Latest News Clips 2017.10.30

1.      Japan Election Vindicates Shinzo Abe as His Party Wins Big

The New York Times    OCT. 22, 2017

TOKYO — Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan won a commanding majority for his party in parliamentary elections on Sunday, reported NHK, the public broadcaster, fueling his hopes of revising the nation’s pacifist Constitution.

NHK said that Mr. Abe’s governing Liberal Democratic Party and its allies had overcome challenges from upstart rivals to capture two-thirds of the seats in the lower house of Parliament. Final results will be delayed until later on Monday because a typhoon that battered Japan on Sunday prevented votes from being counted in 12 precincts. But with the majority of votes counted, the Liberal Democrats and their coalition partner had won enough seats to reach the two-thirds mark.

Pre-election opinion polls had shown lukewarm support for the prime minister’s policies and competition from a party founded by Tokyo’s popular governor, Yuriko Koike, as well as another new center-left party.

For Mr. Abe, the results were a vindication of his strategy to call a snap election a year earlier than expected, and they raised the possibility that he would move swiftly to try to change the Constitution to make explicit the legality of the Self-Defense Forces, as Japan’s military is known.

The Constitution, in place since 1947, calls for the renunciation of war, and Mr. Abe said in May that it should be amended to remove any doubt about the military’s legitimacy, a view he reiterated on Sunday evening.

Amending the Constitution requires the support of two-thirds of both houses of Parliament. Mr. Abe’s party and its allies had those numbers before Sunday’s elections, but the prime minister’s political woes earlier this year, along with the public’s doubts about a constitutional change, created the possibility that he would lose the supermajority in the lower house.

Even with the votes he needs in Parliament, Mr. Abe now must persuade the public, as any constitutional change needs to be approved by a majority of voters. Polls have shown that voters are split on whether they would approve such a measure.

“I think you’ll see the conversation revolve all around what is doable,” said Sheila A. Smith, a Japan expert at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. “The bargaining is what is interesting.”

Sunday’s parliamentary victory could also embolden Mr. Abe to run next year for a third term as leader of the Liberal Democrats. If he won he would be Japan’s longest-serving prime minister.

But the results were a setback for Ms. Koike, who started her new party, Kibou no To, or Party of Hope, with great fanfare just hours before Mr. Abe called the early election last month. After she decided not to run for office, voters lost interest.

“I would like to clearly say that this is a total defeat,” Ms. Koike said in comments to NHK.

Analysts said Mr. Abe’s victory did not represent an endorsement of his platform so much as a lack of strong alternatives.

“Abe’s reading was right that this was the right timing because the opposition was not ready,” said Ichiro Fujisaki, a former Japanese ambassador to Washington. “People have no other choices, really.”

Mr. Abe’s public approval ratings dipped below 30 percent over the summer as he was dogged by a series of scandals, and opinion polls taken during the campaign found that more voters disapproved of Mr. Abe’s hawkish strategy toward North Korea than approved of it.

 “There is an Abe conundrum,” said Jeff Kingston, the director of Asian studies at Temple University in Tokyo. Mr. Abe is a candidate “who is basically unpopular with voters, whose policies are not particularly popular, who doesn’t get high marks for leadership, and yet he keeps winning in elections,” Mr. Kingston said.

Ms. Koike, after starting her own party, probably helped Mr. Abe by setting off a further split in the opposition. The leading opposition Democratic Party initially offered to free all of its candidates to run under the banner of Ms. Koike’s party. But after she said she would submit candidates to a litmus test and require them to sign a loyalty pledge, the left wing of the Democrats split off and formed yet another new party, the Constitutional Democratic Party, which gained momentum during the campaign.

2.      Does the Flu Provide Better Immunity Than a Flu Shot?

The New York Times    OCTOBER 28, 2016

Is natural immunity better than a flu vaccine?

Is the immunity acquired by having the flu any more beneficial than immunity acquired via a flu shot?

Getting the flu itself can provide much stronger immunity than any flu shot does. But getting the flu is dangerous, so getting a flu shot is a better option.

When a flu virus enters your body, the immune system fights the infection by producing a robust antibody response that can spring into action if the same strain of the virus returns. That protection can in some cases last a lifetime. “The evidence we have is that people who were infected back in the ‘30s still have immunity to those viruses,” says Dr. Alicia Fry, a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Studies also show that even when the antibody response wanes, immunity from a natural infection tends to last longer than that from a vaccine. A 2011 study in PLoS One, for example, found that just over half of patients infected with the 2009 H1N1 flu still had an antibody response after six months, while only about a third of vaccinated subjects did.

So why isn’t natural immunity better? For one, natural infection will very likely make you sick. “When people become infected with the flu, they feel terrible. They miss school. They miss work. Some people end up in the hospital, and some people die,” says Dr. Fry. The risks are particularly concerning for older people, those with chronic diseases, pregnant women and young children. Even if you are healthy, you could put your family and others in your community at risk for infection.

Further, natural immunity to one flu virus won’t protect you from most other strains of the virus. “If you were infected with a specific flu virus, your natural immunity would be very good at protecting you against that virus or a similar virus in the future,” says Dr. Fry. But flu viruses evolve quickly and can change from year to year, and several strains of virus typically circulate in any given year. The flu vaccine is updated annually to target the strains most likely to circulate. That, along with its fleeting protection, is why it’s recommended you get a flu shot every year.

Finally, there’s no guarantee you’ll get a robust immune response from infection. It depends on several factors, including your previous exposure to flu viruses, your body’s immune response and how much of the virus you’re exposed to, according to Dr. Suryaprakash Sambhara, an immunologist at the C.D.C.

Flu vaccines use either an inactivated virus or a weakened live virus to mimic infection and spur a controlled immune response — but because the virus is weakened or inactivated, you don’t actually get the flu. Flu vaccines can prevent about 50 to 60 percent of flu infections, according to the C.D.C. Until recently both types of vaccines produced similar results. But over the last few years the live attenuated nasal spray (FluMist), which uses a weakened live virus, has been found to be ineffective and is not currently recommended by the C.D.C.

For perspective, a 2008 study published in Nature found that survivors of the 1918 Spanish flu got lifelong immunity to that flu virus and, as it turned out, protection against the pandemic H1N1 flu in 2009. But the 1918 flu killed 50 million people worldwide. Dr. Eric L. Altschuler, a professor at Temple University and an author of that study, says it would be unwise to expose yourself to one flu virus in the hopes of gaining protection against others. “You might have great immunity to flu x-y-z, but if it's p-d-q, you don’t,” he says.

3.      Can virtual reality help the future of surgery?

Al Jazeera    25 Oct 2017

 

An international team of doctors has worked together to carry out surgery on a woman in a London hospital.

But only one of the doctors was in the room at the time, with the others in India, the US and at another London hospital.

Using virtual reality technology, doctors around the world were able to participate in the consultation.

There are hopes the new resource will allow better access to training for doctors and medical students in every corner of the globe.

4.  The Technological Future of Surgery

The future of surgery offers an amazing cooperation between humans and technology, which could elevate the level of precision and efficiency of surgeries so high we have never seen before.

Will we have Matrix-like small surgical robots? Will they pull in and out organs from patients’ bodies?

The scene is not impossible. It looks like we have come a long way from ancient Egypt, where doctors performed invasive surgeries as far back as 3,500 years ago. Only two years ago, Nasa teamed up with American medical company Virtual Incision to develop a robot that can be placed inside a patient’s body and then controlled remotely by a surgeon.

That’s the reason why I strongly believe surgeons have to reconsider their stance towards technology and the future of their profession.

Surgeons have to rethink their profession

Surgeons are at the top of the medical food chain. At least that’s the impression the general audience gets from popular medical drama series and their own experiences. No surprise there. Surgeons bear huge responsibilities: they might cause irreparable damages and medical miracles with one incision on the patient’s body. No wonder that with the rise of digital technologies, the Operating Rooms and surgeons are inundated with new devices aiming at making the least cuts possible.

We need to deal with these new surgical technologies in order to make everyone understood that they extend the capabilities of surgeons instead of replacing them.

Surgeons also tend to alienate themselves from patients. The human touch is not necessarily the quintessence of their work. However, as technological solutions find their way into their practice taking over part of their repetitive tasks, I would advise them to rethink their stance. Treating patients with empathy before and after surgery would ensure their services are irreplaceable also in the age of robotics and artificial intelligence.

As a first step, though, the society of surgeons has to familiarize with the current state of technology affecting the OR and their job. I talked about these future technologies with Dr. Rafael Grossmann, a Venezuelan surgeon who was part of the team performing the first live operation using medical VR and he was also the first doctor ever to use Google Glass live in surgery.