Another scourge fades away

[elfs]

Dartmouth Medical School has announced that a vaccine against HPV-16 and HPV-18. This is really big news for women; HPV-16/18 cause 70% of all cervical cancers, and a vaccine against them is a big step forward.

In other news (I love BetterHumans; they're definitely one of the Transhumanist news aggregators of choice), a drug that limits food cravings is now working well, stem cell transplants are helping heal hearts, a vaccination against fatherhood is in the works, and the enzymes regulating bone formation have been discovered. And diabetes has now been cured in mice. Whether it applies to humans has yet to be uncovered, but there's tantalizing evidence that it might work.

Comments

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

The vaccination against fatherhood is rather appealing.

[lrodell.livejournal.com]

if they move that diabetes research up, even if it ends up being just for Type 1 folks, I will be happy. It runs on both sides of my family, and I will be delighted to see it gone, my nephews no longer at risk, no more family members lost to it or its complications. Same for the bone research; to be rid of, or at least able to *control* arthritis--!

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

It's also interesting to see that Type I diabetes appears to be an autoimmune disorder, where your body destroys the Islets of Langerhans in the pancreas, rather than a primarily metabolic disorder, as in Type II diabetes, where your body can become unresponsive to insulin at normal levels, as well as the identification of the spleen as the source of the cells that become islet cells.