Lucylastic
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ORIGINAL: Real0ne
what medical breakthroughs has canada made again?
1. Development Of Pablum In 1930, three doctors from The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto developed Pablum as a way to prevent and treat rickets in children. The popular infant food went on to improve the health of millions of children around the world, and has led to ideas to help hundreds of millions more. -
2. Discovery Of The T-cell receptor “The progress of science, especially medical science, is driven by the way we understand mechanisms and how they work,” says Dr. Tak Wah Mak, co-discoverer in 1984 of the T-cell receptor and the gene that produces it. Understanding how T-cells work has helped in developing new drugs for fighting infection, autoimmune disorders, cancer and post-transplant rejection.
3. Development Of The Cobalt Bomb In 1951, when the first cancer patients were given quick and successive radiation treatment from cobalt-60 therapy units at the Victoria Hospital in London, Ont., and at the Saskatchewan Cancer Commission in Saskatoon, Canada ushered in the age of modern nuclear medicine.
4. Safer Stem Cells Researcher Andras Nagy has found a way to safely generate stem cells from adult human skin cells, opening the possibility in the future of using a patient’s own cells to reverse damage caused by disease, injury, aging or genetics and cure diseases whose treatment costs the Canadian health-care system billions of dollars a year.
5. Insulin, Treatments And Possible Cures For Diabetes At the turn of the 20th century it was suspected a substance produced by islet cells in the pancreas regulated sugar in the bloodstream, but it had not been successfully extracted. In 1920, Frederick Banting had an idea how to isolate the substance from the pancreas in dogs.Working in a lab at the University of Toronto, he and Charles Best developed the first pancreatic extract. Enlisting the help of J.J.R. MacLeod and J.B. Collip, on a fellowship from the University of Alberta, the team was able to produce and purify insulin for testing on patients in 1922. Banting and MacLeod were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923
6. SARS - genome and vaccine
Canadian researchers sequence the SARS genome in just 11 weeks, then develop three potential vaccines and a treatment within a matter of months.
7. Fighting Melanoma
After noticing a mole on her ankle in 2000, Annette Cyr waited over a year before making an appointment with a dermatologist. "When I finally went to see her," says the Oakville, Ont., resident, 39 years old at the time, "she said, 'Oh, no, it's nothing.'" A biopsy proved that verdict wrong. The spot was melanoma — the deadliest of skin cancers.
Cyr's story is not unusual. Current methods for diagnosing melanoma can take weeks. But all this is changing. Scientists at the BC Cancer Agency have created a tool that can suss out a mole's malignancy in minutes, right in a GP's office. Dubbed the Verisante Aura (shown below), the device shines a ray of light at a mole or skin lesion and then uses a spectrometer to record an optical signal that can reveal compositional changes in the skin caused by cancer.
"This essentially extends the limits of human vision," says Dr. Harvey Lui, a clinical scientist at the agency, and one of the groundbreaking device's inventors.
Catching melanoma early can save lives. The American Cancer Society estimates a 97 percent, five-year survival rate for those treated for Stage IA melanoma. Those with stage IV? Fifteen to 20 per cent.
"That something so small can become so life threatening is a wake-up call," says Cyr, the founding director of the Melanoma Network of Canada and now cancer-free. "The sooner people get that call, the better."(http://www.verisante.com/products/aura/)
There are more, but..you probably dont think any of them are important...
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RE: National Health Care *FAIL* - 
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