Merry Christmas To All Our Readers

Do you read all of the blogs published by medicineworld.org? Many of our bloggers are busy keeping you updated on the various health related topics. We publish the following blogs at this time.
Cancer blog: I manage the cancer blog with lots of help and support form other bloggers. Through this cancer blog my friends and I try to bring stories of hope for patients with cancer. The cancer blog often republishes important blog posts from other cancer related blogs at Medicineworld.org. If you are searching for a blog that covers wide variety of cancer topics, this may be the one for you.
Breast cancer blog: Breast cancer blog is run by Emily and other bloggers and they bring you the latest stories, news and events that are related to breast cancer. Increasing awareness about breast cancer among women and in the general population is the main goal of this breast cancer blog.
Lung cancer blog: Lung cancer blog is managed by Scott with the help of other bloggers. Through this blog Scott and his friends constantly remind the readers about the dangers of smoking. It's a never-ending struggle against this miserable disease with which a social stigma of smoking is associated.
Colon cancer blog: Colon cancer blog is run by Sue and other bloggers. Sue brings a personal touch to the colon cancer blog since her mother died of colon cancer few years ago. She writes about stories, research news and advances in treatment related to colon cancer.
Prostate cancer blog: Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among American men. American Cancer Society estimates that over 230,000 new cases of prostate cancer occur in the United state every year. This important blog about prostate cancer is run by Mark and other bloggers. This blog brings news, stories, and other personal observations related to prostate cancer.
Medicineworld.org publishes a diabetes watch blog and this blog is run by JoAnn other bloggers. This diabetes watch blog brings you the latest in the field of diabetes. This includes personal stories, advances in diagnosis and treatment, and other observations about diabetes. Improving awareness about diabetes is an important mission of this group.
Janet      
Medicineworld wishes all our readers merry Christmas.
Oh, jingle bells, jingle bells
Jingle all the way
Oh, what fun it is to ride
In a one horse open sleigh
Jingle bells, jingle bells
Jingle all the way
Oh, what fun it is to ride
In a one horse open sleigh
A day or two ago
I thought I'd take a ride
And soon Miss Fanny Bright
Was seated by my side
The horse was lean and lank
Misfortune seemed his lot
We got into a drifted bank
And then we got upsot
Oh, jingle bells, jingle bells
Jingle all the way
Oh, what fun it is to ride
In a one horse open sleigh
Jingle bells, jingle bells
Jingle all the way
Oh, what fun it is to ride
In a one horse open sleigh yeah

Did you know?
Medicineworld wishes all our readers merry Christmas. Oh, jingle bells, jingle bells Jingle all the way
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Phase III Clinical Trial on Pleural Mesothelioma

Do you read all of the blogs published by medicineworld.org? Many of our bloggers are busy keeping you updated on the various health related topics. We publish the following blogs at this time.
Cancer blog: I manage the cancer blog with lots of help and support form other bloggers. Through this cancer blog my friends and I try to bring stories of hope for patients with cancer. The cancer blog often republishes important blog posts from other cancer related blogs at Medicineworld.org. If you are searching for a blog that covers wide variety of cancer topics, this may be the one for you.
Breast cancer blog: Breast cancer blog is run by Emily and other bloggers and they bring you the latest stories, news and events that are related to breast cancer. Increasing awareness about breast cancer among women and in the general population is the main goal of this breast cancer blog.
Lung cancer blog: Lung cancer blog is managed by Scott with the help of other bloggers. Through this blog Scott and his friends constantly remind the readers about the dangers of smoking. It's a never-ending struggle against this miserable disease with which a social stigma of smoking is associated.
Colon cancer blog: Colon cancer blog is run by Sue and other bloggers. Sue brings a personal touch to the colon cancer blog since her mother died of colon cancer few years ago. She writes about stories, research news and advances in treatment related to colon cancer.
Prostate cancer blog: Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among American men. American Cancer Society estimates that over 230,000 new cases of prostate cancer occur in the United state every year. This important blog about prostate cancer is run by Mark and other bloggers. This blog brings news, stories, and other personal observations related to prostate cancer.
Medicineworld.org publishes a diabetes watch blog and this blog is run by JoAnn other bloggers. This diabetes watch blog brings you the latest in the field of diabetes. This includes personal stories, advances in diagnosis and treatment, and other observations about diabetes. Improving awareness about diabetes is an important mission of this group.
Janet      
Emory Winship Cancer Institute will be one of two facilities in Georgia to conduct a phase III clinical trial of Vorinostat (oral suberoylanilide hydromaxic acid) in patients with advanced cancerous pleural mesothelioma. The purpose of the study is to test the safety and efficacy of Vorinostat as well as to compare the overall survival associated with therapy of the drug.
A rare but devastating disease, it is estimated that 2,000 to 3,000 new mesothelioma cases will be diagnosed each year in the United States. Mesothelioma is cancer of the cells found in the mesothelium, which is the protective lining covering most of the internal organs of the body. Pleural mesothelioma is the most common type of mesothelioma, and it is identified by the presence of malignant cells located in the tissue outside of the lungs and inside of the ribs.
Vorinostat is an experimental drug that is believed to work against cancer cells. When cells become malignant, chemical reactions inside the cancer cell allow those cells to multiply out of control. Vorinostat may stop the growth of tumor cells by blocking some of the enzymes needed for cell growth.
The principal investigator on the Vorinostat clinical trial at Winship is Dong M. Shin, MD, Professor of Hematology/Oncology and Otolaryngology; Director of Clinical and Translational Cancer Prevention Programs; and Co-Director of the Lung and Aerodigestive Tract Malignancies Program at Emory Winship Cancer Institute. Dr. Shin joined Winship in 2003 after more than 15 years as a faculty member at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute.
"This is a very important study for this terrible disease," said Dr. Shin. "As a second line treatment, there are currently no options other than this clinical trial."
Eligibility for the Vorinostat clinical trial requires a diagnosis of unidimensionally measurable cancerous pleural mesothelioma, which has progressed or relapsed following therapy with pemetrexed in combination with either Cisplastin or Carboplatin. For more information about this trial, contact Martha Forrester at 404-778-5849.
Source: Emory University
Did you know?
Emory Winship Cancer Institute will be one of two facilities in Georgia to conduct a phase III clinical trial of Vorinostat (oral suberoylanilide hydromaxic acid) in patients with advanced cancerous pleural mesothelioma. The purpose of the study is to test the safety and efficacy of Vorinostat as well as to compare the overall survival associated with therapy of the drug.
View the original article here

School Shut Amid Fears Of Asbestos

Officials conducted air-quality tests at a borough elementary school Friday evening, hours after smoke in its basement forced an evacuation and prompted an asbestos scare.
Results of the tests at Merritt Memorial School were not available Friday night, but borough officials said the tests were merely precautionary. The officials said they expected classes to resume on Monday.
"Right now, we plan on having everyone at Merritt Monday, but I will know better once I get the test results," Superintendent Charles Khoury said.
There were conflicting reports throughout the day Friday as to what transpired in a small area under the school gymnasium where contractors were conducting demolition work as part of a renovation project. County officials at first said no asbestos had been disturbed, but borough police said there had indeed been a "fibrous release" of the carcinogenic substance, which was once used in insulation and fireproofing.
Posted by: Scott    Source
Did you know?
Officials conducted air-quality tests at a borough elementary school Friday evening, hours after smoke in its basement forced an evacuation and prompted an asbestos scare. Results of the tests at Merritt Memorial School were not available Friday night, but borough officials said the tests were merely precautionary. The officials said they expected classes to resume on Monday.
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Suggest your News Item To Medicineworld
Please use this link to suggest a news item from your site for review and inclusion to our collection of blog posts.
Did you know?
As you are aware we are the leading publishers of health news on the web. We publish news items in various forms including numerous blogs and news items. We invite you to participate in our new collection. We are looking for quality news items that would be interesting to our readers. Now you may suggest the news item from your site to be included at Medicineworld.org. Inclusion of news item at our site get instantaneous attention since the item is illustrated from various blog posts. Addition of pictures to the item adds additional attraction to your news item. Inclusion in the Medicineworld.org site brings quality links and visitors to your site.
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Targeting Mesothelioma

There is exciting news for patients with mesothelioma in the making. Two pharmaceutical companies have started a clinical phase II clinical trial to test the efficacy and activity of a new drug in mesothelioma. This new drug is named as PXD101. This is a small molecule histone deacetylase inhibitor.

National Cancer Institute is sponsoring the current clinical trial with CuraGen. Those who are having a diagnosis of mesothelioma, which is not removable by surgery and who have failed at least one line of chemotherapy are eligible for the clinical trial. The drug PXD101 is given by intravenous infusion once every three weeks.

The researchers are trying to determine if the drug PXD101 has any significant activity on mesothelioma in terms of clinical response. The study is also aimed at determining the safety of the drug and time to treatment failure. The study would also look for any survival advantage resulting from the use of the drug.

Researchers are planning to enroll a total of 37 patients at different sites across the United States.

Histone deacetylase inhibitors have the ability to down-regulate genes such as BCL-XL and VEGF and up-regulate cell-cycle regulating genes, including p21. Researchers say that they are excited to begin the trial and would evaluate PXD101 as a potential treatment for mesothelioma.

Sadly, there are no proven therapies available for patients who have progressed on the first line chemotherapy. PXD101 is expected to take this vacant position in the treatment algorithm.

Did you know?
There is exciting news for patients with mesothelioma in the making. Two pharmaceutical companies have started a clinical phase II clinical trial to test the efficacy and activity of a new drug in mesothelioma. This new drug is named as PXD101. This is a small molecule histone deacetylase inhibitor.

View the original article here

Book Review - My Father’s Fortune - By Michael Frayn

Illustration by Joon Mo Kang, photographs by Colin McPherson/Corbis, left, and courtesy of Michael Frayn
Contemporary British letters do not lack for memoirs, autobiographies and other works in which the main event is the father-son relationship. John Mortimer’s wonderful play “A Voyage Round My Father,” about his dad, a celebrated, blind barrister; Max Hastings’s funny and touching “Did You Really Shoot the Television?,” about his feckless but irresistible father; Auberon Waugh’s sublimely titled “Will This Do?,” about life with Evelyn, who comes off (to my mind, anyway) as the Dad From Hell; then there is Auberon’s own son Alexander’s superb multigenerational layer-cake memoir, featuring ­Auberon-Evelyn-Arthur; Martin Amis’s nuanced but adoring portrait of his dad, Kingsley; and most recently Christopher Hitchens’s brilliant “Hitch-22,” featuring his complex, fraught relationship with his father, Commander Hitchens of the Royal Navy. Rich terrain — and I’ve probably omitted a dozen or so others.
In order to view this feature, you must download the latest version of flash player here. Tom Frayn with Michael and his sister, Jill, in 1937. Tom Frayn, Michael and his sister, Jill, are joined by Michael’s mother, Violet; her mother, Nell Lawson; and an uncle, Sid Bubbers, in 1943.
Comes now Michael Frayn’s “My Father’s Fortune,” about his dad. Frayn says at the outset that his father has been dead for 40 years and that he wrote the book at the urging of his 47-year-old daughter, Rebecca, who wanted to know more about her antecedents. One senses that Frayn was initially reticent about the project; but by the time it ends, as many such books do, on a confessional, apologetic note, you feel his relief at having gotten it out. Rebecca owes her dad a kiss and a big thank-you.
Michael Frayn is probably best known in the United States for his hugely successful 1982 comedy, “Noises Off,” which was nominated for a Tony Award for best play. He is probably next-best-known here for his drama “Copenhagen,” about — as Monty Python used to put it, “and now for something completely different” — an encounter in 1941 between the German physicist Werner Heisenberg and the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. It won the Tony for best play in 2000.
Frayn boasts a résumé that would make even Gore Vidal feel inadequate (well, maybe not). Fifteen plays; 10 novels; screenplays; he’s translated Chekhov and Tolstoy and won so many literary awards and medals that if he wore them all at once, he’d look like one of those Soviet generals on top of Lenin’s tomb on May Day. He is, in so many words, a significant literary personage.
I had to keep reminding myself of this fact during the first 70 or so pages of this book. At one point, a line from Clive James’s review of Leonid Brezhnev’s memoirs, which is mentioned in “Hitch-22,” came to me: “Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead.”
I hasten, indeed sprint, to qualify that somewhat impolite reference, for a few pages later, Frayn’s book kicked in and began to engage. It is not his fault that, as he puts it, “my father moved lightly over the earth, scarcely leaving a footprint, scarcely a shadow.” Yet the problem remains — turning Tom Frayn’s life story into compelling stuff. That said, by the end, it has become compelling. And with a dramatist’s sure touch, Frayn introduces a ticking hand grenade on Page 107 that may have you saying to yourself: “Oh. My. God.” Any translator of Chekhov is familiar with Chekhov’s rule: introduce a rifle in Act I, and it must be fired by Act III.
I don’t want to spoil it for you, but there’s no point in being coy, so here it is: It turns out Dad works for a company that makes asbestos roofing and piping. Not only that, but he’s constantly bringing home asbestos samples — huge chunks and slabs of pressed carcinogenic material from which the family makes (one cringes) myriad household items. Young Michael makes toys out of the stuff, hacksawing away at it, merrily filling the air with asbestos particles. My “Oh. My. God” moment came when they started making tomato planters out of it. Alas, the rifle does go off in Act III, but not quite as ­expected.
Frayn’s childhood was a mix, or, to use one of his logophile father’s favorite words, gallimaufry: a bit of Dickens, a bit of Wodehouse. He was 10 years old in 1943 and thus had a front-row seat at the blitz and the buzz bombing. He relates vivid and hairy memories of the “doodlebugs,” the improbably cute nickname given to the V-1 missiles that annihilated 6,000 Britons and wounded tens of thousands more.
His mother dropped dead of a heart attack in November 1945, having survived the war. He and his younger sister, Jill, were not allowed to attend the funeral, presumably on the grounds it might upset them. Their father wasn’t emotionally frigid, exactly, but neither was he a ­hugger.
“I suppose that he loved my mother,” Frayn writes. “And loved me and my sister, though he never said. Perhaps, it occurs to me now with a shock of surprise, he loved us as blindly and helplessly as years later I love my own children — was filled with the same joy at the sight of us as I am at the sight of them.”
Dad remarries a whack job named Elsie, the widow of a tinned-ham entrepreneur. The Frayns’ modest living standard suddenly rises to the level of petite bourgeoisie as they move from a rented home named Duckmore into nicer digs named Chez Nous. For a time, Elsie is Lady Bountiful, cheerful and loving and dispensing pound notes from her handbag — until we discover that she suffers from what we now call bipolar disorder. Michael spends the balance of his father’s second marriage tiptoeing around Chez Nous on eggshells.
But by now Michael is in secondary school, where his keen intellect is nurtured by a Mr. Chips type nicknamed Gobbo, the kind of teacher who makes a critical difference in a young man’s life. Frayn forms a close male attachment — not homo­sexual (oddly, for a British memoir) — with a fellow student named Lane. Years later, Lane, now a sen­ior civil servant in Canada (that must have been an exciting life), rebukes his old pal for having spoken publicly about their friendship and saying that it had “homoerotic overtones.”
With the help of an assiduous and beguiling crammer (tutor), Frayn matriculates at Cambridge, somewhat to the disappointment of Frayn Sr., who had hoped his son would follow him into the — gasp — asbestos business. After he graduates with a perfectly respectable 2.1 degree (a “first” being the best), his father can only shake his head. “I knew it wouldn’t come to anything, going to Cambridge.” But by then Frayn has already gotten a reporting job on The Manchester Guardian. Modestly, he barely says a word about his later successes.
And there the story does not end. There is redemption. There’s a heart-rending deathbed scene. And the rifle — hand grenade, doodlebug, whatever — that has been introduced on Page 107 finally goes off, casting a terrible pall.
In the final pages, Frayn, who in addition to Russian well knows his Greek and Latin, writes of his father, “I have borne him as best I could out of the ashes of the past in the way that the pious Aeneas bore his father Anchises on his back out of the ashes of Troy, in those pages of Virgil that fluttered away in the wind so many years ago.”
This is beautiful writing. This is Michael Frayn’s gift, not so much to his father, who one guesses would probably just have shrugged, but to a daughter who wanted to know what it had all been like. Rebecca’s fortune is quite a large one. h
Christopher Buckley’s latest book is “Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir.”
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School’s Out! (Temporarily); The Auditorium Collapsed

MOUNT VERNON, N.Y. — Students were expecting a tough week here at Mount Vernon High School, trying not to fall apart as they slogged through third-quarter exams and prepared for Advanced Placement exams and Regents tests.

They never thought it would be part of their school that fell apart.

Classes were canceled after a 100-foot section of wall in the auditorium collapsed around 4:30 p.m. Monday. The noisy avalanche exposed steel beams and wires and damaged three nearby classrooms used for woodworking, television production and R.O.T.C. meetings.

The nearest students were on a practice field on the other side of the building, and no one was injured, district officials said.

State and district officials immediately closed the 1,400-student high school, built in 1963, to determine whether it was structurally stable and to test for possible asbestos contamination.

On Thursday, yellow police tape stretched across the school property, and a police officer and security guard kept passers-by from coming onto the grounds. Mount Vernon has two other high schools.

W. L. Sawyer, the superintendent, said that preliminary investigation indicated the problem was limited to the collapsed wall and that classes would resume on Monday.

Inspectors found that cinderblocks were not properly anchored to steel beams during the construction of that part of the wall, but that the rest of the building was safe.

Officials said they would keep the area around the collapsed wall cordoned off.

Some students and nearby residents complained this week that the high school had been poorly maintained.

“It wasn’t a surprise, because there are leaks all over the building that aren’t fixed or repaired,” said Chelsea Hamlet, 18, a senior, who saw a picture of the collapsed wall on a friend’s cellphone.

Still, she said that she was recently in the auditorium for an Easter service and saw no indication of a problem.

Marian Barksdale, a 1973 Mount Vernon High graduate who once had a locker near the auditorium, said that maintenance issues might have been compounded by torrential rains that saturated Westchester this year. “It was probably already weakened and all the rain didn’t help,” she said “That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Dr. Sawyer acknowledged that the district had struggled to maintain its buildings for many years because of budget problems. But, he said, other than a leaky roof, he knew of no structural problems at the high school. “This had nothing to do with maintenance,” he said.

He also said there was no indication that the heavy rain played a role in the collapse.

Mount Vernon is a working-class city of 68,000 where three-quarters of the 10,000 students qualify for free or low-price lunches.

State education officials said that Mount Vernon High School had not been cited previously for any deficiencies in building conditions and had a valid certificate of occupancy.

A major wall collapse at a school in this area in 1989 killed seven children when a tornado tore through a cafeteria at East Coldenham Elementary School in the Valley Central School District in Orange County.

Dr. Sawyer said the high school was trying to make up the four missed days by making at least one professional day for teachers a school day, and is reviewing other options so that it will not have to extend classes past June 25, s the last scheduled school day.

“There’s no time that’s good to lose four days, but when the elements are against you, what can you do?” he said.

Dr. Sawyer said that the district might also seek a waiver from the State Education Department if it cannot make up all the time. State education officials said that they would consider such a request.

Many students said they were enjoying the unexpected break.

Dwight Glin, 17, a senior, said he slept until 9:30 a.m. on Thursday. After a bowl of Froot Loops, he headed to the library to watch music videos and check online for news about the school.

If the school had not been closed, he would have been answering questions about enzymes and respiration on a biology exam, he said.

“It’s good to get another break from school,” he said. “I rub it in with my friends” who go to different schools. “I’m like ‘So how was school? Well, you know what? I didn’t have school today.’ They just get mad.”

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California May Drop Its Rock, And Geologists Feel the Pain

LOS ANGELES -- Empirically speaking, geologists are not a particularly irascible group. But those who make their living studying rocks, minerals and gems in California -- and increasingly those scientists beyond the state's borders -- are enraged over a bill in Sacramento that would knock serpentine, the official state rock, off its mantle.

The lawmaker and others who would like to see serpentine stripped of its title say the olive green rock found all over the state is a grim symbol of the deadly cancers associated with asbestos, which can be found in the rock. Geologists, who have taken to Twitter on behalf of the rock, assert that serpentine is harmless and is being demonized by advocates for people with asbestos-related diseases and possibly their trial lawyers, too.

The bill to defrock the rock -- which recently passed the full State Senate and is awaiting a vote in the Assembly -- is sponsored by Senator Gloria Romero, a Los Angeles Democrat, with the strong support of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization.

Declaring that serpentine ''has known health effects,'' the bill would leave California -- one of roughly half the states in the nation with an official rock or mineral -- without an official rock. (According to the bill, California was the first state, in 1965, to name an official rock.) Asbestos occurs naturally in many minerals, and indeed some serpentine rocks do serve as a host for chrysotile, a form of asbestos. But geologists say chrysotile is less harmful than some other forms of asbestos, and would be a danger -- like scores of other rocks -- only if a person were to breathe its dust repeatedly.

''There is no way anyone is going to get bothered by casual exposure to that kind of rock,'' said Malcolm Ross, a geologist who retired from the United States Geological Survey in 1995. ''Unless they were breaking it up with a sledgehammer year after year.''

Dr. Ross and other opponents of the bill are concerned that removing serpentine, which is occasionally used in jewelry, as the state's rock would demonize it and thus inspire litigation against museums, property owners and other sites where the rocks sit; they cite the inclusion of a letter of support from the Consumer Attorneys of California with the bill as evidence.

''If they keep the asbestos issue bubbling,'' Dr. Ross said, ''it means money for politicians, more money for lawyers and money for scientists to investigate.''

J. D. Preston, a spokesman from the consumer lawyers group, said the group had nothing to do with drafting the legislation and was just responding to a request from the awareness organization for a support letter. ''We just thought this was a good fit in our mission of consumer safety,'' Mr. Preston said. ''It is certainly not the intent, and we don't even see where it opens the avenue for litigation.''

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has indicated no position.

Linda Reinstein, president of the awareness organization, whose husband died of lung cancer, pointed out that the bill had numerous letters of support, including ones from the Childrens Hospital Los Angeles and groups that represent people with mesothelioma, a cancer of the lining of many internal organs associated with asbestos.

''It doesn't do anything legally,'' Ms. Reinstein said of the proposed legislation. ''This bill is all about education and awareness. We never expected such a stir.''

Under the hashtag -- a Twitter identifying phrase that allows easy searching of similarly themed messages -- #CASerpentine, scientists and other opponents of the bill are debating the bill's merits and offering fighting words. One read, ''Dear gloria romero, you have picked the wrong nerds to mess with!''

PHOTOS: PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY MONICA ALMEIDA/THE NEW YORK TIMES) (A1); State Senator Gloria Romero proposed the serpentine bill. (PHOTOGRAPH BY RICH PEDRONCELLI/ASSOCIATED PRESS) (A16)

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New York City’s Inspection Scandal

New Yorkers are rightly alarmed at the ease with which an inspector who was licensed to test buildings and construction sites for lead or asbestos risks got away with filing hundreds of false reports for at least a decade. The Bloomberg administration says reforms that were already in progress when the deception was uncovered will make it less likely to happen in the future.

But the jaw-dropping scope of the fraud carried out by just one inspector raises legitimate concerns about city oversight. It also raises the possibility of collusion between builders and property owners and the inspectors they hire to perform legally required safety tests.

The inspector, Saverio Todaro, who was at one point certified by city, state and federal agencies, operated a company through which he claimed to perform environmental inspection and testing services, including lead clearance testing, asbestos air monitoring and asbestos inspection in the New York City area. Favorable reports allow property owners to certify that their apartments presented no lead risks to young children or that proposed demolition projects would be asbestos-free. That means they do not require special filings with the city or costly abatement efforts.

As William K. Rashbaum reported in The Times on Tuesday, Mr. Todaro submitted results for more than 200 buildings and apartments, including some renovated for the city’s affordable housing initiative, without performing a single test.

The city environmental agency suspended Mr. Todaro’s license in 2004 but failed to notify other public agencies for which he did asbestos-related work. As a result, he continued to file reports until 2008, when an employee of the city’s health department noticed a suspicious pattern in his work.

City officials say that they would notify other agencies of suspensions and irregularities in the future. The city also says it is well on the way to a system that will make it impossible for inspectors who have been suspended from filing subsequent reports.

City Hall should also consider strengthening and consolidating oversight of the testing regime, which currently is spread across several city agencies.

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Madison Square Garden Reopens After Asbestos Scare

Players and coaches had long since left the building. They were still digesting the previous warning — an asbestos scare at Madison Square Garden that forced the postponement of a home game Tuesday night.

Like the fire alarm, the asbestos warning appears to have been unwarranted, and the Knicks will soon resume their normal schedule.

Garden officials announced Wednesday evening that the arena had been deemed safe and that all events would go on as scheduled. The Knicks will play the Washington Wizards there Friday night.

In a statement, the Garden said it had received “assurance from the city and environmental experts regarding the safety of the arena.”

The statement said nothing about asbestos, the word that initially set off concerns after some debris fell from the Garden attic during overnight maintenance Monday. Tests conducted by the city’s Department of Environmental Protection and by independent contractors concluded that no asbestos had been released into the arena.

Garden officials, exercising what they called “an abundance of caution,” postponed Tuesday night’s game between the Knicks and the Orlando Magic. The teams are working with the N.B.A. to schedule a makeup date.

The decision to reopen the arena was made by Garden officials alone. The city’s oversight effectively ended once testing concluded that there was no asbestos in the arena.

“It’s essentially in their hands,” Farrell Sklerov, a spokesman for the D.E.P., said earlier in the afternoon. He added, “There’s no health risk.”

Had the Garden remained closed, the Knicks would have been forced to postpone more home games or play them at another site, probably in New Jersey. Garden officials made initial inquiries with the Prudential Center in Newark, but never made firm plans to play there.

On Wednesday, the Knicks seemed more concerned with cleaning up their offense and their record (1-2) than their aging arena. They lost close games to Boston and Portland last week, outcomes that left them with equal doses of frustration and hope. The tough schedule continues Thursday night in Chicago against the talent-rich Bulls.

So Tuesday’s postponement, however inconvenient, was not all bad. It gave three key players — Anthony Randolph (sprained ankle), Ronny Turiaf (sore back) and Danilo Gallinari (sore wrist) — extra time to heal.

It also allowed the Knicks to avoid, for now, a difficult matchup with Orlando’s Dwight Howard, perhaps the league’s most fearsome big man. The running joke was that the Knicks finally found a way to shut down Howard.

“One of my better coaching performances,” Coach Mike D’Antoni said, chuckling. He added: “It was either Dwight Howard or breathing bad material. It’s a tossup.”

D’Antoni said that his young team might be more ready for the challenge by the time the Knicks see the Magic.

Several players came to the training center to work out or shoot on their own. But the unexpected postponement left them with a free night and an empty feeling.

“It was tough,” Amar’e Stoudemire said. “I mean, we definitely was ready to play, was prepared for Orlando, was geared up, ready to go.”

The players were either headed to the Garden or getting ready to leave their homes when they received word that the game had been postponed. Some players said they just relaxed and watched television. Some watched other N.B.A. games. D’Antoni said he watched game film of the Bulls.

“I wanted to play,” said Gallinari, who is eager to break out of a shooting slump. “I wanted to play the game. That was not good news.”

Gallinari was already on his way to Manhattan when he heard about the incident and decided to keep going. He walked around Central Park, visited the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue (to check out the iPad), then headed to SoHo for dinner at an Italian restaurant.

It was a nice way to spend an evening, just not what he had in mind. Like his teammates, Gallinari had never lost a game to 40-year-old fire retardant.

“Only in New York can that happen,” he said.

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School’s Out! (Temporarily); The Auditorium Collapsed

MOUNT VERNON, N.Y. — Students were expecting a tough week here at Mount Vernon High School, trying not to fall apart as they slogged through third-quarter exams and prepared for Advanced Placement exams and Regents tests.

They never thought it would be part of their school that fell apart.

Classes were canceled after a 100-foot section of wall in the auditorium collapsed around 4:30 p.m. Monday. The noisy avalanche exposed steel beams and wires and damaged three nearby classrooms used for woodworking, television production and R.O.T.C. meetings.

The nearest students were on a practice field on the other side of the building, and no one was injured, district officials said.

State and district officials immediately closed the 1,400-student high school, built in 1963, to determine whether it was structurally stable and to test for possible asbestos contamination.

On Thursday, yellow police tape stretched across the school property, and a police officer and security guard kept passers-by from coming onto the grounds. Mount Vernon has two other high schools.

W. L. Sawyer, the superintendent, said that preliminary investigation indicated the problem was limited to the collapsed wall and that classes would resume on Monday.

Inspectors found that cinderblocks were not properly anchored to steel beams during the construction of that part of the wall, but that the rest of the building was safe.

Officials said they would keep the area around the collapsed wall cordoned off.

Some students and nearby residents complained this week that the high school had been poorly maintained.

“It wasn’t a surprise, because there are leaks all over the building that aren’t fixed or repaired,” said Chelsea Hamlet, 18, a senior, who saw a picture of the collapsed wall on a friend’s cellphone.

Still, she said that she was recently in the auditorium for an Easter service and saw no indication of a problem.

Marian Barksdale, a 1973 Mount Vernon High graduate who once had a locker near the auditorium, said that maintenance issues might have been compounded by torrential rains that saturated Westchester this year. “It was probably already weakened and all the rain didn’t help,” she said “That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Dr. Sawyer acknowledged that the district had struggled to maintain its buildings for many years because of budget problems. But, he said, other than a leaky roof, he knew of no structural problems at the high school. “This had nothing to do with maintenance,” he said.

He also said there was no indication that the heavy rain played a role in the collapse.

Mount Vernon is a working-class city of 68,000 where three-quarters of the 10,000 students qualify for free or low-price lunches.

State education officials said that Mount Vernon High School had not been cited previously for any deficiencies in building conditions and had a valid certificate of occupancy.

A major wall collapse at a school in this area in 1989 killed seven children when a tornado tore through a cafeteria at East Coldenham Elementary School in the Valley Central School District in Orange County.

Dr. Sawyer said the high school was trying to make up the four missed days by making at least one professional day for teachers a school day, and is reviewing other options so that it will not have to extend classes past June 25, s the last scheduled school day.

“There’s no time that’s good to lose four days, but when the elements are against you, what can you do?” he said.

Dr. Sawyer said that the district might also seek a waiver from the State Education Department if it cannot make up all the time. State education officials said that they would consider such a request.

Many students said they were enjoying the unexpected break.

Dwight Glin, 17, a senior, said he slept until 9:30 a.m. on Thursday. After a bowl of Froot Loops, he headed to the library to watch music videos and check online for news about the school.

If the school had not been closed, he would have been answering questions about enzymes and respiration on a biology exam, he said.

“It’s good to get another break from school,” he said. “I rub it in with my friends” who go to different schools. “I’m like ‘So how was school? Well, you know what? I didn’t have school today.’ They just get mad.”

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Book Review - My Father’s Fortune - By Michael Frayn

Illustration by Joon Mo Kang, photographs by Colin McPherson/Corbis, left, and courtesy of Michael Frayn

Contemporary British letters do not lack for memoirs, autobiographies and other works in which the main event is the father-son relationship. John Mortimer’s wonderful play “A Voyage Round My Father,” about his dad, a celebrated, blind barrister; Max Hastings’s funny and touching “Did You Really Shoot the Television?,” about his feckless but irresistible father; Auberon Waugh’s sublimely titled “Will This Do?,” about life with Evelyn, who comes off (to my mind, anyway) as the Dad From Hell; then there is Auberon’s own son Alexander’s superb multigenerational layer-cake memoir, featuring ­Auberon-Evelyn-Arthur; Martin Amis’s nuanced but adoring portrait of his dad, Kingsley; and most recently Christopher Hitchens’s brilliant “Hitch-22,” featuring his complex, fraught relationship with his father, Commander Hitchens of the Royal Navy. Rich terrain — and I’ve probably omitted a dozen or so others.

In order to view this feature, you must download the latest version of flash player here. Tom Frayn with Michael and his sister, Jill, in 1937.

Tom Frayn, Michael and his sister, Jill, are joined by Michael’s mother, Violet; her mother, Nell Lawson; and an uncle, Sid Bubbers, in 1943.

Comes now Michael Frayn’s “My Father’s Fortune,” about his dad. Frayn says at the outset that his father has been dead for 40 years and that he wrote the book at the urging of his 47-year-old daughter, Rebecca, who wanted to know more about her antecedents. One senses that Frayn was initially reticent about the project; but by the time it ends, as many such books do, on a confessional, apologetic note, you feel his relief at having gotten it out. Rebecca owes her dad a kiss and a big thank-you.

Michael Frayn is probably best known in the United States for his hugely successful 1982 comedy, “Noises Off,” which was nominated for a Tony Award for best play. He is probably next-best-known here for his drama “Copenhagen,” about — as Monty Python used to put it, “and now for something completely different” — an encounter in 1941 between the German physicist Werner Heisenberg and the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. It won the Tony for best play in 2000.

Frayn boasts a résumé that would make even Gore Vidal feel inadequate (well, maybe not). Fifteen plays; 10 novels; screenplays; he’s translated Chekhov and Tolstoy and won so many literary awards and medals that if he wore them all at once, he’d look like one of those Soviet generals on top of Lenin’s tomb on May Day. He is, in so many words, a significant literary personage.

I had to keep reminding myself of this fact during the first 70 or so pages of this book. At one point, a line from Clive James’s review of Leonid Brezhnev’s memoirs, which is mentioned in “Hitch-22,” came to me: “Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead.”

I hasten, indeed sprint, to qualify that somewhat impolite reference, for a few pages later, Frayn’s book kicked in and began to engage. It is not his fault that, as he puts it, “my father moved lightly over the earth, scarcely leaving a footprint, scarcely a shadow.” Yet the problem remains — turning Tom Frayn’s life story into compelling stuff. That said, by the end, it has become compelling. And with a dramatist’s sure touch, Frayn introduces a ticking hand grenade on Page 107 that may have you saying to yourself: “Oh. My. God.” Any translator of Chekhov is familiar with Chekhov’s rule: introduce a rifle in Act I, and it must be fired by Act III.

I don’t want to spoil it for you, but there’s no point in being coy, so here it is: It turns out Dad works for a company that makes asbestos roofing and piping. Not only that, but he’s constantly bringing home asbestos samples — huge chunks and slabs of pressed carcinogenic material from which the family makes (one cringes) myriad household items. Young Michael makes toys out of the stuff, hacksawing away at it, merrily filling the air with asbestos particles. My “Oh. My. God” moment came when they started making tomato planters out of it. Alas, the rifle does go off in Act III, but not quite as ­expected.

Frayn’s childhood was a mix, or, to use one of his logophile father’s favorite words, gallimaufry: a bit of Dickens, a bit of Wodehouse. He was 10 years old in 1943 and thus had a front-row seat at the blitz and the buzz bombing. He relates vivid and hairy memories of the “doodlebugs,” the improbably cute nickname given to the V-1 missiles that annihilated 6,000 Britons and wounded tens of thousands more.

His mother dropped dead of a heart attack in November 1945, having survived the war. He and his younger sister, Jill, were not allowed to attend the funeral, presumably on the grounds it might upset them. Their father wasn’t emotionally frigid, exactly, but neither was he a ­hugger.

“I suppose that he loved my mother,” Frayn writes. “And loved me and my sister, though he never said. Perhaps, it occurs to me now with a shock of surprise, he loved us as blindly and helplessly as years later I love my own children — was filled with the same joy at the sight of us as I am at the sight of them.”

Dad remarries a whack job named Elsie, the widow of a tinned-ham entrepreneur. The Frayns’ modest living standard suddenly rises to the level of petite bourgeoisie as they move from a rented home named Duckmore into nicer digs named Chez Nous. For a time, Elsie is Lady Bountiful, cheerful and loving and dispensing pound notes from her handbag — until we discover that she suffers from what we now call bipolar disorder. Michael spends the balance of his father’s second marriage tiptoeing around Chez Nous on eggshells.

But by now Michael is in secondary school, where his keen intellect is nurtured by a Mr. Chips type nicknamed Gobbo, the kind of teacher who makes a critical difference in a young man’s life. Frayn forms a close male attachment — not homo­sexual (oddly, for a British memoir) — with a fellow student named Lane. Years later, Lane, now a sen­ior civil servant in Canada (that must have been an exciting life), rebukes his old pal for having spoken publicly about their friendship and saying that it had “homoerotic overtones.”

With the help of an assiduous and beguiling crammer (tutor), Frayn matriculates at Cambridge, somewhat to the disappointment of Frayn Sr., who had hoped his son would follow him into the — gasp — asbestos business. After he graduates with a perfectly respectable 2.1 degree (a “first” being the best), his father can only shake his head. “I knew it wouldn’t come to anything, going to Cambridge.” But by then Frayn has already gotten a reporting job on The Manchester Guardian. Modestly, he barely says a word about his later successes.

And there the story does not end. There is redemption. There’s a heart-rending deathbed scene. And the rifle — hand grenade, doodlebug, whatever — that has been introduced on Page 107 finally goes off, casting a terrible pall.

In the final pages, Frayn, who in addition to Russian well knows his Greek and Latin, writes of his father, “I have borne him as best I could out of the ashes of the past in the way that the pious Aeneas bore his father Anchises on his back out of the ashes of Troy, in those pages of Virgil that fluttered away in the wind so many years ago.”

This is beautiful writing. This is Michael Frayn’s gift, not so much to his father, who one guesses would probably just have shrugged, but to a daughter who wanted to know what it had all been like. Rebecca’s fortune is quite a large one. h

Christopher Buckley’s latest book is “Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir.”

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Jeffrey Asbestos Mine in Canada Seeks State Aid to Restart Production

Mr. Coulombe, 69, says he believes that you can recapture the past. At a time when Canada, like many countries, is spending millions of dollars to remove asbestos from buildings, to say nothing of covering asbestos-related disability claims, Mr. Coulombe wants a $58 million loan guarantee from the province of Quebec. He is hoping to attract investors and revitalize the mine that gave rise to the town in 1879 and for more than a century has swallowed chunks of it into its ever-expanding pit.

Adding to the controversy over the plan, Mr. Coulombe’s strategy is to sell to countries like India, Pakistan and Vietnam, where enthusiasm for cheap asbestos often comes with a lax approach to workplace health and safety.

It would seem a quixotic venture. Mr. Coulombe’s proposal has been widely condemned by the medical and public health community both in Canada and abroad. The mineral’s dangers have largely eliminated the market for it in Canada as well as the United States, where the last asbestos mine closed in 2002.

But while many Canadians outside Quebec view the mine’s survival as something of an international embarrassment, history suggests it would be unwise to dismiss Mr. Coulombe. The asbestos industry was once a prominent symbol of Quebec’s might in natural resources, and the mine — now known as Mine Jeffrey — played an outsize role in the province’s political history.

“The whole asbestos debate is purely emotional,” said Paul Lapierre, the vice president for cancer control at the Canadian Cancer Society and an opponent of Mr. Coulombe’s proposal. “As Quebeckers we were once so proud of our mining industry, including asbestos.”

The political strength of asbestos will be tested this month when the province is expected to announce a decision on the loan guarantee.

Jeffrey was once a key operation of Johns Manville, the American building materials company, and at one time provided most of the world’s supply of one type of asbestos. But over time a large body of scientific evidence linked it to lung cancer and mesothelioma, a fast-acting cancer of major organs, and asbestosis, a hardening of the lungs that ultimately suffocates its victims.

In 1982, health-related lawsuits forced Johns Manville into bankruptcy; the Jeffrey mine was sold to its managers a year later.

The fortunes of asbestos have continued to sink. After peaking at 4.79 million metric tons in 1977, worldwide production reached only 1.97 million metric tons last year. Some countries, including the members of the European Union, now ban the mineral’s general use. Synthetic fibers have assumed most of the tasks it once handled, if at a higher cost. Asbestos’s remaining markets are mainly less developed nations as well as China and the countries of the former Soviet Union and China, some of which have mines. Its one remaining attraction is its low cost.

Once it reaches developing countries, asbestos from the Jeffrey mine is usually mixed with cement and formed into inexpensive pipes and roof sheeting.

The town of Asbestos, once prosperous, has tracked the mineral’s decline. The former town hall sits abandoned. When repairs to the building proved unaffordable, the local government moved into a church it purchased for $1. The mine pit, which is about a mile wide and 1.2 miles long, and its two huge mills are currently inactive.

As he rapped on a wall in his shabby office, Mr. Coulombe, an engineer who joined the mine 42 years ago, lamented that its asbestos-based wallboard was no longer available.

Mr. Coulombe readily acknowledges the mineral’s dangers and the harm it has done. But he asserted that the trouble mainly resulted from other forms of asbestos and not the variety, known as chrysotile, produced at Jeffrey as well as operations in nearby Thetford Mines. “The people against us in the medical community, they know nothing about chrysotile,” Mr. Coulombe said. “We show our opponents all sorts of studies done over the last 25 years all around the world that demonstrate that there is no problem working with chrysotile. But they don’t take that into account. They say ‘It’s a carcinogen, it’s a carcinogen, it’s a carcinogen.’ ”

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Chemotherapy Gave Us A Gift of Time

By Lorraine Kember

In December 1999, my beloved husband of 32 years was diagnosed with pleural mesothelioma and given a prognosis of 3 to 9 months. He was a former Wittenoom child who at the tender age of seven lived in Wittenoom for period of seven short months. Tragically it was long enough for him to inhale the deadly blue asbestos dust that would ultimately take his life.

As Brian’s disease progressed, the tumor pressed against his esophagus making it almost impossible for him to swallow. For a short period of time, dilatation was given to stretch the opening, thereby enabling him to manage a pureed diet. However when these dilations were no longer successful, we were told that chemotherapy was the only option. It was painfully obvious that unless chemotherapy could shrink the tumor, Brian’s death would be imminent.

Although we had no choice, the thought of chemotherapy was frightening. We had heard stories of extreme nausea and hair loss, and the added fear of the unknown intensified our suffering. There were many questions. How would it affect us? Would it work? How long will it go on? Will Brian ever be able to eat normally again?

For Brian, chemotherapy was never promised as a cure but as a trial, offered to him in the hope of shrinking the tumor, thereby enabling him to eat and drink and hopefully, to afford him “quality of life” for the remainder of his life.

Brian began chemotherapy in January 2001; his reaction to the first round of treatment was dramatic; he vomited continuously and was unable to retain his oral medication and needed to be hospitalized. Unable He remained in hospital for a short time during which the Pain Management Specialist attached to the Palliative Care Unit was able to bring his symptoms under control. The medication he prescribed effectively controlled Brian’s nausea and when taken prior to further chemotherapy sessions, prevented further bouts of nausea from occurring.

Without fear of side effects, Brian welcomed his chemotherapy sessions and the resulting benefits of the treatment soon became obvious. By the end of the second round of chemotherapy it was obvious that the treatment had shrunk the tumor; the changes in his condition and disposition were amazing; he felt and looked so much better, was able to eat meat and enjoy food again. I could not get over the change in him.

Excerpt from my diary:

March 2001

Brian is feeling so much better. He is able to eat meat and enjoy food again. Chemotherapy HAS shrunk the tumor. I cannot get over the change in him. It is a precious gift and I am so grateful for it.
Brian has been amazing. The chemo and nausea medication tire him for a bit but within a few days he is back on top and his general well-being is amazing. Oh the joy of seeing him able to eat again! The chemo has definitely given him better quality of life. His appetite is amazing!

I realized at this time that despite all of our fears regarding chemotherapy, it had worked well for us. It had given us a precious gift of time. A special “time out” from the pain and suffering of it all. There was quality of life and we were determined to live it to the full.

Excerpt from my diary

There’s laughter now in our days
for we have grown stronger.
We have learned to push our grief away
and to live each moment of every single day,
for we know that tomorrow may never come
and that our goodnight may well be our goodbye...

Article written by: Lorraine Kember – Author of “Lean on Me” Cancer through a Carer’s Eyes. Lorraine’s book is written from her experience of caring for her dying husband in the hope of helping others. It includes insight and discussion on: Anticipatory Grief, Understanding and identifying pain, Pain Management and Symptom Control, Chemotherapy, Palliative Care, Quality of Life and dying at home. It also features excerpts and poems from her personal diary. Highly recommended by the Cancer Council. “Lean on Me” is not available in bookstores - For detailed information, Doctor’s recommendations, Reviews, Book Excerpts and Ordering Facility - visit her website http://www.cancerthroughacarerseyes.jkwh.com

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Over 350 existing natural and alternative cancer treatments

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60-70% of cancers are
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Catching a Killer - New Steps Taken in Treating Mesothelioma

By Maggie Kay

There's a silent killer out there. It creeps up on its victims, attacks them quietly and unsuspectingly, and initiates a wound that develops over many years before it eventually causes pain. This unstoppable murderer is known as mesothelioma.

Mesothelioma is a malignant tumor that develops on the mesothelial cells of either the lungs, heart or abdominal organs, and plagues those who have been exposed to asbestos for a prolonged period of time.

Many who fall victim to this disease are people who have worked in specific trades or fields prior to the 1970s, such as blacksmiths, electricians, millwrights, and oil refinery workers.

Since it can take up to forty years for symptoms to surface, mesothelioma-related deaths are higher than ever in the 21st century. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention state that 1,493 people died from asbestos in 2000, compared to 77 people in 1968.

Mesothelioma treatment methods differ depending on the stage of the cancer upon detection, as well as the patient's age and personal choice of treatment. The four distinct stages of the disease are a factor in determining the type of mesothelioma treatment that can be carried out.

The first stage is when the tumor has had limited growth on the pleural lining (the lining of the lungs). At this stage, an attempt can be made to surgically remove the entire tumor. However, if the tumor is detected at a later stage when it has invaded surrounding areas, it is considered incurable.

Traditionally, the later stages of mesothelioma have been treated with either chemotherapy or radiation therapy. Chemotherapy uses drugs to kill cancer cells while radiation therapy uses high-energy x-rays to kill cancer cells and shrink tumors.

Although mesothelioma treatment methods have been proven to prolong patients' lives, they cannot cure the disease. Ongoing clinical trials are dedicated to overcoming this debilitating illness. Current experimental treatments include the following:

Drug Therapy: A drug called Alimta, developed by Eli Lilly, has been shown to significantly increase the life expectancy of patients and decrease symptoms of the disease. It is the only chemotherapy drug to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of patients with malignant pleural mesothelioma.

Gene Therapy: This mesothelioma treatment is currently in the experimental stages. The process involves inserting a "suicide gene" directly into the tumor. This gene makes the cells sensitive to a normally ineffective drug called glanciclovir which destroys all the cancer cells and leaves the healthy cells unharmed.

Photodynamic Therapy: Still in its experimental stage, photodynamic therapy uses light to kill cancerous cells. The patient first receives a photosensitizer that only collects in cancerous cells. Fiberoptic cables are then placed in the body in order to focus the right frequency of light on the tumor. The photosensitizer is then caused to produce a toxic oxygen molecule that kills the cancer cell.

Immunotherapy: Also referred to as biological therapy, this mesothelioma treatment uses the body's personal immune system to defend itself against mesothelioma. It has been discovered that the immune system is capable of deciphering healthy cells from cancerous cells, and can thus eradicate those cells that cause cancer.

While treatment methods are still in the developmental or experimental stages, there is hope that one day all mesothelioma victims will be freed from the murderous hands of this fearsome disease.

Maggie Kay is a freelance writer from Montreal and is the head researcher and content manager of Mesothelioma Attorney Advice Center

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Chronic Pain Management for Cancer Patients

By Lorraine Kember

Chronic untreated pain is debilitating, it dramatically affects a patient’s ability to participate in daily routines and in some cases takes away their will to live. Tragically, many people are suffering chronic pain unnecessarily.

This in part, due to them not being made aware of the importance of pain management and being shown the simple tools necessary to achieve it. Lack of knowledge regarding the benefits and side effects of available medication is also a factor.

Many patients associate morphine and methadone with drug addiction and are reluctant to take it due to their belief that it will cause them to become “high” or sedated, this and their attempts to brave out the pain, results in their pain spirally out of control.

This could be prevented if they were informed that chronic pain effectively “uses up” medication and that these drugs when taken for the relief of pain associated with cancer, can dramatically reduce both the occurrence and intensity of pain, without causing sedation.

Not long after my husband’s terminal cancer diagnosis, I observed that despite his medication, he was in considerable pain and this upset me greatly - determined to help him, I turned to the internet to learn about the progressive symptoms of his disease, the pain he would experience and methods available to control it.

One of the most important things I learned, was that in order to obtain the best possible pain control – medication must be taken at regular prescribed times, regardless of whether pain is or isn’t present, effectively keeping in front of the pain.

I learned that there are different types of pain and that not all pain responds to the same medication; and how to measure intensity of pain and encouraged Brian to communicate to me - the type of pain he was experiencing and its intensity by using a pain scale.

Brian soon realized the benefits of this - It was an immense relief for him- to know that I understood what he was experiencing and more importantly – that I could do something about it.

Despite the large amount of methadone Brian was taking; he remained active and alert, drove his car for eighteen months after diagnosis and was able to continue going fishing, which was the passion of his life. Keeping him out of pain became the reason for my existence and I was vigilant in giving him his medication at prescribed times.

There were many occasions when caring but uninformed loved ones and friends, said to me. “Brian does not need for you to be giving him medication at this time – he is not in pain”. And I would patiently explain to them, that the reason Brian was not in pain, was because the regular medication he was receiving effectively allowed for him to remain in front of it.

Experience has taught me that knowledge is the key, to better quality of life, not only for the cancer patient but for those who care for them. My understanding of the stages and symptoms of Brian’s disease, allowed for me to be one step ahead of its progression and gave me the opportunity to have medication and later, physical aids such as oxygen, wheelchair etc – on hand BEFORE Brian needed them. This alleviated much of the fear, pain and discomfort he would otherwise have suffered.

Article written by: Lorraine Kember – Author of “Lean on Me” Cancer through a Carer’s Eyes. Lorraine’s book is written from her experience of caring for her dying husband in the hope of helping others. It includes insight and discussion on: Anticipatory Grief, Understanding and identifying pain, Pain Management and Symptom Control, Chemotherapy, Palliative Care, Quality of Life and Dying at home. It also features excerpts and poems from her personal diary. Highly recommended by the Cancer Council. “Lean on Me” is not available in bookstores - For detailed information, Doctor’s recommendations, Reviews, Book Excerpts and Ordering Facility - visit her website http://www.cancerthroughacarerseyes.jkwh.com

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National Asbestos Awareness Day Award Winner Announced

(PRWEB) March 31, 2005 -- The Johnson Law Firm announced today the winner of its inaugural "National Asbestos Awareness Day Award" for outstanding contribution to public education and awareness of mesothelioma lung cancer.

The Hon. Harry Reid (D-NV), Senate Minority Leader, was announced as the winner of this year's award for his contribution to establishing April 1 as "National Asbestos Awareness Day."

In announcing the award, Steven Johnson, founder of the Johnson Law Firm (www.nationwidejustice.com/mesothelioma_asbestos), said, "As mesothelioma lawyers we see daily the horrible impact asbestos has on people.

We are committed to raising awareness about the dangers of asbestos exposure because greater awareness and education can reduce both exposure and the resulting cases of mesothelioma. The Johnson Law Firm's mesothelioma attorneys congratulate Sen. Reid for his contributions to public education about mesothelioma."

The National Asbestos Awareness Day Award will honor an individual who contributes to public education of asbestos related cancers, including mesothelioma.

Sen. Reid submitted the following resolution (S. Res. 43) to the Senate Judiciary Committee:

"Whereas deadly asbestos fibers are invisible and cannot be smelled or tasted;

"Whereas when airborne fibers are inhaled or swallowed, the damage is permanent and irreversible;

"Whereas these fibers can cause mesothelioma, asbestosis, lung cancer, and pleural diseases;

"Whereas asbestos-related diseases can take 10 to 50 years to present themselves;

"Whereas the expected survival rate of those diagnosed with mesothelioma is between 6 and 24 months;

"Whereas little is known about late stage treatment and there is no cure for asbestos-related diseases;

"Whereas early detection of asbestos-related diseases would give patients increased treatment options and often improve their prognosis;

"Whereas asbestos is a toxic and dangerous substance and must be disposed of properly;

"Whereas nearly half of the more than 1,000 screened firefighters, police officers, rescue workers, and volunteers who responded to the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001, have new and persistent respiratory problems;

"Whereas the industry groups with the highest incidence rates of asbestos-related diseases, based on 2000 to 2002 figures, were shipyard workers, vehicle body builders (including rail vehicles), pipefitters, carpenters and electricians, construction (including insulation work and stripping), extraction, energy and water supply, and manufacturing;

"Whereas the United States imports more than 30,000,000 pounds of asbestos used in products throughout the Nation;

"Whereas asbestos-related diseases kill 10,000 people in the United States each year, and the numbers are increasing;

"Whereas asbestos exposure is responsible for 1 in every 125 deaths of men over the age of 50;

"Whereas safety and prevention will reduce asbestos exposure and asbestos-related diseases;

"Whereas asbestos has been the largest single cause of occupational cancer;

"Whereas asbestos is still a hazard for 1,300,000 workers in the United States;

"Whereas asbestos-related deaths have greatly increased in the last 20 years and are expected to continue to increase;

"Whereas 30 percent of all asbestos-related disease victims were exposed to asbestos on naval ships and in shipyards;

"Whereas asbestos was used in the construction of virtually all office buildings, public schools, and homes built before 1975; and

" Whereas the establishment of a "National Asbestos Awareness Day" would raise public awareness about the prevalence of asbestos-related diseases and the dangers of asbestos exposure: Now, therefore, be it

"Resolved, That the Senate designates the first day of April 2005 as 'National Asbestos Awareness Day'."

The Johnson Law Firm represents mesothelioma victims and their families nationwide. Mesothelioma is a form of lung cancer caused by exposure to asbestos for which there is no cure. Over 2,000 people die from mesothelioma each year in the United States. More information about mesothelioma and the National Asbestos Awareness Day Award is available at http://www.nationwidejustice.com/mesothelioma_asbestos or toll free at 1-866-374-0338.

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Mesothelioma Cancer

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Mesothelioma - The Largest Man Made Epidemic

By Lorraine Kember

It is documented that Australia had the highest per capita use of asbestos in the world from the 1950’s until the 1970’s. As a tragic consequence, Australia now has the highest per capita incidence of mesothelioma in the world.

With more than 500 Australians contracting mesothelioma per year, it is estimated that up to 18,000 Australians will die from this asbestos related cancer by the year 2020.

Despite the growing awareness of the dangers of asbestos, there are many people who have not heard of Mesothelioma. This asbestos related cancer is defined as: a malignant spreading tumor of the mesothelium of the pleura, pericardium, or peritoneum, arising form the inhalation of asbestos fibers.

One of the most baffling and frightening known facts concerning Mesothelioma is that many years may pass, between inhalation of asbestos dust and its deadly legacy of disease; it is not uncommon for four decades or more to pass before symptoms due to asbestos dust inhalation become apparent.

In November 2004, I was an invited speaker at the Global Asbestos Congress 2004, held in Tokyo Japan. Over 800 participants from 40 countries around the world were in attendance.

To be a part of such a large gathering of fellow humans, united in a quest to rid the poison of asbestos from our environments was an intensely moving experience. Having lost my husband to mesothelioma I know first hand the suffering this cruel disease places on its innocent victims.

There were many speakers and each told a tale, of pain, death and heartache. We listened, we understood and we ached for the past, present and future victims of the killer asbestos and its legacy of mesothelioma and other asbestos related diseases.

We listened and we were shocked and angered to learn that despite the growing awareness of the dangers of asbestos and the increasing incidence of asbestos related disease, there remains some countries who are mining asbestos with little or no regard for their workers or people who will come into contact with asbestos products.

Asbestos disease Association member’s world wide are working tirelessly and fighting almost insurmountable odds to ban asbestos from all countries of the world. It is a sobering and frightening fact, that even if we were successful today in this quest, the legacy of asbestos related diseases will continue for five decades.

Add your voice to the many who want this killer product erased from the worlds environments – Add your voice to the call that pleads for adequate compensation for victims and their families. Sign the online petition at Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization:

The Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO) continues to raise public awareness about the dangers of asbestos exposure and the incurable and often deadly asbestos related diseases. ADAO is quickly expanding and uniting veterans, fire-fighters, shipbuilders, teachers and thousands of other innocent people around the world. Asbestos Awareness leads to education, prevention, new treatments and ultimately a cure.

Article written by: Lorraine Kember – Author of “Lean on Me” Cancer through a Carer’s Eyes. Lorraine’s book is written from her experience of caring for her dying husband-an asbestos victim - in the hope of helping others. It includes insight and discussion on: Anticipatory Grief, Understanding and identifying pain, Pain Management and Symptom Control, Chemotherapy, Palliative Care, Quality of Life and Dying at home. It also features excerpts and poems from her personal diary. Highly recommended by the Cancer Council. “Lean on Me” is not available in bookstores - For detailed information, Doctor’s recommendations, Reviews, Book Excerpts and Ordering Facility - visit her website http://www.cancerthroughacarerseyes.jkwh.com

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Asbestos Killed My Husband

Mesothelioma is an uncommon form of cancer, usually associated with previous exposure to asbestos, which affects the pleura, a sac which surrounds the lungs, the peritoneum, the lining of the abdominal cavity, or the pericardium, a sac that surrounds the heart.

In this disease, malignant (cancerous) cells are found in the mesothelium, a protective sac that covers most of the body's internal organs. Most people who develop mesothelioma have worked on jobs where they inhaled asbestos particles, or have been exposed to asbestos dust and fibre in other ways, such as by washing the clothes of a family member who worked with asbestos, or by home renovation using asbestos cement products.

Symptoms of mesothelioma may not appear until 30 to 50 years after exposure to asbestos. Shortness of breath and pain in the chest due to an accumulation of fluid in the pleura are often symptoms of pleural mesothelioma.

Symptoms of peritoneal mesothelioma include weight loss and abdominal pain and swelling due to a buildup of fluid in the abdomen. Other symptoms of peritoneal mesothelioma may include bowel obstruction, blood clotting abnormalities, anemia, and fever.

If the cancer has spread beyond the mesothelium to other parts of the body, symptoms may include pain, trouble swallowing, or swelling of the neck or face.

These symptoms may be caused by mesothelioma or by other, less serious conditions. It is important to see a doctor about any of these symptoms. Only a doctor can make a diagnosis.

Diagnosing mesothelioma is often difficult, because the symptoms are similar to those of a number of other conditions. Diagnosis begins with a review of the patient's medical history, including any history of asbestos exposure. A complete physical examination may be performed, including x-rays of the chest or abdomen and lung function tests.

A CT (or CAT) scan or an MRI may also be useful. A CT scan is a series of detailed pictures of areas inside the body created by a computer linked to an x-ray machine. In an MRI, a powerful magnet linked to a computer is used to make detailed pictures of areas inside the body. These pictures are viewed on a monitor and can also be printed.

A biopsy is needed to confirm a diagnosis of mesothelioma. In a biopsy, a surgeon or a medical oncologist (a doctor who specializes in diagnosing and treating cancer) removes a sample of tissue for examination under a microscope by a pathologist. A biopsy may be done in different ways, depending on where the abnormal area is located.

If the cancer is in the chest, the doctor may perform a thoracoscopy. In this procedure, the doctor makes a small cut through the chest wall and puts a thin, lighted tube called a thoracoscope into the chest between two ribs. Thoracoscopy allows the doctor to look inside the chest and obtain tissue samples.

If the cancer is in the abdomen, the doctor may perform a peritoneoscopy. To obtain tissue for examination, the doctor makes a small opening in the abdomen and inserts a special instrument called a peritoneoscope into the abdominal cavity. If these procedures do not yield enough tissue, more extensive diagnostic surgery may be necessary.

If the diagnosis is mesothelioma, the doctor will want to learn the stage (or extent) of the disease. Staging involves more tests in a careful attempt to find out whether the cancer has spread and, if so, to which parts of the body. Knowing the stage of the disease helps the doctor plan treatment.

Mesothelioma is described as localized if the cancer is found only on the membrane surface where it originated. It is classified as advanced if it has spread beyond the original membrane surface to other parts of the body, such as the lymph nodes, lungs, chest wall, or abdominal organs.

The mesothelium is a membrane that covers and protects most of the internal organs of the body. It is composed of two layers of cells: One layer immediately surrounds the organ; the other forms a sac around it.

The mesothelium produces a lubricating fluid that is released between these layers, allowing moving organs (such as the beating heart and the expanding and contracting lungs) to glide easily against adjacent structures.

The mesothelium has different names, depending on its location in the body. The peritoneum is the mesothelial tissue that covers most of the organs in the abdominal cavity.

The pleura is the membrane that surrounds the lungs and lines the wall of the chest cavity. The pericardium covers and protects the heart. The mesothelial tissue surrounding the male internal reproductive organs is called the tunica vaginalis testis. The tunica serosa uteri covers the internal reproductive organs in women.

Mesothelioma (cancer of the mesothelium) is a disease in which cells of the mesothelium become abnormal and divide without control or order. They can invade and damage nearby tissues and organs. Cancer cells can also metastasize (spread) from their original site to other parts of the body. Most cases of mesothelioma begin in the pleura or peritoneum.

Incidence

Although reported incidence rates have increased in the past 20 years, mesothelioma is still a relatively rare cancer. About 2,000 new cases of mesothelioma are diagnosed in the United States each year. Mesothelioma occurs more often in men than in women and risk increases with age, but this disease can appear in either men or women at any age.

Risk Factors

Working with asbestos is the major risk factor for mesothelioma. A history of asbestos exposure exists in almost all cases. However, mesothelioma has been reported in some individuals without any known exposure to asbestos.

Asbestos is the name of a group of minerals that occur naturally as masses of strong, flexible fibers that can be separated into thin threads and woven. Asbestos has been widely used in many industrial products, including cement, brake linings, roof shingles, flooring products, textiles, and insulation.

If tiny asbestos particles float in the air, especially during the manufacturing process, they may be inhaled or swallowed, and can cause serious health problems. In addition to mesothelioma, exposure to asbestos increases the risk of lung cancer, asbestosis (a noncancerous, chronic lung ailment), and other cancers, such as those of the larynx and kidney.

The combination of smoking and asbestos exposure significantly increases a person's risk of developing cancer of the air passageways in the lung. The Kent brand of cigarettes used asbestos in its filters for the first few years of production in the 1950s and some cases of mesothelioma have resulted. Smoking current cigarettes does not appear to increase the risk of mesothelioma.

Asbestos has been mined and used commercially since the late 1800s. Its use greatly increased during World War II. Since the early 1940s, millions of American workers have been exposed to asbestos dust. Initially, the risks associated with asbestos exposure were not known.

However, an increased risk of developing mesothelioma was later found among shipyard workers, people who work in asbestos mines and mills, producers of asbestos products, workers in the heating and construction industries, and other tradespeople. Today, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) sets limits for acceptable levels of asbestos exposure in the workplace.

By contrast, the British Government's Health and Safety executive (HSE) states formally that any threshold for mesothelioma must be at a very low level and it is widely agreed that if any such threshold does exists at all, then it cannot currently be quantified. For practical purposes, therefore, HSE does not assume that any such threshold exists. People who work with asbestos wear personal protective equipment to lower their risk of exposure.

The risk of asbestos-related disease increases with heavier exposure to asbestos and longer exposure time. However, some individuals with only brief exposures have developed mesothelioma. On the other hand, not all workers who are heavily exposed develop asbestos-related diseases.

Family members and others living with asbestos workers have an increased risk of developing mesothelioma, and possibly other asbestos-related diseases. This risk may be the result of exposure to asbestos dust brought home on the clothing and hair of asbestos workers. To reduce the chance of exposing family members to asbestos fibers, asbestos workers are usually required to shower and change their clothing before leaving the workplace.

Much controversy still continues regarding Asbestosis (and asbestos-related diseases) compensation and liability disputes.

Treatment for mesothelioma depends on the location of the cancer, the stage of the disease, and the patient's age and general health. Standard treatment options include surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy. Sometimes, these treatments are combined.

Surgery is a common treatment for mesothelioma. The doctor may remove part of the lining of the chest or abdomen and some of the tissue around it. For cancer of the pleura (pleural mesothelioma), a lung may be removed in an operation called a pneumonectomy. Sometimes part of the diaphragm, the muscle below the lungs that helps with breathing, is also removed.

Radiation therapy, also called radiotherapy, involves the use of high-energy rays to kill cancer cells and shrink tumors. Radiation therapy affects the cancer cells only in the treated area. The radiation may come from a machine (external radiation) or from putting materials that produce radiation through thin plastic tubes into the area where the cancer cells are found (internal radiation therapy).

Chemotherapy is the use of anticancer drugs to kill cancer cells throughout the body. Most drugs used to treat mesothelioma are given by injection into a vein (intravenous, or IV). Doctors are also studying the effectiveness of putting chemotherapy directly into the chest or abdomen (intracavitary chemotherapy).

To relieve symptoms and control pain, the doctor may use a needle or a thin tube to drain fluid that has built up in the chest or abdomen. The procedure for removing fluid from the chest is called thoracentesis. Removal of fluid from the abdomen is called paracentesis. Drugs may be given through a tube in the chest to prevent more fluid from accumulating. Radiation therapy and surgery may also be helpful in relieving symptoms.

Because mesothelioma is very hard to control, the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) is sponsoring clinical trials (research studies with people) that are designed to find new treatments and better ways to use current treatments.

Before any new treatment can be recommended for general use, doctors conduct clinical trials to find out whether the treatment is safe for patients and effective against the disease. Participation in clinical trials is an important treatment option for many patients with mesothelioma.

In the United States, the average mesothelioma-related settlement was $1 million; for cases that go to trial awards averaged $6 million, according to a study by the RAND Corporation.

Only a small fraction of the thousands of asbestos-related lawsuits in the United States every year are related to mesothelioma. In 2004, a bill in the United States Senate aimed a asbestos litigation reform failed to reach a floor vote.

In January of 2005, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Spector annouced he would again try to pass an asbestos litigation reform bill.

For people at la fitness maintenance is a serious issue. Whether they have to use pilates or abdicate smoking, they take their health seriously. In addition to pilates, they use other equipment as well. Many are regular consumers of vitamin shoppe as well.

Source: Wikipedia

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