April Fools Message from Grumpy Cat

Thanks to my dear friend Glenda for this!  Gawd, I love this cat!

New Multiple Myeloma Treatment Guidelines Personalize Therapy for Patients

Researchers at Mayo Clinic Cancer Center have developed new guidelines to treat recently diagnosed multiple myeloma patients who are not participating in clinical trials. The guidelines give physicians practical, easy to follow recommendations for providing initial therapy, stem cell transplant and maintenance therapy. The guidelines are published in the current issue of the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings and represent a consensus opinion of hematologists at Mayo Clinic Cancer Center sites in Minnesota, Florida and Arizona.


"Multiple myeloma is an incurable blood cancer that affects more than 20,000 people in the U.S. each year," says lead author Joseph Mikhael, M.D. a hematologist at Mayo Clinic in Arizona. "Over the past decade we have made great progress in understanding the disease, developing drug therapies and increasing overall survival. However, as a medical community we haven't done as good a job at optimizing therapy based on a patient's individual risk factors."
Dr. Mikhael says the new guidelines will help patients with low-risk disease avoid the harsh side effects of therapy and will reserve more intense therapy for patients with aggressive disease.

Among the guidelines:

*A strong recommendation to enroll patients in clinical trials as the first option for therapy or supportive care.

*Separating patients by risk into three groups to make the most of new drug therapy: high risk, intermediate risk and low risk. Previous guidelines included only two groups: high risk and standard risk.

*Adding factors to assess the risk the multiple myeloma poses to the patient, including use of gene expression profiling to help identify patients with high-risk disease.

*Greater emphasis on delaying stem cell transplants to take advantage of improved chemotherapy, resulting in better responses.

*Maintenance therapy using drugs such as lenalidomide and bortezomib that balance benefit with short- and long-term toxicity.

Link

Reversing roles, farmers sue Monsanto over GMO seeds

GMO crops have another interesting quality — you can “use” a patented gene without even knowing it. When you download and share music and movies on peer-to-peer networks or plagiarize blog posts or books, let’s face it — you know what you’re doing. But if you’re a farmer, GMO seeds can literally blow in to your fields on the breeze or just the pollen from GMO crops can blow in (or buzz in via bees) and contaminate your organic or “conventional” fields. And if that happens, Monsanto or Syngenta or Bayer CropLife maintain the right to sue you as if you had illegally bought their seed and knowingly planted it.

In an appropriately Orwellian twist, the companies even call such accidental contamination by their products “patent infringement.” And, in the face of a government more than willing to allow companies to “defend” their “intellectual property” in this way, organic farmers and others have now stepped up and said, in short, “Hell no!”:

If the suit is successful, not only will it limit Monsanto’s ability to sue farmers, the company will have far greater responsibility for how and where its biotech seeds are planted. The regulatory free ride will be over. While that won’t eliminate GMO crops, it will at least give organic farmers a hope of avoiding contamination.
Much More Here

"Happy Easter" from Monsanto

The Frankenbunny

(This is actually quite cute, but if Monsanto designed it I'm quite sure it would be a highly venomous Easter killing machine that shoots out projectile eggs filled with Roundup and Agent Orange...)

Spring Has Sprung- and a Great Fudge Recipe

Spring has sprung, the grass has riz.  I wonder where the flowers is?

Hi gang.... it's getting lovely around here!  The weather is warming up nicely.

Not much to report.  We had a nice St. Patrick's Day with my annual menu of Soda Bread, Oat Farls, Corned Beef, Cabbage, Carrots and Potatoes.  It was just the two of us this year.

I added something extra this year.  Found this recipe on another blog that I follow:


Irish Cream Fudge
2 12oz bags of white chocolate chips
1 1/4 cup sweetened condensed milk (you won't use the whole can)
1/3 cup Irish Cream (whatever brand you choose)

Prepare an 8x8 or 9x9 baking dish by lining it with parchment paper on the bottom, leaving the paper longer than needed so you can lift the fudge easily out of the pan when it is ready to serve.  Spray with a light coat of nonstick cooking spray as well.  

On low heat, add all ingredients into a medium saucepan.  Stir continuously until all of the white chocolate chips are melted.  Pour into the prepared pan, smooth so it is even.  Refrigerate until set and hard.  Use the long sides of the parchment to lift it out and easily cut into serving pieces.

This was absolutely delicious!  It's going to be an annual thing with us.  I added a top layer of Milk Chocolate with Jameson's Irish Whiskey.  It came out a little too boozy.... will cut back next year.

You can check out her blog here:

Thank you for the wonderful recipe!