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Unfortunately still have to use IE at work, but working on that. :(.

OK, a quick look here for some hard numbers: Count and density of human retinal photoreceptors.

Shows only about 60 Million net receptors (rods+cones) in the human eye. Only 1/20 is for color, and almost none are for blue. So unless it's gonna be printed on the side of a building (which you view from far away) you only need a few megapixels for your little 4x5" prints.

Of course, that wont stop anyone...

working at your desk, trying to ignore the tingling or numbness you've had for months in your hand and wrist. Suddenly, a sharp, piercing pain shoots through the wrist and up your arm.

Actually, urine isn't acidic, but basic.

No, it's typically acidic.

>any promising fetal stem cell treatments. But there are not.

The popular media isn't exactly a scientific journal. Don't make absolute statements, unless you're willing to back them up.

The following are written above the soundbite 5th grade level:

search1

Or just type "embryonic stem cells" here and be ready for some surprises.

Material Safety Data Sheet

Opening the source of government written software is the right thing to do: taxpayer dollars spent, so taxpayers should get the software. On my short list, government software that is well-known/useful to me:

1. PubMed's e-utils
2. NIST software, which includes OCR, and handprint recognition software, and fingerprint imaging software.

• Here's a list of technical I put together on Bhopal at my site, listed in my sig. These are very deadly chemicals with effects that linger on and on and on and on...you know Union Carbide became the EverReady before Dow bought them...

  New Exportation of Risk: The Case of Bhopal

• New Bhopal Papers V. Ramana Dhara at Emory University is a nice cource of technical papers including health effects, epidemiology, toxicology and respiratory effects.

• New Chemical Accidents, CHEMICAL SAFETY & SECURITY Environmental Health Watch. A comprehensive page of articles on chemical safety, security and implications since the Bhopal tragedy.

• Toxicological Profiles for Key Pollutants in Bhopal

• The Disaster and Its aftermath: The Hiroshima of the Chemical Industry "Indeed those who died may have been the lucky ones......" Ward Morehouse.

• A child is born... Site not recommended for children.

• Growth Patterns Journal of the American Medical Association (pdf format)

• The $195 Million Discrepancy - Where's The Money Gone?

• Bhopal gas tragedy lives on, 20 years later

• Personal Exposure and Long-Term Health Effects in Survivors of the Union Carbide Disaster at Bhopal

• Lessons Learned? Chemical Plant Safety Since Bhopal

• Chemical Process Safety at a Crossroads

• Here's a list of technical I put together on Bhopal at my site, listed in my sig. These are very deadly chemicals with effects that linger on and on and on and on...you know Union Carbide became the EverReady before Dow bought them...

  New Exportation of Risk: The Case of Bhopal

• New Bhopal Papers V. Ramana Dhara at Emory University is a nice cource of technical papers including health effects, epidemiology, toxicology and respiratory effects.

• New Chemical Accidents, CHEMICAL SAFETY & SECURITY Environmental Health Watch. A comprehensive page of articles on chemical safety, security and implications since the Bhopal tragedy.

• Toxicological Profiles for Key Pollutants in Bhopal

• The Disaster and Its aftermath: The Hiroshima of the Chemical Industry "Indeed those who died may have been the lucky ones......" Ward Morehouse.

• A child is born... Site not recommended for children.

• Growth Patterns Journal of the American Medical Association (pdf format)

• The $195 Million Discrepancy - Where's The Money Gone?

• Bhopal gas tragedy lives on, 20 years later

• Personal Exposure and Long-Term Health Effects in Survivors of the Union Carbide Disaster at Bhopal

• Lessons Learned? Chemical Plant Safety Since Bhopal

• Chemical Process Safety at a Crossroads

• Here's a list of technical I put together on Bhopal at my site, listed in my sig. These are very deadly chemicals with effects that linger on and on and on and on...you know Union Carbide became the EverReady before Dow bought them...

  New Exportation of Risk: The Case of Bhopal

• New Bhopal Papers V. Ramana Dhara at Emory University is a nice cource of technical papers including health effects, epidemiology, toxicology and respiratory effects.

• New Chemical Accidents, CHEMICAL SAFETY & SECURITY Environmental Health Watch. A comprehensive page of articles on chemical safety, security and implications since the Bhopal tragedy.

• Toxicological Profiles for Key Pollutants in Bhopal

• The Disaster and Its aftermath: The Hiroshima of the Chemical Industry "Indeed those who died may have been the lucky ones......" Ward Morehouse.

• A child is born... Site not recommended for children.

• Growth Patterns Journal of the American Medical Association (pdf format)

• The $195 Million Discrepancy - Where's The Money Gone?

• Bhopal gas tragedy lives on, 20 years later

• Personal Exposure and Long-Term Health Effects in Survivors of the Union Carbide Disaster at Bhopal

• Lessons Learned? Chemical Plant Safety Since Bhopal

• Chemical Process Safety at a Crossroads

I searched for "embreyonic stem cell" and indeed got hundreds of results. . . about "bone marrow stem cells," "umbilical cord stem cells," etc. These are adult stem cells. Just glancing over the first 20 of the 131000. . . well, hang on *shows more results* First 50 then, I see nothing about embreyonic stem cells aside from #33, which doesn't talk about curing anything using embreyonic stem cells (read it before trying to bolster your argumet with it, I won't hesitate to tear you a new one for continuing to jump in uninformed). #49 may also be indicative, but looks like they derived cells from embreyonic stem cells and then injected those. Interestingly enough, it leads out with a heart disease comment; repairing scar tissue from heart attacks can be done using bone marrow stem cells, though this fact is not entirely relavent in the context of the analysis of #49. I think I'd need a medical degree to understand what is going on in #49 fully, however.

Now can I accuse you of lying and shoveling propaganda?

As a side note, searching for "embreyonic stem cells" (with the pluralization) turns up a result about tumors on the first 50 hits, and also spits out mostly results seeming to have to do with adult stem cells (this time bone marrow and retinal, etc)

I searched for "embreyonic stem cell" and indeed got hundreds of results. . . about "bone marrow stem cells," "umbilical cord stem cells," etc. These are adult stem cells. Just glancing over the first 20 of the 131000. . . well, hang on *shows more results* First 50 then, I see nothing about embreyonic stem cells aside from #33, which doesn't talk about curing anything using embreyonic stem cells (read it before trying to bolster your argumet with it, I won't hesitate to tear you a new one for continuing to jump in uninformed). #49 may also be indicative, but looks like they derived cells from embreyonic stem cells and then injected those. Interestingly enough, it leads out with a heart disease comment; repairing scar tissue from heart attacks can be done using bone marrow stem cells, though this fact is not entirely relavent in the context of the analysis of #49. I think I'd need a medical degree to understand what is going on in #49 fully, however.

Now can I accuse you of lying and shoveling propaganda?

As a side note, searching for "embreyonic stem cells" (with the pluralization) turns up a result about tumors on the first 50 hits, and also spits out mostly results seeming to have to do with adult stem cells (this time bone marrow and retinal, etc)

There's something wrong with a bunch of blood thirsty, power hungry mongrals who are willing to draw attention to something that has so far been proven in 100% of laboratory tests to be totally useless

Do you really feel that your argument is so weak that it is necessary to lie? If you go to PubMed and type in "embryonic stem cells," you will see a long list of laboratory studies supporting their value.

I meant to type "30", but anyway, why don't you go to the source for updated info instead of citing an 18 month old CBS news story.

NIH Registry

You're a zealot, dude.

Sounds complicated but they just pull marrow (stem cells) from your hip like a blood donation. This replaces the marrow after it is killed off in a bone cancer patient.

Labs like Fermilab are expecting to produce hundreds of terabytes per day of data from research

Charles Cockell, of the British Antarctic Survey, works on microbes growing in the extreme polar conditions. If you have an access to Nature, check his latest paper treating of "Ecology: widespread colonization by polar hypoliths". There's a summary available from BioEd Online for those (prolly 99% of the crowd here) who can't access Nature.

Most doctors are good for mundane, normal stuff. Personally, I was diabetic for years before anyone matched up the symptoms. Despite the fact that I continuously asked for certain tests to be performed that would have shown whether my beliefs (based on what I knew) were correct or not. One of the key tests I wanted the whole time was an insulin test. Type 2 diabetics show elevated insulin long before elevated sugar. But, most of my doctors not only did not know, they did not believe me and would not verify the information even though I told them where to find it! Most of them knew less than I did about the functioning of diabetes, let alone the treatments. The difference is that I studied for a long time (I watched my grandfather die from diabetes) and learned what current research was coming out with. It turns out that many of the assumptions we had held in the past about diabetes are bad assumptions. The treatments were less than good (though they were better than no treatment) and many people have suffered needlessly from diabetes, though something as simple as diet and excercise can control or eliminate practically all diabetic symptons and complications if detected while it is still only elevated insulin, not blood sugar! The ADA diet was not healthy! Then, there have been those lucky enough to meet a doctor who has been truly interested in the causes of diabetes instead of just the *standard* treatment. Strange thing is they were diagnosed earlier, had fewer complications and lived longer (as an average - see WHO and NIH) than the rest of the diabetics.

My sister in law (short-gut and cyliacs (sp?)) has been suffering for over 24 years at the hands of doctors who did not know what they were doing. She finally found one doctor (after shopping through dozens of docs) who actually understood enough about his own lack of knowledge to go hunting. He did not know about the two diseases at first, but now has her the healthiest she has ever been. The difference between him and all (save one) her other docs. He went out of his way to go learn something new that was way outside of his area of work. Doctors like him are an exception, not a rule.

So, if you are one of those doctors, keep it up. There are many doctors who are not.

InnerWeb

Patrick,
You have probably heard this from others already, but it sounds like you might have myocarditis http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/00 0149.htm or endocarditis http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?ident ifier=4436.

As someone who has been through endocarditis and congestive heart failure, your symptoms sound hauntingly familiar. Preferring to lay flat on your back, very little energy, dizziness where all things I experienced. My advice to you is keep looking for the BEST cardiologist (not a general practitioner) you can find. There are many things that a cardiologist will notice that a GP will not. Tell the doctor EVERYTHING you've been through; start a personal blog or journal and note down every time you have symptoms.

Don't give up, don't put it off, don't take "You're fine." as a valid answer; keeping looking until you find a cardiologist who is willing to listen with an open mind. Your health come FIRST! Without that, life is pretty miserable.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi

My daughter has a heart condition and we found the doctors weren't interested in really discussing anything until we started using the "right" terminology. The terminology I picked up after reading a number of PubMed publications about my daugher's condition.

I highly suggest that anyone researching any condition (but especially something exotic like Patrick) hit PubMed. Make it your source you cite when talking to your docs. Make it your primary source of information. All the other websites you read are just summing up the papers published here.

In some ways, it makes sense that dna sequencing hasn't been released to the public directly. To analyze that amount of data and to create the sequence data, it requires insane amounts of cpu cycles and the companies doing the anaylzing, are paying lots of $$$ for the job they're doing without sure revenue. The risk investment in researching is simply too big, to just hand out the results for free in this case.

The cost of sequencing and data analysis is actually quite low, and all publically funded (NSF/NIH) data should be made available to the public.

The best way to make sure that this data remains open source is to increase funding to national granting agencies like the National Science Foundation and the NIH.

No, by percentage of effect, its the impurities that give you the hangover.

Care to back that up? According to this ethanol causes dehydration, electrolyte imbalance and low blood sugar. Further, it states that pure ethanol can cause hangovers, and that it is unknown whether ethanol or the impurities have the greater effect.

That's why they are shooting for 100% pure, in theory no hangover...

Who is they? Care to back this up? You do realize that it's impossible to get 100% pure ethanol, right? Although one could probably produce 99.999% pure ethanol, as soon as the bottle was opened, it would begin absorbing water from the atmosphere until it reached the azeotropic composition, about 95% purity, if I remember correctly.

It was shown that prayer messes up your brain even more. Basically your brain releases serotonin when you pray and it makes you "feel better". Religion is just as addictive as drugs and porn, and if government insists on regulating the last two they should consider regulate the first one. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1459474 2

they seemed friendly, they seemed smart, they saved drowning people.. but they have a nasty side. Apparently they batter their own children to death for kicks. Yikes! Give us our fin back, you evil sods!

What I believe will be killed here is the commercial scientific indexing system ISI Web of Knowledge. Their interface is a real pain, and while they probably contain more data than Google Scholar at the moment, they are up for some really tough competition!

It is about time.

It's free. Or rather, the research has already been paid for by private and federal grants and your taxes. Medline contains many tens of thousands of medical research articles and citations to tens of millions if you have access to paper journals. These articles can be found using keywords for greater precision searches, something Google, Altavista, and Co cannot offer.

It's free. Or rather, the research has already been paid for by private and federal grants and your taxes. Medline contains many tens of thousands of medical research articles and citations to tens of millions if you have access to paper journals. These articles can be found using keywords for greater precision searches, something Google, Altavista, and Co cannot offer.

I'm personally acquainted with him, so if you want to know more, contact me at st_popescu at yahoo dt com. I don't know of any of his papers on Actinomicosis being online, but if you're interested, I can scan some pages and send it to you.

Take care

Have you ever heard of dystonia? It wasn't that long ago that something like only 1 in 10 specialists had heard of it. The other 90% misdiagnosed it as psychological, often with horrible consequences. Patients were in and out of psych hospitals for years. Sometimes decades.

It's caused by a genetic defect.

How about Celiac disease [sprue]? An autoimmune disorder where the small intestine is damaged by ingesting gluten and other such proteins.

Easily treated by a gluten-free diet. Yet the symptoms make it hard to spot. I know someone who had multiple surgeries, more tests than you would believe, and still almost died before they figured it out. And that was with access to the best doctors in NYC.

So, yeah, research helps. If it was me, I'd take every option I could to survive.

Just one thing...

You say that:

'Penicillin is almost useless now because people used it improperly (e.g. for the flu, for too short a duration).'

The full reasons are a bit more complicated. Antibiotic resistance is caused by a lot of things - for example, doctors prescribing antibiotics inappropriately (often for virus infections), not to mention the farming practice of feeding antibiotics to all your animals to stop the poors sods being killed by the inhumane conditions you're rearing 'em in.

http://www.postgradmed.com/issues/2002/08_02/pn_an tibiotic.htm

lists these two causes, as well as failure to finish antibiotic prescriptions, as well as antibiotics being available without prescription in some places, which really doesn't help at all, does it?

http://www.niaid.nih.gov/factsheets/antimicro.htm backs up this viewpoint (but so what? This is the Web...

http://www.mamma.com/Mamma?qtype=0&query=reasons+f or+antibiotic+resistance can give you opinions until the cows come home)

A huge problem these days in hospitals these days is drug resistant bacteria. I've read of results which show that this is caused by the use of antibiotics in hospitals, prescribed by doctors to the patients `by the book' and used exactly as prescribed. How it works? Lots of ways. One mechanism for improving drug resistance is that if one drug doesn't work, prescribing it has the effect of using the patient as a fermenting vessel for evolving bacteria which are more resistant to that particular drug. Maybe the second drug would have worked, but the patient was too weak to live that long - so by this time, you've got a partial course of antibiotics having been given. Are you sure none of those bacteria got loose from the corpse? And so on in as many variations as you have patients following the doctor's orders.

I wish I knew why so many people seem so ready to defend doctors and attack patients when it comes to medical judgements.

Ever met a medical student? I have - lots. Very few of them seem to be very bright - hard working for sure and bright enough to learn a lot of technical facts and practical skills for plying their chosen trade, but that's not really an education and it doesn't take much intelligence. So why are we expected to look up to this lot as utterly reliable founts of wisdom when they get to be doctors?

One might argue that they have access to higher quality information that `the rest of us'. Anyone who's followed the official medical advice of the UK medical establishment knows very well that they keep getting it horribly wrong - no, sorry, certainly can't trust the doctors. Can't trust the patients either - so we'd all better not trust each other to give advice.

But I don't see why we shouldn't trust each other to identify reliable information sources. Strikes me that it'd be better to share information about known-good medical information rather than just say `The internet's shit so We Must Trust The Authorities Because They Are The Authorities And Therefore Know Best'.

Me? I always trust the authorities. Of course the PM knows best. Always has done.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neville_Chamberlain#F oreign_policy

I'm writing in general, about engineers and computer scientists (guys especially) who think that the heuristics of their profession give them any extra advantage over the general public in self-diagnosing illnesses. Its the opposite-- your tools and knowledge, so good for your profession, can harm you when it comes to medical treatment.

Yes, medicine itself is still primative, we've only just built MRIs that can see metabolism by imaging C,N and O on top of H20. Medical error is a leading cause of death. Doctors can believe that real illnesses aren't just psychological - it took medicine a while to accept that bacteria caused ulcers. Sometimes unpatented, ordinary vitamins help with a major symptom of a major illness (and if you have or know someone with diabetes- read the research and go get some benfotiamine!). Medicine is like that.

But the heuristics of medicine are far better than any other for dealing with illnesses. Non-medical common sense is orthogonal to medicine- if it gives good results that's just luck. But given how easily people are helped by placebos, how good are we going to be at telling if a particular treatment is working or not? Given how we can tune out outside signals when working on something (like the need to eat or drink), how often are we going to miss far more subtle clues? Given how personal psychology can make it hard to admit to feeling pain or to talk about body weaknesses (especially guys), how can we make sure that we're telling the doctor all relevant clues? Given how most medical research on the net is in the form of abstracts, not full articles, and given our strong abilities to find patterns (even where there aren't any), how easy is it to be side-tracked into thinking we've diagnosed ourselves when we haven't? Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments is an intensely applicable article to everyone.

I recently had a relative who died. With Staphylococcus aureus pneumonia your odds aren't good, but they're far worse if you don't know if you have the methicillin sensitive or the methicillin resistant version: the antibiotics for MRSA don't work very well on MSSA (the reverse is, of course, obvious).

Very tiny differences in what illness you have can make big differences in what treatment you need. Only medical tests- not all the reading and self-diagnoses in the world- will find those differences. Making sure you get those tests- that's hacking the medical and insurance system. Thinking you can figure out on your own what you have or whether or not a treatment is working? That's trying to hack your own body, and our self-assessments on how well we do that aren't very good. Our own self-diagnosis system is worse than the one in Windows (and for spaghetti code without any comments see dna).

Following your links, pulmonary actinomycosis may be more appropriate. In the writing, he mentions bad dental hygiene and an electric toothbrush that may have caused or contributed to the infection. The symptoms described seem similar too. He should definitely see the specialist in these types of diseases (ID?) ASAP; he should be able to get an appointment later in the day or next morning at the latest - many doctors do understand the urgent need and will accommodate them. This is important since complications of pulmonary actinomycosis sound pretty bad and you don't want to get to those. As I understand from reading the full story, he has not been proactive about treating the illness for several years, but what can you do looking back? Better take care of it ASAP.

I AM NOT A DOCTOR. THIS IS NOT A MEDICAL ADVICE. CONSULT YOUR PHYSICIAN FOR MEDICAL HELP.

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/00 0074.htm The organisms that cause this disease are normally found in the mouth and gastrointestinal tract, where they do not usually cause harm. Poor dental hygiene and dental abscess can predispose people to facial lesions and lung infections caused by these bacteria. Actinomycosis in the lungs causes lung cavities, lung nodules, and pleural effusions. The infection can cross the normal tissue boundaries of the chest producing for example, draining sinuses through the muscles and skin of the chest wall. The disease is rare and may occur at any age, but most affected patients are 30-60 years old. Be sure to check out the link on pleural effusions. Sounds pretty right-on to his descripton.

Faith can be handy, but nothing speaks like preventative action. Good dental hygiene. Seriously. Dead serious. More and more evidence is pointing to poor dental health as a vector for disease including heart disease and stroke.

This writeup on Pulmonary Actinomycosis (the possible disease in question here) reiterates that:

Poor dental hygiene and dental abscess can predispose people to facial lesions and lung infections caused by these bacteria.

So get to those twice-yearly dental cleanings and brush/floss. Plus with the thousands of dollars you save on not getting root canals and crowns, you can buy an awful lot of tech hardware....

I think it's not Actinomyces, but instead Actinomycosis, aka Lumpy Jaw, which is caused by Actinomyces.

If the engine in your car is making a funny sound and the mechanic says, I don't know what's broke but this here Marvel Mystery Oil should fix it, you need to find another mechanic. Same goes for a doctor.

You haven't fixed something until you know how it is supposed to work, figured out why it's not working, identified the cause, and dealt with the cause.

The doctor should figure out why you are broken and then apply a fix. To make sure he is doing his job you need to pin him down, just like you would someone who has written some code that doesn't work.

Looking at PubMed for "Actinomycosis" brings up a couple hundred papers on this beastie.

A good portion of these are "post-", i.e., this looks like its easily misdiagnosed/missed.

The common treatment seems to be: 6-12 months of high levels of penicillin/amoxicillin/ceftriaxone plus surgery to get rid of pseudo-tumour growths.

WebMD was no help, that's rather surprising!

Found this and this if you want some more info. Deep medical geekness on the first one, the NIH.GOV link is a little better for us laypeople. Sounds like Mr. Volkerding has a much more serious version than these talk about.

Dammit man, this is /., not a doctor! Get your ass to the ER NOW! Anything that has a treatment of IV Antibiotics is inherently a bad-ass motherfucker, don't wait for it to kill you before you decide to get treatment.

For reference:

CNN
Glaucoma Research Foundation
Canadian Opthomological Society
National Eye Institute

I realize that letting facts get in the way of things is not the norm here on /. but there's always a first time.

While they aren't about to end the world, they are becoming an unsettling risk. For example, superbug salmonella is on the rise--resistant to 9 different antibiotics. And chicken in Spain is getting nasty, resistant to the antibiotic Vancomycin, a powerful drug used to clear out horrid infections.

So, while the general human population may not be harboring the superbugs right now they could commute from the animal population. Maybe instead of watching human resistance to viruses we should be keeping check on our domestic animals, since the superbugs may come from them.

According to a Nov. 2, 1994 Journal of the National Cancer Institute paper abstract:

Among women who had been pregnant at least once, the risk of breast cancer in those who had experienced an induced abortion was 50% higher than among other women

By omitting this important relationship, the Columbia editorial is itself biased.

Yes, judging from the web page, the pictures appear to be in DICOM format. If so, I highly recommend OsiriX, an extremely cool, free, open source (GPL), DICOM viewer and PACS workstation/server that happens to be Mac only.

There are other programs that will open DICOM files, like the NIH's ImageJ. There are other cool, free medical image viewers for Mac and other systems (MRIcro comes to mind). And there are professional tools that spank OsiriX's ass, but cost over $70,000. But I have seen nothing for a reasonable price that is as good and as easy to use as OsiriX. Make sure you give it a look!

Just search for a generic drug name and see how many "online pharmacies" come up, and how many of the pages have acutal drug information on it

Why are you using Google to search for generic drug names? Sites like Tylenol.com or Rogaine.com have all the info you need just a few clicks away.

In any case, let's see how well Google fares.

A Google search for Tylenol on is own returns this as #10 result. Not too good, but then, how is Google supposed to know if you're looking to buy the product or read about it based on a single word? Let's try a Google search for Tylenol ingredients instead. There we go, #1 result.

Similarly, a Google search for Rogaine returns this as #3 result. It's pretty clear that this is an information page based on its description, but let's try and do better. Simply adding "medical information" to the previous search moves that same result to #1. Boy, that was easy.

Now, if you were looking for the true "generic" versions of these drugs, like acetaminophen or minoxidil, you'll find them at Google search result #1 and #2 respectively.

So what drugs are you looking for, and how can I help you find them?

I use a similar argument all the time - in 2001 there were 30,622 suicides in the US. So even in the year with the most terrorism in the US ever - you were 10 times more likely to kill yourself than be killed by a terrorist!

Seals and dogs are evolutionarily related thus: Mass Die-Off of Caspian Seals Caused by Canine Distemper Virus And Infection studies with canine distemper virus in harbour seals.

The eye is also sensitive enough to detect individual photons under correct circumstances.

I'm not sure the analogy with domestic dogs holds - Genetic labs study dogs precisely because they have among the highest intra-species morphology differences recorded for any mammal - Far more than humans.

The introduction of a white paper on sequencing dog DNA found here describes this in detail.

BTW, What breed do you raise?

How are they making hypoallergenic cats:
knocking out the gene Fel d 1.
Check out pubmed:
Crystal structure of Fel d 1

From this article (you need special access to get it) they say that "Fel d 1 elicits IgE [an immunoglobulin of the human that elicits the immune response] responses in 90-95% of patients with cat allergy and accounts for 60-90% of the total allergenic activity in cat dander"

And this is interesting, there is so much cat dander floating around that:

"The data showing that 80% of Swedish children with cat allergies never had lived with a cat imply that the concentrations of cat allergen in schools or in houses without a cat are sufficient to cause sensitization." Abstract on Animal Danders

So does this mean that even if you get your great cat, you still will be sensitized to it?

The other thing is I have been unable in my brief search, find out what fel d 1 is to the cat. Allerca says deletion is harmless to the cat, but I can't find any info except that it is a member of the secretoglobulin family. Immunoglobulins generally have conserved folds with often distinct structures (think conserved scaffold structure), I think a secretoglobulin would be something similar.

Essentially what this company claims they have the technology for is to create gene knockout cats for the fel d 1 gene.

How are they making hypoallergenic cats:
knocking out the gene Fel d 1.
Check out pubmed:
Crystal structure of Fel d 1

From this article (you need special access to get it) they say that "Fel d 1 elicits IgE [an immunoglobulin of the human that elicits the immune response] responses in 90-95% of patients with cat allergy and accounts for 60-90% of the total allergenic activity in cat dander"

And this is interesting, there is so much cat dander floating around that:

"The data showing that 80% of Swedish children with cat allergies never had lived with a cat imply that the concentrations of cat allergen in schools or in houses without a cat are sufficient to cause sensitization." Abstract on Animal Danders

So does this mean that even if you get your great cat, you still will be sensitized to it?

The other thing is I have been unable in my brief search, find out what fel d 1 is to the cat. Allerca says deletion is harmless to the cat, but I can't find any info except that it is a member of the secretoglobulin family. Immunoglobulins generally have conserved folds with often distinct structures (think conserved scaffold structure), I think a secretoglobulin would be something similar.

Essentially what this company claims they have the technology for is to create gene knockout cats for the fel d 1 gene.