One of these days

 Covid will no longer be such a threat to the world. In the meantime, we all must do our part not to spread the disease. I am unable to understand those people who claim it is hoax. The entire world is affected. Everyone must do their part in subduing this menace.

I am returning to this blog after several years of inactivity. Like many of us in Ontario. I am in lockdown. Keep safe everyone.

HAPPY 75TH, ART

My friend Art Benjamin of London, Ont., turned 75, Oct. 31. His children surprised him with a gift that has left him smiling still. They arranged to fund the Art Benjamin Children's Library in his synagogue. Nothing could have pleased him more--not even 500 pounds of licorice allsorts!
Happy Birthday, Art.

ANTI MUSLIM 'MOVIE'

I watched a few seconds of this infamous movie about Muhammad that has so angered the Muslim world. What a piece of unadulterated crap.
I erased it. Suppose Jesus had been the subject. Christians would have been angered and disgusted, but they would simply have hit the delete button. They understand our freedom of speech. Many Muslims, on the other hand, simply can't get their heads around the concept of degrading a holy person and not being held accountable.
If this film had been produced in Canada, I suspect that our anti-hate laws could have been brought into play.

I AM A VICTIM OF ONLINE FRAUD!

When friends notified me that I had been beaten up and robbed while in Spain and needed money, I was stunned.  I was still at home in Ontario. I had been the victim of an online fraud. Somehow, the crooks had obtained my email password. Rogers, my service provider, was obliging and helped me reset it. The crooks had also taken my accounts list or address book, too.

Advice to all: Protect your email account password. The Rogers technician advises not to agree when a Windows account  asks if you want it to remember your password. Should a virus enter your computer, it can easily access the remembered passwords. Passwords are a nuisance sometimes when you must enter them and you are in a hurry, but they are necessary and should be carefully protected. Banks, she said, never ask to remember passwords .

MELANOMA SKIN CANCER TARGETED

Melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer, yet to the average person it cannot be distinguished from an innocent skin tag or other sometimes ugly blemish on the skin. As a result, patients don't bother to show it to their doctors. It can metastasize (spread). It is deadly and responsible for 79% of skin-cancer related deaths.
Western University scientists in London, Ontario, have identified a protein called Pannexin (Panx1). It appears in normal levels on the surface of healthy skin cells, but with melanoma it is over-produced to a pathological level.
Silvia Penuela and Dale Laird are the researchers behind this discovery. They say that if the level of Panx 1 is reduced, the afflicted cell becomes more normal.
"We think this over-production of Panx 1 enables the melanoma to become very aggressive. The cells have these extra Panx 1 channels and they can leave the primary tumor and invade other tissues," explains Laird, a professor in the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology and Canada Research Chair in Gap Junctions and Disease. "And when you find a protein that is highly up-regulated in a disease cell such as melanoma, the question becomes, is there therapeutic value in targeting a drug to that protein to reduce its production  or block its function? Would that be an effective treatment?"

They now plan to correlate their discovery to patient samples using the human melanoma bank through the collaboration with Dr. Muriel Brackstone and other clinicians at the London Health Sciences Centre, to see if this is a cancer marker. "If a melanoma lesion has a lot of this protein, it might be a tool for prognosis. And because it is on the skin, it would be more accessible for treatment." And treatment might be something as simple as a cream to use on melanoma lesions.
This research will be published in the Aug. 17 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

PRISONERS ARE PEOPLE, TOO

The inhumane conditions at the East-Elgin-Middlesex Detention Centre, long under public scrutiny thanks to the London Free Press, will continue to be kept out of public sight. The excuse?
“Disclosure of information from this investigation would impact security matters that might endanger both staff and inmates,” officials claimed, according to the newspaper.
“Furthermore, depending on the nature of the investigation, human resource or health matters may also be involved. As such, the ministry does not release this type of information for any internal investigation it performs within its correctional facilities.”
Just because these prisoners are in jail does not mean their treatment and living conditions should be kept as a secret of the ministry. Some men are forced to stay three to a cell, even if it means one must sleep on the floor. To my mind, this is beginning to sound like a prison in Afghanistan, but without the torture. The public pays for prisons and should surely have a say in how our money is spent. After the various government debacles in eHealth and the Ornge fiasco, how are we to know that money for prisons isn’t being skimmed into some fat cat’s bank account?
I am not suggesting that prisoners should be living in country club conditions, just that they are treated fairly.