Faith In God

Professor : You are a Christian, aren’t you, son ?

Student : Yes, sir.

Professor: So, you believe in GOD ?

Student : Absolutely, sir.

Professor : Is GOD good ?

Student : Sure.

Professor: Is GOD all powerful ?

Student : Yes.

Professor: My brother died of cancer even though he prayed to GOD to heal him. Most of us would attempt to help others who are ill. But GOD didn’t. How is this GOD good then? Hmm?

(Student was silent.)

Professor: You can’t answer, can you ? Let’s start again, young fella. Is GOD good?

Student : Yes.

Professor: Is satan good ?

Student : No.

Professor: Where does satan come from ?

Student : From … GOD …

Professor: That’s right. Tell me son, is there evil in this world?

Student : Yes.

Professor: Evil is everywhere, isn’t it ? And GOD did make everything. Correct?

Student : Yes.

Professor: So who created evil ?

(Student did not answer.)

Professor: Is there sickness? Immorality? Hatred? Ugliness? All these terrible things exist in the world, don’t they?

Student : Yes, sir.

Professor: So, who created them ?

(Student had no answer.)

Professor: Science says you have 5 Senses you use to identify and observe the world around you. Tell me, son, have you ever seen GOD?

Student : No, sir.

Professor: Tell us if you have ever heard your GOD?

Student : No , sir.

Professor: Have you ever felt your GOD, tasted your GOD, smelt your GOD? Have you ever had any sensory perception of GOD for that matter?

Student : No, sir. I’m afraid I haven’t.

Professor: Yet you still believe in Him?

Student : Yes.

Professor : According to Empirical, Testable, Demonstrable Protocol, Science says your GOD doesn’t exist. What do you say to that, son?

Student : Nothing. I only have my faith.

Professor: Yes, faith. And that is the problem Science has.

Student : Professor, is there such a thing as heat?

Professor: Yes.

Student : And is there such a thing as cold?

Professor: Yes.

Student : No, sir. There isn’t.

(The lecture theater became very quiet with this turn of events.)

Student : Sir, you can have lots of heat, even more heat, superheat, mega heat, white heat, a little heat or no heat. But we don’t have anything called cold. We can hit 458 degrees below zero which is no heat, but we can’t go any further after that. There is no such thing as cold. Cold is only a word we use to describe the absence of heat. We cannot measure cold. Heat is energy. Cold is not the opposite of heat, sir, just the absence of it.

(There was pin-drop silence in the lecture theater.)

Student : What about darkness, Professor? Is there such a thing as darkness?

Professor: Yes. What is night if there isn’t darkness?

Student : You’re wrong again, sir. Darkness is the absence of something. You can have low light, normal light, bright light, flashing light. But if you have no light constantly, you have nothing and its called darkness, isn’t it? In reality, darkness isn’t. If it is, well you would be able to make darkness darker, wouldn’t you?

Professor: So what is the point you are making, young man ?

Student : Sir, my point is your philosophical premise is flawed.

Professor: Flawed ? Can you explain how?

Student : Sir, you are working on the premise of duality. You argue there is life and then there is death, a good GOD and a bad GOD. You are viewing the concept of GOD as something finite, something we can measure. Sir, Science can’t even explain a thought. It uses electricity and magnetism, but has never seen, much less fully understood either one. To view death as the opposite of life is to be ignorant of the fact that death cannot exist as a substantive thing.

Death is not the opposite of life: just the absence of it. Now tell me, Professor, do you teach your students that they evolved from a monkey?

Professor: If you are referring to the natural evolutionary process, yes, of course, I do.

Student : Have you ever observed evolution with your own eyes, sir?

(The Professor shook his head with a smile, beginning to realize where the argument was going.)

Student : Since no one has ever observed the process of evolution at work and cannot even prove that this process is an on-going endeavor. Are you not teaching your opinion, sir? Are you not a scientist but a preacher?

(The class was in uproar.)

Student : Is there anyone in the class who has ever seen the Professor’s brain?

(The class broke out into laughter. )

Student : Is there anyone here who has ever heard the Professor’s brain, felt it, touched or smelt it? No one appears to have done so. So, according to the established Rules of Empirical, Stable, Demonstrable Protocol, Science says that you have no brain, sir. With all due respect, sir, how do we then trust your lectures, sir?

(The room was silent. The Professor stared at the student, his face unfathomable.)

Professor: I guess you’ll have to take them on faith, son.

Student : That is it sir … Exactly ! The link between man & GOD is FAITH. That is all that keeps things alive and moving.

Legend has it that the student was EINSTEIN.

Biography: Dr. Wu Lien-Teh 伍连德

Dr. Wu Lien-Teh (伍连德, Wu Liande, Gnoh Lean Tuck, Ng Leen-tuck, 1879 – 21 January 1960) was a Malayan-born Chinese and the first medical student of Chinese descent to study at University of Cambridge.

Dr. Wu was also the first ethnic Chinese nominated to receive a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1935.He was born in Penang, one of the three towns of the Straits Settlements (the others being Malacca and Singapore). The Straits Settlements formed part of the colonies of Great Britain. His father was a new immigrant from Taishan, China. His mother’s family also originated from China but she was a second generation resident of Malaya. Dr. Wu had four brothers and six sisters. His early education was at the Penang Free School.

Dr. Wu was admitted to Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1896,[2] after winning the Queen’s Scholarship held in Singapore. He had a successful career at university, and won virtually all the available prizes and scholarships. His undergraduate clinical years were spent at St Mary’s Hospital, London.

In 1903, Dr. Wu returned to the Straits Settlement after finishing his medical studies. However, there was no specialist post for him. This is because, at that time, there was a two-tier medical system in the British colonies, where only British nationals could hold the highest position of fully qualified medical officers or specialists. So, Dr. Wu spent the first 4 years of his medical career researching beri-beri and then, he was in private practice.

He was very vocal in the social issues of the time, and founded the Anti-Opium Association in Penang. This attracted the attention of the clandestine forces involved in the lucrative trade of opium. Later it led to an intentional search and subsequent discovery of a mere one ounce of tincture of opium in Dr. Wu’s dispensary, which was considered illegal, although he was a fully qualified medical doctor who had purchased this to treat opium patients. His prosecution and appeal rejection attracted worldwide publicity, including an invitation from the then Grand Councillor Yuan Shikai of the Qing Dynasty in Peking to take the post of Vice-Director of the Imperial Army medical College in Tientsin (Tianjin).

In the winter of 1910, Dr. Wu Lien-Teh was given instructions from the Foreign Office, Peking, to travel to Harbin to investigate an unknown disease which killed 99% of its victims. This turned out to be the beginning of the large pneumonic pandemic of Manchuria and Mongolia which ultimately claimed 60,000 victims. Dr. Wu would be remembered for his role in asking for imperial sanction to cremate plague victims, as cremation of these infected victims turned out to be the turning point of the epidemic. The suppression of this plague pandemic signified medical progress in China.

Dr. Wu chaired the International Plague Conference in Mukden (Shenyang) in April 1911, a historic event attended by scientists from the United States of America, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Netherlands, Russia, Mexico and China. He later presented a plague research paper at the International Congress of Medicine, London in August 1911 which was published in The Lancet in the same month. Dr. Wu was the first president of the China Medical Association (1916–1920) and directed the National Quarantine Service (1931–1937).

In 1937, with the Japanese occupation of much of China and the retreat of the Nationalists, Dr. Wu moved back to Malaya where he worked as a General Practitioner in Ipoh. To encourage the young to share his love for reading, Dr. Wu tirelessly collected donations to start the Perak Library (now The Tun Razak Library) in Ipoh, a free lending public library. In his own medical practice at 12 Brewster Road (now Jalan Sultan Idris Shah), long queues were a common sight, and he was known as the doctor who gave free consultation and treatment to the poor. He practised medicine until the age of 80, when he bought a new house in Penang for his retirement. He died on 21 January 1960, aged 81.

A road named after Dr. Wu can be found in Ipoh Garden South, a middle-class residential area in Ipoh located between Hock Lee Park and Ipoh Garden East. In Penang, a private road named Taman Wu Lien Teh is located near the Penang Free School.

Dr. Wu Lien-Teh is regarded as the first person to modernize China’s medical services and medical education. In Harbin Medical University, bronze statues of Dr. Wu Lien-teh are built to remember his contributions in promoting public health, preventive medicine and medical education.[3] In Malaysia, a quiet place opposite of Penang Free School was named after him as Taman Wu Lien Teh.

Read more here: http://wulientehsociety.org/?p=20

Call for ban on disability abortions after Paralympics

By John Bingham. Published by The Telegraph on 19 September 2012.

The success of the Paralympics should trigger a rethink of Britain’s abortion laws to make it illegal to terminate a pregnancy because a child will be born disabled, a coalition of campaigners and charities argues today. An alliance of pro-life campaigners and religious groups is launching a new push to restrict the 1967 Abortion Act, to prevent doctors terminating pregnancies on the grounds of physical abnormality.

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, they describe the practice of aborting foetuses on physical grounds as a form of “eugenics”. The letter, signed by leading figures from groups such as Life and the Pro-Life Alliance, as well as the Catholic Bishops Conference of Scotland and a number of evangelical Christian groups, argues that the current law enshrines a form of disability discrimination.

Also among the nine signatories is Peter Elliott, a businessman who founded the Down Syndrome Research Foundation UK, after the birth of his son, David, in 1985. The signatories say that while pregnancies can be terminated even up to 40 weeks on physical grounds in certain circumstances, the moment the child is born a “moral volte-face” is performed and the official approach is “full of compassion”.

“The recent Paralympics made this contradiction yet more glaring,” the letter says. “The athletes produced such astonishing examples of courage and triumphs over disability that we now have to rethink what we mean by ‘disabled’ and ‘able’.”

The 1967 abortion act, as it is currently applied, allows terminations up to 24 weeks if two doctors agree that the physical or mental health of a pregnant woman is in jeopardy. After that, however, abortion is possible in cases in which there is a “substantial risk” that the child will suffer from a “serious handicap”. It is also permitted in cases where the life of the mother is judged to be at risk from the continuation of the pregnancy.

The most recent figures available show that there were 146 abortions after the 24-week limit in 2011 in England and Wales out of a total of almost 190,000. But overall there were more than 500 abortions after screening for Down’s Syndrome. The campaigners argue that this amounts to a form of eugenics – the belief that a society can be “improved” through controlled breeding to increase the occurrences of desirable characteristics.

But supporters of abortion reacted with anger saying that the term – with its Nazi connotations – was an “insult” to women who had faced agonising choices.

“Eugenic abortion is bad medicine,” the letter states. “Killing people with disabilities, rather than striving to support and care for them, is contrary to the high principles of medicine.” They insist that the “positive and civilised” approach is exemplified by the work of baby hospices and greater research into fetal conditions rather than allowing terminations.

Prof Jack Scarisbrick, founder of the anti-abortion group Life, said that the group is hoping to mobilise pro-life MPs to bring forward a private members bill in the Commons to amend the act. A simple two-clause bill could make it illegal to terminate a pregnancy after screening for conditions such as Down’s syndrome, he said. “We are very hopeful that now we can make a move from a new direction, that rather than focusing on weeks and grounds for abortion we can tackle this particular aspect which we believe we can win.

“That would send a wonderful signal across the world.”

But Darinka Aleksic, campaigns coordinator at the Abortion Rights group, said: “Every year about one per cent of abortions are carried out on the grounds of fetal abnormality. “A diagnosis of this sort places families in an extremely painful and difficult situation, which requires privacy and support as they decide whether to continue with the pregnancy.

“We believe that the decision is a matter for the parents and their doctors alone. It should not be used as a political football. “Using terms like 'eugenic abortion' is an insult to people who are faced with this difficult choice. “Pro-choice supporters respect the rights of all women, including those with disabilities, to make their own reproductive choices. We believe women are best placed to make the right decision for themselves and their families."

A Department of Health spokesman said: "There are some circumstances where the law permits an abortion beyond 24 weeks - for example where there is a substantial risk of serious physical or mental handicap. "This decision is not taken lightly. Two doctors must agree on the seriousness of the handicap, while also taking into account the facts and circumstances of each individual case.

"The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists' guideline on abortion and foetal abnormality is clear that a woman needs sufficient information and time to help her understand the nature of the foetal abnormality and the probable outcome of the pregnancy so that she is able to make an informed decision about the options available to her."

Read more:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9551305/Call-for-ban-on-disability-abortions-after-Paralympics.html

http://davidalton.net/2012/09/19/new-calls-to-end-eugenic-abortions-in-the-week-a-judge-handed-down-a-sentence-of-8-years-for-the-death-of-an-unborn-child/

In the same week that a  Judge handed down a sentence of eight years to a woman who killed her unborn baby at 39 weeks gestation, calls have been made to end eugenic abortions in Britain. There is a link between these two stories because if the convicted mother had been able to claim that her baby had a disability – such as cleft palate or Down’s Syndrome – she would legally have been able to kill the baby right up and even during its birth.

There is also a link, as the article below points out, between our celebration of the achievements of people with disabilities and our discriminatory abortion laws which single out babies with disabilities for “special” treatment – that is, their death. This is cold blooded eugenics – for which no sentence of years in jail is handed down to those who legislated to make it legal or those who end these babies lives.

Standing up for sex workers is standing up for pimps

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/standing-up-for-sex-workers-is-standing-up-for-pimps-20120618-20k84.html Published by The Age on 19 June 2012. By Caroline Norma.

Prostitutes are not sex workers, they are prostituted women.

ELITE academics in Australia love to profess their support for ''sex workers''. University of New South Wales academic Catharine Lumby in ''Sex is not dirty work'' on these pages pleaded for the media to treat sex workers with more respect, given that prostitution is a legal form of employment in Australia.

Lumby recalls telling her sons over the dinner table to not make jokes about women their friends call ''prosties'', and to remember that feminists and Christians could be condemned for failing to properly recognise prostitution as work.

This idea of prostitution conveyed to the two Lumby juniors is unmistakably a liberal one. In this framing, prostitution is embarked upon by individual women as something akin to a small-business enterprise (women in brothels in Australia are legally recognised as sub-contractors, not employees). While ''sex workers'' might be at the bottom rung of the social ladder in terms of education, prior victimisation, social networks, and personal asset bases, liberals see them as admirable for attempting to improve their circumstance, and possibly give their kids a better chance in life.

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In conveying this idea of prostitution, Lumby teaches her sons to be nice to ''sex workers'', which is indubitably a charitable thing for an elite academic to do.

However, in framing prostitution as a benign form of ''work'', Lumby also disenables her sons taking social and political measures against the sex industry and its customers as perpetrators of serious and widespread harm against women in Australia.

There now exists a mountain of empirical research, not only from feminist social scientists, but also from psychologists, clinicians, nurses, anthropologists and economists, of the harms of prostitution for women. These harms include post-traumatic stress disorder, genital and other physical injuries, pregnancy, depression and anxiety, and social isolation.

It has been known since the late 1970s that a major precursor of women's entry into prostitution is childhood sexual abuse. There is also empirical evidence of the damage to women's social status, and the negative impact on women's connection to local community, of the sex industry.

Overwhelmingly, the social science and health literature condemns prostitution as a source of harm to women, as well as children.

For liberals to successfully frame prostitution as ''work'', rather than commercially mediated sexual abuse, they must close their eyes to this evidence. They must also avoid encountering most women in prostitution - even the most conservative demographic studies of this population find that half would leave the sex industry if they could. And they must overlook the good results that governments in Sweden, South Korea, Norway and Iceland have achieved in declaring prostitution a violation of gender equality, and criminalising the sex industry and its customers.

Most significantly, though, liberals must avoid mentioning pimps, traffickers, and sex industry customers in making their argument that prostitution is a legitimate form of work for poor women. Lumby doesn't breathe a word of the profit-making activities of pimps in Australia, nor the acts perpetrated by sex industry customers who buy women in half-hour blocks. She fails to tell her sons about the strategies of violence, debt and intimidation that pimps use to keep women in prostitution, and to make sure they service customers with a smile.

She also omits to mention the kinds of sex acts customers do to women in prostitution, and the misogynistic abuse and brutality that women face when they're dispatched to the hotel rooms and houses of prostitution buyers.

These inconvenient facts cause liberals great difficulty in selling the message that prostitution is work. In light of these facts, prostitution begins to look like a system of hush money paid to pimps to supply men with vulnerable women for sexual use and abuse.

When elite academics like Lumby publicly declare their allegiance to ''sex workers'' they concurrently reveal a loyalty to pimps and sex industry customers. They do this through framing prostitution as ''work'', and therefore sending the message that no policy or community action need be taken against the sex industry as an employer of women and legitimate business sector.

In this atmosphere, pimps and their customers are able to continue their harmful activities, and the sex industry in Australia is able to profitably expand and diversify.

On the other hand, when elite academics like me declare our support for ''prostituted women'', we declare a commitment to elimination of the sex industry. We work towards public recognition of prostitution as a social harm through public awareness campaigns highlighting the effects of the sex industry on individual women, and women's social status.

Just like the anti-smoking campaigns that began in the 1970s, we seek a reorientation of the public's thinking about prostitution towards a critique of the ''pretty woman'' and ''happy hooker'' stereotype. Australian policymakers and community leaders mobilised against the tobacco industry in the past three decades, and we seek similar government action against the sex industry as a driver of social harm.

The criminalisation of pimps and sex industry customers is a necessary first step towards this goal, but we also call for public education about the reality of prostitution, as well as policy planning for programs and initiatives to assist women to leave the sex industry and build lives that reflect their worth as full citizens.

Dr Caroline Norma is a lecturer in the school of Global Studies, Social Science & Planning at RMIT University.

Selling Sex Short: The Pornographic and Sexological Construction of Women’s Sexuality in the West

http://feministsforchoice.com/feminist-conversations-meagan-tyler.htm Published by Feminists for Choice on 18 June 2012. By Hennie.

Feminist Conversations is a regular feature at Feminists for Choice, in which we spotlight activists. After reading Meagan Tyler’s book Selling Sex Short: The Pornographic and Sexological Construction of Women’s Sexuality in the West, and not being able to put it down, I had to ask her a few questions. 

You have written extensively about pornography, the sex industry, and the construction of women’s sexuality. How did this interest come about?

Looking back now, it seems rather an odd thing to have chosen to research! What really got me interested was teaching in high-schools in my home town of Melbourne. Most schools in Australia have uniforms and on the few “free dress” days a year, students often want to wear their most coveted pieces of clothing. All the way back in 2004, I noticed a growing number of 12 and 13 year old girls wearing Playboy branded t-shirts, which seemed like a new phenomenon. I wanted to know about the marketing operations that were going on with companies like Playboy and if they were consciously “mainstreaming” their brands. So I went back to uni to do a PhD.

What was your motivation for writing Selling Sex Short?  

The book came out of my PhD research. When I started looking at the mainstreaming of pornography, or what some scholars refer to as “pornographication” or “pornification” of popular culture, it became clear that you can’t look at these pop culture trends without looking at the pornography industry itself. I hadn’t bargained on this when I started and didn’t really know what to expect when my research led me to actually having to look at how elements of the porn industry operate.

A lot of other academics have undertaken content analyses of pornography (i.e. to find out what is in mainstream porn, e.g. what kind of acts, violence, engagement with the camera / other actors etc.) so I needed to do something different. What interested me was what those within the industry actually say about how and why porn is produced, which is what led me to analyse Adult Video News, a porn industry based magazine aimed at producers, directors, distributors and vendors. In intra-industry forums people are often very open and forthright about the problems and harms that they believed are associated with the production of pornography. That, to me, was fascinating, and occasionally, quite disturbing. But it is important that we understand pornographic content in the context of its production. How the porn industry markets its products, for example, gives us important information about how the industry wants itself to be seen and what those within the industry believe consumers want to see and buy.

The other half of the book is really about sex therapy. I had done some previous research on the supposed “epidemic” of female sexual dysfunction (FSD), which was largely “discovered” after Viagra hit the market. In countries like Australia, the US and the UK, some medical experts were claiming that almost half of all women were suffering from some form of FSD. I wanted to find out how the sex therapy industry was marketing its treatments for this form of dysfunction and what larger cultural changes were occurring to create such popular interest in a medicalised understanding of sexuality.

In the end, I wanted to know what kind of sex these two industries were promoting. The trend towards pornographication and the trend towards the medicalisation of women’s sexuality post-Viagra were both noticeable cultural shifts occurring in roughly the same time period but I had no sense of if they were connected or if they related to each other at all. I was quite surprised to find that there were both theoretical and material connections between the two. I had no idea before starting my research, for example, that some therapists recommend pornography to patients as a template to follow for their own sex lives or that a number of porn stars have produced their own sex advice literature.

The book really came about because I didn’t want the debates about these issues to be limited to academia. We need to be having much more informed public discussions about sexuality and inequality.

The book is written from a feminist perspective (especially so radical feminism), what does feminism mean to you?

Yes, the book certainly draws on radical feminist writing and theorising, which is quite unusual these days. So much so, I am often required to dispel myths about radical feminism and feminism in general before even beginning to speak about my research. It is quite bizarre being accused of being a prude or being “anti-sex” when you spend your professional life researching, writing and talking about sex and sexual pleasure!

One of the most important elements of feminism is an understanding that sexuality is socially constructed. That is, sexuality is not purely an issue of biology. How we understand and experience sexuality is heavily contingent upon the cultural and historical circumstances in which we live. This perspective is not unique to feminism, but it is a very important element of all forms of feminism.

So when we talk about inequality between men and women, for example, a social constructionist approach forces us to recognise that this is not an innate or pre-determined situation. This is a situation that can, and should, be challenged.

But challenging inequality is, unfortunately, not enough. There are real material barriers relating to overcoming disadvantage associated with gender, class, race and ethnicity, disability and sexuality (to name but a few). And this is why claims that individuals can simply be “empowered” to overcome disadvantage rings a bit hollow. If we do not recognise that there are often structural and institutional barriers to equality then we tend to blame people for their own circumstances.

To bring about real change, we need social movements. And that is what, to me, feminism is at its heart: a social movement for equality and women’s civil rights.

What are the main points you would like readers to know about the book, but also about pornography and sexology?

The overarching theme of the book is really that sex is a social act. Our conceptions of what sex is, and what is should be, are framed by cultural expectations and norms. The porn industry and sex therapy are both important players in forming these expectations and norms in the West today. So it is important that we question the glamourised version of porn that is (carefully) presented to us in many pop culture representations and that we also question the over-simplified and medicalised version of sexuality presented to us by many so-called “sex experts”. The book shows that the concepts of what “good sex” is in both porn and sexology (the “science of sex”) actually have a lot in common, in particular, the idea that women’s sexuality is largely there to service men’s needs. Hardly a great vision for women’s sexual pleasure!

Ultimately, we need to start imagining versions of sexuality we would like to see and this is how I end the book. There aren’t any grand solutions presented, I just hope it opens up some new conversations.

You discuss the influence of the sex industry and sexology on women’s sexuality and the notion that these industries promote harm, objectification and the sexual servicing of men by women. For those who have not read the book, could you offer a short explanation?

I argue that the dominant model of sexuality promoted to women in both pornography and in sexology / sex therapy has a lot in common with systems of prostitution. That is, it is assumed that women should be constantly sexually available and that women’s role is primarily having to sexually service men. In this model it is not a woman’s sexual pleasure that defines whether or not sex is “good sex” but rather whether or not she has performed to the expectations of an (assumed) male lover.

That this model of sex, focused on men’s sexual pleasure, is a hallmark of how the porn industry constructs “good sex” is probably not surprising.  What was surprising, to me at least, was that these same assumptions about what women are “really for” can be found in academic and popular sexology. There are concepts such as “receptivity”, for example, which suggest normal and healthy women should be “highly receptive” to sexual advances from a male partner and that women should have sex when they don’t want to in order to please angry or irritable partners. This vision of sex presented to women is quite bleak, and in many instances, tends to justify men’s sexual coercion.

A model of sex which promotes the idea that women should acquiesce to unwanted sexual advances because they are there simply to please men is seriously harmful, not only to individual women’s interests, but to women as a group. It also sounds like something from a century ago! Instead of telling women to “Lie back and think of England” we tell them to watch porn or take a variety of pills, patches and creams.

When you are not busy lecturing, writing and doing research, what do you do to unwind?

Nothing very glamorous – I’m not sure how I survived before the advent of DVDs and Wii. Curling up in front of the TV with a blanket and a cuppa helps keep me sane and I like to kid myself that being good at tennis on the Wii means I could have been a Wimbledon champion if only I hadn’t spent all my time reading books.

Dr Meagan Tyler is a lecturer in sociology at Victoria University, Australia. She tweets @DrMeaganTyler.

Don't Go To China For Organ Transplants

Published by Free Malaysia Today, 12 July 2010. By Teoh El Sen.

SUBANG JAYA: Malaysians who go to China for organ transplant risk contracting serious diseases, says a World Health Organisation (WHO) expert.

Dr Francis Delmonico, a WHO adviser, said some Malaysians who had gone abroad for organ transplants had returned home with diseases like TB, hepatitis and HIV.

According to a report by the Malaysian Dialysis and Transplant Registry, some 60% of Malaysians have gone overseas for transplants in the past nine years (2000-2009), with 856 seeking treatment in China alone.

Speaking at a forum on "Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism -- the need for regulatory and legislative control" held here last Friday, Delmonico advised Malaysians not go to China.

"We do not know where they get the organs. But in most cases, the organs are taken from executed prisoners. And we know that when patients go there and ask for a donor, the authorities would just say, 'we need a B-blood type execution' and it's done and some middlemen get the money," said Delmonico, who is also the director of medical afffairs and president-elect of the Transplantation Society.

"People need to know that those who went abroad for organ transplants have become ill on returning home. Besides, nobody is keeping tabs on how these transplants are done after the money has been paid. This is a fact. They (medical authorities) don't care and there are no guarantees," he added.

He said the commercialisation of organs – buying and selling of organs – is known to occur in countries such as China, Pakistan, India, the Philippines and Egypt.

“This is unethical and should not be sanctioned,” he added.

Delmonico also urged the Malaysian government to draw up new laws to combat organ trafficking and at the same time boost the efficiency of the local transplant agency.

Condemning reports of kidnappings and other forms of coercion to harvest human organs, he said that it was often the rich who would travel abroad to purchase organs from the poor.

“This is also a form of exploitation,” he said.

Be tough on middlemen

Malaysian Society of Transplantation president Dr Harjit Singh agreed, saying: "We must be aware that this (kidnappings) is happening."

"We need laws in place to safeguard the interest of our citizens and to prevent organ trafficking from reaching our shores,” Harjit said.

He added that organ transplants in Malaysia are governed by the Human Tissues Act 1974, which needs to be amended or replaced with a new Act.

Former Bar Council president Ambiga Sreenevasan, who was also present, said Malaysia needs to be "tough on the middlemen" by enacting news laws or amending existing ones such as the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act 2007.

She said the country should have comprehensive programmes to address poverty so that Malaysia would not become a target for the organ black market.

Ministry of Health official Dr Azmie Shapie said the ministry is trying to strengthen its capacity to provide transplants but the main challenge is getting more organs.

"If we do not address this, then other issues will crop up. Our people who go to other countries for tranplants could contract hepatitis B, HIV, and so one. We cannot condone it," said Azmie.

National Transplant Resource Centre chief national transplant coordinator Dr Lela Yasmin Mansor told FMT that organ trafficking is now decreasing as countries are becoming more aware of the problem.

"In line with the Declaration of Istanbul on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism we adopted last year, we must have laws to prosecute those who traffick.

“Right now, the Ministry of Health has a set of policies against the buying and selling of organs but there is no provision to penalise those who do it."

Lela added that in addition to more public willingness to donate, the transplant agency also needs funding for more doctors, nurses and logistics.

About 60,000 transplants are taking place worldwide each year, and one in 10 are done illegally. In Malaysia, some 10,000 patients are waiting in line for organs such as kidneys, livers, hearts and lungs.

Unifi ‘backdoor’ allows hacking, spying

Published by The Malaysian Insider, by Lee Wei Lian.

KUALA LUMPUR, June 2 — Over 1,000 UniFi customers are exposed to a potential security risk of attacks from hackers and spying when using the high speed broadband service from Telekom Malaysia.

The security risk comes from a second administration account on routers that UniFi customers have to use.

The routers have the option for remote management enabled and customers were not informed and therefore unable to reset the password.

Security consultant Dinesh Nair, who has seen the second administration account, said that it appeared to be for maintenance purposes and allows Telekom Malaysia to troubleshoot UniFi problems remotely.

But he added that the password was “guessable” and with the remote management option turned on, it left the router vulnerable to unauthorised access and abuse such as forcing dropped connections and listening to the setting up of email passwords.

“It’s a security risk,” said Dinesh

“Telekom Malaysia should have been open about it from day one. The potential for damage is there.”

He said that the remote management option should have been turned off by default and turned on only when Telekom Malaysia needed remote access.

He added that it was particularly critical for business Unifi customers as competitors could try and gain unauthorised access to company IT systems via the remote management option.

“It’s a foot in the door,” he said.

When contacted, Telekom Malaysia said that they will discuss the issue with their technical team and issue a response.

One broadband industry executive said that the severity of the risk depended on the permissions that were granted to the remote access user.

“Can they reset the box? Or is it just to monitor usage?” said the executive.

“But the risk is greater for business users than home users as it could pose a security breach.”

UniFi user KC Lau said he was upset after reading about the issue on a techie forum (http://forum.lowyat.net/topic/1439287 ) and recalled how his technician told him not to change the passwords on even his WiFi router so that Telekom Malaysia technicians could have remote access.

“Why can’t we change the password on our own WiFi router?” he said.

As of May 7, there were about 1,700 UniFi customers.

Telekom’s UniFi service is part of its High Speed Broadband (HSBB) project was initiated in 2008 and is initially be available in fourareas around the Klang Valley: Shah Alam, Subang Jaya, Taman Tun Dr Ismail and Bangsar. It will be expanded to another 22 areas by June and a further 22 by December.

By 2012, TM expects to hit 1.2 million premises passed.

Blood Recipient vs Gay Donor Rights

My blood is ‘gay’, is that OK?

The Malaysian Insider.

WASHINGTON, May 28 — Apparently not, in the UK or US. On June 10-11 the Federal Advisory Committee on Blood Safety and Availability will reconsider the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) 1983 ban on accepting “gay” blood or the blood from any man who has had sex with a man (MSM) since 1977.

World Blood Donor Day takes place on June 14 and this year’s campaign is “New blood for the world” with targeted efforts to get youth worldwide to donate blood not just on June 14 but more regularly without rewards. To be a blood donor, there is a long list of factors that first have to be considered that could make you ineligible for varying periods of time, that can range from travelling/living outside of the US, medications, MSM, cocaine-use, piercings, tattoos, even electrolysis.

The current ban on “gay” blood is centred on men’s sexual orientation rather than lifestyle. On March 9, 18 US senators including former Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry urged the FDA to address their “outdated” policy according to the news network CNN on May 26. Kerry wrote, “a heterosexual who has had sex with a prostitute need only wait a year [before giving blood]. That does not strike me as a sound scientific conclusion” given that “gay men, including those who are in monogamous relationships, are forbidden from contributing blood for the rest of their lives.”

However the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) continues to show MSM as the highest risk group in HIV transmission and claim that gay men are 15 times more likely to have HIV than the rest of the population.

And, Jay Brooks,MD, professor of pathology at the University of Texas Health Science Center, explained this is about science not about gay rights, adding it has “nothing to do with someone being gay. Any group that’s epidemiologically at risk of making blood unsafe, it’s unfortunate. ... It’s a matter of epidemiology.”

Brooks continued, “The interest of the recipient is greater than any donor” and “I’d hate to tell the one person who got HIV through a blood transfusion, ‘Sorry, we changed the regulation.’ “

Technologies and practices in blood screenings have come a long way since the haemophilia blood contamination catastrophe of the late 1970s and early 1980s where companies were soliciting blood from high-risk individuals including prisoners and junkies.

Various organisations, including the Human Rights Campaign and the American Red Cross, agree that safety is paramount and each and every donor needs to be screened equally irrespective of the sex of their partner. They also agree with Kerry that gay men, who have been cleared the same way heterosexual men are, should be allowed to donate blood and not be banned for life. — AFP/Relaxnews