| Elekta Announces First Two Clinical Sites Using VMAT Cancer Treatment ...
ATLANTA, Jan. 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Elekta, a world leader in clinical solutions for radiation therapy and radiosurgery, announced today that two sites are utilizing Elekta technology to implement clinical treatments with Volumetric Modulated Arc Therapy (VMAT)*. With the recent CE designation of VMAT in Europe, the way has been cleared for The Royal Marsden Hospital in Sutton, UK and General Hospital Vienna in Austria to treat cancer using Elekta's VMAT solution. VMAT is a significant improvement to existing advanced radiation therapy techniques, often referred to as IMRT (Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy) and offers a faster alternative to helical tomotherapy. With Elekta's VMAT technology, the target continuously is radiated while the source of the beam is rotated around the patient in single or multiple arcs.
Dodgy 'docs' swallow bitter pill
DODGY "doctors" who make false claims about curing cancer or who fleece vulnerable patients with high-priced but worthless treatments will now face tough penalties. The State Government is cracking down on unregistered health practitioners such as massage and reiki therapists, counsellors, naturopaths and herbalists following concerns some were preying on sick people. The move comes after a NSW coroner recommended charges be laid against the parents of nine-month-old Gloria Thomas who died of an infection after being treated with homeopathic remedies. And with 60 per cent of the Australian population now dabbling with alternative medicine, the rate of complaints in NSW is on the rise and the number of protests to the Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC) regarding alternative health providers has risen 17 per cent in four years.
Scientists Discover Virus Linked To Deadly Skin Cancer
A new way of searching for human viruses has helped scientists at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute in the US find a previously unknown one that is linked to a deadly form of skin cancer called Merkel cell carcinoma (MCC).
The discovery is published as a paper in this week's publication ahead of print issue of Science and is the result of work by a husband and wife team that had already discovered another virus linked to another incurable skin cancer, Kaposi's sarcoma.
The University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute (UPCI) researchers and authors of the paper, Drs Huichen Feng, Masahiro Shuda, and husband and wife, Drs Patrick Moore and Yuan Chang, describe their 10 year programme to perfect the sequencing technology for hunting the virus, which they have named the Merkel cell polyomavirus (MCV).
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