Here's me.

I'm happy to join the crew and I hope I can help out on this website!

Bye! ~Karpolo

Visit me at here!

Chloe and I are both very silly, which is plain to see in Spanish, and was even more so the other day. At the moment, we are learning how to describe accidents, breakdowns etc., for a piece of coursework on 'A Day That Went Wrong'. Hmm. Anyway, we were told to do an exercise from the text book that involved describing an road accident. It gave a basic structure and we had to flesh it out with details. Oh dear. When Chloe and I are given any creative freedom, our writing goes really quite silly. Her accident involved her talking to her cheese, and mine looked like this:
"Esta mañana, hubo un accidente muy grande. Estaba nevado y yo estaba cantando a un peatón, cuando un moto atropelló a un queso azul. El pobre queso murío, el perro estaba llorando y las gambas estaban en la calle. La motociclista no fue herida, porque había caido sobre las gambas."
This (hopefully) translates as:
"This morning, there was a very big accident. It was snowing and I was singing to a pedestrian, when a motorbike ran over a blue cheese. The poor cheese died, the dog was crying and the prawns were in the street. The motorcyclist was not hurt because she fell on the prawns."
I was asked where the prawns came from by my teacher, to which I replied "I dunno, they just... appeared there"; the same goes for the crying dog. Let's just hope I never have to give a witness statement to the Spanish police.

In other news, I got into the Shropshire Youth Orchestra. Woo! I received a letter yesterday congratulating me, and telling me to expect yet more forms to fill in. Unfortunately, Lydia, a cellist friend of mine, did not get in, so commiserations to her.
So, this means I can get rid of the bow tie and white shirt! Bring on the black shirt!

Argh, I've had some real GCSE exams this week: biology yeterday, chemistry today and physics to come on Friday. Oh yay. But some of the questions were seriously wierd. In the biology paper, we were told about drug testing on rats (not brilliant). Scientists gave some 'teenage' rats THC (the active chemical in cannabis) and then had some that had had none. The rats then had catheters shoved up their noses, and they could administer themselves THC (or maybe heroin, not too sure) by pressing on a lever. Supposedly, it helped to show a link between cannabis and heroin addiction in humans, because the rats that had already had THC administered themselves more, because their bodies had become used to the chemical, or something like that. I actually laughed at this question. I mean, to start with, I had visions of doped up rats pushing on a lever to get their fix, which retrospectively is quite sad. And also, why? I mean, any statistics will tell you that people who take cannabis are far more likely to go onto harder drugs, like heroin, most probably because it's stronger and they get higher from it becuase their bodies are used to the chemicals in cannabis. Leave the poor rats out of it! Personally, I think that drugs are really quite silly. I mean, wasting your money on something that'll eventually lead on to brain/heart/lung damage seems totally pointless to me. Yes, OK, you feel all laadeeydah and happy, but you can do the same with a little alcohol, that you can easily control the intake of. Not that I'm endorsing alcohol, because that ruins lives and livers too.

Anyway, I must go, seen as I have to write some more for my English media essay on quiz shows: 'The Weakest Link' and 'A Question of Sport'. How lovely.

Deacon: Usher, calm down.  What's wrong with that, he just wants you to know that you're a minister.

Usher; I give tithe, offerings, volunteer and after all that, he wants us to do more?  What the heck is he here for?  He gets paid and takes the weekend off playing golf while we raise funds for programs he brags about in church on Sunday morning.  Deak, I got a real problem with that.

Deacon: Calm your jets boy, you're gonna have a coronary

If convicted, Roozrokh -- a Stanford-trained doctor -- could face up to eight years in prison. He has pleaded not guilty.

"Dr. Roozrokh did not intend to hasten Mr. Navarro's death and, in fact, did not hasten his death," defense attorney Gerald Schwartzbach told CNN before a gag order was imposed in the case.

Navarro's mother, Rosa Navarro, disagrees. Her son, she says, "died without respect and dignity."

"I loved that boy," she told CNN. "He was the world to me and nothing can make me happy, except him."

Some in the transplant profession say Dr. Roozrokh should not have even been in the operating room while the patient was still alive.

"The standard of practice is for the transplant surgeon to be outside the operating room until death has been declared," said Thomas Mone, president of the Association of Organ Procurement Organization. "The unfortunate error in this case was the transplant surgeon being in the room and that's highly, highly unusual."

To be completely honest, I didn't think a whole lot about the medications young Mr. Navarro was given - after all, he could have been in horrendous pain, since he was dying of a debilitating nerve disease and had been taken off life support - and I do believe in making dying patients as comfortable as possible, even if making them comfortable hastens their death somewhat. Sometimes, doctors are accused of killing those patients, when all they were really doing was providing sufficient pain relief. To my mind, it is morally and ethically wrong for a doctor to deny a dying patient sufficient pain relief, since rather than prolonging their life by hours, what it is really doing in many cases is prolonging their suffering by hours.

Then, I read the part about Betadine being injected into his feeding tube. That raised my eyebrows, and I started reading the article again from the beginning.

Do comatose patients feel pain? I was always under the impression that they did not. If that's the case, why was he given Morphine and Ativan at all? It would appear the only reason they were given is that he didn't die as fast as this doctor wanted him to die, after he was taken off life support. After all, each of those drugs suppress respirations. He was given 100 mg of morphine and 40 mg of Ativan, and his breathing tube was removed. His heart continued to beat. So the transplant doctor gave him 100 mg more of morphine, and 40 mg more of Ativan.

That is a deadly dose of morphine. To give you an idea of how deadly, 140 mg of morphine is the dose used to anesthetize a 1200-lb horse. This patient weighed only 80 lbs, and was given a total of 200 mg.

I still don't know why anyone would put Betadine in a living person's feeding tube, though it is used in a deceased's nasogastric tube after death, and before organ removal. However, this young man wasn't dead, so pouring Betadine into his stomach would accomplish nothing but to poison him (and iodine poisoning is not pleasant, to say the least). The picture I'm getting is that they were standing there waiting for him to die, but despite everything they had already done, he wasn't dead. So, this transplant surgeon poisoned him.

I think it's clear at this point that all of the actions taken were intended to kill him. And what on earth was a transplant surgeon doing in the room with a living donor in the first place? Transplant specialists are not allowed to be in the OR with donor patients prior to death, and this is a good example of why.

Needless to say, the young man's mother is horrified. Once he was overdosed and poisoned with iodine, though, of course he would die within hours. And die he did, the next morning, but by then his organs were no longer suitable for transplant.

This transplant doctor needs to be in prison, if for no other reason than to send a warning to other doctors, and restore the public's faith in the transplant program. I'm sure a lot of people who have heard about this case have changed their minds about being organ donors, for fear of being tortured by someone trying to make them die faster so they can get their organs. It's gruesome, and not something which should ever happen, and certainly it should never happen again.

Read the entire article here.

Hughes, from Centerville, Utah, studying social work at Brigham Young University, had an adverse reaction to the vaccine Gardasil when it was administered to her within minutes of her flu shot. According to Hughes, this poisonous, and nearly lethal, combination could have been avoided if there wasn’t so much pressure to promote and distribute the vaccine.

“Gardasil is a good vaccine,” Hughes said. “But because it’s being pushed so much, health care officials may not be up to date. Everyone is looking at this as a miracle drug.”

Gardasil is a vaccine targeted toward women ages nine to 26 designed to help prevent certain types of the human papillomavirus (HPV). HPV is transmitted sexually, and certain strands of the virus have been found to cause 70 percent of cervical cancer cases and 90 percent of genital warts cases.

Many health care professionals are encouraging all girls within this age range to receive the vaccine regardless of their sexual activity. Hughes worries Merck & Co., Inc – the company producing Gardasil – is promoting the vaccine so heavily in Utah because so many girls are already at low risk for contracting HPV since many are not sexually active.

“In 20 years, very few of these girls will have cervical cancer, but it won’t be strictly because of Gardasil,” Hughes said. “It will be more of a reflection of their lifestyle.”

And according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), lifestyle really is the best way to avoid HPV.

“Abstaining from sexual activity … is the surest way to prevent infection,” according to the CDC Web site. “For those who choose to be sexually active, a monogamous relationship with an uninfected partner is the strategy most likely to prevent future genital HPV infections.”

Recently, the Utah Legislature refused to allocate funds to provide Gardasil for underinsured and uninsured women. Legislators may have been worried since HPV is transmitted sexually, officially approving the vaccination would encourage sexual promiscuity among young women. But while they did not approve funds to distribute the vaccine, they did pass a bill to promote public awareness of cervical cancer.

The bill, passed in April, “directs the [Utah] Department of Health to establish a public awareness campaign to educate parents, healthcare providers and women about the causes and risks of cervical cancer and the prevention of cervical cancer.”

As stated by the bill, the public awareness campaign must include “information about abstinence before and fidelity after marriage being the surest prevention of sexually transmitted diseases including the human papillomavirus.”

Many agree with the Utah Legislature and the CDC that sexual abstinence is the best way to avoid HPV. They may even feel the traditional Christian values of no sex before marriage and complete fidelity after marriage make Gardasil unnecessary. But for some, too much confidence is put in the expectation of children to be sexually abstinent.

“Parents shouldn't be so ignorant to think that just because they're LDS, their children aren't having sex," said Stephanie Murdock, a senior from Charlotte, N.C., majoring in public health education. "Gonorrhea and Chlamydia rates are significantly increasing in Utah. Plus, you never know what's going to happen. A girl may get raped, or she may marry someone who used to be sexually active and had contracted HPV without knowing it. Immunization is almost always the best prevention.”

Brigham Young University does not require its students to receive any vaccinations. However, the BYU Student Health Center does send out a letter to all incoming freshman regarding health insurance and recommended vaccinations.

The letter states, “We mention [HPV and its vaccine], which is only transmitted by sexual contact, because the CDC has recently issued a recommendation for the vaccination of women up to age 26.”

The recommendation for the HPV vaccine is right alongside many other vaccines including those for diphtheria, pertussis and meningococcal infection.

“We have a very good national immunization program with standard recommended vaccines,” said Gene Cole, professor of health science at BYU. “I’m very much in favor of the HPV vaccine for all children, not just females. HPV is one of those viral infections that once you’re infected, you’re infected for life. The complications resulting from HPV can be devastating, and it carries a burden of discomfort and the additional risk of cancer in females. We’re trying to prevent a tragedy.”

Just because HPV is transmitted sexually, prevention of HPV shouldn’t be treated any differently than prevention of tetanus, measles or any other disease with a proven vaccine, according to Cole. Even the vaccine for hepatitis B – a disease that can be contracted through sexual activity – is given to babies at birth.

“We just don’t know how people may or may not be exposed in the future,” Cole said. “There are no moral judgments here.”

As for Hughes, she takes some blame for her poor health these past months, but she also feels her doctor was not educated well enough on Gardasil, specifically the warning to not administer it within six months of any other vaccine. She worries since the vaccine is being promoted so heavily, people will get vaccinated without proper education.

"People still have to be active participants in their own health care," Hughes said. "They need to do their own research. They need to talk about it. It should not be taken for the mere fact it is available."

That is all.

-Scotty