Stem cell risks can be high

A heartbreaking story is coming from Israel today about a boy with a lethal brain disease whose parents -- out of desperation -- sought experimental stem cell therapy and ended up adding to their son's problems.

The boy has ataxia telangiectasia, or A-T, a degenerative brain disease that robs children of movement, while an accompanying faulty immune system leads to frequent infections and cancers. Most die in their teens or early 20s.

At age 9, the boy's parents took him to Moscow for stem cell treatment. Such clinics are located in several East European countries. In this hemisphere, Tijuana, Mexico is a favourite destination. By the time he was 13, tumours had formed on his brain stem and his spinal cord. The spinal cord tumour was eventually removed. Researchers in Israel concluded the stem cells caused the tumours to form.

The case, written up this month in the journal PLoS Medicine, has sparked warnings from stem cell researchers for patients to stay away from such clinics.

“Patients, please beware,” said Dr. John Gearhart, a stem cell scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who wasn’t involved in the Israeli boy’s care but who sees similarly desperate U.S. patients head abroad to clinics that offer unproven stem cell injections.

“Cells are not drugs. They can misbehave in so many different ways, it just is going to take a good deal of time” to prove how best to pursue the potential therapy, Gearhart said.

Last fall, I wrote in the Star about a Canadian couple hoping to go to Tijuana for stem cell treatment after the wife had a brain stem stroke. They knew it was a desperate move, but felt compelled to try it anyway. As the husband said, "If I didn't at least try, I couldn't live with myself."

It is such sentiments, critics say, that the clinics prey upon.

Comments

[medical supply company]

Nice Post. Thanks for sharing and keep posting more new info.

Thanks again.

[deana]

Pointing-the-finger tactic... Why the witch-hunt on foreign clinics?

Everybody in the medical industry preys upon people's fear of dying. Desperate people are the target market, hope is the product.

We only have the medical industry we have now because it has arbitrarily evolved that way. It could have gone some other way... If people were a little more encouraged and taught how to look after their own health, we wouldn't have physiology knowledge held ransom by profit-mongers and sold back to us. We also wouldn't have people terrifed to know anything about themselves in case they bruise a doctor's ego and annoy him.

It's like that story of the island full of coconuts. A soft drink company went there, bought up everything, built a factory, employed islanders who then had to play second fiddle and buy the coconuts which they freely picked before.

Things are really bad these days despite the hype. Hospitals have become opportunistic "farms" for the career-minded, and places of risk management above all else. There is the official line where the media tells of great miracles taking place while behind the scenes we're getting a hodge podge medical workforce which is paid to leave their consciences at home--wherever that might be.

We are living a culture of death and disposal, with recycling entering the waste of life in the form of organ donation, and the programmed murder of young people with slightly less than perfect brains. This is the biggie, with of course other policies toward the elderly and iatrogenically damaged babies in play, and not divulged as a routine part of the medical script.

It's time for Canada to start again. The medical and drug industries are out of control, hence ethics websites asking important questions. The public has to be allowed to regroup and adjust to the truth.

It's not what's being done, it's the fact that we don't know about it. Deceiving the public is the priority of the current medical model. This has also evolved, and becomes the proof that if they have to hide it, it's wrong. Case closed.

[Lea chimbalanga]

I am a lady in malawi. last april ihad a stroke and ct scan revealed that SOME veins in the brain are bloked as a result cause shortsupply of oxygen and sometimes have seizures. Iam on ecotrin currently, cabamarzipine, and phnoitein daily.Iknow I have a problem but due to finacial problem i dont know what to do. I need some advice.

[Ajlouny]

Some parents in these positions really feel like they have nothing to lose. It's kind of the same concept of playing the lottery, you can't win if you don't play. They feel, maybe, it just might work.