 November 2005



WASHINGTON, D.C.--Some parents play Mozart for their infants, hoping to instill genius, or at least give them a leg up when they start school. While the strategy has been discounted as a path toward early achievement, musicians may have an edge over nonmusicians when distinguishing between speech sounds. The results may help explain how music therapy sometimes aids children struggling with language and reading.

Listening to people speak is more complicated than it might seem. The brain must make out the individual sounds--called phonemes--that make up words. The critical contrasts can be slight: The acoustic difference between the syllables "ba" and "da," for instance, lasts only 40 milliseconds. Trouble with these distinctions may make reading difficult for dyslexic children. But studies have shown that singing and rhythm games improve dyslexic children's spelling and phonological skills.

That led Nadine Gaab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge to wonder whether music somehow enhances a student's ability to discriminate rapid changes within sound. She and colleagues looked for the answer by rounding up 14 adult musicians who had learned to play an instrument before they were 7 years old and who continued to play at least a few hours each week. They then pitted the speech discrimination abilities of these performers against 14 nonmusicians matched in age, gender, and general language ability. The researchers asked the subjects to listen to pairs of synthesized speech syllables and say whether they were the same, then made the sounds increasingly similar until the listeners could no longer distinguish between them.

Early music exposure appears to make a difference. While musicians and nonmusicians were equally matched when it came to distinguishing pairs of syllables that differed only in frequency, usually perceived as pitch, musicians were more adept when timing was involved. They heard finer differences in the brief gap between consonant and vowel that separates the syllables "ga" and "ka" than nonmusicians. And when both timing and frequency were involved, in the contrast between "ba" and "wa," musicians outperformed nonmusicians by a wide margin. This enhanced ability to correctly categorize speech may be what gives musicians a better memory for words, says Gaab, who presented her work at the Society for Neuroscience meeting this week.

Neuroscientist Robert Zatorre of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, says the results are surprising. "You wouldn't necessarily expect that musicians would be better at speech," he said. Further work is needed, he said, to identify the specific type of musical experience that might lead to better language skills.

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Stuff again!

After long long time no any message here, I put some stuffs again. Thanks to a project in University of Oregon called e-Asia, we can review some works written by our President Mao (Tse-Tung). Enlosed please find a glimpse at some of his words:

THE CHINESE PEOPLE
CANNOT BE COWED BY THE ATOM BOMB
From the Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung,
Foreign Languages Press
Peking 1977
First Edition 1977
Vol. V, pp. 152-53.

Prepared for the Internet by David J. Romagnolo, djr@marx2mao.org?(November 1999)

January 25, 1955

China and Finland are friendly countries. Our relations are based on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence.
China and Finland have never come into conflict. In the past, China's wars with European countries were only with Britain, France, Germany, tsarist Russia, Italy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Holland; these countries all came from afar to commit aggressions against China, as in the invasions by the Anglo-French allied forces and by the allied forces of the eight powers, including the United States and Japan. Sixteen countries took part in the war of aggression against Korea, including Turkey and Luxembourg. All these aggressor countries claimed to be peace-loving while branding Korea and China as aggressors.
Today, the danger of a world war and the threats to China come mainly from the warmongers in the United States. They have occupied our Taiwan and the Taiwan Straits and are contemplating an atomic war. We have two principles: first, we don't want war; second, we will strike back resolutely if anyone invades us. This is what we teach the members of the Communist Party and the whole nation. The Chinese people are not to be cowed by U.S. atomic blackmail. Our country has a population of 600 million and an area of 9,600,000 square kilometres. The United States cannot annihilate the Chinese nation with its small stack of atom bombs. Even if the U.S. atom bombs were so powerful that, when dropped on China, they would make a hole right through the earth, or even blow it up, that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a major event for the solar system.

* Main points of a conversation with Ambassador Carl-Johan (Cay) Sundstrom, the first Finnish envoy to China, when he presented his credentials.

We have an expression, millet plus rifles. In the case of the United States, it is planes plus the A-bomb. However, if the United States with its planes plus the A-bomb is to launch a war of aggression against China, then China with its millet plus rifles is sure to emerge the victor. The people of the whole world will support us. As a result of World War I, the tsar, the landlords and the capitalists in Russia were wiped out; as a result of World War II, Chiang Kai-shek and the landlords were overthrown in China and the East European countries and a number of countries in Asia were liberated. Should the United States launch a third world war and supposing it lasted eight or ten years, the result would be the elimination of the ruling classes in the United States, Britain and the other accomplice countries and the transformation of most of the world into countries led by Communist Parties. World wars end not in favour of the warmongers but in favour of the Communist Parties and the revolutionary people in all lands. If the warmongers are to make war, then they mustn't blame us for making revolution or engaging in "subversive activities", as they keep saying all the time. If they desist from war, they can survive a little longer on this earth. But the sooner they make war, the sooner they will be wiped from the face of the earth. Then a people's united nations would be set up, maybe in Shanghai, maybe somewhere in Europe, or it might be set up again in New York, provided the U.S. warmongers had been wiped out.

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The Hogans

Photo by Steve Granitz / WireImage.com

Hulk Hogan, son Nick Hogan, daugter Linda Hogan, and wife Brooke Hogan, were on the Los Angeles premiere of Get Rich or Die Tryin. Link

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