A woman who lost her husband to suicide brought on by mental illness has parted with her biggest link to her late husband to try and help others.
Susan Futterman cried as her late husband’s 1967 Lamborghini 400 GT 2+2 sat in their garage for one of the last times. The car, one of only 250 ever made, was a passion of her husband’s until he was stricken with mental illness at age 58. Frederic Paroutaud lost his battle with mental illness just two months later when he committed suicide at the couple’s home.
“We really didn’t know there was an issue until April 2012, until he had what appeared to be a psychotic break,” Futterman said. “Things deteriorated pretty rapidly, and at some point he was diagnosed as bipolar.”
The car was auctioned over the weekend for $522,500.
Futterman gave every dollar from the sale to La Cheim Behavioral Health Services, a non-profit group seeking to help boost mental health care in Alameda and Contra Costa counties in California.
“I think the staff is a very dedicated group of people really trying to serve an underserved community, and they’ve been operating on a shoestring,” Futterman said. “I’d like to contribute to something where I can see a difference being made.”
“I think it’s tremendously generous and redemptive. She’s turning a tragedy into something that provides healing for people,” Frances Raeside, La Cheim’s program director, told the Contra Costa Times. “She’s creating a legacy for a really creative and beautiful person. … It’s a great act of courage on Susan’s part, letting go of the car that’s sitting in her garage and was a constant reminder of her husband.”
The chair of the council for Justice & Peace of the Irish Catholic Bishop’s conference is speaking out about Christian persecution around the world, saying that 11 Christians are killed every hour for their faith in Christ.
Bishop John McAreavey cited a Pew Research survey showing Christianity is the most prosecuted religion around the world with persecution against them reported in 110 countries.
“Many of these countries have significant trade links with Ireland. Persecution is increasing in China. In North Korea a quarter of the country’s Christians live in forced labour camps. Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and the Maldives all feature in the 10 worst places to be Christian,” McAreavey said. “According to the International Society for Human Rights, a non-religious organization, 80 percent of all acts of religious discrimination in the world today are directed against Christians.”
McAreavey said that the persecution of Christians in the Middle East is “a threat to our common humanity” and that the stability of the entire planet is at risk because of the violence in the region. He also condemned Western leaders who are not taking steps to help persecuted Christians.
“Perhaps because of a fear of being seen as less than aggressively secular in their own country,” he said, many governments of majority Christian countries in the West seem reluctant to give direct aid to churches and religious minorities.”
McAreavey defined the loss of religious freedom and persecution as something that “can run from subtle cultural exclusion of the religious voice from the public square and refusal to accommodate reasonable differences of conscience to active discrimination, forced displacement, exploitation and loss of life.”
Scientists at Imperial College London have found what they call a “game-changer” for cancer treatment: a protein that will “turbo-charge” the immune system to fighting cancers and viruses.
“This is exciting because we have found a completely different way to use the immune system to fight cancer,” said Professor Philip Ashton-Rickardt, from the Section of Immunobiology in the Department of Medicine at Imperial, who led the study.
“It could be a game-changer for treating a number of different cancers and viruses. This is a completely unknown protein. Nobody had ever seen it before or was even aware that it existed. It looks and acts like no other protein.”
When the body detects cancer, it will immediately flood the immune system with T-cells which fight the cancer. However, the body quickly reduces that output after the initial wave. The new protein creates T-cells in large enough numbers that cancer cannot fight them off.
The protein also creates “memory cells” in the immune system to recognize previously fought cancers and viruses to lessen the chances of their return.
“The discovery of a protein that could boost the immune response to not only cancer, but also to viruses, is a fascinating one,” Dr. Mike Turner of the Wellcome Trust, told the Daily Telegraph. “Further investigation in animal models is needed before human trials can commence, but there is potential for a new type of treatment that capitalizes on the immune system’s innate ability to detect and kill abnormal cells.”
The study has been published in the journal Science.
A new study shows that Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world and will surpass Christianity by the middle of the century.
The study from the Pew Research Center says that the only religion that won’t see increases in numbers by 2050 is Buddhism. Islam will be the only religion that increases faster than the world’s population on the whole.
Christianity and Islam will obtain equal status by 2050 according to the study.
The study showed bad news for Christianity in North America. The number of Christians in the United States will decline from 78 percent of the population to around 66 percent by 2050.
Muslims, “other religions” and those who are not affiliated with any religion will see the largest increases. The study predicts there will be more Muslims than Jews in the U.S. by 2050.
The study attributes the increase to Muslim women having the highest fertility rate with 3.1 children per woman. Christians are second with 2.7 per woman. The highest percentage of youth are Muslim at 34 percent compared to 27 percent for Christians.
A medieval remedy for eye infections has accidentally been discovered as a killer of the drug-resistant superbug MRSA.
Dr. Christina Lee of Nottingham University, England, recreated the 10th century potion to see if it really worked as an anti-bacterial remedy for stys and other eye infections.
The salve comes from two species of Allium (garlic, onions or leeks), wine and oxgall (the bile from a cow’s stomach.) The substances are place din a brass vessel to brew, strained for purity and then left for nine days before used on the subjects.
The researchers were shocked to see the “medication” cured stys.
The researchers then decided to see if other diseases could be impacted by the salve and tested it on mice that had MRSA in wounds. The study showed 999 of 1000 MRSA cells were killed by the remedy.
Dr. Kendra Rumbaugh of Texas Tech University said the salve worked “as good, if not better than” drugs that are currently on the market.
The researchers are now seeking approvals to test the concoction on humans.
A dangerous and deadly bacteria has been released from a high-security laboratory in Louisiana.
The release of Burkholderia pseudomallei from the Tulane National Primate Research Center has been the subject of investigations by multiple federal and state organizations but none has been able to explain the cause of the release or even how much bacteria has contaminated the land in the area.
The lab, 35 miles north of New Orleans, is just the latest safety breach at some of the biggest laboratories in the nation.
“The fact that they can’t identify how this release occurred is very concerning,” Richard Ebright, a biosafety expert from Rutgers University, told USA Today.
The scientists at the lab say that four monkeys that were never used in the experiments have been confirmed to have exposure to the virus. A federal investigator became ill after visiting the facility and tested positive for the virus. The scientist will make a full recovery.
“We’re taking this extraordinarily seriously. It’s very disturbing to us,” said Andrew Lackner, director of the Tulane primate center. “Right from the beginning we’ve spent an enormous amount of time trying to figure out how this could have happened.”
Lackner says there is no public health threat.
British scientists say they have found the key to stopping Alzheimer’s disease in the early stages.
The study at Cambridge University could lead to a “statin-like” drug that could be prescribed to stop dementia.
The scientists found a naturally occurring molecule that slows down the formation of plaque in the brain. The plaques are closely connected to memory loss and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s.
“This is the starting point for finding a drug that stops Alzheimer’s disease in its tracks. It might be used when the first symptoms appear. But another potential approach is that people would take it as a preventative drug,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Samuel Cohen.
The molecules that slow the plaque are Brichos, a family of proteins that naturally exist in human lungs. Testing in mice showed the molecules stick to fibrils and stop them from forming more plaques.
“There may well be lots of other molecules like this – we just have not been looking until now because it was not clear what to look for,” Dr. Cohen said.
“People could take them in their 60s to stop these proteins grouping together, well before the symptoms appear, which would reduce the risk of developing the devastating effects of this disease.”
A Gallup survey finds that many Americans are not happy with the current laws regarding abortion in the nation and those who are dissatisfied want stricter laws by a 2-1 margin.
The poll showed that only 34 percent of Americans are satisfied with current abortion law. That’s the lowest since Gallup began polling on the question.
Almost half, 48 percent, are dissatisfied with current policies. Twenty-four percent want stricter laws while the remaining 24 percent was split evenly between keeping the laws the same despite their dissatisfaction and making abortion easier to obtain.
Those polled who identified as Republicans showed the greatest level of increasing dissatisfaction with abortion laws. Satisfaction with the laws has fallen from 42 percent to 26 percent in the last three years.
Democrats and independent voters have stayed roughly the same when it came to their satisfaction levels. However, among independents, the dissatisfied would like to see stricter laws by a margin of 25 to 9 percent.
The polling had a margin of error of four percentage points.
A Christian persecution watchdog group announced that the level of Christian persecution last year was the highest worldwide since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Open Doors USA said that 2014 was far more violent than 2013 and that it was the worst year of persecution since the group started tracking violence against Christians 24 years ago.
“Perhaps most chilling is the fact that all the factors, all of the issues that made this a violent year for Christian persecution are still in place,” said David Curry, president and CEO of Open Doors, at the press conference.
“During the past reporting period we can confirm that 4,344 people were executed or murdered for their faith in Jesus Christ. Over twice that of the previous reporting period.”
The comments from Curry came as Open Doors USA released their annual list of the countries where Christian persecution is the highest.
North Korea maintains the number one spot for the thirteenth year in a row.
Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran, Pakistan, Eritrea, and Nigeria round out the top 10.
Africa had the most countries on the list and Islamic terrorism was the driving force in 40 of 50 nations.
Scientists have used the cells from aborted babies to create a mouse that has a brain that is “half human.”
“Researchers took the immature glial cells from donated human fetuses and injected them into mouse pups,” the New Scientist reports. “The cells developed into star-shaped glial cells known as astrocytes. 300,000 human cells were injected into each mouse, but 12 months later that number had increased to 12 million. The mouse’s own glial cells had been driven out by human astrocytes which are up to 20 times larger than those in mice.”
The scientists would not confirm that the tissue used came from aborted children.
The reports say that the “half human” mice showed significantly higher intelligence than their all mouse counterparts.
The scientists said they had considered using monkeys for the tests but stayed with mice “due to ethical concerns.”