who closes Nassau OTB, a public benefit corporation, on roman catholic Easter Sunday in preference to Greek orthodox Easter Sunday.
Ny state will default just like Greece.
Greece's sorry reckoning
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Japan BCG Laboratory was established in 1952 and has produced high-quality BCG (Bacillus-Calmette Guérin) vaccine ever since. Japan BCG Laboratory is the sole supplier of this vaccine in Japan.
Working with UNICEF, WHO and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), Japan BCG Laboratory has distributed its BCG vaccine in more than 50 countries worldwide, and has become a respected and longstanding supplier of high-quality products. Japan BCG Laboratory has supplied more than 2 billion doses of BCG vaccine over the past 40 years. |  |  |
In 1924, Dr Kiyoshi Shiga brought to Japan a BCG strain from the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France. The strain was sub-cultured and was subsequently named BCG Tokyo 172 strain. Under the auspices of the Japan Anti-Tuberculosis Association (JATA), the Research Institute of Tuberculosis (RIT) developed and produced dried BCG vaccine and tuberculin. In 1952, the production department of RIT became Japan BCG Laboratory. Since then, Japan BCG Laboratory has gained international recognition:
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Japan BCG Laboratory puts customer needs first and foremost, prioritizing all associated activities to ensure the timely supply of BCG vaccines. This dedication to outstanding performance has earned Japan BCG Laboratory an exceptional reputation among its numerous clients. Throughout the whole activities, Japan BCG Laboratory continually strives for the prevention of tuberculosis all around the world.
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Arlene Weintraub Contributor
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Here's How Lee Iacocca Wants To Cure Diabetes
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In the late 1990s, former Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca handed more than $10 million to Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) scientist Denise Faustman and instructed her to transform an ancient tuberculosis vaccine into a cure for type 1 diabetes. Today Faustman announced the latest milestone in that project—FDA clearance to launch a large trial in people based on what her lab learned from that early research. And the 90-year-old auto magnate continues to fund her studies through the Iacocca Family Foundation, which he founded in 1984 in memory of his late wife, Mary, who died of complications from diabetes.
The trial, announced at the American Diabetes Association conference in Boston, will investigate whether treating patients with the vaccine, bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG), will improve natural insulin production in adult patients whose pancreases still produce small but detectable levels of the hormone. If it works, BCG might one day be used to essentially reverse the disease in some patients—even adults who have suffered from diabetes from childhood—says Faustman, director of MGH’s immunobiology laboratory and the study’s principal investigator. And it wouldn’t cost much, either, since BCG has been around for nearly a century and is available in generic form.
“We’re not only going for something cheap and safe, but also trying to figure out a good treatment that might reverse the most severe form of the disease in people who are 15 or 20 years out,” Faustman says.
Here’s how BCG works: The vaccine prompts the immune system to make tumor necrosis factor (TNF), a protein that destroys the abnormal T-cells that interfere with the pancreas’s ability to make insulin. That elevation of TNF has already been well-proven to be quite therapeutic in some settings—BCG, in fact, is approved by the FDA not only to prevent tuberculosis but also to treat bladder cancer.
Faustman’s lab spent years doing basic science experiments to show TNF can temporarily eliminate the abnormal T-cells that cause type 1 diabetes. Iacocca’s foundation, which had been supporting some of that work since coming across the lab’s earliest studies, invited Faustman to present the results of her research at a board meeting in 1999, she recalls.
Iacocca asked Faustman why she wasn’t using BCG to cure diabetes in mouse models of the disease. “I said, ‘It’s too early. We need to do more basic science,’” Faustman recalls. “He looked at me and said, ‘You know, it’s my money.’ We made a deal that if I would aggressively go forward in the mouse he would support me. He gets the credit for supporting the basic science that led to the discovery that TNF is needed in type 1 diabetes.”
Lee Iacocca’s foundation has supported basic diabetes research at Massachusetts General Hospital (Credit: AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
With continued funding from the foundation and other supporters, Faustman launched a small phase 1 clinical trial in people designed to prove that BCG would kill the bad T-cells and stimulate good T-cells in a way that would restore insulin secretion. It worked, though the positive effects were transient. So Faustman started planning a larger phase 2 study to prove that regular injections of BCG, followed by periodic booster shots, would produce a sustained response, and to determine whether that response might improve over time as the pancreas regenerates.
Still, Faustman’s team had to overcome one big hurdle before the FDA would approve the phase 2 trial: a massive shortage of BCG. Two of the biggest producers of the vaccine, Merck and Sanofi , have suffered production problems, leading to huge manufacturing delays. The issue has left some bladder cancer patients in the lurch, as reported recently in the Wall Street Journal. Faustman and her colleagues, who had been using Sanofi’s vaccine, had to go looking for an alternate supplier.
Still, Faustman’s team had to overcome one big hurdle before the FDA would approve the phase 2 trial: a massive shortage of BCG. Two of the biggest producers of the vaccine, Merck and Sanofi , have suffered production problems, leading to huge manufacturing delays. The issue has left some bladder cancer patients in the lurch, as reported recently in the Wall Street Journal. Faustman and her colleagues, who had been using Sanofi’s vaccine, had to go looking for an alternate supplier.
So MGH collaborated with a division of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization to secure the vaccine for the trial from a drug manufacturer that’s run by the Japanese government, Faustman says. “We had to get the FDA to certify that [the manufacturer's] processes are up to U.S. standards so the BCG can be used for trials,” she says. “This is not something that academics normally do, but we were determined.”
Faustman’s team has raised $19 million of the $25 million needed to complete the phase 2 study, thanks largely to the Iococca Family Foundation, which continues to be the project’s biggest source of support. “I made a promise to my late wife to find a cure for type 1 diabetes,” Iococca said in a statement. “Now my family and I look forward to the continued progress and are proud to support this effort to get closer to that goal.”
Faustman’s plan is to enroll 150 adults with diabetes, some of whom will receive BCG, with the others getting a placebo. The patients will have two injections four weeks apart and then annual injections over four years. They will continue to take insulin, though the research team will be watching closely to see if the BCG reduces the amount of insulin needed to maintain blood-sugar control, Faustman says. “We expect the metabolic effect to occur gradually over five years,” she says.
However it turns out, Faustman says, she will always be grateful to Iacocca for having the patience to continue funding the BCG research. “Many other people support us now, but the Iacocca Foundation makes a huge contribution to these trials,” she says. “He sees the big picture and is willing to look for ways to change the paradigm.”
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FALIRON BAY, Greece — THE sea, as I look from my office window, is calm. Little white sailboats glide over silver waters in the Saronic Gulf. A picture of peace, but the scene of countless battles. In these waters, at Salamis, an alliance of free Greek states under Athens’s leadership defeated the Persian navy in 480 B.C., giving democracy room to develop. In 1941, as German forces swept into the country, a handful of allied airmen tried to stop black waves of enemy planes, with many pilots plunging to their deaths in the bay one April day.
Today, as my country rushes toward another battle of sorts — a referendum that will determine its place in the world and mark its history — I sense “the eternal note of sadness” that the poet Matthew Arnold imagined Sophocles hearing in “the turbid ebb and flow of human misery,” as he stood on this shore.
Our country is at peace, but the stakes are as high as if we were at war — a war waged not with battleships, guns and planes but with words and money. Its foot soldiers, in a sense, are the lines of the unemployed, the pensioners crowding outside banks; cars queuing at gas stations are a crippled cavalry; generals are the finance ministers who lob proposals at one another with the aggression of those who will not suffer the consequences.
All are caught up in a five-year campaign in which Greece has struggled to meet the terms of the biggest bailout in history, a total of 240 billion euros from the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund in exchange for austerity and reform. The government blames the creditors for Greece’s woes, claiming they turned the country into a “debt colony.”
With the E.C.B. declining to raise the limit on emergency funds this past week, our banks quickly began to run out of cash. Within days, a sophisticated society began to unravel — old people struggled to draw their pensions, trade and industry froze, websites could not renew their domain names with overseas providers, smartphone owners could not download apps as their credit cards were blocked.
On the brink of bankruptcy, Greece is in a worse state than before the bailout. In Sunday’s referendum, we voters will show whether we want to keep negotiating for a deal with our partners or gamble the future on a proud “no” to further diktats.
A lot more is at stake than the only stable currency Greece has had in a history punctuated by bankruptcies. Will we raise children and grow old in a united society? Will we remain part of Europe’s further development? Will the idea of Europe — named after a maiden in Greek myth, Europa — as a union fall apart, country by country? Will our children be able to study abroad, or will we sink into an isolation that will harm the next generation as much as our pensioners now suffer?
The effort to restore Greece to normalcy has been a failure, because of poor policies, fundamental problems in Greece’s dysfunctional state and a pitiful lack of leadership in Greece and among policy makers in Europe and at the I.M.F. The collapse of the parties that had mismanaged Greece for decades created a vacuum that Syriza, a coalition of the radical left, filled with promises: It would continue to procure bailout funds, scrap austerity, undo reforms and still keep the country within the eurozone.
Five months of acrimonious sparring with our partners and creditors failed to achieve this. Domestically, the government has overseen the unraveling of many reforms, done little to crack down on tax evasion and corruption, and repeated the cronyism of the past with blatantly political appointments in the public sector. With no options left before bankruptcy, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras rolled the dice and announced the referendum, urging citizens to vote “no.”
Those citizens (and taxpayers in other countries) have paid a price for the failed bailout; now the Greeks face even greater hardship, whether we stay in the euro or are forced out. Worse, though, is the isolation that stems from a lack of communication between Athens and its partners. Both sides played a game of chicken, and neither was bluffing — the Europeans, led by Germany, were determined to continue imposing austerity; the Greeks were determined to ride their recklessness to the end. The Greeks’ demand for debt relief, and their declarations of restored pride, were seen by creditors as petulance. Instead of working for solutions, both sides sought excuses for failure.
The greatest damage, so far, has been the rift that it opened between Greece and our partners. We forgot that we are all supposed to be in this together, that Greece and the European Union should be indivisible, that the problems one country faces will be faced by others, that each country can survive only as part of the Union. A “yes” vote will oblige both Greece and Europe to solve the current impasse; a “no” will be an excuse to let Greece sink.
Within Greece, the tensions and divisions of the past few years have been compounded by the uncertainty of recent months and the real misery of the last few days. A “yes” majority might allow us to get down to the business of making Greece a viable economy while an integral part of the European Union; a “no” vote would divide us further, with economic woes and social tensions growing.
Throughout their history, the Greeks have fought hardest when all seemed lost. We won so many wars, overcame so many coups and foreign occupations to achieve the stability that now — in peacetime — is threatened. With so much at stake, we will soon see whether today’s Greeks are worthy of their ancestors.
