Word: triggering
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...good era? Hardly. Like any other medication, Redux has side effects. Some are merely annoying: fatigue, diarrhea, vivid dreams, dry mouth. But some are patently dangerous. The drug has caused significant, possibly permanent brain damage in lab animals--though not, as far as anyone knows, in humans. It can trigger a rare but frequently fatal human disorder called primary pulmonary hypertension, which destroys blood vessels in the lungs and heart. European research on fen/phen shows that using such drugs for more than three months boosts the risk of pph from the normal 1 or 2 in 1 million patients...
...person who suffers from it is different from that of someone who does not. Stimulation studies using the drug yohimbine have revealed an abnormal firing rate in an area of the brain stem called the locus ceruleus, which is rich in cells that release the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, the trigger for human fight-or-flight response. This primal alarm system has obvious survival value--useful for fleeing man-eating tigers and such. But in patients with panic disorder, it appears to kick in at too low a threshold...
...first alternative vaccines that researchers came up with were safe, all right; they just didn't work very well. Called subunit vaccines, they depend on noninfectious pieces of HIV to try to trigger immunity. Unfortunately, it now seems apparent that it takes a whole virus to produce a completely effective immune response...
...haywire, and the overload causes many neurons to kill themselves. The dying nerve cells leak calcium, which attracts enzymes to the area that chew on the tissues. The by-products are free radicals, unstable compounds that scavenge oxygen from healthy cells, often destroying them. As these cells die, they trigger a secondary wave of destruction that sweeps from the injured area and radiates outward. Blood flow to the central nervous system is slowed, immune cells flood the area and, in a frenzied attempt to clear away the debris, begin to chew up damaged and healthy nerves alike...
...almost too faint for anyone but a marketing manager to hear, but faintly is how these issues begin. It may be only a matter of time before everyone will have to take a stand on deceased animals. Is it respectful, for instance, for Roy Rogers to display his horse Trigger stuffed in a noble pose but disrespectful for Torrington to display a stuffed gopher robbing a bank? (Burrowing, after all, is not a felony...