PHOTO BY JANE LOPES/The Gazette A MEMORIAL GARDEN: at the steps to the Town Hall was dedicated prior to Monday night’s selectmen’s meeting in memory of former selectman M. Victor Sylvia, who served on a number of town boards and advocated for the cleanup of hazardous waste sites and research on the cause of ALS, Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Attending were members of Mr. Sylvia’s family, from left, great-granddaughter Julia Axon, daughter Cheryl Sylvia-Kirwin, his wife Marion, son Roy and his wife Susan, granddaughter Kerry Sylvia, niece Danielle Axon, daughter Debbie Axon and her husband Dane.

Garden in Middleboro to be dedicated to former selectman, environmental activist

By Eileen Reece
Mon Sep 21, 2009, 02:56 AM EDT
MIDDLEBORO -
M. Victor Sylvia’s lasting legacy in town was his fight against industrial pollution and advocating for the cleanup of the Rockland Industries on Plymouth Street.
On Saturday, a garden will be named in honor of the former selectman and town advocate will be dedicated during a ceremony 6 p.m. at Town Hall.
Light refreshments will be served.
Selectwoman Muriel Duphily spearheaded the drive to create the garden in Sylvia’s memory along with The Friends of Middleboro who helped finance the project and will oversee its maintenance.
Sylvia died in his sleep at age 78 on Feb. 23, 2008.
A town advocate, he often frequented selectmen’s meetings long after he left the board.
Sylvia was a strong believer that pollution was the main contributor to the high rate of Lou Gehrigs disease in Middleboro.
He convinced town meeting in 2007 to vote to support a committee to begin a data base of cancer victims.

State announces release of ALS registry report this summer, cites concerns in Middleboro

MIDDLEBORO - The state will release its first report of the ALS registry this summer, containing information on the occurrence of Lou Gehrig’s disease statewide and in communities.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease or motor neuron disease, is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord and is usually fatal.
Middleboro has one of the highest concentrations of ALS in the country. Former selectman and environmental advocate M. Victor Sylvia, who died in February at age 78, for years had documented the high cases of cancer and Lou Gehrig’s disease in Middleboro. He believed there was a link to hazardous waste sites in the town, and advocated for the cleanup of Rockland Industries on Plymouth Street.
Christine Fischetti, epidemiologist and ALS Registry Coordinator for the Department of Public Health, said in a written statement, “In Middleboro, there has historically been a concern about the occurrence of ALS, as well as any connection that may be possible between ALS and environmental contaminants identified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Mass. Department of Environmental Protection at multiple sites in the community.”
Fischetti said the ALS Registry will allow investigators to explore any possible environmental association with ALS in Middleboro.
The data is collected from physicians, hospitals, vital statistics, nursing homes and hospices, and advocacy groups to ensure all ALS cases are captured. They are medically verified from patient medical records.
Massachusetts is the first state in the nation to create a statewide registry for ALS. The registry will be available online at www.mass.gov/dph/environmental_health.
Selectmen also learned this week, through Suzanne Dube, chairman of Middleboro’s Citizens Environmental Health Impact Committee, that the DPH is developing a first-of-its-kind web-based system to track key environmental hazards and health problems across Massachusetts.
Suzanne K. Condon of the Bureau of Environmental Health, in a statement said the network “will help us identify threats to our state’s health posed by the environment and improve our response to those threats.”
The tool also provides the location of schools, and environmental data such as the location of hazardous waste sites and active landfills, along with the cancer incidence data. The Tracking Network is part of a national initiative led by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention.

ALS registry information to be released

ALS registry information to be released
Boston Globe
State health officials are poised to soon release their report on information collected in a statewide amyotrophic lateral sclerosis registry, created in 2008 to track the neurodegenerative disease often referred to as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Christine Legere
July 5, 2009

MIDDLEBOROUGH

ALS registry information to be released
By Christine Legere
Globe Correspondent / July 5, 2009
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State health officials are poised to soon release their report on information collected in a statewide amyotrophic lateral sclerosis registry, created in 2008 to track the neurodegenerative disease often referred to as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease.


Residents in Middleborough and across Southeastern Massachusetts will find the upcoming report, to be released sometime this summer, of particular interest, since the region is known to contain hot spots for ALS.
Prevalence estimates, developed by the state Department of Public Health in 2007, showed there were 4 to 6 cases of ALS per 100,000 statewide, compared with 9.5 cases per 100,000 in Plymouth County and across Southeastern Massachusetts.
ALS, which is almost always fatal, deprives its victims of the ability to control their movements, speech, and eventually their breathing. Most patients die within two to five years of diagnosis.
Many Middleborough residents have long thought there is a connection between the town’s high rate of ALS, particularly in the Everett Square area, and the proximity of several known contam inated sites. Most of the 27 cases that residents have counted, plus a number that have since been reported to the registry, are clustered around the site of the former George E. Keith factory north of Sumner Street that burned down in a four-day fire in 1974, Middleboro Plating on Cambridge Street, and a property adjacent to the plating company where chemicals were handled and shipped.
Contamination at those sites has been confirmed either by the federal Environmental Protection Agency or the state Department of Environmental Protection. A fourth property, Rockland Industries, lies down-gradient of the three sites and is listed by DEP as a Tier IA contaminated site.
A spokesman for the ALS Association’s Massachusetts chapter called the ALS Registry’s upcoming report “a victory’’ for advocates, as it will be the first time any of the information contained in the registry, the first in the nation, is made available.
The report will document the rates of the disease and ultimately track any trends across the state. Once released, it will be placed on the Department of Public Health’s website at www.mass.gov/dph/environmental_health.
Information for the registry is supplied by neurologists, major hospitals, nursing homes, and hospices, who report on the gender, age, address, and diagnosis of each person with ALS. Information on some 700 cases was provided to the registry in its opening year. Wherever clusters of the illness are detected, health officials will search for possible environmental causes. And if a definite link can be established, the focus can turn to developing ways to control and prevent those causes, officials said.
“Hopefully, the registry is going to unlock a lot of secrets about clusters of ALS and their locations,’’ said ALS Association spokesman Richard Lombardo.
Middleborough selectmen chairman Patrick Rogers said it is important that local officials collect as much information on ALS as possible, so they are able to “determine just where the issues lie.’’ He added the Middleborough Citizens Environmental Health Impact Committee has served as liaison between the town and the state, conveying information related to the prevalence of ALS in town.
Lombardo called the registry long overdue. “We believe the pathway to a cure is strongly tied to the registry, as clusters of the disease are found and their locations studied,’’ he said.
Suzanne Dube, who chairs the Middleborough Citizens Environmental Health Impact Committee, recently outlined other ALS-related efforts. State health officials are reviewing records of the state Department of Environmental Protection regarding chemicals found on the four contaminated sites in Middleborough. Their aim is to identify common denominators.
Christine Legere can be reached at christinelegere@yahoo.com.

Middleboro selectmen hear about continuing effects of contaminants from Rockland industries

Chemicals from Rockland Industries site may be entering brook

The Enterprise
Posted Jul 02, 2009 @ 01:31 AM
MIDDLEBORO —
By Eileen Reece
For more than 40 years the town has dealt with the effects of chemical contamination from Rockland Industries on Plymouth Street, and selectmen learned Monday night there may yet be contaminants from the site entering Purchade Brook.
Selectmen this week met with Middleboro’s Citizens Environmental Health Impact Committee, which recently hired a consultant, Environmental Strategies & Management Inc., to conduct a review of the site using a $10,000 grant from the state Department of Environmental Protection.
Thomas Sylvia, ES&M principal chemical engineer who grew up near Rockland Industries, said placing the top soil was a cost-effective remedy but more needs to be done. Specifically, he said the “hot spots” ought to be dug up and removed.
“I feel contaminants are still migrating down the swale and entering the wetlands and entering Purchade Brook,” said Sylvia, adding the contaminants “don’t look to be too gross and it doesn’t stress vegetation and there aren’t fish kills anymore.”
Historically, known chemicals of concern found at Rockland Industries include chlorobenzenes, metals, including arsenic, mercury, zinc, and chromium; cyanide; formaldehyde; diesel fuel; and chlorinated solvents.
Sylvia said he agreed with the DEP’s assessment that while there are contaminants at the site, there is no immediate human health risks since the site is not actively used.
The Mass. Department of Public Health has long been concerned about the high occurrence of ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease, in Middleboro and any possible connection between the disease and environmental contaminants found at multiple sites, including Rockland Industries.
Residents are familiar with the history of the site. What was once farmland became the site of Rockland Industries when the Striar family purchased the land on Plymouth Street in 1960.
Before its transformation to a textile chemical plant, fish swam freely in Purchade Brook, adjacent to the property, which empties in the Taunton River. But within 10 years all that changed. In 1968 the Board of Health began investigating whether there was a link between dead fish now found in the brook and chemical discharges from the plant.
In 1981, the federal Environmental Protection Agency shut down the plant and began a cleanup of the site. In 1994 the DEP declared it a Tier 1A hazardous waste site that required its direct oversight.
The cleanup has been slow, and in 2002 the DEP renegotiated a remedial cleanup strategy with the Striar family to place an 18-inch layer of soil over the lagoon and swale area to act as a cap on the site.
More information on the site cleanup is available at the Citizens Environmental Health Impact Committee Web site at www.middleborough.org/cehic.

Stem cell injection offers fresh hope for MS sufferers

(Agencies)Updated: 2009-02-02 17:34
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/life/2009-02/02/content_7439309.htm

Stem cell injections can reverse the crippling effects of multiple sclerosis, a study published today says.
Four out of five adults in the early stages of MS who were injected with stem cells taken from their bone marrow saw an improvement in symptoms after three years. The rest of the patients saw their condition stabilise.
Dr Doug Brown of the MS Society said: 'These are very encouraging results and it is exciting to see that in this trial not only is progression of disability halted, but damage appears to be reversed.
'Stem cells are showing more and more potential in the treatment of MS. The challenge we now face is proving their effectiveness in trials involving large numbers of people.'
Evidence previously had showed stem cell treatment could stabilise MS but had not suggested it could reverse the condition.
MS is the most common disabling neurological condition, affecting around 85,000 people in the UK.
Damage to myelin - a protective sheath surrounding nerve fibres --leads to difficulties with sensation and muscle control. The study was designed to see whether injections of stem cells from bone marrow would migrate to parts of the nervous system damaged by MS and repair them.
Among the 21 men and women in the trial, aged between 20 and 53, 17 had improved on a scale of disability after three years.
None of them reported a worse score. The report in The Lancet Neurology medical journal today says the technique suppresses cells that cause damage and effectively 'resets' the immune system.
Study leader Dr Richard Burt of Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, said: 'It is a feasible procedure that not only seems to prevent neurological progression, but also appears to reverse neurological disability.' A trial involving 100 patients is to get under way soon.

Obama names Besser acting CDC head

http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=obama-names-besser-acting-cdc-head-2009-01-23

Pres. Obama late yesterday named bioterrorism and infectious disease expert Richard Besser interim director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Besser, 49, a pediatrician and longtime CDC researcher, will fill the slot—at least temporarily—vacated by Julie Gerberding, who headed the agency for six years during the Bush administration. Besser, most recently director of the CDC's Coordinating Office for Terrorism Preparedness and Emergency Response, is an expert on biological and chemical weapons and on preparing for and responding to public health emergencies. He studied food-borne illness in the agency's Epidemic Intelligence Service and led a nationwide campaign to prevent overuse of antibiotics, which as been blamed for a rise in drug-resistant infections. Besser, who earned his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania and did his pediatric residency at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, has published scientific papers on topics related to biological and chemical weapons as well as on antibiotic resistance.

Director of Disease Control Centers Resigns

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 10, 2009
ATLANTA (AP) — Dr. Julie L. Gerberding has resigned as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and will be replaced on an interim basis by a deputy as of Jan. 20, the day President-elect Barack Obama is inaugurated.

Susan Walsh/Associated Press
Dr. Julie L. Gerberding has led the C.D.C. since 2002.
Her resignation was announced in an e-mail message to employees on Friday night.
Dr. Gerberding, the first woman to direct the agency, led the C.D.C. through a post-Sept. 11 world of bioterrorism fears and was considered an effective communicator with legislators and the public.
In a November e-mail message to staff members, Dr. Gerberding said she expected that she might leave the post after the Bush administration left office. But colleagues said she had quietly held out hope that she would be allowed to stay on.
A spokesman for the agency, Glen Nowak, said Dr. Gerberding was traveling in Africa on agency business and was not available for comment.
Mr. Nowak said in a prepared statement that the Bush administration, “as part of the transition process,” had requested resignation letters from “a number of senior-level officials, including Dr. Julie Gerberding. This week, the administration accepted Dr. Gerberding’s resignation, effective Jan. 20.”
The agency investigates disease outbreaks, researches the cause and prevalence of health problems, and promotes illness prevention efforts. In a 2007 Harris Poll, the C.D.C. was rated the government agency that does the best job.
Dr. Gerberding is also head of the sister agency to the C.D.C., the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. The two have a combined budget of about $8.8 billion and more than 14,000 full-time, part-time and contract employees.
Dr. Gerberding receives a total compensation of $202,200.
Dr. Gerberding, 53, was named director in July 2002. She had been an infectious diseases specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, and joined the disease centers in 1998 to lead a patient safety initiative.

New website for people with multiple sclerosis

MS Invigor8 is a website developed by researchers at the University of Southampton to treat fatigue in people with multiple sclerosis (MS) using cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT).
The research team led by Professor Rona Moss-Morris at the School of Psychology, with the technological side led by Dr Gary Wills at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, now seeks 40 people in the UK who experience MS fatigue to take part in the web-based trial which will begin on 12 January.
The team adopted an approach which used eight sessions of manualised CBT to treat fatigue in MS effectively, and developed an Internet based version of the package.
'We know this works because six months after the manual treatment, not only had fatigue substantially reduced, but people with MS reported levels of fatigue that were significantly lower than those of a matched healthy, non-fatigued group,' said Professor Moss-Morris.
The researchers found that a limitation of the manual package is that skilled CBT therapists are not available to many people with MS due to the lack of available resources and difficulty of access. The new web-based package will enable effective treatment for more people with minimal therapist time.
The team used expert services users to work with them to develop eight sessions to assess users’ levels of fatigue, their patterns of activity and rest and then to enable them to manage issues such as sleep patterns and stress. The programme is interactive and personalised allowing people to set goals for managing their fatigue and work towards developing and maintaining a healthier lifestyle.
Lawrence Gilbert, an expert service user who has been very involved in the process from the outset, said: 'MS can be like a Duracell battery, you could be going along fine and then suddenly the energy drains out of you. My concern has always been that the fatigue, which is a part of the condition, could be wrongly attributed to being just "all in the mind". The approach taken by the Southampton team is not like that at all.'
More information about the programme can be found at: http://octopussy.ecs.soton.ac.uk/MSInvigor8/Intro/index.php

BREAST CANCER INCIDENCE & HORMONE REPLACEMENT THERAPY

In the years following the end of World War II, the number of breast cancer cases diagnosed each year began to climb in the United States, and they kept on climbing until, in 2003, a historic decline in the annual incidence of breast cancer suddenly appeared. One year earlier, another dramatic event related to breast cancer also occurred. A huge prospective, randomized, placebo-controlled hormone replacement therapy (HRT) clinical trial, the Women’s Health Initiative study, prematurely terminated the portion of the study evaluating combination HRT pills (the most common type of HRT medication prescribed throughout the world). The plug was pulled on this clinical study because a worrisome excess of breast cancers (as well as cases of cardiovascular disease) was observed among the women who were secretly randomized to receive HRT pills containing both estrogen-like and progesterone-like female hormones (estrogen-only HRT pills are reserved for women who have previously undergone hysterectomy, as this type of HRT is associated with an increased risk of uterine cancer). The preliminary results of this study’s adverse findings, published in 2002 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, identified a nearly 30 percent increase in the risk of breast cancer among the women who had been randomized to take combination HRT pills.

Many of us in the cancer research and treatment community have been arguing, for decades, that the continuously rising incidence of breast cancer observed in the post-war United States has been due to, at least in part, the rising use of HRT medications. Even prior to the publication of the Women’s Health Initiative study’s adverse findings, there have been numerous clinical studies that have linked a woman’s lifetime exposure to female sex hormones to the risk of developing breast cancer. In fact, even decades-old epidemiological studies have, repeatedly, identified an early onset of menstrual periods and a late arrival of menopause as risk factors for breast cancer (these events mark the beginning and end of ovarian hormone production, respectively). More recently, large breast cancer prevention studies have confirmed that estrogen-blocking medications can reduce the risk of breast cancer by about 50 percent in women who are at high risk for this type of cancer.

However, despite decades of clinical and scientific evidence linking HRT to breast cancer risk, it took the sobering results of the Women’s Health Initiative study to finally convince large numbers of women, and their physicians, that HRT increases the risk of breast cancer (and, contrary to the findings of less rigorous and much older epidemiological studies suggesting that HRT reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease in women, the opposite effect actually appears to be the case). Following widespread reporting of the negative findings of the Women’s Health Initiative study, new HRT prescriptions in the United States declined an average of 40 percent over the first three years following the publication of the study’s results.

Several clinical studies over the past 5 years have compared HRT prescribing trends with the incidence of breast cancer in the United States. These studies have shown a significant decrease in the number of new HRT prescriptions filled each year since 2002, and when plotted on a graph, the curve of this decline in new HRT prescriptions matches up very nicely with the curve of the declining number of new breast cancer cases observed each year since 2003. And yet, a significant number of doubters still remain. Some have hypothesized that a small downturn in the number of women undergoing screening mammograms might explain the fewer cases of breast cancer that have been diagnosed each year since 2003. Others have come up with even less likely potential explanations, hoping to explain away the growing and already substantial research evidence linking HRT with an increased risk of breast cancer. However, two new breast cancer research updates further confirm the link between HRT and breast cancer risk.

An update of a previous breast cancer incidence study, from the National Cancer Institute and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, has just been published online in the journal Breast Cancer Research & Treatment. In this study, the authors reviewed and analyzed the newly updated SEER (Surveillance Epidemiology & End Results) database, which is the national cancer statistics database maintained by the National Cancer Institute.

When compared to the period between 2000 and 2002, significant declines in the number of new cases of breast cancer were observed between 2003 and 2005. Altogether, a 20 percent drop in the incidence of new breast cancer cases was observed during the period beginning in 2003 and ending in 2005, and this historic trend closely mirrors the results predicted by the 2002 Women’s Health Initiative study report. Moreover, nearly the entire decline in breast cancer cases was observed in postmenopausal women over the age of 50, and in breast cancers sensitive to estrogen, further linking this dramatic decrease in breast cancer incidence to decreased HRT use among women.

The other dramatic breast cancer research update was announced at the world’s largest annual breast cancer research conference, the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, less than two weeks ago. At this symposium, the researchers from the Women’s Health Initiative study provided an update on the women who participated in the combination HRT group. These updated results offer striking proof that combination HRT pills are associated with a significantly increased risk of developing breast cancer. Among the study volunteers who took combination HRT pills for an average of 5 years, their risk of breast cancer is now 100 percent greater than what is being observed among the women volunteers who were secretly randomized to receive identical placebo (sugar) pills. This means that the incidence of breast cancer among the women who received combination HRT pills is now fully twice as high as is being observed in the women who did not take HRT pills.


I have, for almost two decades now, recommended against taking HRT medications. In 85 to 90 percent of women, the symptoms of menopause subside significantly within 2 to 3 years. Although they are not quite as effective as HRT drugs in relieving the symptoms of menopause, there are also a variety of prescription and non-prescription remedies available that can reduce the severity of the hot flashes, night sweats and irritability that often accompany the early phases of menopause. (I will have much more to say on the topic of breast cancer prevention in my forthcoming book, “A Cancer Prevention Guide for the Human Race.”) Today, in 2008, my recommendations against HRT drugs remain even more vigorous than ever before.