RUTHFULLY YOURS

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Trials success for gastroenteritis treatment. Israeli biotech Redhill has announced that the Phase 3 trial of its BEKINDA treatment for acute gastroenteritis and gastritis, on 321 patients in 21 US clinical sites, met its targets for efficacy and safety. There are some 179 million cases of gastroenteritis annually in the US.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israels-redhill-says-gastroenteritis-drug-found-safe-in-study/

Fighting infections via DNA. I reported previously (July 2015) on Tel Aviv University Professor Udi Qimron’s research into bacterial viruses (phages) that can kill resistant bacteria. His DNA delivery method is now much more sophisticated and he has just received a $700,000 grant from TAU’s Momentum fund.
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/israel/dna-delivery-technology-joins-battle-against-drug-resistant-bacteria/2017/06/19/ http://www.cell.com/molecular-cell/abstract/S1097-2765(17)30310-6

Algorithm finds new treatments. Professor Amiram Goldblum at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has won a 2017 Kaye Innovation award for his Iterative Stochastic Elimination (ISE) algorithm, which helps discover new molecules to treat diseases. It identifies candidate treatments in months rather than years.
http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/35036

Life-changing tech for the visually impaired. I reported previously (May 2016) on the text to speech MyEye device from Israeli startup Orcam. MyEye now clips onto your spectacles and can read text in English, Hebrew, Chinese, French, Italian and German. It can also store names and faces to help identify the people you meet.
http://nocamels.com/2017/08/orcam-visually-impaired-glasses-read-text/
https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZgFGMZTvoX0?rel=0 https://www.youtube.com/embed/Je6f-awtwTg?rel=0

Games therapy for the brain. More about Israeli startup Intendu that I reported on previously (2nd July). Designed by neuroscientists, clinicians and games developers, the home training console is designed to enhance and possibly rehabilitate, eight cognitive functions. It is currently on trial at the UK’s Hull Royal Infirmary. https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevorclawson/2017/08/31/the-therapy-gap-startup-offers-hope-for-brain-impaired-patients/#134ac0944a5c

Israel’s new school of medicine. (TY Atid-EDI) Ariel University recently held a ground-breaking ceremony for a new medical school. The $28 million facility will vastly enhance Ariel’s current pre-med program and 30 research labs. Currently, 4000 students are studying medicine at Israel’s five medical schools.
https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4983189,00.html

Israeli bio-techs in San Diego. 23 Israeli companies (listed here) exhibited at the Bio International Convention in San Diego – the world’s largest conference in the field of life sciences, with over 16,000 delegates from some 76 countries. http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/israeli-firms-share-innovations-at-bio-international-convention-in-san-diego/2017/06/13/

What goes around, comes around. 15 years ago, Batya donated a kidney to save her daughter’s life. Shortly afterwards, her daughter gave birth to a baby girl. 15 years later, Batya contracted Myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) and needed a bone marrow transplant. Thanks to the Ezer Mizion database, a 100% match was found.
http://www.ezermizion.org/blog/what-goes-around-comes-around/

“You’ve scurried along the gutter floor for too long, unnoticed. Your prejudice towards Muslims deserves to be put on blast. I’ll do that!” pompously proclaimed “Islamophobia” expert Nathan Leanto me on Twitter on June 23. His subsequent insulting Twitter conversations with me over the summer would give a revealing insight into this deceitful, hateful, and shallow leftist thug, an ideological clone of the demagogic Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

Lean had previously revealed his character and intellectual deficiencies during a humorous Twitter spat he initiated with me around New Year’s 2014, the subject of one of my previous articles. After a few weeks of debate, Lean had answered my Twitter responses to his politically correct rants by blocking me. Yet suddenly on June 16, he emerged like a bolt from the blue of cyberspace to snarl at me again.

Lean initially objected to my rejection of the totalitarian term “Islamophobia” underlying his fraudulent career. This postulated “irrational fear” seeks to suppress criticism of Islamic ideas by conflating that criticism with prejudice against Muslim individuals. He indicated as much, statingthat “religion is more than a mere disembodied collection of ideas. It is integral to identity.” Therefore he effectively condemned critique of Islam as the “suggestion that Islam is merely a belief system is a loophole for you to malign Muslims with impunity.”

Lean’s concern for beliefs as “integral to identity” did not stop him from irreverently using Jesus’ name as a curse when he tweeted to this Christian that “Jesus Christ, you’re a character.” Surprisingly, while Lean’s research interests include “Muslim-Christian relations,” he admitted, “I actually don’t care for religion at all — any of them. I do care, however, about prejudicing people based on their religious identity.” The corresponding theological illiteracy of this “expert” appeared when he reiterated the hackneyed canard that the “Bible is full of vicious & violent stuff, and is no different than the Quran.”

Yet Lean nonetheless wants to appear as an authority on Islam on the basis of his graduate school and Arab language studies while condemning me as having “zero education in anything related to Islam; no Arabic.” He thus tweeted following the recent Barcelona, Spain, vehicular jihad attack that “Barcelona suspect Driss Oukabir doesn’t represent Islam. He doesn’t represent Muslims. He represents only himself, and only he is to blame.” This statement notwithstanding, Lean contradicted himself, tweeting to me in answer to my question about jihad’s meanings among Muslims that “I’m not the spokesperson. Ask the world’s 1.7 billion Muslims.”

Lean also presents himself as an authority on Israel, a country that draws his consistent scorn, irrespective of how much the ancestral Jewish homeland is “integral to the identity” of Jews. He crudely caricatures Jewish national liberation under Zionism as an “ideology which asserts that a certain group of people have the ‘right’ to a certain tract of land, and can thus expel all others.” “You’re damn right I’m condemning Zionism,” he forthrightly tweets, and claims that the radical Linda “Nothing is creepier than Zionism” Sarsour “is a champion of human rights. Zionism is bad.” He not surprisingly calls Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the “leader of an apartheid project,” although Lean qualifies this by saying that this slander does not apply to Natanyahu’s “entire country. The Occupied Territories, for sure, though.”

In the early morning hours of Thursday, Syria’s al-Tala’i military research facility located in Masyaf was reduced to ash and flames. The Jerusalem Post reports that contemporaneous with the strike on al-Tala’I, a Hezbollah weapons convoy in the vicinity was also hit and destroyed. According to Western intelligence sources, al-Tala’i is a center for the production of chemical weapons. Syria blamed Israel and claimed that at least two regime soldiers were killed in the attack. The regime issued a banal and somewhat hypocritical warning of the “dangerous repercussions of this aggressive action to the security and stability of the region.”

Israeli officials were mute but Israel’s defense minister Avigdor Liberman issued a terse statement shortly after the attack making it clear that Israel reserves the right to act when its interests are affected. “We are not looking for any military adventure in Syria but we are determined to prevent our enemies from harming, or even creating the opportunity to harm the security of Israeli citizens,” he said. This is as close to an admission that we’re likely to witness.

According to former Israel Air Force Head Maj.-Gen. Amir Eshel, Israel has carried out over 100 precision strikes in Syria in the past five years, mostly aimed at thwarting arms transfers to Hezbollah. Other strikes, like the one carried out on January 18, 2015, have been aimed at sending a message to Iran and Hezbollah that Israel will not tolerate the creation of Iranian or Hezbollah bases near the Golan Heights border. Twelve Iranian and Hezbollah operatives, including the son of Imad Mughniyeh, and an Iranian general, were killed in that raid.

The al-Tala’i facility is located in northwest Syria near the Russian naval base at Tartus and lies 70km southeast of Russia’s largest and most important airbase in the Mideast, Khmeimim air force base. Russia maintains formidable air defenses in Syria, including the S-400 anti-aircraft platform but the Russians refrained from firing. Perhaps the Israeli aircraft simply didn’t register on the S-400’s radar system – Israel is known to possess a sophisticated array of electronic counter measures – or perhaps there is an unspoken understanding between the Israeli and Russian militaries – the two nations maintain effective liaisons to prevent military mishaps. No one can say for certain why the Russians held their fire but either way, it was a clean operation with no Israeli casualties, no collateral damage and no political fallout.

There is speculation that Syria was prepared to hand over the facility to its ally, Hezbollah. This theory was forwarded by former Israeli national security adviser, Maj.-Gen (ret.) Yaakov Amidror. Amidror, who is currently an analyst at Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, cited a recent visit to Damascus by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah where the terror leader requested control of the facility. The acquisition of a WMD facility in the hands of the world’s most dangerous and best armed terrorist organization would represent a strategic threat to Israel, and one that the Jewish State could not easily ignore. Amridor’s theory seems plausible and if accurate, would explain the urgency of the Israeli action.

Ayman Qawasmeh and Issa Amro would have been better off being arrested by Israeli authorities. Had that happened, their stories would have made it to the pages of major Western newspapers. CNN or NBC might have dedicated an entire program to their ordeal. Without a way for the Western media outlets to implicate Israel, however, their tale remains buried — along with their freedom.

The group also points out that it has documented some 472 cases of deaths consequent to torture in Syrian detention centers and prisons over the past few years.

Would anyone like to know about the true apartheid laws applied to Palestinians in different Arab countries? The information is readily available: all that needs to happen is for the Western media and the rest of the international community to reconsider their obsession with Israel and to start paying attention to the real Palestinian victims — those living in the Arab countries.

More than 1,600 Palestinians have gone missing in Syria, and hundreds have been killed, since the beginning of the civil war there. This is not the type of news that makes it to mainstream media in the West, however.

To catch the eyes of the international community and media, Palestinians need to live in the West Bank, Gaza Strip or Jerusalem. These are the lucky Palestinians whose stories (and plights) are regularly covered by the international media. Why? Mostly because these are the Palestinians whose stories are often linked, directly and indirectly, to Israel.

It is no secret that Western journalists and mainstream media outlets have developed an obsession with Israel. Everything that Israel does (or does not do) receives widespread coverage, especially if there is a way to blame Israel for inflicting suffering on the Palestinians.

When Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas imposed punitive measures against the two million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, denying them medicine, electricity and salaries, somehow the mainstream media finds a way to implicate Israel.

Abbas’s ongoing crackdown on the Palestinian media, including the arrest of journalists and Facebook users, is also apparently not newsworthy, in the view of the Western media. Who cares if Abbas blocks 30 news websites because of their criticism of his policies and actions? Who cares if Abbas just this week ordered the arrest of journalist Ayman Qawasmeh, the director of a private radio station in Hebron?

Qawasmeh was arrested shortly after he criticized Abbas and called on him and his prime minister, Rami Hamdallah, to resign. Western journalists covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict dismiss these stories only, it seems, because they lack an anti-Israel angle.

As if the arrest of Qawasmeh were not enough, Abbas’s security forces later arrested Issa Amro, a Palestinian activist from Hebron, for speaking out against the arrest of the journalist. Amro was taken into custody after he published a Facebook post criticizing the Palestinian Authority security forces for arresting the journalist and stifling freedom of expression.

Qawasmeh and Amro would have been better off being arrested by Israeli authorities. Had that happened, their stories would have made it to the pages of major Western newspapers. CNN or NBC might have dedicated an entire program to their ordeal. Without a way for the Western media outlets to implicate Israel, however, their tale remains buried — along with their freedom.

The tragic tale of Palestinians in Syria exposes the double standard of the international media and community when it comes to covering the Middle East: when Israel is not involved, journalists are not involved.

What happens to Palestinians in Arab countries seems to be rather ho-hum to most of the world. So what if thousands of Palestinians have gone missing or have been killed? If an Arab state is involved, the media stays away.

Advocating the need for food banks throughout the world, Moon believes that this is the key element in reducing the number of hungry and malnourished people.

“The good news is that if you look at the world population who lives with chronic hunger [people who don’t consume enough calories in their daily diets], that has dramatically decreased over the past 20 years. There are still about 800 million people in the world who go to bed hungry,” Lisa Moon told The Jerusalem Post in an exclusive interview on Monday, adding that they mainly reside in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia.

For the past 18 months, Moon has been president and CEO of the Global Food-Banking Network (GFN), an international nonprofit organization working in 32 countries, dedicated to alleviating world hunger by creating, supporting and strengthening food banks around the world that currently serve 57 million people annually.

On her first trip to Israel, Moon is primarily visiting the Leket Israel facilities outside of Ra’anana, meeting with the staff and observing practices that Leket is using in Israel that can be applied throughout the world to combat hunger.

Leket, Israel’s national food bank, has “rescued” some 15,000 tons of produce for the needy which mainly comes from farms throughout Israel.

“So far, the biggest takeaway for me is that Leket’s approach is really unique, because they focus on fresh fruits and vegetables and working with local producers and focusing on nutrition with the people they are serving and people in food banks all over the world,” Moon said.

Moon, an expert on global international policy and food waste, who has been involved with GFN since 2015, explained the shift in world hunger from chronic hunger to “hidden hunger.”

“When people who may have enough to eat on a fairly regular basis but may have to miss meals, and they also don’t have access to nutritious foods, and, regrettably, about one in four people globally has micronutrient deficiencies and is subject to ‘hidden hunger’ – that’s really the hunger that food banks are working to address,” she said.

Moon noted that we are living in a time when there is enough food for everyone, yet the statistics show that one in nine people in the world go to bed hungry.

“It doesn’t matter how much food we produce; if we don’t have a way to distribute it to the people who are in need, we are still going to have a hunger issue,” she said. “So it’s an honor for me to work with food banks, because they really work with distribution.”

Advocating the need for food banks throughout the world, Moon believes that this is the key element in reducing the number of hungry and malnourished people.

“Right now, hunger is not about food production,” she said, “because, right now, we produce enough food for everyone to have enough. It’s a distribution challenge and a logistics problem. And so what is so challenging about that is that a third of all the food that is produced goes to waste.”

Explaining the need to provide impoverished communities with food banks, Moon said the challenge facing these organizations is getting this food directly to those in need efficiently and, of course, cheaply.

“And so we need a mechanism to take that surplus food which is edible,” she said. “We need a way to capture that surplus food and redistribute it to those who can’t access this at the store – maybe the price is too high, maybe they’re too sick. That’s really the role of food banks. And that’s why GFN is so passionate about promoting this model to communities around the world.”

Moon credits Leket Israel for its “unique method of collecting fresh, rescued food from the top of the food chain at the level of agricultural production.”

Hoping to apply Leket’s model on a global level, Moon said: “We must focus on scaling food rescue around the world in order to meet growing demands and enter emerging markets.”

1. According to the June 15, 2017 Wall Street Journal, six Israeli startups (three in the cybersecurity sector) are among the top 25 tech companies, which may be the global leaders of tomorrow.

2. According to Forbes Magazine, Israel has become a cybersecurity powerhouse, creating more than 300 cybersecurity startups, exporting in 2016 $6.5BN in cybersecurity products, convincing more than 30 multinationals to establish local research & development centers in Israel and attracting foreign investors. According to Forbes, there are six reasons leading to Israel’s prominence in the world of cybersecurity: the close government-military-business-academia interaction; government support of early-stage cybersecurity startups; Israel’s military as a startup incubator and accelerator, combining research and operation; investing in human capital (e.g., cybersecurity is an elective high school matriculation exam, and operating six university cybersecurity research centers); Israel’s overall inter-disciplined and diverse human factor enhanced through military service and interaction with global giants; Israel’s constant need to defy security and commercial odds.

3. Enhancing the mutually-beneficial, two-way-street US-Israel cooperation, a cybersecurity bilateral working group was established by the Trump Administration, aimed at combatting cyber offensives. Tom Bossert, White House homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, stated: “Israel’s agility in developing solutions will innovate cyber defenses that the US can test in Israel and bring back to America….”

4. During the first half of 2017 – in addition to Intel’s March 2017 acquisition of Israel’s Mobileye for $15.3BN – Israeli hightech companies were acquired by foreign companies for a total sum of $1.8BN. For example, Symantec, the Mountain View, CA software security and storage systems giant, acquired Israel’s FireGlass and Skycare (cybersecurity) for $250MN each (Globes, July 13, 2017).

5. During the second quarter of 2017, $1.3BN were invested in Israeli startups, mostly by foreign investors, second highest quarter in the last five years, compared to $1.1BN in the first quarter, as well as the fourth quarter of 2016, and $1.7BN in the second quarter of 2016. For instance, the Japanese giant SoftBank invested $100MN in Israel’s cybersecurity, Cybereason, and Johnson & Johnson led a $12MN round by Israel’s medical/nutritional tech, Day Two. Israel’s venture capital fund, Qumra, raised $115MN for its second fund, mostly from US and European Family Offices (Globes, July 20).

6. Intel is bolstering its operations in Israel – over and beyond its 10,000 employees, four R&D centers, two manufacturing plants and $4BN annual exports out of Israel – leveraging Israel’s cybersecurity added-value. Intel has recently expanded its Israel Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, partnering with Illusive Networks, a cybersecurity startup, and Israel’s Team8, a cybersecurity powerhouse, which has developed close contacts with Microsoft, Cisco, Qualcomm, ATT&T, Nokia, Mitsui and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, aiming to develop cutting edge cybersecurity technologies.

7. India-Israel trade balance surged from $200MN in 1992 to over $4BN in 2016.

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Patient receives new implant to treat diastolic heart failure. A 72-year-old Canadian at Israel’s Rambam Medical Center is the first congestive heart failure patient to receive a new CoRolla implant from Israeli biotech CorAssist. The device was implanted by catheter and the patient has improved sufficiently to be discharged.
http://www.jpost.com/Business-and-Innovation/Health-and-Science/Israeli-doctors-are-first-to-implant-device-for-congestive-heart-failure-503648 https://www.youtube.com/embed/Iy0iL1cKG2s?rel=0

Rabies treatment approved. Israeli biotech Kamada has received FDA approval for its anti-rabies vaccination in the US. US company Kedrion will be responsible for distributing the new product. Kamada is already marketing the anti-rabies vaccine in various countries.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-kamada-receives-fda-approval-for-rabies-treatment-1001202763

Seeing the signs of Alzheimer’s. I reported recently (30th July) about the research at Sheba Medical Center into the link between Alzheimer’s disease and loss of retina function. Israel’s RetiSpec is already working towards building an ocular scanner for the spectral signature of neuropathological changes due to the disease.
https://www.israel21c.org/look-into-my-eyes-do-you-see-early-signs-of-alzheimers/ http://retispec.com/

Curing glaucoma in the blink of an eye. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Belkin Laser has developed an innovative laser ray system that can treat glaucoma in just one second every year, instead of daily eye drops. There is no need for direct contact of the equipment with the eye. Belkin recently raised $5 million of funding.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-glaucoma-treatment-co-belkin-laser-raises-5m-1001191036
https://www.youtube.com/embed/5HkXjWPSpxU?rel=0 http://www.belkin-laser.com/

An app to guide the visually impaired. Israel’s RightHear is an iPhone app that enables the visually impaired to find their way through shopping malls, hospitals, universities – any of the 200 locations (mostly in Israel) where Apple iBeacon transmitters have been installed. It’s also integrated with taxi apps Gett, Uber and Lyft.
https://www.israel21c.org/app-orients-visually-impaired-in-malls-schools-hospitals/

The elderly can benefit from baby movements. Researchers at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University have found that older adults use the same exploration-exploitation mechanism that babies use to successfully grasp objects. And as with babies, making “mistakes” helps improve future task performance.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/older-adults-could-use-babies-strategy-to-grasp-objects-israeli-study/

Gaza man cured of Tree-man virus. Doctors at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center cured Mohammed Taluli from Gaza of a rare genetic disorder. Epidermodysplasia verruciformis (tree-man disease) is contagious and cancerous. It causes scaly lesions on the feet and hands that resemble tree bark. (See the astonishing photo.)
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/israel/jerusalem/jerusalem-doctors-treat-rare-treeman-virus/2017/08/29/

Returning the smiles to African children’s faces. Israeli surgeons Omri Emodi and Zach Sharony from Haifa’s Rambam Medical Center have been in Ghana correcting facial deformities (e.g. cleft lips and palates) in local children. The mission was managed by US organization Operation Smile.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-doctors-return-smile-to-african-childrens-faces/
https://www.rambam.org.il/EnglishSite/AboutRambam/Publications/NewsandEvents/Pages/Rambam-Doctors-Perform-Pediatric-Surgery-Marathon-in-Ghana.aspx

After treatment, PA official donates recovery room. A senior Palestinian Arab official has donated tens of thousands of shekels to Haifa’s Rambam Medical Center after he himself underwent cancer treatment at the Israeli hospital. The money will fund a room for children, pre-and-post chemo and radiotherapy treatment.
http://www.jpost.com/Business-and-Innovation/Health-and-Science/Palestinian-official-gives-back-to-Israeli-hospital-that-treated-him-496545 http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4974484,00.html