World In Brief (10/03/06)

New vaccines would immunize people against bad habits

Ronald Kotulak, Chicago… New vaccines would immunize people against bad habits

Ronald Kotulak, Chicago Tribune

Vaccines, the most potent medical weapon ever devised to vanquish deadly germs, are now being called on to do something totally different and culturally revolutionary: inoculate people against bad habits like overeating, cigarette smoking and drug use.

The evidence is promising enough to persuade the federal government to put millions of dollars toward finding out if two of the vaccines can end nicotine and cocaine addiction.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse, which has spent $15 million on clinical trials for the vaccines and plans to spend more, predicts that one of the nicotine vaccines may be available for marketing in three years.

“What we’re seeing is a renaissance in vaccine technology,” said Dr. Gary Nabel, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ Vaccine Research Center. “It’s only natural that when you have a technology that’s this powerful it can be applied to other medical problems.”

Unlike most older vaccines, which tend to confer permanent immunity, the new breed of vaccines is reversible, providing immunity against nicotine, cocaine or the hunger hormone ghrelin for one to three months before booster shots are needed. So far, none of the lifestyle vaccines have produced side effects other than some flu-like symptoms and soreness at the injection site.

“These vaccines are not going to be a panacea for treating everything,” said Kim Janda of the Scripps Research Institute, a pioneer in developing vaccines for addiction and obesity. “I believe they can be helpful. When people are undergoing abstinence for drugs of abuse and they have weak moments, if you have a vaccine in place it can assist them so they don’t spiral down to ground zero.”

Research brings hope body parts can regrow

Ronald Kotulak, Chicago Tribune

Buoyed by recent genetic breakthroughs, researchers at Northwestern University and across the country say they have hopes of achieving a feat long thought to be impossible: enabling people to replace damaged body parts or even regrow missing limbs.

Like salamanders and other lower species, humans possess genes that direct the body to make new arms and legs after an injury. But in humans the genes lie dormant, inactivated after evolution favored the swift patching of wounds through scarring over the slow regeneration of body parts.

The discoverer of those genetic switches, Northwestern University developmental biologist Hans-Georg Simon, and other researchers now think they can find a way to turn on the dormant genes. A person who lost a leg might be able to generate a new one.

“All of a sudden this becomes not so much science fiction but really a challenging science problem,” said Dr. Stephen Badylak, a research professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who is coordinating one of the research teams. “This particular project to regrow digits and limbs on humans is kind of like saying we’re going to go to the moon.”

The project, the first national scientific effort of its kind, is heavily financed by the U.S. military, which is seeking better therapies for the unprecedented number of military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan who are surviving previously mortal wounds.

For Afghan women, the veil prevails

By Andrew Maykuth, The Philadelphia Inquirer

In a country where most women still don’t show their faces in public, the government offer seemed revolutionary: free market stalls for women to encourage them to start their own businesses.

But there were strings attached. The seven shops proposed were located in a remote section of Bamiyan’s bazaar, far from customers, and far from anyone who might be offended by independent Afghan women.

“The deputy governor told us we should be in the far corner so that nobody bothers us, so they won’t see our faces,” said Fatima Hassanzada, 27, the sole female shop owner in this mountainous provincial capital in central Afghanistan.

So much for social engineering. The six other women interested gave their market stalls to male relatives. Hassanzada’s cosmetics business survived because she traded her shop for a better location in the bazaar. “If I cared about my face bothering people,” she said, “I wouldn’t be in business.”

Such are the small steps forward for women in post-Taliban Afghanistan.

Five years ago, when the repressive Islamist government was ousted, women celebrated the end of restrictions that banished them from jobs, schools or even walking alone on the street without a male family member. But social change has come neither dramatically nor as easily as some expected.

Afghanistan has a new constitution that guarantees equality for women, which is a rare declaration in the Islamic world. And nearly 2 million girls have returned to schools and women have returned to the workplace, including to Parliament, where a quarter of the members are women.

But women say the new freedoms are largely superficial and that profound cultural restrictions remain. Most women still wear burkas in public, and those who don’t must endure stares and hisses on the street.

“We do have rights on paper, but we don’t have them in reality,” said Fatima Kazimyan, Bamiyan’s representative for the Ministry of Women’s Affairs.

What quickly became clear after the Taliban’s ouster five years ago was that Afghanistan was not going to return to the ways of the 1980s, when the Soviet-backed government diminished Islamic influences and women discarded their veils.

Afghanistan and the Islamic world have changed a great deal in the last two decades, and conservative forces reacting against secularism have gained power. Though the Taliban governed Afghanistan for only five years, they expressed a sentiment that resonates deeply in this male-dominated society.

“Our society is very conservative and we have to pay attention to that,” said Habiba Sarabi, the governor of Bamiyan and the only woman to head one of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. It was Sarabi’s idea to give the market stalls to women.

Older women who experienced both Afghanistan’s liberal reforms as well as the Taliban’s response to them are mindful that any liberalization sparks a harsh reaction. Afghan’s king Amanullah Shah tried to modernize the country in the 1920s and was forced to abdicate.

“If you have read the history of Amanullah Shah and also during the communist regime, you can compare how much the extremist people who lived in the rural area put too much pressure on the central government,” said Sarabi, who is 49 years old. “Even if we go a little bit forward, there will be a kind of backlash for women.”

Sarabi, who was the minister of women’s affairs before President Hamid Karzai appointed her governor last year, often found herself alone at formal government celebrations because the other ministers did not bring their wives because of social pressure to conform.

“We have many celebrations, but no minister can bring their wives,” she said. “Why? They are the people who are well educated, and many of them studied in the West. But this social pressure influences their minds, their thoughts.”

Shukria Barakzai, the editor of a women’s newspaper who is now a member of Parliament, said that many of her male colleagues in Parliament are unvarnished sexists, freely admitting that they would support her proposals if she were a man.

“It will take at least 20 years to change,” Barakzai said in an interview at her home in Kabul. “We’ll need a new generation, the ones who are now teenagers, when they become decision makers.”