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Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Jury convicts former doctor in Vegas hep C case

FILE - In this Jan. 267, 2012 file photo, Dr. Dipak Desai is shown during his competency hearing at Regional Justice Center in Las Vegas. Neither Desai, the former owner of clinics blamed for a 2007 Las Vegas hepatitis C outbreak nor a former employee took the witness stand before the defense rested in their state trial on criminal charges that could get them decades in prison if they?re convicted.(AP Photo/Las Vegas Review-Journal, Jeff Scheid, File) LAS VEGAS SUN OUT

Former doctor and endoscopy clinic owner Dipak Desai is taken into custody by Clark County marshals at the Regional Justice Center in Las Vegas Monday, July 1, 2013 after a jury found him guilty. Nevada state court jury found Desai guilty of all 27 criminal charges against him? including second-degree murder ? in a 2007 hepatitis C outbreak that officials called one of the largest ever in the U.S. At left is defense lawyer Richard Wright. (AP Photo/Las Vegas Review-Journal, Jessica Ebelhar)

Nurse-anesthetist Ronald Lakeman is taken into custody by Clark County marshals at the Regional Justice Center in Las Vegas on Monday, July 1, 2013 after a jury found him guilty. Lakeman was found guilty of 16 of 27 charges against him, but was spared a murder conviction stemming from the death of 77-year-old former Desai patient Rodolfo Meana in April 2012. (AP Photo/Las Vegas Review-Journal, Jessica Ebelhar)

Nurse-anesthetist Ronald Lakeman watches as the jury's verdict is read at the Regional Justice Center in Las Vegas on Monday, July 1, 2013. Lakeman was found guilty of 16 of 27 charges against him, but was spared a murder conviction stemming from the death of 77-year-old former Desai patient Rodolfo Meana in April 2012. (AP Photo/Las Vegas Review-Journal, Jessica Ebelhar)

LAS VEGAS (AP) ? A prominent former Las Vegas doctor and endoscopy clinic owner was convicted Monday of all 27 criminal charges against him ? including second-degree murder ? in a 2007 hepatitis C outbreak that officials called one of the largest ever in the U.S.

A former employee at Dipak Desai's Endoscopy Clinic of Southern Nevada, nurse-anesthetist Ronald Lakeman, was found guilty of 16 of 27 charges against him but was spared a murder conviction stemming from the death of 77-year-old Rodolfo Meana in April 2012.

Defense attorneys for both men said they'll appeal.

Desai, a former Nevada state medical board member, surrendered his medical license, declared bankruptcy and turned over his business affairs to family members and lawyers in recent years. He stared straight ahead as the jury's verdicts were read.

His lawyers maintained that he was unfit for trial because of the effects of several strokes in recent years.

Desai's wife, Kusam, sobbed quietly and one of their adult daughters cried out as Desai and Lakeman were handcuffed and led from the courtroom to jail to await sentencing Sept. 5.

"We love you, Daddy," she said to Desai. "God is with you. Always with you."

Desai didn't appear to respond.

Desai, 63, and Lakeman, 66, face the possibility of life in prison for their multiple felony convictions.

Jurors heard more than 70 witnesses during seven weeks of testimony about a case that shocked the community when the outbreak became public in February 2008. Health officials issued advisories that led 63,000 clinic patients to get tested for potentially fatal blood-borne diseases, including hepatitis and HIV.

Investigators blamed unsafe injection practices and traced the infections of nine people to Desai clinics, although local and federal health investigators said they thought the hepatitis C infections of another 105 patients might have been related to similar practices. In those cases, however, they said they couldn't rule out other sources of infection.

The charges in Clark County District Court resulted from the infection of seven patients and bills paid by their insurers.

Prosecutors alleged that Desai and Lakeman recklessly and negligently put patients at risk with the reuse of syringes and vials of the general anesthetic propofol during procedures at a clinic where speed was emphasized over patient safety.

Health investigators testified that they believed vials became contaminated with hepatitis C virus from two different "source" patients on two dates in 2007, and that tainted anesthetic was injected into subsequent patients on those dates.

In addition to the murder charge, Desai was found guilty of seven counts of criminal neglect of patients resulting in substantial bodily harm, seven counts of reckless disregard of persons resulting in substantial bodily harm, nine counts of insurance fraud, two counts of obtaining money under false pretenses and one felony theft charge.

Lakeman was found guilty of 16 charges including insurance fraud, criminal neglect, reckless disregard, obtaining money under false pretenses and theft. He was acquitted of 11 counts.

"I'm elated that he didn't get convicted on the murder charge," Lakeman's lawyer, Frederick Santacroce, said outside court. "I'm disappointed that he was convicted of the other charges."

Desai attorneys Richard Wright and Margaret Stanish, and prosecutors Michael Staudaher and Pamela Weckerly, declined immediate comment.

The jury of seven women and five men deliberated Friday and most of the day Monday before reaching their verdict.

Another former Desai clinic nurse anesthetist, Keith Mathahs, 77, pleaded guilty in December to five felonies, including criminal neglect of patients resulting in death, insurance fraud and racketeering. He testified against Desai and Lakeman and could get probation or up to six years in state prison when he is sentenced.

The state criminal case is separate from a case pending against Desai and a former clinic business manager, Tonya Rushing, in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas.

Desai and Rushing have pleaded not guilty to conspiracy and health care fraud charges alleging they schemed to inflate anesthesia times and overbill health insurance companies. Trial is scheduled to begin Aug. 20.

The hepatitis outbreak also spawned dozens of civil lawsuits, including several that yielded jury findings holding drug manufacturers and the state's largest health management organization liable for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages to plaintiffs.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/bbd825583c8542898e6fa7d440b9febc/Article_2013-07-01-Hepatitis%20Exposure%20Trial/id-1fa64030082e4efda8fffbc1f1fdd598

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Obama calls embattled Egyptian President Morsi

President Barack Obama gestures while speaking at a business forum aimed at increasing investment in Africa, Monday, July 1, 2013, in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. The president is traveling in Tanzania on the final leg of his three-country tour in Africa. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania (AP) ? President Barack Obama is encouraging embattled Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi (MOR'-see) to respond to concerns being voiced by throngs of protesters seeking his removal from office.

The White House confirmed in a statement Tuesday that Obama called Morsi on Monday while traveling in Africa. The call came as Egypt's military said Morsi must meet the demands of millions of protesters who have taken to the streets.

The statement said Obama told Morsi that the United States is committed to the democratic process in Egypt and does not support any single party or group. The statement also said Obama underscored to Morsi that the current crisis can only be resolved through a political process.

Obama also told Morsi he's particularly concerned about violence in the demonstrations, especially sexual assaults against women.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2013-07-02-Obama-Egypt/id-1135c7816e8e4ff4b370eb09fe5bc9a5

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Contact lens gives telescopic vision

2 July 2013 Last updated at 07:56 ET By Mark Ward Technology correspondent, BBC News

Researchers have created contact lenses which, when paired with special spectacles, bestow telescopic vision on their wearers.

The contact-lens-and-spectacles combination magnifies scene details by 2.8 times.

Polarising filters in the spectacles allow wearers to switch between normal and telescopic vision.

The telescopic sight system has been developed to help people suffering age-related blindness.

Age-related macular degeneration is one of the most common forms of blindness and damages the part of the eye, the macula, that handles fine detail. As this area degenerates, sufferers lose the ability to recognise faces and perform tasks, such as driving and reading, that rely on picking up details.

Precise control

The contact lens created by the researchers has a central region that lets light through for normal vision. The telescopic element sits in a ring around this central region. Tiny aluminium mirrors scored with a specific pattern act as a magnifier as they bounce the light around four times within the ring before directing it towards the retina.

In ordinary use, the magnified image is not seen as it is blocked by polarising filters set in a companion pair of spectacles. Wearers can switch it on by changing the filters on the spectacles so the only light falling on their retina comes from the magnified stream.

For their filtering system, the researchers, led by Joseph Ford at UC San Diego and Eric Tremblay at Switzerland's EPFL, adapted a pair of glasses that Samsung produces for some of its 3D TV sets. In normal use, these spectacles create a 3D effect by alternately blocking the right or left lens.

The prototype contact lens produced by the team is 8mm in diameter, 1mm thick at its centre and 1.17mm thick in its magnifying ring.

"The most difficult part of the project was making the lens breathable," Dr Tremblay told the BBC. "If you want to wear the lens for more than 30 minutes you need to make it breathable."

Gases have to be able to penetrate the lens to keep the parts of the eye covered by the contact, especially the cornea, supplied with oxygen, he said.

The team has solved this problem by producing lenses riddled with tiny channels that let oxygen flow through.

However, said Dr Tremblay, this made manufacturing the lenses much more difficult.

"The fabrication tolerances are quite challenging because everything has to be so precise," he said.

Despite this, gas-permeable versions of the telescopic lens are being prepared that will be used in clinical trials in November, he said. Eventually it should be possible for those with age-related sight problems to wear the telescopic lenses all day.

The lenses are an improvement on other ways these sight problems have been tackled which has included surgery to implant a telescopic lens or wearing bulky spectacles that have telescopic lenses forming part of the main lens.

Clara Eaglen, eye health campaigns manager at the RNIB said the research looked "interesting" and praised its focus on macular degeneration.

"It is encouraging that innovative products such as these telescopic contact lenses are being developed, especially as they aim to make the most of a person's existing vision," she said. ""Anything that helps to maximise functioning vision is very important as this helps people with sight loss to regain some independence and get out and about again, helping to reduce isolation."

The lenses may one day find their way into other areas as the research was being funded by Darpa, the research arm of the US military.

"They are not so concerned about macular degeneration," he said. "They are concerned with super vision which is a much harder problem.

"That's because the standard is much higher if you are trying to improve vision rather than helping someone whose eyesight has deteriorated," he said.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23142469#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

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Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Vitamin C helps control gene activity in stem cells

July 1, 2013 ? Vitamin C affects whether genes are switched on or off inside mouse stem cells, and may thereby play a previously unknown and fundamental role in helping to guide normal development in mice, humans and other animals, a scientific team led by UC San Francisco researchers has discovered.

The researchers found that vitamin C assists enzymes that play a crucial role in releasing the brakes that keep certain genes from becoming activated in the embryo soon after fertilization, when egg and sperm fuse.

The discovery might eventually lead to the use of vitamin C to improve results of in vitro fertilization, in which early embryos now are typically grown without the vitamin, and also to treat cancer, in which tumor cells abnormally engage or release these brakes on gene activation, the researchers concluded in a study published June 30, 2013 in the journal Nature.

In the near term, stem-cell scientists may begin incorporating vitamin C more systematically into their procedures for growing the most healthy and useful stem cells, according to UCSF stem-cell scientist Miguel Ramalho-Santos, PhD, who led the study. In fact, the unanticipated discovery emerged from an effort to compare different formulations of the growth medium, a kind of nutrient broth used to grow mouse embryonic stem cells in the lab.

Rather than building on any previous body of scientific work, the identification of the link between vitamin C and the activation of genes that should be turned on in early development was serendipitous, Ramalho-Santos said. "We bumped into this result," he said.

Working in Ramalho-Santos' lab, graduate student Kathryn Blaschke and postdoctoral fellow Kevin Ebata, PhD, were comparing different commercial growth media for mouse stem cells. The researchers began exploring how certain ingredients altered gene activity within the stem cells. Eventually they discovered that adding vitamin C led to increased activity of key enzymes that release the brakes that can prevent activation of an array of genes.

The brakes on gene activation that vitamin C helps release are molecules called methyl groups. These methyl groups are added to DNA at specific points along the genome to prevent specific genes from getting turned on.

During the development of multicellular organisms, humans among them, different patterns of methylation arise in different cells as methyl groups are biochemically attached to DNA at specific points along the genome during successive cell divisions. Normally this gradual methylation, a key part of the developmental program, is not reversible.

But after fertilization and during early development, a class of enzymes called "Tet" acts on a wide array of the methyl groups on the DNA to remove these brakes, so that genes can be activated as needed.

The UCSF researchers demonstrated that Tet enzymes require vitamin C for optimal activity as they act to remove the methyl groups from the DNA and to stimulate gene activity that more faithfully mimics in cultured stem cells what occurs at early stages of development in the mouse embryo.

"Potential roles for vitamin C in the clinic -- including in embryo culture media used during in vitro fertilization, which currently do not contain vitamin C, and in cancers driven by aberrant DNA methylation -- deserve exploration," Ramalho-Santos, said.

In addition, scientists previously have found that many adult tissues also have stem cells, which can generate a variety of cell types found within a specific tissue. This raises the possibility that vitamin C might help maintain healthy stem cell populations in the adult, according to Ramalho-Santos.

"Although we did not in this paper address the function of Vitamin C in adult tissues, given the roles that Tet enzymes are now known to play in adult tissues, we anticipate that Vitamin C might also regulate Tet function in the adult," Ramalho-Santos said. "This remains to be determined."

Vitamin C already has become a popular supplement in recent decades, and potential health benefits of vitamin C supplementation continue to be investigated in clinical trials. It has been more than 80 years since vitamin C was first recognized as vital to prevent scurvy, a now rare connective-tissue disease caused by the failure of another enzyme that also relies on vitamin C.

The function of vitamin C as an antioxidant to prevent chemical damage is the likely reason why some commercial suppliers of growth media have included it in their products, Ramalho-Santos said, but other antioxidant molecules cannot replace Vitamin C in the enhancement of the activity of Tet enzymes.

Despite its importance, humans, unlike most animals and plants, cannot synthesize their own Vitamin C and must obtain it through their diet. The mouse makes vitamin C, but that fact does not diminish the expectation that the new findings will also apply to human development, according to Ramalho-Santos. Only adult liver cells in the mouse make vitamin C, he said.

Ramalho-Santos now aims to explore the newly discovered phenomenon in the living mouse. "The next step is to study vitamin C and gene expression in vivo," he said.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/zYVb0oyP8dw/130701163755.htm

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Monday, July 1, 2013

The Cabin In The Woods Cabin Is Gonna Exist And It Sounds Terrifying

If you didn't see Cabin In The Woods that was stupid of you. It's really great. Scary, meta and pretty gutsy. And like all good things, well okay like all things, its brilliance is being exploited for a theme park attraction. But it sounds awesome. Some sort-of-not-really spoilers ahead.

Universal Orlando is adding the cabin as part of its 23rd annual Halloween Horror Nights event, which runs on and off from the end of September until November 2. Visitors do a walk through of the cabin, the Facility, and the cube cells and there's more background on the mythology surrounding the movie. Michael Aiello from Universal says:

We are building the cabin completely. You?re going to walk through a forest to get there. You?re going into the cabin. You?re going to go into the cube cells. We?re literally taking everything we can in the film and giving you a kind of best-of montage of the film with this kind of linking story. You?re going to be in the control room when merman attacks.

Creepy, fascinating and terrifying. Sounds pretty much perfect. [The Mary Sue, Zap2It]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/the-cabin-in-the-woods-cabin-is-gonna-exist-and-it-soun-628730058

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Veteran performers wow crowds on final day of Glastonbury

By Isla Binnie

PILTON, England (Reuters) - An octogenarian entertainer and a veteran country music singer had fans of all tastes and ages roaring on the final afternoon of the Glastonbury music festival on Sunday.

The sun beat down on the sprawling 900 acre farm in southwest England that this year showcased the Rolling Stones and Arctic Monkeys and features British folk rockers Mumford & Sons on Sunday, playing to up to 150,000 music fans.

Glastonbury organiser Michael Eavis is known for bringing eclectic and surprising acts to the venue, which this year has 2,000 acts performing across 58 stages.

In the lead-up to Sunday's headline slot, crowds flocked to see 85-year-old British TV presenter and all-round entertainer Bruce Forsyth or country music's Kenny Rogers.

"It's not usually my bag but he's great," said Kevin Watt, a 32 year-old computer games tester, as he watched Rogers play hits including "We've Got Tonight" and "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town".

The average age of ticket buyers has gone up to 36 since Eavis first invited 1,500 hippies to a festival on his farm in 1970, and the lineup reflects the range of ages.

Forsyth said: "I'll try to do a programme that will suit every one of you," before impersonating Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger to chants of "We love you, Bruce!" from the crowd.

"I grew up with Bruce Forsyth," said Jane Douglass, 50, a dance teacher from Buckinghamshire. "He was in my living room every Saturday night when I was growing up and now he's in the living room every Saturday night for my kids."

It is the first time that Mumford & Sons will headline at the world's best known music festival and it marks their return to the stage after bassist Ted Dwane underwent emergency surgery for a blood clot on the brain this month.

"After our set, I will make my annual trip up to the stone circle where I hope to kick back, reflect on the weekend and maybe even catch the sunrise," wrote keyboard player Ben Lovett on the band's website.

The main headline act was the Rolling Stones who played on Saturday to more than 100,000 fans, in a two and a quarter-hour Glastonbury debut topped with fireworks.

Festival organizers said the event had run smoothly despite rain on the first day temporarily turning the site into a mudpit and proving too much for British rapper Wiley who headed home, complaining about the weather, before his Saturday slot.

But the rain stopped on Friday and festival-goers dispensed with their waterproofs.

A team of about 300 police were on duty at the site but reported a 30 percent drop in crime since the last Glastonbury festival held in 2011.

(Reporting by Isla Binnie and Belinda Goldsmith; Editing by Alison Williams)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/veteran-performers-wow-crowds-final-day-glastonbury-180043513.html

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This Decaying, Futuristic Lego City Is Neotokyo Reborn

Most Lego cities are well-planned models of urban order. But at Brickworld this year, a team of six builders led by Carter Baldwin created this intricate model of urban disorder. Their unique version of Neotokyo borrows from a handful of great cyberpunk novels and movies, from Akira to Neuromancer.

Baldwin worked with Nate Brill, Kyle Vreze, Forest King, Ignacio Bernaldez, Sam Wormuth, Alex Valentino, and Chris Edwards on the project, which includes rare or obscure pieces from Lego's Scala collection. It shows us a snippet of a futuristic city, where decaying high-rises leave fetid canals in constant shadows on the ground level. The level of detail is incredible, and including tangled wires, hanging laundry, and cyberpunk minifigs. The Japanese signage, meanwhile, is made from electroluminescent wire, and includes billboards for "foreign girls."

It's cool to see a physical model of a fictional city, especially one that's been described by so many different authors over the past three decades. There's a bit of the real-life Kowloon Walled City here, too?the now-razed urban experiment that, arguably supplied the precedent for many fictional cyber-cities, which William Gibson famously described as "vast, multilayered engines of choice." Check out more images on Flickr, or see the model yourself at BrickFair on August 3. [Fred Scharmen via Archinect]

This Decaying, Futuristic Lego City Is Neotokyo Reborn

Images by Nathaniel Brill.

Source: http://lego.gizmodo.com/this-decaying-futuristic-lego-city-is-neotokyo-reborn-634853762

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