BigShinyThing

The World Health Organisation estimates that some 3m young girls are subjected to female circumcision each year and that, in total, between 100m and 140m women have undergone it. Surgery to reopen the vagina and mitigate the medical complications of genital cutting have long been available. But in Burkina Faso, where as many as 75% of women have thought to have their clitorises cut, a relatively new procedure is being offered.

Clitoral reconstruction surgery aims to restore sexual sensation to women who have been mutilated. The technique is possible because most of the clitoris resides inside the body. Surgeons can pull out this remaining tissue and stitch it the external skin. Unfortunately the technique used does not restore sexual sensation completely if the pressure-sensitive tip of the clitoris has been removed.

A year after it was first introduced, more than 100 women have elected to undergo the procedure, according to Michel Akotionga of the Yalgado Ouedraogo University Hospital in Ouagdougou.

However, unlike surgery to reopen the vagina, which is free in Burkina Faso, clitoris reconstruction costs about $150 in a public hospital and up to $400 in a private clinic.

Pierre Foldes, who started pioneering the reconstruction method some 25 years ago (it’s apparently taken ’till now to popularise it …) has now trained 15 surgeons to use the technique in France.

As The Economist rightly points out:

While a partial cure is better than nothing, prevention would be best of all.

Brilliant. WhoIsSick.Org mashes up Google Maps with user-contributed data about who is unwell, where they are, and what ails them.

And has an inspiring origin story as well:

The genesis of the idea for Who Is Sick was actually from an acute need that our founder had when his wife started experiencing severe stomach pain while they were on vacation. With no way of knowing whether the pain was from appendicitis, food poisoning, or some other stomach illness, our vacationing couple went to the emergency room and waited for 4 hours (BTW - this was from 11pm until 3am) to be seen by a doctor…only to be told that there was a stomach flu going around and that if the pain didn’t go away in 24 hours, to come back. Wow. 4 hours wait for that…in the middle of the night… (of course the doctor did check to see if it was appendicitis so they weren’t all bad…).

Our founder thought, “if only there were a website that had current AND local sickness information, maybe we could have avoided the long wait.” Needless to say, this started the wheels spinning and a couple of months later, Who Is Sick was born.

There’s obviously a way to go before this becomes a seriously useful epidemiological early-warning system — self selecting reporters, and rudimentary demographics aren’t the researcher’s best friends! And we seriously hope that they don’t get sued by Trivial Pursuit for their wedge-based symptom-reporting tools. But, like many of the best mashups, the idea is in retrospect so obvious and, well, right that it seems amazing that no-one has done this before. Expect bigger, shinier versions of this to pop up all over the web until someone gets it just right. Don’t expect that someone to be the NHS, mores the pity!

[Via Search Engine Journal]

New figures, released this week, are expected to show that almost 8,000 people were diagnosed with HIV last year, increasing the number of people living with the virus in the UK to around 70,000. Around a third of people with HIV are unaware that they are carrying the virus and there is fresh concern that people may now be carrying a cocktail of STDs, including HIV, chlamydia, syphilis and gonorrhoea. The annual report of the Health Protection Agency is expected to also highlight the rise in infection amongst heterosexuals. Around two-thirds of heterosexuals with HIV acquired the infection abroad, primarily in Africa.

The Terrence Higgins Trust said too many people in the West were taking risks because they felt HIV was a treatable disease and that this lessened the chances of contracting it. The UK government have just launched a TV campaign warning young people of the risks of unprotected sex. One in five under-24s say they do not take condoms with them on a night out.

Source: The Independent via Towleroad.

The controversial images are popular with some people and not others. We say there’s a (not all that actually) fine line between cute boy skinny and a look that says I’m wasted and/or ill. And yes, that is supposed to look like Pete Doherty.

The scientists, from Darwin’s Crocodylus Park, a tourism and research centre, are now collecting blood from the animals in the hope of developing an antibiotic for humans.

Due to their ultra-violent lifestyle, the crocodile’s immune system is much more powerful than that of humans. Says one of the scientists on the trial, “They tear the limbs off each other and despite the fact they live in this environment with all of these microbes, they heal up very rapidly and normally almost always without infection.”

Another explains, “If you take a test tube of HIV and add crocodile serum it will have a greater effect than human serum. It can kill a much greater number of HIV vital organisms.” The crocodile immune system works differently from the human system by attacking bacteria as soon as an infection occurs in the body. Sounding like something out of a video game, the scientists say, “The crocodile has an immune system which attaches to the bacteria and tears it apart and it explodes. It’s like putting a gun to the head of the bacteria and pulling the trigger.”

The study hopes to extract enough crocodile blood to isolate the powerful antibodies and eventually develop an antibiotic for humans. However, the crocodile’s immune system may be simply too powerful for humans and may need to be synthesised for human consumption.

The scientists admit that, “There is a lot of work to be done. It may take years before we can get to the stage where we have something to market.”

Reuters has the full story.