The 'golden anniversary' of the contraception pill

The history of contraception is long and full of inventions and prejudices equally. The development of the contraception pill, and subsequent approval to market are no exception. On August 18, 1960 the sale was the first of these preparations, specifically designed to gain the confidence of women and obtain the approval of the Catholic Church.
The first historical references about contraception date back to ancient Egypt, where women used a mixture of dates, acacia and honey to not get pregnant. Since then, and maybe even before, other civilizations have left samples of his' adventures contraceptive. " Greeks, Romans, condoms, spermicides ...
Avoiding pregnancy is an old goal, however, has been hampered by more factors than the purely scientific and inventive. The idea of contraception pill or birth control by artificial methods soon clashed with the religious doctrines.
That was the scenario in the late 50s were found responsible for the search of the pill. In the U.S., a country that gave birth to this drug, in force since 1873 Comstock Laws, which prohibited the sale and use of contraceptives. And, despite the strong movement against him, which gradually led to their repeal, some social sectors, and continue still today-to support the restriction of the use of these products.
To try to overcome the opposition of the Catholic Church approves only natural methods, and to gain the confidence of women, wary at the thought of leaving your period, the inventors of the pill devised a 'week off' . In these days when you do not take contraception pills or a placebo was ingested, there is a slight fall hormone that causes bleeding that mimics menstruation, although it is totally unnecessary.
The contraception pill

This was the format that finally got approval from the American agency Drug Administration (FDA) and was claimed by thousands of women in U.S. pharmacies as of August 18, 1960. First, only married women and then for anyone who did not want to become pregnant, spreading to the West. In Spain came later, in 1978, when it amended the Penal Code to legalize its use.
"From the beginning, the pill had no complications and was highly effective. It is the pioneer of modern contraception," he told DPA the reproductive health expert Population Fund (UNFPA), Nuriye Ortayli.
In this half century, millions of women have taken the contraception pill, although in many countries is the method used, only about 100 million women worldwide currently consume daily, according to UNFPA figures collected by this agency. This represents only 9% of the female population of reproductive age, reaching 1,000 million.
Concern about side effects and lack of access to thousands of women to family planning has reduced the popularity of the pill. Anyway, this drug-the best scientific advances of the twentieth century as' The Economist', has enabled women who so wish to control when to have children and can thus live their sexuality more freely.

Cancer is the most costly disease

Cancer is a disease that costs the most modern societies in economic terms. A report from the American Cancer Society has been released to coincide with a conference on the disease to be held in China reveals a burden will increase further in the future.
In terms of labor productivity, the tumors and cancer have a greater burden of accounting for AIDS, malaria, influenza and other infectious diseases combined. In 2008, the burden of this disease was around 900,000 dollars (700,000 million euros), equivalent to 1.5% of global GDP. And that taking into account only their impact on productivity and years of life lost, not including what they cost treatments (increasingly expensive).
Indeed, as highlighted in this week's newspaper "The Washington Post, leading oncologists call an international movement similar to that already experienced the financing of HIV in the nineties to cope with the weight of tumors in the economy world.

The Cancer Cost

"It is not about taking money from infectious diseases," says Otis Brawley, director of the Society (one of the largest oncology agents nonprofit world), but cancer cost devote the attention it deserves.
According to his data, chronic diseases (cancer, diabetes, heart disease ...) cause 60% of global mortality, but receive only 3% of the global public and private funding.
The problem, recalled the report of the ACS (conducted in collaboration with the foundation's Livestrong Lance Armstrong), is that this disease affects individuals earlier in life than others, such as cardiovascular disease, which is a blow in the prime of its life.

Our brain "is wired like the Internet"

The brain is organized and is wired as a large interconnected system - similar to the internet - not as a hierarchical system where orders are given from the top, as was believed for a long time.
The brain is organized and is wired as a large interconnected system - similar to the internet - not as a hierarchical system where orders are given from the top, as was believed for a long time, says new research.

The finding came after Larry Swanson and Richard Thompson of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, United States, invented a new technique to follow the sign of small regions of the brain associated with stress, depression or appetite.
The results of their research, were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, could lead to a new map of the entire nervous system.
Scientists isolated a small section of the brain of a rat in the core accumbes, a region associated with pleasure and reward.
They injected locators - molecules that do not interfere with the movement of signals throughout the tissue, but serve to illuminate and identify them in different areas to look at them through a microscope - in particular parts of the brain tissue.The novelty was that the researchers injected two markers in each of the points at once: one showing where they were going signals and one who taught where they came from.
With this approach could be seen up to four levels of connection.

If the brain had a hierarchical structure of the brain, such as large companies - as neuroscience has long maintained - the diagram would have shown hotlines between different brain regions in the direction of a processing unit: the boss's office of the company.
Instead, scientists found curves and meanderings between different parts of the brain, and direct links between regions are not known to communicate with each other.

And this model agrees more with the idea that the brain is a large communication network, similar to the Internet.The hypothesis of a highly correlated structure as had been circulating for some time and could be an important tool for analyzing the brain processes information organization.

Our Brain  like the Internet

"We were surprised to see how much of the current experimental neuroscience literature is dominated by the thought that the brain acts as a hierarchical structure, which dates back to the nineteenth century, especially in neurology," Swanson told the teacher the BBC .
"The important thing is that regardless of what we create, the circuit has been shown, the specific set of structural connections, had not been demonstrated before."
The work illuminates a small tip of the iceberg of the huge number of connections present even in the brains of smaller mammals.But by superimposing the map of the different regions may get a big picture of how everything works.
"The method can be repeated in a reasonable manner, so that neuronal connections may continue to arrive and finally there where you can get the entire wiring diagram of the brain," said Swanson.
The diagram could be endlessly complex and the degree to which could shed light on slippery issues as consciousness or cognition is still debated.