Watching the World
“Important” Tonsils
‘Increased awareness of the important immunobiological function of the tonsils’ warrants a new ‘less radical approach’ as an alternative to tonsillectomy, according to a professor of otolaryngology at Boston University School of Medicine. Dr. Geza Jebo reports success with a CO2 laser in treating 22 cases of chronic tonsillitis, using it to repair rather than remove the tonsils. “The patients ranged in age from 14 to 42 years and all had reported frequent bouts of tonsillitis two to 11 years prior to surgery,” says The Medical Post of Canada. Another very important benefit: “No postoperative bleeding occurred requiring office or emergency room visits.”
Baby Snooze
Twelve years ago, a Japanese doctor placed a miniature condenser microphone in a human womb. By playing the tape recording of the sounds of the uterus to 87 crying babies, he was able to calm 84 percent of them. A more modern development of this same idea has been supervised at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, London, England, with the recording of the sound of a mother’s arterial blood supply to the placenta. The mother found its sleep-inducing effects successful in calming her baby for the first five months after its birth. The key to effective use of such techniques, reports The Times of London, is to start playing the tape as soon as possible after the child’s birth.
Praiseworthy Liver
In the Spanish town of El Ferrol, Mayor Ulla recently unveiled a memorial statue to the liver. During his working life as a doctor and the one who conducts postmortems in the town, he has seen hundreds of livers “that were tortured by cocktails, wine, tranquilizers, and other medicines.” Every day the liver has to contend with such poisons, he said. The granite sculpture, which was financed by the town council and a bank, is intended to give credit to this “unpretentious and unselfish organ.”
Undermining Marital Stability
“The overall association between premarital cohabitation and subsequent marital stability is striking,” states a report by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The dissolution rates of women who cohabit premaritally with their future spouse are, on average, nearly 80 percent higher than the rates of those who don’t.” The study included 4,996 Swedish women between 20 and 44 years of age, some of whom had lived with their mates before marriage and some of whom had not. Sweden’s rate of cohabitation before marriage is three times that of the United States. “It appears that people who cohabit premaritally are less committed to the institution and are more inclined to divorce than people who don’t live together,” said Neil Bennett, one of the report’s authors.
Feigned Illness
When a man recently turned up at a London, England, hospital, his heart attack proved to be as false as the personal details he gave about himself. Yet, according to the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, his numerous surgical scars indicated that he had successfully fooled medical professionals at other hospitals into operating on him. The reason? He suffers from a form of Munchausen’s syndrome, a medical term for imaginary illness. Every year as many as 1,500 similar sufferers in Britain try to get hospitals to perform operations on them. According to The Times of London, so convinced are these sufferers of their own illness that they have been known to forge medical records and even tamper with diagnostic equipment to attract attention.
Leukemia Risk
An Australian medical study claims that there is a link between having X rays during the early stages of pregnancy and childhood leukemia. Even dental X rays in the first trimester may be risky, say researchers. The study’s head researcher, Dr. Bill McWhirter, concluded: “I think we can definitely say, as a result of these findings, that X-rays during pregnancy can cause leukemia in children and are to be avoided as far as possible.” The research team did not find a link between household pesticides and leukemia, although agricultural herbicides and pesticides are still suspect. The report in The Medical Post also noted that pregnant women on a supplement of folic acid were “less likely to have a child with leukemia.”
Unique Problem
“Though the Catholic church disbars women from the priesthood, it holds that a priest once ordained remains one forever, whatever his transgressions,” notes The Economist. The problem now is that a priest named Paolo, who served for 25 years in a town in southern Italy, recently underwent a sex-change operation to become a woman. “She” then applied for, and received, early retirement and the priestly pension. Now the Vatican must figure out what to do with Paolo. “The Vatican might have preferred this unique episode in the history of the priesthood to have remained undiscovered,” says The Economist.
Microscopic Miners
A new method for processing gold ores is under way in South Africa. According to the South African newspaper Business Day, stubborn deposits of ore that do not respond to the usual method of extracting gold are being fed to bacteria called Thiobacillus ferrooxidans. These microscopic miners break down the surrounding pyrite, which makes it easy to extract the gold. The new method, called bioleaching, is much cheaper than the old method of roasting ore, which involved a costly process to prevent pollution. Efficiency seems to be another advantage. “At our Fairview bioleaching plant,” states metallurgist Pieter van Aswegen, “we achieve gold recoveries of 95 percent or more, compared with 90 percent recovery using roasting.”
Rebuilding Babylon
For eight years now, the government of Iraq has been working on rebuilding ancient Babylon. They have not had much to work with, as the best artifacts were removed long ago by the Germans and the French, and the Turks had used the bricks for building dams on the Euphrates. With few original pictures to go on, most of the restoration has been based on an imagination of what the original city—that once covered almost eight square miles [20 sq km] and had a population of one million—looked like. Some 1,800 foreign workers have been at the task, since Iraqi men are off fighting in a war. Recently, they hastily laid 14 million bricks to reconstruct walls and turrets. How has the work been going? “It is said that the walls they constructed thousands of years ago were straighter than the walls they are putting up now,” said one diplomat.
Second Boat Found
The second underground chamber near the Great Pyramid of Giza has now been penetrated and viewed through a small camera. As expected, it contained another funerary boat for the “soul” of Pharaoh Cheops. However, the researchers’ goal of recovering a sample of trapped ancient air, to find out what it was like before increased burning of fossil fuels, appears to have been thwarted. “It is unlikely that the air in the pit remained unchanged for 4,600 years,” said research scientist Pieter Tans, who took a whiff of it. “The limestone was extremely soft and porous, indicating that there might not be much ancient air in the pit.” There are no plans to excavate this second boat. It took ten years to reassemble the dismantled pieces of the first one.