�The U.S. Food & Drug
Administration (FDA) has approved the Roche COBAS(R) TaqMan(R) HBV Test,
the first assay for quantitating Hepatitis B Virus DNA approved in the U.S.
The test uses Roche's real-time PCR technology to quantify the amount of
Hepatitis B virus DNA in a patient's blood. Doctors may use viral load
testing results to establish a baseline level of infection and during
treatment as an assistance in assessing individual responses to therapy.
Widespread application program of antiviral therapy along with the Hepatitis B
vaccine has helped reduce prevalence; however, Hepatitis B remains a
serious and potentially life threatening global disease, potentially
resulting in death from extensive liver damage or liver malignant neoplastic disease for
chronically infected people.(1)
"Viral load examination with an FDA approved test has long been the
criterion for managing patients with HIV and Hepatitis C," said Teresa
Wright, M.D., Chief Medical Officer at Roche Molecular Diagnostics.
"Availability of this new Roche test enables doctors and laboratories to
bring that same level of standardised viral encumbrance measurement to Hepatitis B
treatment."
Because the goal of Hepatitis B therapy is to treat until the virus is
undetectable in the patient's bloodline, it is critical for viral shipment
monitoring tests to be able to quantify selfsame low levels of virus.
Similarly, it is of import for the test to quantify identical high levels of
virus (higher than 100 meg IU/mL), an indicator of the need for more or
less aggressive treatment. The Roche COBAS(R) TaqMan(R) HBV Test can notice
the World Health Organization (WHO) HBV International Standard in plasma
and blood serum as low as 3.5 IU/mL and 3.4 IU/mL respectively. The test lavatory
measure HBV DNA as high as 1.10E8 IU/mL, representing a importantly
broader dynamic range than previously uncommitted tests in the U.S.
Other infections concomitant with Hepatitis B are common, with up to
10% of HIV patients in the US also septic with Hepatitis B virus. This
makes it essential for the test to quantitate the HBV virus in presence of
other viruses.
Designed for manipulation with the High Pure System, the test is run on the
COBAS(R) TaqMan(R) 48 analyzer and gives labs the added benefits of
automated real time PCR. The test system benefits from the same
contamination control protection intentional into all COBAS(R) TaqMan(R)
assays, including closed-tube processing and integral Roche-proprietary
AmpErase enzymes. To help with needed standardization, the Roche COBAS(R)
TaqMan(R) HBV Test has been calibrated with the WHO standard and reports
with the international unit of measure IU/mL. The quiz was designed to
quantify all major Hepatitis B genotypes, including pre-core mutants that
can lead to more
Monday 8 September 2008
Friday 29 August 2008
Rage Against the Machine to play during DNC
Rage Against the Machine will legion the "Tent State Music Festival to End the War," Aug. 27 at the Denver Coliseum. The concert, scheduled to be held during the Democratic National Convention, is existence presented in association with Iraq Veterans Against the War and Tent State University.
The Flobots, The Coup, State Radio and Wayne Kramer besides are scheduled to do at the concert, which starts at 11 a.m.
story_top_holder>
to the festival ar free and available only when by drawing. Ticket lottery details are available at the Tent State website.
�
More info
Tuesday 19 August 2008
Eagles Of Death Metal Get Serious On New LP, Probably Thanks To Tattoo Artist Kat Von D
Jesse "The Devil" Hughes has a more interesting life than you. And why shouldn't he?
Dude's in a critically praised rock and roll band called Eagles of Death Metal with his best acquaintance, Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme. He loves Los Angeles, and he kicks it around Hollywood with the likes of Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl, director Liam Lynch and Jack Black. He's a self-proclaimed philanderer, loves the drink and has a cell speech sound full of pictures of women in various stages of undress.
But perhaps he's been having overly much fun.
"When we were [recording] at Sound City Studios, I establish it selfsame easy to get drunk and stay put there," Hughes recently told MTV News. "I also found it easy to amuse my friends. Joshua, any time he's low, I just want to make him happy, and nothing delights him more than than seeing me on Rollerblades. One night I got sh--faced, and, long story short, when the head of Sound City, one of the preeminent recording studios, wakes you up at 7 in the morning in their upstairs parking lot, and you're wearing nothing merely a tank top, cutoffs and Rollerblades, you've got f---ing problems."
While that's the Hughes his friends � and this reporter � know and love, there's also a rarely seen, more serious side to the Eagles of Death Metal frontman. Fans will finally get a probability to hear that side on the band's extroverted album, Heart On, which will feature of speech a guest spot from well-known tattoo artisan Kat Von D (star of A&E's "L.A. Ink").
Heart On hits stores October 21. The record album is, in Hughes' run-in, "an essay on the joys of rock and roll," merely it's partly about brokenheartedness, too. Hughes wouldn't thumb the bird who broke his pump � non by name, anyway.
"I was rolling with a certain Hollywood figure who may or english hawthorn not have been aforementioned as a guest vocaliser on this record, and this tattoo artist I was rolling with, in order to keep her in my life as my booster, it meant the end of the potential for another aspect of our relationship, so it was more of a disappointment," Hughes aforesaid. "That's the worst kind of brokenheartedness, in a way, because it was the heartache of organism an adult. It was the grief not of having someone sh-- on you or break up with you, but the heartbreak of having to go, 'F---, I love you, and we can't do this.' "
Hughes' despair is most evident on the track "Now I'm a Fool." He said that while hanging backstage before a QOTSA gig non too long ago, Homme told him that he wanted Hughes to write a song reminiscent of Beck's "Already Dead." Then he got a call from the object of his affection.
"I get off the sound with this girl, and I aforesaid out tatty, 'F---, now I'm a f---ing dupe. I'm not just an idiot [for falling for you], I'm a f---ing fool,' " he recounted. "I don't care what anybody says, when you're hanging out with celebrities, you never expect to get mired with them emotionally, no matter how much you like them. When you're rolling with someone, and suddenly it's 4 a.m. and the cameras are turned off of the television set show they've got or whatever, and they share something with you where you want to protect them, it changes sh-- and it can have scary.
"This album is kind of � I hate to sound corny � but it's kind of a mature look at Hollywood," he continued. "I fell in love with Hollywood, the city itself, in a Randy Newman sort of way. So I guess the album is around a change of things: di-- vacillation in Hollywood and acting tougher than you in truth might be."
Hughes said that, for the first time, he mat up pressure header into the recording process. "I truly believe if you want to keep back doing what we're doing in this business, you've got to grow," he said. "You have to go somewhere � you have to be on a curve, not on a line."
Despite this being the band's third criminal record, Hughes said it was the most difficult to make.
"I've never had anything to lose before," he said. "Not that it's a good one, but I have got some sort of reputation, and I could fluorine that up doing the wrong thing. That's on the spur of the moment a considerateness that's never been salute before that's going to affect everything. The fast one was eruditeness how to give appropriate time to certain things, but what I'm glad to see is in truth, on this record, it's the same story: deuce best friends having a sh--s-and-giggles good time making rock and roll."
Eagles of Death Metal will circuit in September with the Hives.
More info
Saturday 9 August 2008
Tuesday 1 July 2008
Midnight Configuration
Artist: Midnight Configuration
Genre(s):
Ambient
Discography:
Dark Hours Of The Southern Cross
Year: 2000
Tracks: 12
Formerly of Every New Dead Ghost and founder of Nightbreed Records, Trevor Bamford is the brain minor behind Midnight Configuration. Combining elements of medieval influence from the 80's and 90's and eerie samples taken from fetish and horror films, Midnight Configuration have been considered identical before of their time and the about original one man band to come forth out of this genre. Having already released tetrad albums severally and gaining a renouned following in Eurpoe, Bamford is as well united by guitar player Nick Hopkinson and the icy vocals styles of Lisa Ross for his hot performances and occasional colaborations. A compilation "best of" going is also available through Cleopatra Records entitled Dark Desires, which as well features remixes of some of his more well known metro hits.
Basic Unit
Wednesday 25 June 2008
Krzysztof Penderecki
Artist: Krzysztof Penderecki
Genre(s):
Other
Discography:
Viola Concerto (Polish Radio and TV Symphony Orch., Szymon Kawalla)
Year:
Tracks: 1
Threnody For The Victims Of Hiroshima
Year:
Tracks: 1
Penderecki: Orchestral Works V
Year:
Tracks: 8
Monday 16 June 2008
Wagner's 'Das Rheingold' at the San Francisco Opera
SAN FRANCISCO -- It's "Ring" time in the West. Tuesday night, San Francisco Opera opened its summer season with Wagner's "Das Rheingold," the relatively brief (2 1/2 -hour) prologue in his four-opera cycle.
The new production proved but a peek into Francesca Zambello's fascinating concept of Wagner's damaged gods, dumb-cluck giants, malicious dwarfs and clueless mortals as Americans headed down the wrong side of history. The full cycle will be on display in San Francisco in summer 2011.
West Coast Wagnerites should be well sated by then. Next summer, Seattle Opera will bring back its more traditionally minded "Ring." In summer 2010, the upstart Los Angeles Opera will mount its first "Ring": Achim Freyer's visually fantastic approach, which it will begin unveiling, an opera at a time, next season.
San Francisco, though, is the appropriate starting place. The Metropolitan Opera brought a cycle from New York to Baghdad by the Bay in 1900. San Francisco Opera mounted its first "Ring" in 1935. Its most recent was in 1999. Pictures from 1935 reveal a laughably primitive staging. By 1999, Wagner's epic of the creation of modern society had a pertinent post-apocalyptic appearance.
"Rheingold" begins in the river Rhine, where underwater maidens guard gold. In San Francisco on Tuesday, Alberich, a '49er with his pan, forswore love and stole the hoard. The gods were the idle rich of the Roaring '20s, lounging on a veranda as Valhalla was being built. Fasolt and Fafner, the giants as oversized construction workers who looked like Popeyes with scissorhands, were lowered down on steel beams. Loge, the wily god of fire, became a magnificently deceitful lawyer. In Nibelheim, the dwarfs' realm, child laborers mined coal. Was that a croquet mallet that Donner, the cream-suited dandy thunder-god, was swinging?
These are strong images. Zambello, according to the program notes, will build from them a parable about modern America, its legacy of arrogant corporate power and the defoliation of the environment. Though a co-production with Washington National Opera, Tuesday's "Rheingold" was said to be a significant revision of the 2006 staging, about which there has been ridicule in the blogosphere, and many cast members were new not only to the production but also to their roles.
San Francisco has not solved all of Washington's problems and has probably added a few of its own. The production juggles freshness and staleness, effective concepts and clichés. Video projections by Jan Hartley were predictable, low-def images of stars and waves and the like. Michael Yeargan's sets were inconsistent -- the brilliant coal mine and the intriguing veranda versus hokey stage fog for the Rhine and nary a visual suggestion of Valhalla. After Donner swings his mallet, from which sparks fly, giggling, sodden gods walk up a gangplank as if leaving for a voyage on the Queen Mary.
Mark Delavan sang his first Wotan. Jennifer Larmore, once a favored mezzo-soprano in Handel and Rossini, has moved on to Wagner for her first Fricka. They are a decadent couple out of F. Scott Fitzgerald, she clinging to him. Both probably have a fondness for the bottle. And both sang and acted like Americans. Musical phrases were effectively articulated. Characters were beginning to be built.
Stefan Margita, a Czech tenor, was a terrific Loge, shamelessly conniving, clearheaded. Richard Paul Fink's Alberich is a study in the banality of evil. But then fine, unfussy singing was the rule, and that included Jill Groves' Erda, the earth goddess and Wotan's old love, before whom he prostrates himself.
Zambello turned Freia (Tamara Wapinsky), the voluptuous goddess who looks after the apples that keep the gods young, into an interesting case. The giants paw her with their metal hands. Perhaps that turns her on. She throws herself on the body of Fasolt (Andrea Silvestrelli) after Fafner (Günther Groissböck) slays him, wanting to keep the gold and the ring fashioned from it for himself.
Zambello's translations on the supertitles are colloquial ("Shut up you wind bag"). The Rhine's gold becomes "pure gold." But Donald Runnicles, the company's music director, didn't carry through with that American colloquial feel. He got a soupy sound from the orchestra, rich in bass. His Wagner is not American; his round phrases lack the rhythmic incisiveness and the crisp shaping needed for naturalistic acting.
Zambello, who did not take a bow Tuesday, may be onto something with this "Ring," but "Rheingold" is just the start, and considerable refining of it is still needed. I hope that Zambello, busy on Broadway and directing operas around the world, has the time.
mark.swed@latimes.com
The new production proved but a peek into Francesca Zambello's fascinating concept of Wagner's damaged gods, dumb-cluck giants, malicious dwarfs and clueless mortals as Americans headed down the wrong side of history. The full cycle will be on display in San Francisco in summer 2011.
West Coast Wagnerites should be well sated by then. Next summer, Seattle Opera will bring back its more traditionally minded "Ring." In summer 2010, the upstart Los Angeles Opera will mount its first "Ring": Achim Freyer's visually fantastic approach, which it will begin unveiling, an opera at a time, next season.
San Francisco, though, is the appropriate starting place. The Metropolitan Opera brought a cycle from New York to Baghdad by the Bay in 1900. San Francisco Opera mounted its first "Ring" in 1935. Its most recent was in 1999. Pictures from 1935 reveal a laughably primitive staging. By 1999, Wagner's epic of the creation of modern society had a pertinent post-apocalyptic appearance.
"Rheingold" begins in the river Rhine, where underwater maidens guard gold. In San Francisco on Tuesday, Alberich, a '49er with his pan, forswore love and stole the hoard. The gods were the idle rich of the Roaring '20s, lounging on a veranda as Valhalla was being built. Fasolt and Fafner, the giants as oversized construction workers who looked like Popeyes with scissorhands, were lowered down on steel beams. Loge, the wily god of fire, became a magnificently deceitful lawyer. In Nibelheim, the dwarfs' realm, child laborers mined coal. Was that a croquet mallet that Donner, the cream-suited dandy thunder-god, was swinging?
These are strong images. Zambello, according to the program notes, will build from them a parable about modern America, its legacy of arrogant corporate power and the defoliation of the environment. Though a co-production with Washington National Opera, Tuesday's "Rheingold" was said to be a significant revision of the 2006 staging, about which there has been ridicule in the blogosphere, and many cast members were new not only to the production but also to their roles.
San Francisco has not solved all of Washington's problems and has probably added a few of its own. The production juggles freshness and staleness, effective concepts and clichés. Video projections by Jan Hartley were predictable, low-def images of stars and waves and the like. Michael Yeargan's sets were inconsistent -- the brilliant coal mine and the intriguing veranda versus hokey stage fog for the Rhine and nary a visual suggestion of Valhalla. After Donner swings his mallet, from which sparks fly, giggling, sodden gods walk up a gangplank as if leaving for a voyage on the Queen Mary.
Mark Delavan sang his first Wotan. Jennifer Larmore, once a favored mezzo-soprano in Handel and Rossini, has moved on to Wagner for her first Fricka. They are a decadent couple out of F. Scott Fitzgerald, she clinging to him. Both probably have a fondness for the bottle. And both sang and acted like Americans. Musical phrases were effectively articulated. Characters were beginning to be built.
Stefan Margita, a Czech tenor, was a terrific Loge, shamelessly conniving, clearheaded. Richard Paul Fink's Alberich is a study in the banality of evil. But then fine, unfussy singing was the rule, and that included Jill Groves' Erda, the earth goddess and Wotan's old love, before whom he prostrates himself.
Zambello turned Freia (Tamara Wapinsky), the voluptuous goddess who looks after the apples that keep the gods young, into an interesting case. The giants paw her with their metal hands. Perhaps that turns her on. She throws herself on the body of Fasolt (Andrea Silvestrelli) after Fafner (Günther Groissböck) slays him, wanting to keep the gold and the ring fashioned from it for himself.
Zambello's translations on the supertitles are colloquial ("Shut up you wind bag"). The Rhine's gold becomes "pure gold." But Donald Runnicles, the company's music director, didn't carry through with that American colloquial feel. He got a soupy sound from the orchestra, rich in bass. His Wagner is not American; his round phrases lack the rhythmic incisiveness and the crisp shaping needed for naturalistic acting.
Zambello, who did not take a bow Tuesday, may be onto something with this "Ring," but "Rheingold" is just the start, and considerable refining of it is still needed. I hope that Zambello, busy on Broadway and directing operas around the world, has the time.
mark.swed@latimes.com
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