TOP 100 SCIENCE SITES
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| Whale carcass prompts shark warning The Department of Fisheries in WA is concerned about a whale carcass which is lodged into reef 50 metres offshore at one of Perth's northern beaches. abc.net.au |
Laurie Engel Fund: After the sky fell in Four years ago Matthew Engel wrote in the Guardian about his son, Laurie, who had died of cancer. As a new children's ward opens – paid for by donators touched by his story – he tells of his mixed emotionsI have had many pieces of good fortune in my life, and one of them is that I write by a window that has one of the best views in England: the eastern ridge of the Black Mountains, which divides Herefordshire from Wales.My mountain never looks the same twice, changing with the seasons, the weather and the light. As I write now, a layer of mist is moving south, sleet is falling, and the outline is vague, ethereal. Often I think of the ridge, with only slight geographical inaccuracy, as Housman's Blue Remembered Hills.That is the land of lost content /I see it shining plain /The happy highways where I went /And cannot come again.It is six years now since my son Laurie was his happy, original self, well enough to force me regularly out of window-gazing and into a game of football, and nearly four and a quarter years since the cancer that lurked in his body finally killed him, aged 13.And it is four years ago to the week since Guardian Weekend published my article about Laurie (The day the sky fell in, 3 December 2005), which transformed our early, unfocused fundraising efforts on behalf of Teenage Cancer Trust and made possible next week's astonishing event: the handing over of a new £2.5m unit for teenage patients in Birmingham.There are, to put it mildly, mixed emotions for us: my wife Hilary, my daughter Vika and myself. I think a great deal about the land of lost content, but it doesn't shine plain any more. The memories of Laurie also grow vague and ethereal. It gets harder to hear his voice and recall his gestures. That's true of everyone we lose: my grandparents have all been gone for 40 years and more now, and of them only the blurriest mental snapshots remain. Vika was seven when Laurie died and for her, he is already becoming blurry. We have to imagine what Laurie would now be doing: A-levels, we presume; his Ucas form; planning a gap year that I hope would have been more original than going to Machu Picchu to send emails.We are lucky too that I had videoed Laurie's life fairly obsessively: 50 hours of tape that a friend boiled down to a snappy half-hour for his memorial service. But the passage of time does what it does.What it hasn't done is erode the pain. Every parent knows by instinct that the loss of a child is not to be compared with other forms of grief. But I had no idea how deep the wounds would be or how permanent the scars. I have been able to make use of the cathartic process of writing: I have not felt so creatively energetic in years. I am also good at superficial blitheness. Hilary – an editor not a writer, a mother not a father – has found it far harder.We cannot know the effect on Vika. She's now 11: athletic, bubbly, imaginative rather than cerebral. She has just started at the local high school, Fairfield, that Laurie adored and which has its own memorial to him, Laurie's Well. And she loves it too. But we know we are not the parents we might have been.Still, we have at least hung in there together. After the Guardian piece appeared and the fund went whoosh, I began to receive emails – dozens of them – from people who had lost children but had not had the opportunity to tell their story in a national newspaper. These would often finish with a similar line: "Sadly, the pressure was too great for our relationship, and we have now separated." Mourning is an individual process, not a communal one, because no two people grieve in synch. Yet parents have to try.And a surprising number of friends and acquaintances have told us something else: that they had lost siblings in their childhood – cot deaths, cancer, accidents, whatever. The punchline of these stories tends to be different: that their parents – in those tight-lipped days – stayed together all right but never referred to the dead child again. And that they themselves were only now, as adults, coming to terms with the dim recollections of their loss.The Engels have not gone in for stony-faced silence. We talk about Laurie constantly, repeat his jokes, and have private rituals, like toasting him whenever we have a special dinner. And the public success of the Laurie Engel Fund has forced us into the open.Heaven knows what we thought we were doing when we started. Birmingham Children's hospital, where Laurie was treated, had a Teenage Cancer Trust (TCT) unit on its wish list. But it was a long wish list, and there was no obvious means of delivering it, given the constraints of budgeting, and of building on its hemmed-in city centre site.We had stumbled on TCT as a charity in the weeks before Laurie died. And we quickly realised its goals represented the aggregate of his needs during his illness: it builds hospital wards that don't feel like institutions; places that can offer privacy and self-respect during the bad times, but also the opportunity for fun in the good times; places that friends will visit out of something more than duty; places which recognise that older kids, suffering long-term illness while on the cusp of maturity, have needs that cannot be met in either traditional children's wards or adult ones.And we also stumbled on a novel relationship. The Laurie Engel Fund would exist solely to raise money for TCT, thus obviating the need to register as a charity with all the attendant bureaucracy. TCT in return would spend the money we raised only for the specific project we wanted – ie a new unit in Birmingham. But no one had even said there would be such a unit.Luckily again, Paul O'Connor, then the chief executive of the hospital, was among those who read the Guardian article. He knew already how his staff felt about the cramped and ill-designed conditions in the existing ward for cancer patients. Now he grasped that something had to be done sooner rather than later, or sometime never.So we all began to look for a solution. The first meeting concocted a possible scheme, using a couple of rooms belonging to the haematology unit, which would be kicked out into a prefab. The second meeting had an extra participant, someone I could not immediately identify, who sat there looking daggers. That was the haematology consultant. And he wasn't going anywhere without a fight.Gradually, a more ambitious plan took wing. There might not be an inch of spare ground, but there was just enough spare sky. So it was decided to build up – putting a steel-clad extension over the ambulance bay, nuzzling up to the operating theatres, and then linking through to the old ward.All this while, the scheme was gaining impetus by sheer force of money. When Laurie died, we talked of raising £10,000; in the Guardian I mentioned £100,000. We soon left that behind, as readers' donations poured in. More followed, as other papers picked up the story. Then came the local efforts, from our friends in Herefordshire. Then these rippled outwards.By the summer of 2006, an extraordinary range of people were running, cycling, rowing, canoeing, climbing, walking, skydiving, swimming, eating, singing, dancing, playing cricket, playing football … all to raise money for our fund. Big cheques came in from Singapore and Australia. There was a quiz night on Mallorca. Laurie's old schoolfriends in Maryland, where we lived for two years, sold homemade lemonade for us. One friend, with a phobia about motorways, raised £400 by forcing herself to drive four miles down the M54.Our three biggest single sources of funds all came about through extraordinary flukes. An old schoolmate of mine, Simon Silver, was someone I had seen, ooh, at least twice in the previous 35 years. He is no Guardian reader but glimpsed a copy of the Weekend cover lying round a hotel lounge while on holiday. He says the expression on Laurie's face was exactly the same as mine aged 13, and he divined at once whose son this boy in the beanie must be – and also what the story might tell him.Simon is a director of property company Derwent London, which already had connections with TCT. The upshot was a lunch for the fund at the Savoy in November 2006, when Derwent's business contacts (luckily again) were still feeling flush. It was the most elegant shakedown imaginable. I told the gathering that Simon owed me £128,000 from a dice game during a Spanish lesson when we were 15, something I remember vividly although he – curiously – does not. I urged them to give enough money to redeem his reputation. They more than doubled it.Then a complete stranger, a businessman called Nigel Williams, stopped for petrol at our local garage, which was selling copies of the book about Laurie that Hilary had put together. He spotted one by the till, bought it and, a father of teenage boys himself, was captivated. His company, Parkhill Estates, had a woodland site near Peterborough which could not be developed, and donated it. This sold for £100,000.Finally, there was Otto Putland, a year younger than Laurie and living in another Herefordshire village. Otto read the story in the Hereford Times and was struck by the similarities between the two of them: both sport-mad boys, homebaked themselves, whose parents had then adopted younger girls from overseas at the same time. His sister, Nicky, comes from the Philippines; Vika was born in Siberia.Otto's sporting achievements outstripped Laurie's: he is a champion junior swimmer with Olympic aspirations. I think he's wasted on swimming. He marked his arm with a 6 – to represent the number of UK teenagers diagnosed with cancer each day – and, still a 13-year-old himself, went round the swim clubs, challenging and cajoling them. He raised £26,000.Through 2006 and 2007, the fund grew exponentially and the plans moved ahead rapidly. In 2008, the drumbeats from Birmingham grew fainter; there were mutterings about "difficulties"; the price tag rose as the technical complexities of the aerial site became clearer. Finally, there was a breakthrough, and word came that the planning application was in and then that it had gone through.Last Christmas, Vika sprained her ankle ice-skating: it's the sort of thing she does. In January, we had to take her to the orthopaedic consultant at the children's hospital. The place was now a building site. The other parents were probably rather irritated.Now it is almost ready, and I have seen the nurses peering through the glass from the old ward into the new one, as though gazing on the promised land. At the moment four very sick kids, plus four parents sleeping on camp beds, have to be shoehorned into a room measuring only 6 metres by 5½. There is double the bed-space in the TCT unit plus the TV-space, pool-table-space, computer-space, gaming-space and schmoozing-space.We have collected about £890,000. The Maria Watt foundation, run by another bereaved family, has produced £100,000. The TCT's regional fundraiser has delivered something like £500,000. But even my maths cannot get that to add up to £2.5m. So we will keep going.At £890,000 there are two very tantalising figures on the horizon. And everything we raise will leave TCT's central funds that much better placed for their next projects: at the Royal Marsden near London, in Southampton, Manchester and Scotland. In any case, we want to hold back some spare cash to ensure that the Birmingham unit does not look sumptuous on day one and NHS-tatty by year three. And I suppose we still need the therapy of doing something, of ensuring that Laurie's life – brimming with unfulfilled promise – makes some kind of sense.The mountain is covered in snow now, the wind is bitter, and I find myself thinking of Housman again.Into my heart an air that kills /From yon far country blows:I have nothing that could be described as faith, but I do keep wondering whether there is a far country where Laurie and I might be able to carry on where we left off. Dying does not seem such a big deal if your child has achieved it.Our lives here are still punctuated by the dates of Laurie's crisis: 20 April, when he was diagnosed; 13 June, when we were told – 14 months later – that the cancer had returned and must be presumed incurable; 22 September, when he died. And coming up, sodding 25 December which, to bereft parents, looms each autumn like a mountain that somehow has to be endured and conquered.But we now have another date too: 4 January. That's when the first patients are tentatively scheduled to move in. And that's amazing.TCT Laurie Engel Fund, Fair Oak, Bacton, Hereford HR2 0AT. laurieengelfund.org. Matthew Engel is a columnist on the Financial Times.CancerMatthew Engelguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Sea urchins 'bulldozing' Tasmanian reef A combination of overfishing and climate change are triggering catastrophic overgrazing of reefs by sea urchins in eastern Tasmania, say researchers. abc.net.au |
Scientists develop cheap, rapid test to tackle bug deadlier than MRSA • Rival £25 kit copies DNA, but reliability is in doubt• Hospitals spending 'small fortune' testing patientsScientists believe they may have made a big advance in tackling a virulent bug that kills more people than the feared MRSA bug.Clostridium difficile is the underlying cause of more than 40% of the near 6,000 deaths a year in England and Wales with which the infection is associated.But now researchers in London say they have developed a fast, cheap and trustworthy test for the bacterium. The ingredients cost about 50p per test and can deliver results in about 45 minutes.The team developing the test are, however, being forced to seek commercial partners after failing to persuade the NHS to fund further work.The furore surrounding deaths at Stoke Mandeville hospital in Buckinghamshire, linked to C difficile in 2005, forced massive tightening up on hygiene, the isolation of infectious patients, their treatment by specific antibiotics, and monitoring on wards, but there is still a problem over the expense, speed and reliability of tests to establish beyond doubt that patients have the infection.The most reliable tests at present can take up to four days to identify the precise toxin produced by C difficile – although some more expensive commercial kits already on the market offer a verdict within a few hours. Hospitals are spending a small fortune on testing thousands of patients for sums between £8 and £25 a time.A team at Barts and London School of Medicine and Dentistry has won funding mainly from the charity Bowel and Cancer Research to do the work so far on the test and hopes to overturn official resistance to screening patients without symptoms.Big London hospitals already test about 9,000 patients a year, but the researchers think many patients have the bug before entering hospital and hope to use the test on all patients admitted to the colorectal unit at Royal London Hospital, London .Stephen Bustin, professor of molecular science at the Barts and London School of Medicine and Dentistry, said: "Because the test is so quick, it won't delay admissions. It will also give us a clearer idea of how much C difficile is out there ."It is one of the great killers in our hospitals. It's nonsense that the death rate should continue at the current levels when there is no need."He says the bug is more difficult than MRSA to eradicate by better hospital hygiene and that successful treatment requires rapid medical intervention."One of the biggest difficulties is reliable detection of the C difficile bacterium," Bustin said. "There is an urgent need for a diagnostic test which combines speed with sensitivity and low costs."The most reliable tests at present involve growing the bacterium from a stool sample which can take two days. Confirmation of toxin takes another 48 hours.The more easy-to-use rapid tests, costing up to £25 a time, involve a technique that makes copies of tiny pieces of DNA, but a scientific review in the Lancet last year cast doubt on their reliability.The new tests developed by Bustin's team use a similar method but have drastically reduced the costs. "To date we have developed three individual assays that can detect single copies of C difficile," said Bustin. These assays take less than 45 minutes, and reagent cost is around 50p per assay. The assays detect both the bacterium and the DNA that is responsible for its virulence."He added: "We have applied the assays to patient stool samples and have been able to detect the presence of C difficile in a number of patients where conventional assays reported a negative result."He recognised national infection rates were now falling, but suggested more sensitive tests may send numbers up again.The Health Protection Agency said: "Studies have suggested different tests have better efficacy rates depending on the strain. The most effective way to reduce cases of this infection is to practice good infection control, use antibiotics judiciously, and to test as soon as the patient shows symptoms."MRSA and superbugsInfectious diseasesHealthJames Meikleguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Engineers Plot the Future of a Hobbled Mars Rover Engineers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory met to discuss rescue possibilities for the Spirit, which is stuck in a Martian sand pit. feeds.nytimes.com |