A new treatment for hairy cell leukemia has achieved impressive success, reports Dr. Martin Tallman, a cancer researcher at Northwestern University Medical School.
Eighty percent of patients treated with 2-chlorodeoxyadenosine, or 2-CdA, have had complete disease remission, and the other 20 percent had partial remission, Tallman said.
Northwestern Memorial Hospital is one of four centers across the country testing 2-CdA for treating this fairly rare form of cancer that primarily strikes white middle-aged men. The new treatment is not only more effective than previous therapies, but also has minimum toxicity and is well tolerated by most patients, Tallman and colleagues have found.
ARGONNE LEARNS HOW TO RECYCLE `AUTO FLUFF` About 500 pounds of every junked car is made of non-metal materials that people in the business sometimes call ”auto fluff.” This mix of plastics, glass, fibers and foams once was just burned away as processors went after the valuable scrap metal in a junked car. Today, however, such open-air burning isn`t allowed, and car scrappers have a fluff problem.
Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory have set up a system to recycle up to half the fluff for use as materials in carpet padding, plastic lawn furniture, plastic garbage cans and other plastic products. After the various components are separated, Argonne researchers treat them with solvents to reconstitute plastic for reuse. If the lab process can be commercially developed, as many as 5 million tons of fluff a year might be converted to new plastic products, Argonne researchers say.
ASPIRIN MAY INFLUENCE SOME INFERTILITY Aspirin causes sperm to loose their mobility, possibly leading to some degree of infertility in males, according to a preliminary report in the journal Therapeutic Drug Monitoring.
Tests with four healthy volunteers showed that their sperm mobility decreased by about 50 percent up to 48 hours after taking 650 milligrams of aspirin, said Offie Porat-Soldin of the Columbia Hospital for Women Medical Center, Washington, D.C. Further studies are needed to verify these findings, she said.
BLOOD DONORS TELL COMPUTERS DEEP SECRETS Several studies suggest that people prefer to tell their embarassing secrets to machines rather than fellow humans, and a new study involving blood donation supports this notion.
Reporting in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Steven Locke and colleagues at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, compared results from 272 blood donors who gave their medical histories to a person and then to a computer terminal. Locke found that 12 people confided risky behaviors to the machine that they neglected to tell the human. These behaviors, associated with risk for acquired immune deficiency syndrome, included having had sex with AIDS patients and with intravenous drug users. The researchers concluded that people have greater trust in a computer keeping their confidences than they do in a person.
