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U.S. Study Says All Clones Genetically Abnormal
WASHINGTON (Reuters) By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

Cloned mice have hundreds of abnormal genes. Many cloned animals die at or before birth. This shows it would be irresponsible to clone a human being, scientists said.

The process of cloning introduces the genetic mutations, and there seems no immediate way around the problem, Rudolf Jaenisch and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported."I think this confirms suspicions that I have always had and that many others had that cloning is a very inefficient method at this point," Jaenisch said. "It is very irresponsible to think this method could be used for the reproductive cloning of humans."

Even before Dolly the sheep became the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, in 1997, researchers have known that cloning is difficult. The most common cloning method is called nuclear transfer and involves taking the nucleus out of an egg cell, replacing it with the nucleus from a cell of the animal to be cloned, and then "reprogramming" the creation so the egg begins dividing as if it had been fertilized by a sperm. Only one of every several hundred eggs ever start. Many of the animals that survive to birth die soon after, or develop abnormalities of the lung, liver and other organs.

Jaenisch and colleagues at MIT's Whitehead Institute, working with Ryuzo Yanagimachi of the University of Hawaii, who was the first to clone mice, made dozens of cloned mice and then looked at the activity of 10,000 genes using a gene chip. They found many abnormal genes. The pattern was so clear that they could tell normal mice from cloned mice by looking at the results of the gene chip study, they reported. "There is no reason in the world to assume that any other mammal, including humans, would be different from mice," Jaenisch said.

He said the finding should convince anyone who doubted the danger of trying to clone a human, referring to last summer's debate between he and other cloning experts, and three scientists who said they planned to try to clone human babies to help infertile couples.

"It settles the old question ... about how normal can clones be," Jaenisch said.

Philip Morris Accepts Food and Drug Administration to regulate the marketing of cigarettes

Philip Morris Inc., the nation's largest tobacco producer, the move by the Food and Drug Administration to regulate the marketing of cigarettes. The company vice president, said that Philip Morris was willing to allow the agency to regulate tobacco products, although he said the details would have to be worked out."I could see at some point in the future an appropriate way to regulate tobacco products." The tobacco industry had agreed in the past to some federal regulation in exchange for stopping lawsuits by states seeking to recover the costs of treating sick smokers. But that law failed in a bitter fight in the Senate two years ago. Philip Morris is now trying to get that law passed now because of recent information that the tobacco industry knew much more about the dangers of smoking than they previously had acknowledged.

Nonetheless, critics of the tobacco industry hailed the company's statement. The Philip Morris statement is "a very big step -- an enormous step," former FDA Commissioner David Kessler, who led the fight to regulate the tobacco industry, told the paper. "This is real progress, and there's no question but that we need to move ahead." Could Set Tone For Industry Parrish told the Post he was only speaking for his own company.

Parrish said he would formally announce his proposal Thursday while speaking, along with Kessler and others, at a forum in California sponsored by Columbia University's Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. Often cigarette companies take part in meetings discussing smoking problems. Philip Morris wants people to think they are interested in peoples health. This is one way to get laws which are easier for the cigeratte companies. Philip Morris said it would be willing to accept some regulation of the firm's marketing and sales activities. In addition, the company could accept some regulation of the composition of cigarettes, potentially including nicotine levels. Nicotine is one of the very dangerous chemicals in cigarettes.

When the FDA first declared that it had the authority to regulate tobacco in 1995, agency officials said they wanted to focus on the industry's sales and marketing activities in hopes of reducing smoking by teen-agers. The FDA's attempt to regulate tobacco was struck down in court, but the Justice Department appealed that decision to the Supreme Court, which heard argument in the case in December.

Comments and Questions:

Why do you think the tobacco companies are now willing to accept some control?

Some law makers want to impose standards and controls on the tobacco companies. They believe the tobacco companies want to have very weak laws so their business will not be affected. The tobacco companies will agree on controls if the lawmakers will pass laws to stop people from taking them to court for damages on sickness caused by smoking.

Is it fair that the tobacco companies be protected when they cause so many people to become sick?

Why do people smoke when scientific facts show such big health problems?

World wide AIDS Problem
GENEVA (Reuters) - The HIV /AIDS epidemic has exploded in eastern Europe and Commonwealth of Independent States, posing the greatest health threat to youth in the region, the United Nations said on Wednesday. In a report, the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) warned that the killer disease was spreading "virtually unchecked" into the wider population through heterosexual contact with injecting drug users. Russia and Ukraine account for nine-tenths of the estimated one million HIV/AIDS cases in the 27 transition countries, according to UNICEF's Social Monitor 2002. The one million figure, through 2001, compares to 700,000 in 2000, and 420,000 in 1998. "HIV is spreading at a faster rate in some countries in the region than in any other part of the world," UNICEF said.
"The HIV epidemic is the biggest threat to young people's health in the region....There is also little evidence that public interventions to halt the spread of HIV in the hardest hit countries have been sufficiently effective."
In the CIS countries, a quarter of all officially registered infections between 1997 and 2000 were among women, suggesting increasing heterosexual transmission, it said. But awareness of the need to use condoms to reduce the chances of transmission remains poor in the CIS region, where both the number of prostitutes and injecting drug users is growing, it said. Condoms provide protection if the condom does not break, and if the virus is inside a body cell. If the virus is moving between cells it is small enough so it can go through the pores in a condom.

Africa has been hit especially hard. In seven countries in central Africa, 20 percent or more of adults are infected with the virus that causes AIDS, and would die within the next few years, leaving some 40 million children orphaned. Infant mortality was expected to double and child mortality to triple. In South Africa alone, an estimated 4.2 million people, or nearly 10 percent of the population, are infected with the HIV virus that causes AIDS. The problem of AIDS would mean that life expectancy would drop by 20 years or more. Similar trends were expected in India, Southeast Asia and the former Soviet Union.

This could make the bubonic plague of the Middle Ages seem like a small problem. It was also caused by a virus. AIDS is very difficult to treat because the virus keeps changing and is not destroyed by treatments used now. Billions of dollars is being spent world wide to find a cure.

"Ukraine has one of the fastest-growing rates of HIV prevalence in the world at this time. Ukraine has many other health-care priorities both related and unrelated to AIDS: nutrition, smoking, alcoholism, unemployment, industrial pollution, a poor medical and health infrastructure, tuberculosis, and no running water in many rural areas," says Bohdan A. Oryshkevich, MD. He continues, "You are infinitely more likely to catch HIV from sexual contact or from a dirty needle.

"According to the British 'Council report on AIDS in Ukraine, the AIDS epidemic in Ukraine may create over 300,000 additional orphans in the next 15 years. Most of these children will not be infected but will be left without parents and subjected to a child-care system that is ill prepared to deal with them. Ukraine is a fully literate country with a well-educated populace. Ukraine has the advantage of being able to observe how other countries have grappled with the AIDS problem. Now that Ukraine has devoted 15 years to Chernobyl, it should devote similar attention to the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. If you are human, you cannot deal with AIDS and not offend someone," concludes Bohdan A. Oryshkevich, MD.

Full text of Bohdan A. Oryshkevich, MD. from the Kyiv Post