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சித்தர் சிவவாக்கியர் சிந்தனை

by Keyem Dharmalingam 

சித்தர் சிவவாக்கியர் சிந்தனை -114

பாரடங்க உள்ளதும் பரந்த வானம் உள்ளதும்

ஓரிடமும் இன்றியே ஒன்றி நின்ற ஒண் சுடர்

ஆரிடமும் இன்றியே அகத்திலும் புறத்துளும்

சீரிடங்கள் கண்டவன் சிவன் தெளிந்த ஞானியே

பூமியில் அடங்கியுள்ள யாவிலும் ஆகாயமாக விரிந்துள்ள அனைத்திலும் அங்கிங்கெனாதபடி நீக்கமற நிரந்த பரம்பொருளே சோதியாகவுள்ளது. அச்சோதியே எல்லா உயிரிலும் வியாபித்து அவரவர் மனத்துள்ளும் புற உடம்பிலும்  மெய்ப்பொருளாக விளங்கி நிற்கின்றது. அதனை அறிந்து தன் சீவனிலேயே சிவனைக் கண்டு தியானிக்கும் யோகி தெளிந்த ஞானியே !!!!

http://sivavakiyar.blogspot.com/ நண்பரே லிங்கினை அழுத்தி சித்தர் சிவவாக்கியரின் சிந்தனை மற்றும் சிவனைப் பற்றிய 550 பாடல்களை இனிய சந்தத்தில் வேண்டும் பொழுது கேளுங்கள் மனதிருக்கு மகிழ்வாக இருக்கும். இந்நாள் இனிய பொன் நாளாக ...மலர வாழ்த்துக்கள்

புற்றுநோய் கட்டி வளர்ச்சியை தடுக்கும் வலி நிவாரண மருந்து

புற்றுநோய் கட்டி வளர்ச்சியை தடுக்கும் வலி நிவாரண மருந்து இபு ப்ரோபென் போன்ற வலி நிவாரண மருந்துகளுக்கும், புற்றுநோய் புரதத்திற்கும் தொடர்பு இருப்பதை ஆய்வாளர்கள் கண்டறிந்து உள்ளனர். இத்தகைய வலி நிவாரண மருந்துகள் மூலம் புற்றுநோய் கட்டி வளர்ச்சியை தடுக்க முடியும் என தெரியவந்துள்ளது. இந்த புது கண்டுபிடிப்பு ப்ராஸ்டேட் மற்றும் இதரப் புற்றுநோய்களுக்கு தீர்வு காண உதவும் என ஆராய்ச்சியாளர்கள் நம்பிக்கை தெரிவித்து உள்ளனர். இபு ப்ரோபென் வலி நிவாரணி போதை மருந்து தூண்டுதல் வகை சாராத ப்ரோபென் மருந்து வகையைச் சார்ந்தது ஆகும். புற்றுநோய் கட்டி வளர்ச்சியைத் தடுக்கும் வலி நிவாரணி குறித்து கெமிக்கல் கொம்யூனிகேஷன்ஸ் இதழில் வெளியிடப்பட்டுள்ளது. வலி நிவாரணத்திற்கு பயன்படும் ப்ரோபென் வகை மருந்துகள் உடலில் ஒரே வழியில் செயல்படுகின்றன. இவை AMACR என்ற புரதத்தை கட்டுப்படுத்துவதாக உள்ளது. இந்த புரதம் பல புற்றுநோய்களில் தீவிரமாக செயல்படுகின்றன. இந்த புரதம் அபரிதமாவதை கட்டுப்படுத்துவதில் வலி நிவாரண ப்ரோபேன் வகை மருந்துகள் வெகுவாக உதவுகின்றன. வலி நிவாரணிகளான இந்த வகை மருந்துகள் புற்றுநோய் கட்டி வளர்ச்சியை தடுக்க உதவுவதை எங்களது சோதனைகள் உறுதிப்படுத்தி உள்ளன என பாத் பல்கலைகழக தலைமை ஆய்வாளர் டொக்டர் மாத்யூ லாயிட் தெரிவித்தார்.

Conquistador Silver May Not Have Sunk Spain's Currency

by Sara Reardon 

Pieces of eight. Spanish coins may not have been minted from New World silver until the 18th century, researchers argue.

Credit: (Left) Photo courtesy of Daniel Frank Sedwick, LLC; (Right) Howard Pyle “An Attack on a Galleon” frontispiece/Wikimedia Commons

Between 1520 and 1650, Spain’s economy suffered crippling and unrelenting inflation in the so-called Price Revolution. Most historians have attributed that inflation, in part, to the importation, starting in 1550, of silver from the Americas, which supposedly put much more currency into circulation in Spain. But in a report out this week, a team of researchers argues that for more than a century the Spanish did not use this imported silver to make coins, suggesting that the amount of money circulating in Spain did not increase and could not have triggered the inflation.

Between the 16th and 18th centuries, the Spanish extracted as much as 300 tons of silver per year from mines in Peru and Mexico. If the heavy bars managed to survive the hazards of the Atlantic, both natural and piratical, they could either be coined into pieces of eight or be traded with other countries to offset Spain's many costs, which at this time included financing wars in the Netherlands and importing porcelain and silk from China.

But did the Spanish actually use the imported silver to make coins? To find out, archaeometrist Anne-Marie DeSaulty and colleagues at the University of Lyon in France used mass spectrometry to measure the ratios of several metal isotopes—atoms of the same element with different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei—in 91 old coins: 24 ancient coins from Greece and Rome, 23 medieval coins from around Europe, 25 coins minted in Spain from the 16th and 18th centuries under a succession of different kings, and 19 coins minted from Latin American silver.

The Latin American coins generally had a broader mix of different silver, lead, and copper isotopes than the European coins, likely because of the geologic complexity of the volcanic caves that hosted the New World’s most prolific silver mines, the researchers report online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The ratio of the silver-109 isotope to silver-107 turned out to be much higher in New World silver than in the European coins. More important to the debate over the Price Revolution, the researchers discovered that coins with dates and heads indicating that they were minted in Spain prior to the reign of Philip V (1700 to 1746) had an isotopic makeup similar to medieval European coins. In contrast, coins minted later were more similar to those from the Andes. That suggests that even though American silver arrived in Spain in 1550, the Spanish waited well over 100 years before using it for their own currency. Instead of making coins, DeSaulty argues that the Spanish probably traded the American silver quickly.

However, Akira Motomura, an economist at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts, who studies the economics of silver flow during this time period, questions whether the sample of coins DeSaulty studied is large enough to support her conclusions. The researchers analyzed only two to five coins minted under each of the Spanish kings between the 16th and 18th centuries. DeSaulty contends that because the isotopic makeup of contemporaneous coins is very consistent, the sample is likely representative of the coins that were in circulation.

But even if one accepts that the Spanish did not use New World silver in their coins for decades, does that eliminate the importation of silver from the Americas as the cause of the runaway inflation? It certainly wasn’t the sole cause, DeSaulty argues, and Motomura says the situation was far more complicated. “In terms of the effect on prices, there’s a lot more going on,” Motomura says, than simply the amount of money in Spain. China switched to silver currency from paper money about this time, he says, which would drive up the value of silver even as the world’s supply went up.

Did Quiet Sun Cause Little Ice Age After All?

Did Quiet Sun Cause Little Ice Age After All?

by Govert Schilling 

Brrr ... Cold winters in 17th-century Europe, as shown in this painting by Hendrick Avercamp, may have been caused by a lack of solar activity.

Credit: Hendrick Avercamp/Wikimedia Commons

BOSTON—For decades, astronomers and climatologists have debated whether a prolonged 17th-century cold spell, best documented in Europe, could have been caused by the sun's erratic behaviour. Now, an American solar physicist says he has new evidence to suggest that the sun was indeed the culprit.

The sun isn’t as constant as it appears. Instead, its surface is regularly beset by storms of swirling magnetic fields. As a result, like a teenager plagued with acne, the face of the sun often sprouts relatively dark and short-lived “sunspots,” which appear when strong magnetic fields inhibit the upwelling of hotter gas from below. The number of those spots waxes and wanes regularly in an 11-year cycle. However, even that cycle isn’t immutable.

In 1893, English astronomer Edward Maunder, studying historical records, noted that the cycle stopped between 1645 and 1715. Instead, the sun was almost devoid of sunspots during this period. In 1976, American solar physicist John “Jack” Eddy suggested there might have been a causal link between this “Maunder Minimum” in the number of sunspots and the contemporaneous Little Ice Age, when average temperatures in Europe were a degree centigrade lower than normal.

One might expect the absence of dark spots to make the sun slightly brighter and hotter. But the absence of other signs of magnetic activity, such as bright patches of very hot gas known as faculae more than compensates for this effect. So in fact, the total energy output of the sun is lower during a solar minimum. If the minimum is prolonged, as it was in the second half of the 17th century, the dip in output might indeed affect Earth’s climate.

However, scientists have debated whether the effect could have been large enough. For instance, in a recent paper in Geophysical Research Letters, solar physicist Karel Schrijver of the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, California, and his colleagues argue that during the Maunder Minimum, the sun couldn’t have dimmed enough to explain the Little Ice Age. Even during a prolonged minimum, they claim, an extensive network of very small faculae on the sun’s hot surface remains to keep the energy output above a certain threshold level.

Not so, says Peter Foukal, an independent solar physicist with Heliophysics Inc. in Nahant, Massachusetts, who contends that Schrijver and his colleagues are “assuming an answer” in a circular argument. According to Foukal, who presented his work yesterday here at the summer meeting of the American Astronomical Society, there is no reason to believe that the network of small faculae would persist during long periods of solar quiescence. In fact, he says, observations between 2007 and 2009, when the sun was spotless for an unusually long time, reveal that all forms of magnetic activity diminished, including the small-faculae network.

What’s more, detailed observations from orbiting solar telescopes have shown that the small faculae pump out more energy per unit surface area than the larger ones already known to disappear along with the sunspots. So if the small faculae start to fade, too, that would have an even stronger effect on the total energy production of the sun. “There’s tantalizing evidence that [during the Maunder Minimum] the sun may have actually dimmed more than we have thought until now,” Foukal says.

Even so, Foukal concedes that other factors, such as enhanced volcanic activity around the globe, may also have played a role in causing Europe’s Little Ice Age. Meanwhile, the biggest worry to solar physicists—and to society—is that no one knows what caused the sun’s prolonged quiescence in the first place. As far as anybody knows, a repeat of the Maunder Minimum could start within a few years with the next dip in the number of sunspots.

Furor Over Proposed Brazilian Forest Law

by Antonio Regalado 

Credit: NASA

The passage on Tuesday by Brazil's Chamber of Deputies of anamended forest law favorable to ranchers and loggers has brought an outpouring of concern from environmentalists, with some calling it a green light for deforestation.

The bill, which passed by a wide margin but is subject to change by Brazil's Senate, offers amnesty from penalties for illegal cuts made prior to July 2008, and for small landholders in the Amazon (up to 400 hectares) it would suspend a rule requiring them to maintain a minimum of 80% forest cover, among other changes.

"It's a disaster. It heightens the risk of deforestation, water depletion, and erosion," Paulo Gustavo Prado, head of environmental policy at Conservation International-Brazil told The Globe and Mail .

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has threatened to veto parts of the bill, which also gives states more control over establishing conservation rules.

Rural lawmakers say the legislation is a much needed update to Brazil's forest code, which dates to 1965, and argue that it would actually slow deforestation by allowing landowners to obtain legal titles to their plots. Brazil already has strict laws on deforestation, but these are only intermittently enforced in the vast Amazon region, leaving many farmers in legal limbo.

Brazil's scientific community complained this week that researchers were largely shut out of deliberations. On Wednesday, the Brazilian Academy of Sciences called the legislation "precipitous" and said it had no "scientific and technical foundation" (statement, in Portuguese).

The society has called for another 2 years of scientific review.

Environmentalists appear set on rallying against the proposed changes. Marina Silva, Brazil's outspoken former environment minister, called the legislation "one of the biggest steps backwards I've ever seen in Brazil. ... We have returned to the worst possible world." Indeed, the bill's advance comes amid a recent surge in deforestation, which in March and April reached a pace almost five times that of 2010. Farmers may have cleared land in the hopes of winning amnesty, said experts, but rising commodity prices likely played a role as well by increasing demand for land. Brazil is a major exporter of food to the rest of the world, including soybeans to Asia and beef products to Eastern Europe.

Fueling outrage among activists, the bill passed in Brazil's congress only hours after the killing of environmentalist and antideforestation campaigner José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and his wife, Maria do Espírito Santo, in an ambush in the state of Para, which has among the highest rates of clear cutting. News reports said the ears were cut off of the couple, a sign of a contract killing.

Another Look Beneath Hawaii Knocks Islands Off Their Riser Pipe

by Richard A. Kerr 

Hawaii may be a vacation destination and a surfers’ paradise, but it is also an exemplar of a long-sought geological structure for some earth scientists. The Big Island of Hawaii sits atop a vast “plume,” or upwelling, of hot rock from Earth’s deep mantle—at least, so some scientists argue. However, new seismic imaging reported in tomorrow’s issue of Science reveals no plume under Hawaii. Instead, it draws attention to a new feature well west of Hawaii that may or may not be part of a new kind of plume system. The prize for bagging the first bona fide plume seems to remain out of reach for a while longer.

The most recent sighting of a standard Hawaiian plume came when seismologists imaged the mantle by monitoring how quickly seismic waves from distant earthquakes passed upward beneath and around the islands (Science, 4 December 2009, p. 1330). The waves slowed when passing through hotter-than-normal rock in a column extending at least 1500 kilometres beneath the islands. That could be the upper half of a hot, vertical plume of rock rising like smoke from a chimney. It might extend from near where the rocky mantle meets the core's molten iron 2900 kilometres down. Such a plume would deliver molten rock to fuel the Hawaiian volcanic hot spot at Earth's surface. Other mantle-spanning plumes might stoke a few dozen other hot spots around the world.

The latest look beneath Hawaii using seismic waves differently reveals a different mantle. Seismologists Qin Cao of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge and colleagues use seismic waves that rise through the mantle and reflect from the underside of mantle layers, where different minerals form thanks to changing pressure. The depth of a given mineral transformation reflects the temperature there. Using this reflected wave technique, Cao and colleagues found elevated temperatures a few hundred kilometres beneath Hawaii, as the earlier study found. However, deeper down, they saw no sign of a rising hot column. There is no deep plume beneath Hawaii in their observations.

More than 1000 kilometres to the west, however, they find scorching rock almost 700 kilometres down, where the upper and lower mantle meet at a prominent boundary. Although rock can rise or sink through the upper-lower mantle boundary, passing through it isn’t easy. Cao and colleagues speculate that the thousand-kilometre-wide flattened blob of hot rock they see may be trapped at the boundary, with only a bit at its eastern edge managing to leak upward and feed Hawaii. And if the hot blob is old enough to have created the 60-million-year-old chain of Hawaiian Islands, they say, it would likely be replenished by hot rock rising from below.

So, the new view beneath the Pacific could reveal an offset plume. “It’s tough to make a simple, undistorted plume that extends all the way to Hawaii,” says seismologist Rob van der Hilst of MIT, a co-author on the paper. The reflection method could be revealing the upper part of a rising mantle plume as if a smokestack’s plume rose to hit a glass ceiling—the 700-kilometre boundary—only to flow to an open window at the ceiling’s edge and rise again in another plume.

As is common in mantle imaging, the new view gets a mixed reception from others in the field. “It might be right; it’s hard to tell,” says Donald Forsyth of Brown University. He and others point to inconsistencies between the new view and other studies using the same seismic waves analysed using different techniques. “Meticulous studies using different techniques don’t agree,” says seismologist Edward Garnero of Arizona State University, Tempe. The possible offset plume “is a prediction about the Earth. Let’s see how it holds up.”

Who Needs a Moon?

by Govert Schilling 

Not essential? Earth's long-term climate is stabilized by the moon. But even moonless terrestrial planets could be habitable, contrary to previous belief.

Credit: NASA

BOSTON—The number of Earth-like extrasolar planets suitable for harboring advanced life could be 10 times higher than has been assumed until now, according to a new modeling study. The finding contradicts the prevailing notion that a terrestrial planet needs a large moon to stabilize the orientation of its axis and, hence, its climate.

In 1993, French mathematicians Jacques Laskar and Philippe Robutel showed that Earth’s large moon has a stabilizing effect on our planet’s climate. Without the moon, gravitational perturbations from other planets, notably nearby Venus and massive Jupiter, would greatly disturb Earth’s axial tilt, with vast consequences for the planet’s climate. The steadily orbiting moon’s gravitational tug counteracts these disturbances, and Earth’s axial tilt never veers too far from the current value of 23.5°, where 0° would mean the axis was perpendicular to the plane of Earth’s orbit around the sun.

Indeed, Laskar and Robutel also showed that the axial tilt of Mars, which has only two tiny moons, has varied between 10° and 60° in the past, which caused huge climate variations that in turn could have contributed to the loss of most of the planet’s atmosphere, leaving Mars the bone-dry desert world that it is now. Since then, most astrobiologists have assumed that Earth-like planets in other solar systems would need a comparatively large moon to support complex life over long periods of time.

Given the generally accepted idea of how Earth got its big moon—through an improbable, dramatic collision with a Mars-sized body that knocked a huge chunk of Earth loose—astronomers estimate that only 1% of all Earth-like planets in the universe might actually have such a hefty companion. That would mean that planets harboring complex life might be relatively rare.

However, Jack Lissauer, a theoretical astrophysicist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffet Field, California, is much more optimistic. Together with Jason Barnes, a physicist at the University of Idaho, Moscow, and John Chambers, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington, D.C., he has carried out large numbers of detailed numerical simulations of "moon-less Earths," which show that the consequences are less dire than is generally assumed.

That’s because really big changes in a planet’s tilt would occur only after a very long time, so there would be more than enough time for the evolution of life, Lissauer reported yesterday here at the summer meeting of the American Astronomical Society. “The variations in Earth’s axial tilt would indeed be substantially larger if there was no large moon,” Lissauer says, “but really big excursions from the current value would only occur on time scales of billions of years.” That would leave ample time for advanced land life to evolve under relatively stable climatic conditions—although what would happen to such life during an axial shift remains unclear.

When a planet rotates in the opposite direction to its orbital motion (which happens to be the case for Venus), the effect of gravitational perturbations on its spin axis would be even smaller, the simulations indicate. And, of course, if a planetary system contains only one planet, there are no perturbations at all. Nobody knows how common such single-planet system might be.

Not everybody is overwhelmed by the importance of the new results. “I don’t think [changes in a planet’s axial tilt] would be a problem for the development of advanced life,” as any type of life would adapt to changing circumstances anyway, says planetary scientist Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

But Bill Borucki of NASA’s Ames Research Center, who is the principal investigator of the planet-hunting Kepler satellite mission, says he is “surprised and delighted” by Lissauer’s conclusions. “Kepler is searching for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars,” he says, “and this means much more of them might be harboring complex life. It’s a wonderful result.”

Satellite Imagery Uncovers Up to 17 Lost Egyptian Pyramids

by Heather Pringle 

The streets have no name. Satellite imagery reveals a maze of streets and buildings at the ancient Egyptian city of Tanis.

Credit: DigitalGlobe

When Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in 1798, he brought more than 150 scientists and scholars along with his massive army. The scholars fanned out across Egypt, describing the country’s natural and cultural history, mapping archaeological sites from Alexandria to Aswan, and bringing places such as the Valley of the Kings to the attention of the scientific world for the first time. This week, an American research team announced that it has succeeded in a high-tech follow-on to Bonaparte’s grand survey. By analyzing high-resolution satellite imagery covering all of Egypt, researchers have reportedly discovered up to 17 lost pyramids, nearly 3000 ancient settlements, and 1000 tombs.

The effort was led by archaeologist Sarah Parcak of the University of Alabama, Birmingham. The team’s work will be highlighted in a BBC documentary airing Monday in the United Kingdom and later on the Discovery Channel in the United States.

The findings are groundbreaking, says Egyptologist Willeke Wendrich of the University of California, Los Angeles, who has followed closely the team’s as-yet unpublished work. “It gives us the opportunity to get at the settlement of ancient Egypt without digging even a centimeter,” she says.

In the wake of the finds, the Egyptian government reached an agreement this week to work with Parcak and other American researchers to develop a nationwide satellite imagery project to monitor archaeological sites from space and protect them from looting and illegal house construction and other encroachments. “We are going to be teaching young Egyptians how to look at the satellite data and analyze it so they can keep an eye on these sites,” Parcak says. She and her colleagues plan to raise funds privately to support the effort.

Parcak began her study 11 years ago, searching for traces of ancient village walls buried under Egypt’s fields and desert sands. Obtaining images from both NASA and QuickBird satellites, she combined and analyzed data from the visible imagery as well as the infrared and thermal parts of the light spectrum. Through trial and error, she discovered that the most informative images were taken during the relatively wet weeks of late winter. During this period, buried mud-brick walls absorbed more moisture than usual, producing a subtle chemical signature in the overlying soil that showed up in high-resolution, infrared satellite images. These places became “our hot spots, the places that we could end up exploring on foot,” Parcak says.

The team found 17 buried pyramid-shaped structures, including one at Saqqara, famed for its numerous pyramids. That sighting was confirmed by a team of Egyptian archaeologists who excavated part of what is now thought to be a late Middle Kingdom pyramid at the site. The other 16 structures look like pyramids from space but could be elite tombs, Parcak says. “Let’s be honest, we won’t know if those pyramids are pyramids until we excavate,” she says.

To further test some of the most recent satellite finds, Parcak enlisted the help of a French archaeological team already digging at a 3000-year-old site known as Tanis. The satellite data revealed a warren of mud-brick walls, mazelike streets, and large residences that may have housed the wealthy. So the French team chose a structure from the images and excavated there. Beneath about 30 centimeters of sediments, they discovered mud-brick walls. “They found an almost 100% correlation between what we see on the imagery and what we see on the ground,” Parcak says. “So this gives a significant amount of credence to what we see in the whole image.”

“It’s really incredible work, particularly the results for Tanis,” says Peter Lacovara, an Egyptologist at the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta, who is not a member of Parcak’s team. “You can see the entire city plan under the sands.” The greatest payoff may become apparent in years to come, adds Lacovara, as the Egyptian government develops a space-based archaeological monitoring system founded on satellite data. “Ancient sites are all over the place in Egypt,” Lacovara concludes. “And there’s just not enough time and money to monitor them on the ground.”

On the Fly, German Doctors Find Treatment for DeadlyE. coli Infections

by Kai Kupferschmidt 

In the middle of the biggest outbreak of food poisoning caused by the bacterium enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC) that Germany has ever seen, a group of doctors may have found a way to treat the most severe cases. The finding appears today in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

At least four people have died in the outbreak, thought to have been caused by eating contaminated vegetables. To date, 276 patients have developed hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS). The potentially fatal syndrome, characterized by a destruction of red blood cells and severe kidney problems caused by the bacteria’s toxin, is the most severe complication of an EHEC infection.

In the article, Franz Schaefer, a nephrologist at the Center for Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine in Heidelberg, Germany, and other physicians describe how they successfully treated three EHEC-infected children suffering from HUS with a novel approach. They used the monoclonal antibody eculizumab, which has been on the market since 2007, to treat a rare blood disorder. Eculizumab inhibits a part of the human immune system called the complement system that usually destroys invading cells that have been tagged for destruction by other parts of the immune system.

The complement system has been implicated for some time in certain patients who develop HUS without any EHEC infection, known as atypical HUS patients, and eculizumab has been used successfully to treat them. Recent research suggests that the complement system might also be involved in the HUS cases caused by EHEC.

Last autumn, Schaefer saw a young girl suffering from HUS due to an EHEC infection. He first tried the most common treatment, replacing the patients’ blood plasma with donor plasma to rid the body of the toxins. (HUS patients are usually not treated with antibiotics because the antibiotics can aggravate the symptoms by releasing the shiga toxin from the bacteria in large amounts.)

When the girl’s health did not improve, Schaefer tried the antibody. "We did not have any other option. She was showing severe neurological symptoms, paralysis of one side of the body, cramps, and then slipped into a coma," Schaefer remembers. “But when we finally gave her the antibody, she improved immensely within 24 hours,” Schaefer says. “This was not a controlled experiment, of course,” he says. “But the improvements were very suggestive of being due to the treatment.”

Schaefer was apparently not the only one with this idea. When he wrote a case report for NEJM, the editors notified him that two other groups had sent in similar reports around the same time. “So we wrote something all together and it was accepted for publication 14 days ago,“ Schaefer says. A few days later, HUS cases started appearing en masse in northern Germany.

“I could not believe it," Schaefer says. "HUS cases with severe neurological symptoms are very rare, but now they are everywhere." He also informed his colleagues elsewhere. “A lot of them have asked about the new treatment, and a few patients are already being treated with it."

At the university clinic in Essen, Andreas Kribben is treating two HUS patients with the antibody. "We have seven HUS patients altogether, but we are using eculizumab only on the two patients that are not responding to the plasmapheresis," he says. Kribben wrote the original paper on using eculizumab to treat atypical HUS, so he had experience with the drug. “We actually started treating the first patient on Wednesday, before Schaefer’s paper came out. Sadly, we have not seen the kind of response that Schaefer describes and that we know from the atypical HUS patients," he says.

Jens Nürnberger, nephrologist at a clinic in Schwerin is somewhat skeptical of the treatment. “There is no real evidence for this treatment," he says. “It might work or it might not." The cases described in Schaefer’s paper could also be spontaneous remissions, he cautions. "The other problem is that this drug is hugely expensive, costing at least €15000 per patient, and the health insurance is not going to pay for it.“

However, in cases in which no other option remains, doctors would be right to try the new drug anyway, Nürnberger says. “But we should really be defining groups of patients who will get the drug and groups who do not and make this into a kind of controlled study," he says. “Instead, a lot of people will be treated this way, some will get better, some will not. In the end, we will not have learned anything.“ But he, like everyone else, is still hoping that this will turn out to be the right treatment at the right time.