Word: detect
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...Whether you're talking about conventional therapy or one of these promising new approaches, experts agree the earlier you catch a cancer, the better your chances of controlling it. And thanks to a growing understanding of the cancer cell's natural life cycle, doctors are learning how to detect the disease at its very earliest stages. One well-known example is the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test, which identifies a protein secreted by abnormally growing prostate cells before any symptoms appear. (The test is not perfect, however, since PSA is also secreted, albeit in smaller amounts, by benignly growing prostate...
...Eventually, the goal is to detect precisely which molecular processes have gone wrong in an individual patient's cancer. Rather than being identified as lung cancer or breast cancer or kidney cancer, tumors will be tagged as EGFR positive, for example, or COX-2 positive. "The dream," says M.D. Anderson's Mendelsohn, "is that if Mrs. Smith gets a breast biopsy, we'll be able to say, 'Here are the four genes that are abnormal in her tumor,' pull open a drawer, pick out the antibodies or small molecules designed against the abnormal products of those genes, and give...
Other Babe Ruth moments followed, none more satisfying to Barrett than the 1998 publication in J.A.M.A. of a report by Emily Rosa, an 11-year-old Colorado girl who for a school science project devised a simple test of therapeutic touch. It demonstrated that practitioners were unable to detect the "human energy field" on which their technique is based. Hearing of Emily's project, Barrett helped edit a report, got it published and was rewarded with worldwide press coverage...
...tricks the leukemic cells into, in essence, committing suicide. (Normal white blood cells soon take their place.) So far, 51 of 53 patients who received the highest dose of the drug in one of the studies have gone into remission. In seven of those cases doctors can no longer detect any cancer-causing genetic abnormalities...
While Europe's internal embargoes are, by some measures, stricter than the USDA's, some in the European community detect a whiff of protectionism in Washington's moves. David Byrne, E.U. health commissioner, called the new regulations "excessive and unnecessary." The French newspaper Le Figaro groused that the world is "divided between contaminated countries and those barricading themselves behind drastic health and commercial barriers." The French government, however, has remained tellingly quiet. And in Germany, the media voiced full-throated approval of the new restrictions. "Animals are being dragged through the whole world in huge numbers," wrote the daily Tagesspiel...