Monday, January 22, 2018
How One Pair of Socks Led to a Movement That Helped 350,000 Homeless People
When a college student took the time to listen to a homeless man, she's started a revolution that even celebrities have supported.
A few years ago, Adina Lichtman was handing out sandwiches on the streets of New York City to help people experiencing homelessness. One man, grateful for the sandwich, approached her and offered some surprising insight.
“It’s great that you’re giving out sandwiches,” he said, “but one thing we really need is socks, especially as winter approaches.”
“Here I was, sandwiches in hand, assuming I knew the best way to help people, when in reality, helping is about listening, and hearing the needs of different communities,” Lichtman said. “It was a powerful lesson, and I wanted to put it into action.”
She began that night, with a simple step: going door-to-door on the floor of her dormatory at New York University, asking fellow classmates if they could each just donate just one pair of their own socks to someone experiencing homelessness.
She got 40 pairs of socks in a single night, from a single floor. The next morning she opened her door to find a huge pile of socks that other people had donated.
“College students love to do good, but sometimes they need a literal knock on their door to do so. And most everyone has an extra pair of socks they can donate,” Lichtman said.
That morning officially kicked off Knock Knock, Give a Sock (KKGS), a new nonprofit organization that has now provided over 350,000 pairs of socks to the homeless in cities and states across America. It is also now Lichtman’s full-time job.
“While many people donate clothing, nine out of every 10 clothing donors have never donated socks. On top of that, people who are trying to donate socks often find it difficult to donate used socks,” she says. “KKGS is one of the only organizations that collects gently used socks. We have volunteers knocking on doors of their classmates in school, of their colleagues at work, and even of their neighbors.
Recently, Cash Warren, Jessica Alba’s husband, donated 250,000 pairs from his company Pair of Theives, which has helped Lichtman bring socks into city schools where students are living below the poverty rate.
Lichtman also hosts “Meet Your Neighbors Dinners” in an attempt to bring people who are experiencing homelessness together with their neighbors in order to encourage discussions and ultimately dissipate the stigma.
“I thought this would be such a great example of ways people can take action in small ways, especially the college age-Millennial set, and how it can grow to expand and become national,” she says.
To date, over 50 colleges and high schools across the U.S. have gotten involved over the years.
But, whether you’re 26 or 62, you don’t need to wait to organize your own sock drive, collect socks, or even wash and clean some of your own to donate to your local shelter, or someone in need who you meet on the street.
When it gets cold out, think about what you use to bundle up—scarves, hats, gloves—that includes socks and shoes, too.
This Medical Breakthrough Can Cure Cancer with Your Own Cells
CAR T and other immunotherapies are transforming the dreaded diagnosis into a manageable disease. How living drugs may become the final answer to this killer.
In 2008, just after she’d started kindergarten, Tori Lee was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), an aggressive form of blood cancer. Chemotherapy cures most children of the disease, but Tori wasn’t as lucky. A playful little girl who was doted on by her three older sisters, she “was treated with chemotherapy for about two years, and then she relapsed,” says her mother, Dana Lee. “We started a new protocol, with more intensive chemotherapy and radiation. She spent hundreds of days in the hospital.” And still the cancer held on.
With Tori growing weaker, her parents decided to take her to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) for several weeks of chemo in preparation for a bone marrow transplant, a complex and risky procedure. Just before the Lees were scheduled to leave for the hospital, her doctors told them that they would also collect Tori’s T cells as a backup plan: If Tori turned out to be too sick to have the transplant, she might be able to participate in an ongoing trial of a promising experimental treatment called CAR T, which takes a patient’s own immune cells and genetically reprograms them to kill cancer. CAR T had been used months earlier to cure another little girl, Emily Whitehead, with the same form of leukemia. “I reached out to the Whiteheads,” says Dana. “I was petrified to put my daughter, who’d been through multiple years of chemo, through the harsh reality of a bone marrow transplant.”
Still, deciding on CAR T therapy wasn’t easy. While Emily was doing great, several of the children who had followed her in the clinical trial at CHOP had died. Tori would be only the tenth to undergo the treatment. “We finally said, ‘All right, we want to try CAR T.’ We petitioned the study board to be included in the trial. We thought it gave her a better chance of survival” than the bone marrow transplant, says Dana.
In April 2013, doctors injected Tori with her own modified T cells. Six weeks later, her cancer was in remission. Four years on, Tori, now 14, remains cancer-free.
This past August, after 50 more patients in the trial went into remission, the FDA approved the treatment that had saved Emily and Tori. The process of genetically engineering CAR T cells, patented under the brand name Kymriah, is now available to other children and young adults under the age of 25 with ALL that hasn’t responded to standard treatment.
“Surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy cure a little over half of people who develop cancer. But that means almost 600,000 Americans die of the disease every year,” says Steven A. Rosenberg, MD, PhD, chief of the surgery branch at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and one of the pioneers of the effort to use the immune system to fight cancer. “With the approval of CAR T, we’re taking a first step toward a completely new approach to curing cancers that have been incurable.”
Scientists have known since the 1890s that the immune system can destroy cancer cells. The trouble is that T cells—the immune cells that attack bacteria, viruses, and cancer cells—aren’t usually strong enough to wipe out malignancies completely.
In the 1980s, a team led by Dr. Rosenberg was the first to remove T cells from patients with cancer, multiply them in the lab, and then reinject them—in essence, turbocharging the patient’s own immune system to fight the disease. In an early study of this treatment, tumors in 11 of the 25 patients shrank by at least half, and one patient, with malignant melanoma, was cured. Still, in most cases, it wasn’t enough to eradicate the cancer.
But researchers continued to experiment and innovate. Immunologist Zelig Eshhar, a researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, thought he could use a recently developed gene therapy technique to make T cells into better cancer fighters. He engineered T cells to carry a chain of amino acids called chimeric antigen receptors (CARs). These CAR-carrying T cells—CAR Ts—seek out cells that may be cancerous. When the receptors on CAR T cells find cancer cells, the receptors latch on to them like a key fitting into a lock. That connection then acts like a trigger, telling the T cells to multiply like crazy and kill the cancer cells.
“CAR T therapy is something wholly new,” says David Porter, MD, an oncologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s not a compound or a chemical. It’s made up of living cells. Once infused into a patient, a single CAR T cell can multiply into 10,000 cancer-fighting cells.”
While drugs, including those used in chemotherapy, are flushed from the body and typically have to be given repeatedly, CAR Ts “go on circulating through the bloodstream, in some cases for years,” Dr. Porter explains. During that time, they can track down and destroy more cancer cells that may arise. This may explain one of the most promising results of CAR T therapy: Of the 52 patients who responded to Kymriah, two thirds still showed no signs of cancer a full year after treatment.
In fact, the CAR T model worked so well that in October 2017, the FDA approved a second type, sold under the name Yescarta, for certain forms of non-Hodgkin lymphoma that, until now, have almost always proved fatal. Of the 101 adults with large B‑cell non‑Hodgkin lymphoma enrolled in the clinical trial of Yescarta, 72 responded, meaning their cancers diminished or disappeared. Over half had no detectable cancer after eight months.
One of the patients was a doctor himself. Diagnosed in 2014, Jeff Backer had developed visible masses of lymphoma cells under his arms and on his face, chest, and neck. A large mass on his back, the size of a fist, made it hard for him to lie down. In June 2016, he received the new CAR T therapy as part of the clinical trial. “Within a day or two, the lumps started getting softer, smaller, disappearing,” says Dr. Backer, who recently returned to his job as an emergency room physician in Orlando, Florida. “The response was unbelievable. It was as if a nuclear bomb had been dropped on the cancer.”
The process—and the cost
CAR T treatments are tailored for each individual cancer patient, with T cells isolated from the blood and then sent to a facility where new genes are inserted into them. The cells are then stimulated to grow into a legion of CAR Ts. The resulting cells are frozen, sent back to the patient, and then reinjected. The production process can take two to three weeks, and it’s jaw-droppingly expensive. The cost of Kymriah: $475,000 per treatment. Yescarta: $373,000.
Like all cancer treatments, CAR T has side effects. The immediate danger is a severe reaction, dubbed a cytokine storm, that begins with flu-like symptoms but can escalate into plummeting blood pressure, extreme confusion, hallucinations, tremors, and seizures. Today, researchers understand that the reaction is actually a sign the therapy is working. When CAR T cells go after cancer cells in large numbers, levels of immune chemicals called cytokines can rise dangerously. “In some patients with widespread disease, CAR T cells destroy up to seven pounds of malignant cells,” says Dr. Porter. The more extensive a patient’s cancer, the more likely a cytokine storm will follow the treatment.
A Teenage Girl Voluntarily Went Into A Septic Tank to Save a Little Boy
Madison Williams was
studying in her bedroom in Dublin, Ohio, in August 2016 when the
door burst open. It was her mother, Leigh Williams, with a horrific and incredible story: “A little boy fell
into a septic tank, and no one can reach him.” Then she made this
request of her 13-year-old daughter: “Can you help?”
Madison and Leigh ran to a neighbor’s yard, where they found the boy’s distraught mother and other frantic adults surrounding a septic tank opening that protruded a few inches above the neatly trimmed lawn. It was 11 inches in diameter—slightly wider than a basketball—with a hatch that had not been secured. The boy, who was only two years old, had slipped in and was drowning in four feet of sewage inside a tank that was eight feet deep.
The men and women—who
minutes earlier had been enjoying
a party in a nearby home when they heard the boy’s mother scream—were dropping extension cords into the sludge, hoping the child would grab hold so they could pull him out.
Madison quickly surveyed the
situation. She was the only one who could fit through the small hole. Without hesitation, she got on her stomach next to the opening, placed her arms out in front of her, and told the adults, “Lower me in.”
Leigh and others held her waist and legs. “I wiggled my arms and shoulders until I got through the opening,” Madison says. Inside, the tank was dark, and the air putrid. Madison thrust her arms into the muck. In the process, she jammed her left wrist against a concealed pole, injuring the muscles in her wrist and arm so severely that the hand was rendered useless.
Rather than tend to her injury, Madison skimmed the surface of the sewage, hoping to feel the
submerged boy. “Every once
in a while, I’d see his little toes pop out of the water,” she says. “Then I would try to grab them.” Minutes ticked by before she saw the faint outline of his foot again. Madison shot her good hand out and grasped the foot tightly. “Pull me up!” she shouted to the others above.
As they were pulled to the surface, the boy’s free foot got stuck under the inside lip of the hatch. “Lower me down!” she yelled.
“I had to wiggle his foot until
it was free,” she tells Reader’s Digest. Then, ten minutes after Madison had entered the tank, she and the boy were lifted out.
But the toddler wasn’t out of trouble. He had been deprived of oxygen long enough that he wasn’t breathing. He was placed on his side, and an adult gave him several hard whacks on the back, one right after the other, until the boy coughed up fluids. It was only when Madison heard him cry that she knew he was all right. (Learn about how one little girl reversed her brain damage after nearly drowning.)
It took Madison longer to recover than the boy, who was taken to the hospital and released that same night. She, however, endured months of physical therapy for her wrist, which, says neighbor Mary Holley, made the girl’s actions all the more impressive.
“Madison’s a hero,” Holley says. “What other teenage girl is going to voluntarily go into a septic tank?”
Which Cryptocurrency Should You Buy In 2018?
Which Cryptocurrency Should You Buy In 2018?
Cryptocurrency is definitely a popular topic these days especially since Bitcoin just reached an all time high of $20,000 per coin. The question is, which cryptocurrency should you invest in 2018? Will there be another coin that peaks as much as Bitcoin? Will we miss the opportunity yet again?
Ethereum was the second breakthrough after Bitcoin, with their
awesome smart contracts feature. There are currently at least 1,000
different types of coins as listed on Coinmarketcap. Which one will prevail? Or rather, which group of coins will survive?
Nobody knows for certain, but we normally look at certain traits to see if a coin has potential or not. Here are some factors that you should consider:
- Who is the team that developed the coin? Are they highly reputable?
- How active are they in maintaining and improving on the coin?
- Do they actively communicate with their investors?
- What is the technology behind the coin? Is it blockchain-based?
- What is the total number of coins that will be issued and how many are in circulation?
- How much are these coins worth now?
- How much of these coins were premined and can you mine them?
- How many exchanges are these coins traded on?
here are many factors to consider before purchasing cryptocurrencies.
Don’t take people’s opinion as gold. Similarly, don’t follow my advice simply because I wrote about it. Always, always do your own research and make your own decisions. This is because cryptocurrencies are very volatile and you may lose all of your money if something happens. Never invest more than you can afford to.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, here are a few coins I would recommend buying. Don’t take it as an investment advice. It’s merely my opinion.
Steem is a token that is used on Steemit (an incentivized social media cum blogging platform). It comes with Steem dollars as well, meaning
there are two different cryptocurrencies on that platform. However,
Steem dollars is pegged to $1, unlike Steem which depends on market forces.
I think it has value because of Steemit itself. When you look at social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, they are not incentivized.
There’s a better chance that you’ll need to pay them to use the platform, than to make money from it. Steemit on the other hand, allows you to make money in the form of Steem and Steem dollars, simply by posting quality content. This means that you can actually blog for money on Steemit, although how much you earn depends on who upvotes your content.On Steemit, you can power up your Steem into Steem power. Your amount of Steem power decides how much your vote is worth. For instance, if I have 1,000 Steem power (equivalent of 1,000 Steem), my full upvote is worth $0.20. However, when you have 500,000 Steem power, your full upvote can be around $100. See the big difference? In other words, you are encouraged to put your money into Steemit.
Furthermore, if you want to withdraw money, you need to wait 3 months for the power down to fully complete. This discourages people from moving money away from Steemit, and therefore maintains the value of Steemit. To make a lot of money from Steemit, you should network well with all sorts of people, including those with a high amount of Steem power, a.k.a. whales.
Ethereum
Ethereum is dubbed to be the best Bitcoin alternative and it’s reflected in its price. It trades at $380 at the time of writing.
The reason why Ethereum is amazing is because it introduced an
Ethereum network, in which other coins can be based. It made
programming on blockchain so many times easier, which is why many of the popular coins are based on Ethereum. Look at OmiseGo and Golem.
Another reason is the introduction of smart contracts by Ethereum. Bitcoin also has a very simple smart contract, i.e. the sending and receiving of coins. But that’s about it. Ethereum’s smart contract system is at a different level. It allows people to manage agreements between each other, and ensures that payment is made upon the performance of the agreement.
It has a lot more flexibility than Bitcoin and I foresee it to be the next big thing. It’s already pretty popular, but it may surpass Bitcoin some day.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)