AFRICAN AMERICAN BUSINESSMAN SPENDS 1M TO URGE BLACKS TO VOTE PRO-LIFE. With the balance of power in Congress hanging in the air, a leading African American businessman says black voters in the United States should put their historical pro-life values above political party. That means voting for pro-life candidates rather than supporting Democratic candidates across the board. Herman Cain is best known as the former chairman and CEO of Godfather’s Pizza. He is a political commentator and was a candidate for the U.S. Senate.

Statement by Cain: “More and more African Americans are pro-life...Our message to African Americans is simple -- it's time you vote for candidates who support our values." Cain will underscore that message with a $1 million advertising campaign in key states and congressional districts targeting black radio programs and urban radio stations young African Americans enjoy. Some of the ads focus on abortion. The campaign is a second go-round based on a highly successful Ohio campaign in 2004 that helped President Bush garner 17% of the African American vote in the Buckeye State – double his vote total from the 2000 presidential race.  [LifeNews.com, 14Sept06]

ABORTION ADVOCATES TO CREATE NATIONAL TALK RADIO NETWORK FOR WOMEN. Whether the programming will represent the majority of American women, who oppose abortion, remains to be seen. Abortion activist Gloria Steinem and pro-abortion actress Jane Fonda are two of the founders of Greenstone Media, a radio company that plans to sponsor the new network. Steinem said the radio network is planned as an alternative to the current talk show radio landscape, where hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Michael Reagan, G. Gordon Liddy, James Dobson and others are decidedly pro-life.  Whether the network will represent women is questionable. Polls of women's attitudes on abortion find a majority are pro-life. A June 2003 poll conducted by the pro-abortion Center for the Advancement of Women found 51% of women took a pro-life position opposing most or all abortions while only 30 percent said it should be generally available. [LifeNews.com, 14Sept06, NY]

SURGERY HOPE FOR PARALYSED. A new treatment to repair damaged nerves could help thousands of patients regain movement in their arms and legs. Using a finely woven plastic tube, surgeons will regrow and reconnect severed nerves in road and work accident victims.

The neural prosthesis is attached to the ends of the damaged nerve and acts as a scaffold to aid repair. Victorian doctors say the advanced surgical technique is more effective than nerve grafts and will restore sensation in the limbs of victims.

St Vincent's Hospital neurosurgeon Assoc Prof Michael Murphy said the device was a vast improvement. "You can't stretch severed nerves," he said. "You can do a graft, taking nerves from elsewhere in the body, but the end result is poor. If the tubular scaffold works, it will speed up repair and improve the outcome."

Chemicals in the polymer tube accelerate regrowth of nerve cells, allowing the nerve to grow up to 4mm a day. And there is no need for surgery to remove the biodegradable tube because it breaks down within nine months.

The cutting-edge treatment has been developed by Bionic Technologies Australia -- a $6 million state government-funded project. Involved in the research is the Bionic Ear Institute, St Vincent's Hospital, CSIRO, University of Wollongong and Melbourne-based biomaterials company PolyNovo.

Prof Murphy said that a similar repair device was used on patients in the US, including those with severe cuts and trauma injuries. He said 5 per cent of all hospital patients suffered peripheral nerve damage -- 60 per cent of those patients were car and motorbike accident victims and 15 per cent were injured in falls and industrial mishaps. Most of these injuries occur to the arms, legs, hands and feet. In the next 2 years Prof Murphy and his team will trial the plastic scaffold on animals before progressing to clinical trials. Scientists at Bionic Technologies Australia are also researching treatments including a device to detect and control epileptic seizures. [21Sept06, Kate Jones, medical reporter, http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0%2C21985%2C20448680-662%2C00.htm]

WOMB TRANSPLANTS MAY BE POSSIBLE WITHIN TWO YEARS, GIVING HOPE TO WOMEN UNABLE TO HAVE CHILDREN. London-based researchers, working with medical teams in New York and Budapest, have developed a technique for providing a transplanted womb with a reliable blood supply. Women born without a uterus or who have undergone an emergency hysterectomy would be among those to benefit from the procedure.

The transplant would be temporary, doctors being reluctant to continue giving a patient drugs to help the body to fight rejection of the womb. That could leave the woman two to three years to conceive and carry a baby or babies before the womb was removed.

Maintaining a reliable blood supply has been seen as crucial before the technique — which has worked in animals — can be successfully performed on humans. The first uterus transplant, carried out on a Saudi woman in 2000, failed when a blood vessel supplying the organ developed a clot. Richard Smith, a consultant gynaecologist at Hammersmith Hospital in West London, said: “By getting to a place where we seem to have a reliable method of giving the uterus a blood supply, that takes us a whole heap closer to being able to provide this for humans.” Mr Smith and his team, who have been working on the project for eight years, hope that before long they will be able to transplant a womb from a deceased donor into a woman who is unable to conceive. He said: “I think that two years probably is realistic.”

Researchers in Sweden as well as Saudi Arabia are also working on womb transplants. Mr Smith said that about 30 women had expressed an interest in the procedure. There are thought be more than 15,000 women in Britain without a uterus. At present, one option for a childless woman is surrogacy, but that brings physical and emotional complications.

Now Mr Smith and his team intend to apply for permission from his hospital’s ethics committee and the UK transplant programme to proceed with a human womb transplant. In 2002 doctors in Saudi Arabia, where surrogacy is illegal, disclosed that they had carried out the world’s first uterus transplant two years earlier. The patient was a 26-year-old Saudi woman who had lost her uterus because of excessive bleeding after childbirth. The transplanted womb, from a 46-year-old post-menopausal woman who had to have a hysterectomy, produced two menstrual periods before it failed and had to be removed.

Dr Wafa Fageeh, a professor at Abdulaziz University who carried out the procedure with her team at King Fahd Hospital and Research Centre in Jedda, said at the time it was a “good start”. The operation failed because a blood vessel supplying the uterus developed a clot, which cut off the blood supply, the International Journal of Gynaecology and Obstetrics reported.

Many scientists had considered womb transplants impossible, given the complex blood vessels that must be connected and because of fears that anti-rejection immunosuppressant drugs could harm a foetus. But Mr Smith said: “There is plenty of experience of transplanting kidneys and those women getting pregnant, and there appear to be minimal problems (with reactions to immunosuppressant drugs).”

Swedish scientists have produced healthy offspring from mice with transplanted wombs.

The project leader, Dr Mats Brannstrom, of Sahlgrenska University in Gothenburg, has estimated that, in 3 per cent of infertile women, problems may be traced to the uterus. [Ian Evans, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0%2C%2C2-2342896%2C00.html, The Times, 5Sept06]