'Man with the golden arm' saves 2million babies in half a century of donating rare type of blood

By Mail Foreign Service

Life-saver: James Harrison has donated his rare blood nearly 1,000 times

An Australian man who has been donating his extremely rare kind of blood for 56 years has saved the lives of more than two million babies.

James Harrison, 74, has an antibody in his plasma that stops babies dying from Rhesus disease, a form of severe anaemia.

He has enabled countless mothers to give birth to healthy babies, including his own daughter, Tracey, who had a healthy son thanks to her father's blood.

Mr Harrison has been giving blood every few weeks since he was 18 years old and has now racked up a total of 984 donations.

When he started donating, his blood was deemed so special his life was insured for one million Australian dollars.

He was also nicknamed the 'man with the golden arm' or the 'man in two million'.

His blood has since led to the development of a vaccine called Anti-D.

He said: 'I've never thought about stopping. Never.' He made a pledge to be a donor aged 14 after undergoing major chest surgery in which he needed 13 litres of blood.

'I was in hospital for three months,' he said. 'The blood I received saved my life so I made a pledge to give blood when I was 18.'

Just after he started donating he was found to have the rare and life-saving antibody in his blood.

At the time, thousands of babies in Australia were dying each year of Rhesus disease. Other newborns suffered permanent brain damage because of the condition.

The disease creates an incompatibility between the mother's blood and her unborn baby's blood. It stems from one having Rh-positive blood and the other Rh-negative.

After his blood type was discovered, Mr Harrison volunteered to undergo a series of tests to help develop the Anti-D vaccine.

'They insured me for a million dollars so I knew my wife Barbara would be taken care of,' he said.

'I wasn't scared. I was glad to help. I had to sign every form going and basically sign my life away.'

Mr Harrison, dubbed 'the man with the golden arm', is still donating every few weeks at the age of 74. He is thought to have saved 2.2million babies

Mr Harrison is Rh-negative and was given injections of Rh-positive blood.

It was found his plasma could treat the condition and since then it has been given to hundreds of thousands of women.

It has also been given to babies after they are born to stop them developing the disease.

It is estimated he has helped save 2.2 million babies so far.

One of the mothers he has helped is Joy Barnes, who works at the Red Cross Blood Bank in Sydney.

Grateful: Mr Harrison's friend Joy Barnes is one of many mothers who have been able to give birth to healthy babies thanks to his donations

She has known Mr Harrison for 23 years but has only just told him she is one of the countless mothers he has helped.

Ms Barnes, who miscarried at four and five months before having treatment, said: 'Without him I would never have been able to have a healthy baby.'

Speaking to Mr Harrison on an Australian TV show, she said: 'I don't know how to thank you enough.'

His own daughter, Tracey, also had to have the Anti-D injection after the birth of her first son.

She said she was 'proud' of her dad for continuing to give blood, even after the death of her mother after 56 years of marriage.

Mr Harrison said: 'I was back in hospital giving blood a week after Barbara passed away.

'It was sad but life marches on and we have to continue doing what we do. She's up there looking down, so I carry on.'

Mr Harrison is expected to reach the 1,000 donation milestone in September this year

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1259627/Man-golden-arm-James-Harrison-saves-2million-babies-half-century-donating-rare-blood.html#ixzz0jCAZWSYL

Cocaine Vaccine Nullifies the Effect, Helps Abusers Quit

By Susannah F. Locke

Cocaine Alaska Department of Public Safety

Researchers have shown for the first time today that a vaccine can help reduce drug abuse. There's currently no FDA-approved treatment to get people off of cocaine (or crack), so this could really help out the 2.5 million Americans dependent on cocaine.

Thirty-eight percent of drug abusers who were given the vaccine produced anti-cocaine antibodies. Over the course of seven weeks, these subjects were 45 percent likely to have a cocaine-free pee test, as opposed to 35 percent for those who got placebo vaccine instead.

The vaccine works similar to vaccines for microorganisms, training your body to view cocaine as a bad invader. The shots, which include a cocainelike substance (succinylnorcocaine), encourage the body to pump out antibodies against cocaine. The antibodies bind to the coke, which prevents it from getting into the brain, and theoretically prevents people from getting high. Right now, only about 38 percent of the subjects who got the vaccine produced high levels of antibodies, so there's room for improvement.

Study leader Dr. Thomas Kosten, a psychiatrist at Baylor College of Medicine, told Popsci.com that they're planning to confirm the results in a larger study in six cities in January and that the vaccine could become widely available in two to three years.

The study was published in the October issue of the journal Archives of General Psychiatry.

Vaccine Shields Monkeys From Simian Form of HIV

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SUNDAY, May 17 (HealthDay News) — Raising hopes for the development of an AIDS vaccine that might actually work, researchers report they were able to protect monkeys against infection with simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), the primate version of HIV.

They did so by using a novel approach that delivered antibody-producing genes directly to the animals’ muscles. Typically, vaccines are aimed at ramping up the immune system to fight off infection, but this strategy eliminated that middle step.

“Traditional approaches toward developing an HIV vaccine that have worked for other viruses like influenza have just has not worked for HIV and, quite frankly, might not work for a long time or ever,” explained the study’s author, Dr. Philip R. Johnson, chief scientific officer at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

“But Mother Nature has allowed us a few breaks, in that we know that in a very few cases, people who have been infected for a very long time have been able to naturally develop antibodies that neutralize a lot of the circulating virus,” he said. “So, we thought perhaps we could take the genes that represent these antibodies ‘off the shelf,’ so to speak, give them directly to patients and, in essence, bypass the immune system.”

“So, first we worked through mice and showed we could do it with mice,” Johnson explained. “And now we’ve shown that we can actually transfer these genes into monkeys and protect these animals from SIV.”

The findings are in the May 17 online issue of Nature Medicine.

The researchers’ efforts focused on preventing SIV infection in nine macaque monkeys who were “immunized” against SIV by inserting genes already known to express anti-SIV antibodies directly into the monkeys’ muscles.

Once the genes were injected, they prompted the muscles to produce antibodies that were released into the bloodstream and began attacking the SIV.

After being exposed to SIV four weeks later, six of the nine monkeys appeared to be fully protected from infection because they remained completely uninfected, and none of the nine immunized monkeys went on to develop AIDS or died from exposure to the virus, the researchers reported.

In contrast, six non-immunized monkeys exposed to SIV all became infected, and two-thirds died.

Johnson and his team concluded that their immunization strategy triggered the development of long-lasting and complete protection against SIV infection among monkeys.

“I’m not about to over-hype this,” Johnson cautioned. “But we are continuing our work with monkeys in parallel with moving forward to begin human trials in two years, if everything goes perfectly with our work with the FDA to develop safety preparations, which is absolutely appropriate. And if the immunization trials work, then you have another few years to gear up. So, in the best of all possible worlds, you’re looking at five years down the road for a practical benefit for patients. But, scientifically, we believe we are on the right track.”

Rowena Johnston, director of research at the Foundation for AIDS Research in New York City, described the work as “one of the most interesting and potentially promising concepts to come out of the vaccine field in quite a while.”

“They’ve cut straight to the chase and eliminated the middle man,” she explained. “That is the really exciting thing they’ve done. We already all know that the traditional approaches to a vaccine won’t work for HIV. And so HIV is a field where researchers are required to come up with ideas that nobody has needed to think about before, and that is where the challenge is. And here what they’ve done is to get antibodies to the virus themselves being produced directly, rather than waiting for the very slow-moving immune system to respond. And that is so elegant.”

“Of course, the caveat is that this paper is a concept, and not yet a solution,” Johnston noted. “But as concepts go, this is very, very interesting, even if it seems so obvious after you see it, like all good research.”

More information

The World Health Organization has details on efforts to develop an HIV vaccine.

By Alan Mozes
HealthDay Reporter

SOURCES: Philip R. Johnson, M.D., chief scientific officer, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and professor, pediatrics, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia; Rowena Johnston, Ph.D., vice president and director, research, Foundation for AIDS Research, New York City; May 17, 2009, Nature Medicine, online

Last Updated: May 18, 2009

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