Steve Job's future line-up!

Basket-mouth

The law of the wild says kill only when you are hungry!

Photographer Michel Denis-Huot, who captured these amazing pictures on safari in Kenya 's Masai Mara in October last year, said he was astounded by what he saw:

"These three brothers (cheetahs) have been living together since they left their mother at about 18 months old,' he said. 'On the morning we saw them, they seemed not to be hungry, walking quickly but stopping sometimes to play together. 'At one point, they met a group of impala who ran away. But one youngster was not quick enough and the brothers caught it easily'".

These extraordinary scenes followed.

Pregnant IVF women more at risk of death

Researchers believe the increased threat may come from the body rejecting donated eggs or underlying health problems that may come to the fore during artificial conception.
They want increased vigilance so that the exact nature of the risk can be calculated.
"Women should be counselled and made aware of the risks they are taking and deaths should be properly reported," Professor Didi Braat at Radboud University in the Netherlands told the Sunday Times.
Prof Braat looked at the deaths between 1984 and 2008 in the Netherlands but believes they will apply to any developed country.
She found 17 women who died in pregnancy who had had IVF treatment – a death rate of 42.5 for every 100,000 pregnancies.
The death rate is 12.1 in every 100,000 for women who conceived naturally.
The rising age of mothers may be increasing the number of complications. Last year nearly 27,000 women over 40 gave birth, a rise of 50 per cent in a decade.
The research was published in the journal Human Reproduction.

Mum heads to Thailand in bid for daughter

A Melbourne woman is flying to Thailand to circumvent Australian guidelines which prevent families from determing the sex of of IVF babies.

The woman, known as Olivia, has three sons and says she has a strong desire to have a daughter.

"It's just something deep in me that I can't shake. I just feel this really strong wish to have a daughter to raise with my sons in a balanced family," she said.

"We conceived naturally for our three sons. This is not something we've taken on lightly."

Families are not allowed to choose the sex of a child through IVF in Australia under current guidelines and that is why she has to travel to Thailand for the procedure, which she estimates will cost about $15,000.

She says the treatment should be available in Australia.

"To me it's about providing choice but with parameters," she said.

"I don't think there is going to be a flood of women because this doesn't affect a lot of women."

Olivia says she is in touch with a number of other women who are also going overseas to obtain gender selection treatment.

Professor Loane Skene, from the University of Melbourne and a member of the Australian Health Ethics Committee, supports the plan.

She says Australians are allowed to travel to the United States to have a surrogate baby and does not see why Olivia and her family should be prevented from doing what they want to do.

However, Professor Skene does not think the law needs to be changed.

"I think many people are going to have sympathy for this sort of thing because it is such a strong human urge," she told ABC Radio's Jon Faine.

"It seems to me that the kerfuffle of going through IVF with all of the ups and downs and heartache of it all is not something that people are going to take on lightly quite apart from the cost."

Victorian Premier John Brumby has ruled out relaxing restrictions on access to IVF treatment in the state.

"There might be some particular cases where there is a medical case for saying that it's important to have a boy or a girl, but where it is non-medical, the Law Reform Commission and indeed the overwhelming body of advice on this suggests that it is not a requirement or a priority, in terms of changing policy," he said.

Jailed welfare cheat granted access to IVF treatment

A jailed 45-year-old welfare cheat has won the right to IVF fertility treatment while living as a serving prisoner in Australia.
Kimberley Castles, an inmate at minimum-security Tarrengower Prison, had claimed in the Supreme Court that her human rights were breached because she was refused access to fertility treatment. Debbie Mortimer, SC, had told the Supreme Court that significant psychological harm had been caused to Castles, who was having self-financed IVF treatment before she was jailed last November. Ms Mortimer told Justice Karin Emerton her client wrote to prison authorities within days of being incarcerated asking to continue IVF.

Castles sued the Justice Department, seeking an injunction and a declaration she could continue treatment.Ms Mortimer said conjugal visits were allowed at Tarrengower and that time was running out for Castles - who has age-based infertility - because she turns 46 in December and that is the cut-off date for treatment from Melbourne IVF.

Justice Emerton said: “(The relevant section of the Corrections Act) confers on Ms Castles the right to continue to undergo IVF treatment for her infertility, although not necessarily at the Melbourne IVF Clinic.“IVF treatment is both necessary for the preservation of Ms Castles’ reproductive health and reasonable given the commitment to the treatment that Ms Castles has already demonstrated, her willingness to pay for further treatment, her age and the fact that she will become ineligible for further treatment before she is released from prison.”Justice Emerton said the prisoner’s request for a permit that would enable her to leave the prison to undergo required treatment over a number of months could not be accommodated, so she would have to apply for permits on a “visit by visit basis”. Castles is serving an 18-month minimum term for fraudulently claiming almost $140,000 in single-parent welfare benefits between 1984 and 1998, and then claiming further benefits under a false name between 2000 and 2006.

Washington Post Commentary Explores Embryo Freezing

The Washington Post featured a commentary from Gillian St. Lawrence, a 30-year-old woman who underwent in vitro fertilization and embryo freezing as "a way to postpone parenthood without risking the higher miscarriage and genetic disorder rates that occur in babies conceived from parents older than 35." Typically, women who undergo IVF take hormones to produce several blastocyts -- five- to seven-day-old embryos -- and one or two of the embryos are implanted into the woman shortly thereafter. The remaining embryos can be frozen for future pregnancy attempts.
St. Lawrence writes that she initially did not plan on having children and that the idea of embryo freezing occurred to her while she was researching ways to donate her eggs. "My husband and I could create embryos, freeze them and, essentially, donate them to our future selves," she states.

Through her research on IVF, St. Lawrence "learned that the younger the parents are when they produce the eggs and sperm involved in any conception, whether in the womb or in vitro, the better the chance of a healthy baby." The Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology reports that 47% of IVF pregnancies derived from fresh embryos resulted in live births, compared with 35% of pregnancies from frozen embryos that resulted in live births. "Initially, those success rates did not sound high," St. Lawrence writes, adding, "But the numbers referred to a single cycle; most couples ... produce several embryos during IVF, and if the first implantation is unsuccessful, they try again, and the cumulative success rate is much higher" (St. Lawrence, Washington Post, 7/6).