HISTORICAL EVENTS ON 11TH JANUARY IN MEDICINE...

1st human used of insulin

11th jan 1922,

Leonardo Thompson,age 14, from Canada, was the very first person to receive an injection of insulin as treatment for diabetes. He weighed only 30 kg, and was about to slip into coma & die. The allergic reaction he displayed was attributed to an impurity in the pioneering extract provided by Drs. Frederick Banting and Charles Best. Twelve days later Thompson received a more purified dose of insulin prepared by Dr. James Collip. His symptoms began to disappear as his blood sugar returned to normal and he regained strength. Before this time, diabetes had inevitably resulted in death within months or even weeks of the diagnosis. Thompson lived another 13 years with the insulin. He died at the age of 27 due to pneumonia, a diabetes complication.

Tetracycline was patented

11th Jan 1955,

Lloyd H. Conover invented the antibiotic tetracycline. Tetracycline was the first therapeutically superior drug to be made by chemical alteration of an antibiotic produced by microbial metabolism. It sparked a wide-scale search for superior structurally modified antibiotics, which has provided most of the important antibiotic discoveries made since then.

Smoking Bad For You

11th Jan 1964,

U.S Surgeon General Luther Terry released a report that said that smoking cigarettes was a definite health hazard. He announced the results of a study on the health effects of smoking, ordered by President Kennedy in 1962. As America's first widely publicized official recognition of the dangers, it stated “Cigarette smoking is a health hazard of sufficient importance in the United States to warrant appropriate remedial action.” The report reviewed over 7,000 articles in medical journals, and concluded that cigarette smoking was a cause of lung and larynx cancer and of chronic bronchitis. Male cigarette smokers were 1,000 times more likely to die from lung cancer than non-smokers. In 1965, the U.S. Congress required printed health warnings on cigarette packages.

Netherlands To Band Drug Khat

11th Jan 2012,

The government of the Netherlands has announced that will ban the use of the drug khat, a mild narcotic often used by the Somali community. The ban came after concerns emerged that the drug caused a public threat and had the potential to induce psychosis or schizophrenia.

Flu Reaches Epidemic Levels in USA

11th Jan 2013,

Health officials claim that the influenza has crossed over the threshold into epidemic status in the United States. The CDC stated that the percentage of deaths caused by the flu went up to 7.3% which was just enough to reach epidemic levels.

GenX

11th Jan 2014,

GenXians went to Kasr El Aini Medical School to grab ophthalmology knowledge as much as they can, while G2Gians of GenX was struggling in the ENT end round exam.