Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Women's Views on News

Women's Views on News

FDA to shake up guidance for early breast cancer treatment

Posted: 05 Jun 2012 08:30 AM PDT

Ellie Watmuff
WVoN co-editor 

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the US, issued a directive this week to allow breakthrough treatments to be trialed on women suffering from early-stage, aggressive breast cancer.

Under the new guidance women suffering with early-stage but hard-hitting form of the disease could trial drugs for several months, even prior to undergoing surgery.

This is significant as it could grant more immediate access to potential life-saving drugs. Currently women diagnosed with early stage cancer have a lengthy wait for innovative treatments, despite having the best chance of recovery.

“We’re looking at introducing drugs into a very early stage of breast cancer, where a patient has a primary tumor and the chemotherapy is given before surgery, Dr Richard Pazdur, director of the FDA’s cancer drug office, told an American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago.

“The aim of this therapy would be to cure the woman of breast cancer”.

The current process requires that drugs be trialed first on patients whose cases are advanced, where the potential for treatment to extend life outweighs any detrimental side-effects.

There are concerns that this new guidance could expose women to potentially harmful drugs without sufficient proof to support their efficacy.

Pazdur explained that the changes "should be for patients that are most likely to benefit and also those that are at highest risk of having a recurrence of the disease".

In order to minimise the risk from these drugs, the FDA´s guidance suggests only women suffering from a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer called triple-negative breast cancer, particularly prevalent in young women, have access to piloted drugs.

Trials would be structured by an adaptive design approach, where researchers derive their results from patient response.

Women would be treated with either chemotherapy or chemotherapy alongside an experimental drug for several months before surgery. Researchers would then compare response rates across both groups.

If the drug cures significantly more patients, it would be subject to a provisional type of approval, which with further, long-term monitoring could lead to full approval.

Dr George Sledge, co-director of the breast cancer program at the Indiana University Simon Cancer Center said that although the new approach is not a cure all answer, it’s a step in the right direction:

“It recognizes that we want to try to move drugs up front into an early disease setting as soon as possible – not wait until the patient is beat up and out of chances and out of hope before we throw a drug at [them] and hope it does something.”

Cherie Blair tells young women to be financially self-reliant

Posted: 05 Jun 2012 07:30 AM PDT

Sarah Graham
WVoN co-editor 

Women need to support themselves financially, the founder and patron of the Cherie Blair foundation said last week, when speaking to an audience of young women in North London.

Ms Blair, wife of the former prime minister Tony Blair, blamed women's social conditioning for the gender pay gap, which currently stands at 20 per cent, saying that women are often too nice to ask for a pay rise.

"Part of the reason why men are still paid a higher salary is because girls are socially conditioned to be nice, so that holds them back from asking for a salary increase," she said.

Speaking at the Dialogue Society, Islington, Ms Blair urged young women never to be financially reliant on "your father, your brother, your husband or your son."

She added that women should be independent from male influence, and never have to worry about "anyone leaving you."

A successful barrister, Ms Blair revealed that as a teenager she had dreamed of being prime minister herself, and said her working class Liverpool upbringing prepared her for life at Downing Street.

Ms Blair was raised by her mother after her father, actor Tony Booth, left when she was just eight years old.

She spoke highly of her mother's influence: "My mother was a trained actress but also spent a long period working in a fish and chip shop when my father left her.

"She picked herself up and got herself a career in travel. But it taught me a very important lesson – to be self-reliant. If you support yourself financially, firstly you won't have to worry about anyone leaving you, but secondly you can make choices you wouldn't otherwise make."

A mother of four herself, Ms Blair said, "I have spent my life taking risks and pushing myself forward, and by the time I'd got [to Downing Street] I'd learned a lot of lessons that helped me deal with [the press's] attitude.

"I have no regrets about my life, because it's made me who I am."

Historic Indian school welcomes girls for first time

Posted: 05 Jun 2012 06:00 AM PDT

Sarah Graham
WVoN co-editor 

A teacher in New Delhi has won a ground-breaking battle to allow girls to be educated in the historic Anglo-Arabic Senior Secondary School.

Faiza Nisar Ali made history when she and many other Muslim women successfully campaigned for the school to admit Muslim girls as well as boys.

The management of the 300 year old school made the decision earlier this year following efforts by Nisar, who was appointed to prepare a feasibility report on why Muslim boys and girls should be educated together.

"After months of research, consultations with educationists, psychologists and parents, I concluded in my report that co-education among Muslims would result in greater progress and help them in the later stages of life," she said.

Ali is the school's business teacher and the first woman teacher to be employed by the school. Today she remains one of only three women on the teaching staff.

She and the school received much resistance, both from the predominantly male staff and members of the community who accused her of being "un-Islamic".

Ali was hospitalised by the mental pressure of the angry reactions she received and, at eight weeks pregnant, suffered a miscarriage.

However her cause was furthered when Fatima Alvi, a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University, filed a petition in the Delhi High Court, with the support of many other Muslim women.

The court backed the decision at the end of May and the school has since admitted more than 30 girls to classes 6-11.

The Times of India described the change as "a massive step for a school that recruited its first woman teacher only in 2006."

Nevertheless, Faiza remains conscious of the resistance. "Let's hope there is an attitudinal shift and changes begin to happen," she said.

The school, which started in 1696 and is situated at Ajmeri Gate in Delhi's old quarters, is a sought after institution, boasting alumni including Pakistan's first Prime Minister, Liaqat Ali Kahn; Syed Ahmad Kahn, founder of Aligarh Muslim University; and a number of Indian politicians.

The school plans to improve facilities such as a girls' common room and separate toilets, and to recruit more female staff.

Video gaming – still a man’s world?

Posted: 05 Jun 2012 04:00 AM PDT

Mariam Zaidi
WVoN co-editor

Although women make up about 42 percent of online gamers in the US, they are still largely unaccepted by men.

According to a BBC report, they are very often subject to online abuse, much of which is derogatory, sexually degrading and sometimes violent.

One gamer, Jenny Haniver, has set up her own website, Not in the Kitchen Any More, which contains phrases from the audio transcripts she records when playing Call of Duty on Xbox live. And they don’t make for easy listening.

Nor is her website a one-off. Another - Fat, Ugly or Slutty - was set up in the hope of making people think twice about sending “creepy, disturbing, insulting, degrading and/or just plain rude messages to other online players, usually women”.

Recently, an online video series called Extra Credits launched a campaign targeting Microsoft’s Xbox Live online gaming platform, describing it as “the service most often referenced when harassment in our community comes up”.

As a result Microsoft vowed to improve its service.

Strangely, 60% of women say that gaming allows them to relax and de stress.  Men on the other hand seem more attracted to the competition aspect, particularly violent games.

But when video game writer Jennifer Hepler was quoted in a post earlier this year that the gaming experience would be better if there was an option to skip the combat section of a game, she was subjected to vicious abuse online.

In another incident at a gaming competition called "Cross Assault" a male player made indecent comments about a female competitor to her face.

The man later claimed that sexual harassment was part of the culture of the gaming community and defended his use of phrases like “rape that bitch” as expressions for defeating another character.

Is it any wonder that video gaming is still so much a man’s world.

 

Turkish women protest against proposed curb on their right to choose

Posted: 05 Jun 2012 02:30 AM PDT

Sharda Vishwanathan
WVoN co-editor

As fears grow about a proposed anti-abortion bill being worked on by the Turkish government,  thousands of women took part in a pro-choice rally in Ankara on Sunday to voice their dissent.

According to a report by Reuters, women held banners with slogans saying: “My body, my choice” and “I am a woman not a mother, don’t touch my body” as they marched to the city’s Kadikoy Square.

Although it has been legal in Turkey since 1983 to have an abortion until the 10th week of gestation, the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP) is said to be working on a bill to curb that right to four weeks.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister said last month that he didn’t think there was any difference between abortion and murder, adding that:

“Nobody should have the right to allow this. You either kill a baby in the mother’s womb or you kill it after birth. There’s no difference.”

The health minister, Recep Akdag, said that women's rights are unrelated to abortion and Turkey must prevent its use as a means of birth control:

"The thought that a live being is destroyed has been completely missing from all the commentary" by opponents of a ban, said Akdag, adding that health reasons will be excluded from the government's abortion discussions.

Women’s groups in the country are, not surprisingly, concerned. Tugba Ozay Baki of the Istanbul Feminist Collective was quoted as saying:

"If abortion is banned in Turkey, women will still have them, but under unhealthy and dangerous conditions. Shady characters will start to make money off desperation."

Dr Mustafa Ziya Günenc, a gynaecologist in the German hospital in Istanbul, was quoted as saying that the government’s proposal to cut the legal limit for abortions to four weeks would amount to a ban:

“Abortions simply cannot be performed at that stage, both for technical and health reasons.

“Before abortion became legal in 1983, 250 out of 10,000 pregnancies ended with the mother’s deaths, and 225 of these deaths occurred because the women they tried to abort using wire, chemical substances or bird feathers,” said Günenc.

“Abortion was legalised for that exact reason.”

Sudanese woman condemned to death by stoning for alleged adultery

Posted: 05 Jun 2012 01:00 AM PDT

Alison Clarke
WVoN co-editor 

A young Sudanese woman has been convicted of adultery and sentenced to death by stoning.

Amnesty International (which is asking people to send a letter to the Sudanese president) reported that Intisar Sharif Abdallah was handed the sentence by the criminal court of Ombada, Khartoum state, central Sudan on 13 May.

She had initially pleaded not guilty, but admitted to the charges at a later hearing after she was reportedly beaten by her brother. The conviction was based solely on this testimony.

Abdallah – who is thought to be under 18 – was sentenced under article 146 of Sudan's Criminal Act of 1991, which provides that the penalty for adultery by a married person is execution by stoning, and the penalty for an unmarried person is 100 lashes.

Since her sentencing, she has been held in Omdurman prison with her five-month-old baby, with her legs shackled.

"No one should be stoned to death – and imposing this punishment on someone who may be a child is especially shocking," said Daniel Bekele, Africa director at Human Rights Watch.

"Sudan should immediately reform discriminatory laws and abolish both the death penalty and all corporal punishments that violate the international treaty obligations it has promised to respect."

Sudanese law states that anyone accused of a serious crime has the right to legal representation and that it cannot impose the death penalty on juveniles.

Lawyers acting on her behalf for free have lodged an appeal and expect a response within two months. Meanwhile, Abdallah remains in prison.

"Abdallah did not even receive the benefit of protections in Sudan's own laws," Bekele said. "Authorities should drop the charges and free her immediately."

 To sign Amnesty’s letter to the president of Sudan, please click here.