DIPG Childhood Brain Cancer

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Larissa Bufka, Germany

Do you ever feel you can’t control what is about to happen in the future? That’s how many parents feel if their child is diagnosed with Diffuse Instrinsic Pontine Glioma ( DIPG).

Most of the people in the world have never heard of this type of cancer, so what is DIPG?

DIPG is a highly aggressive and difficult to treat brain cancer. Most likely children between the age 1- 14 are diagnosed. The cancer is located in the base of the brain, more specifically the brain-stem (Pons). The pons is located in the middle of the brain and is one of the most important parts. It is responsible for breathing, sleeping, blood pressure and many more.

a graphic diagram of the human brain showing the names of different areas

What causes it?

Many other cancers are influenced and caused  by the environment such as smoking, drinking, drug abuse, radiation and inherited genes from their parents, but there is no link or connection to either one of them to DIPG. There is nothing that parents could have changed. New studies have shown that the brain cancer is connected to the brain development, which suggested that the disease process may be influenced by particular cells that are present in the highest concentrations while the brain is growing and developing. That could also explain why only children get DIPG and not adults. There is not a lot of research yet, so nobody knows what exactly causes the brain tumor.

What are the symptoms?

The tumor is growing really fast, so the symptoms are appearing all of a sudden and get worse really quickly. The tumor is growing in the brainstem and is growing really fast. Because of the location in the middle of the brain, children usually have problems at the beginning with the face muscle and also with the eye movement. Later, one side of the face drops. Children also experience bad headache and vomiting. They have problems chewing, swallowing, and get hearing problems, many children also become deaf.  After a time, the tumor causes limb weakness, difficulty standing or walking, abnormal gaits and unbalanced limb movements.

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Is there a treatment or even a cure?

Surgery 

Doctors can not remove the brain tumor with surgery and there are two reasons. Reason number one is because the pons is located in the middle of the brain. A surgeon could not get to the tumor without damaging the surrounding brain. Damaging the neighboring area could be even more fatal, and would cause neurological damage. The second reason is that, even if the doctor is able to surgically remove the tumor, it would return soon. The reason for that is that the tumor is not a solid tumor, which is a big or small mass of cancer cells which can be removed easily. A DIPG tumor spreads between the healthy brain mass, so it is impossible to remove all of the cancer cells and not damage the healthy part of the brain. The tumor would return immediately.

Radiation

Radiation helps many DIPG patients. It lets the tumor shrink a little and makes the patients feel more comfortable. Many symptoms are not as bad as they could be. But radiation is not strong enough, so the tumor is grows back within month.

Chemotherapy

In the past years many DIPG patients have  tried different kinds of chemotherapy, sometimes alone or sometimes with other drugs, but not one of them has shown any benefit for survival.

Are there any survivors and what is the long-therm outlook?

The advanced medicine has done nothing for the children with DIPG. There has been no change since 1960. A child diagnosed with DIPG gets the same treatment/prognosis as he would have 60 years ago. There is no chance of survival. Some other cancers had a survival chance of 10 % in 1960, but nowadays they have a survival rate of 90% (Wilms tumor) so the survival rate improved by 80 %, which is amazing. Children who get diagnosed with DIPG die usually nine month after the prognosis. In some cases, they survived two years, but it depends how advanced the tumor is. Just 5% survive for five years. No one who has been diagnosed with DIPG has ever survived. The long-therm outlook is to make them feel as comfortable as possible. This type of cancer should get more attention and there should be more test and research to help many families and children in the future.

I choose this subject to bring more awareness about this specific brain cancer and that everyone should be happy to be healthy and alive:)

 

 

 

New Season for the Los Angeles Lakers

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Adele Fadier, France

Can I tell you something? My interest in the Lakers team this year began because of  LeBron James.

This famous NBA player, who began is career in 2003, is a smart man on the ground and in his life. Everybody knows that he enters in the Lakers franchise for this 2018/2019 season. Obviously, this decision brings many questions and especially why has he chosen the Los Angeles Lakers ?

This new team is very young and maybe it’s the time to trust in these youth. The French football team was a good example during this FIFA World Cup. Like LeBron said, they’re “not on the Warrior’s level”. Despite this, they will work hard to progress with LeBron’s experience and confidence. But before that, we have to wait for the beginning of the NBA regular season, that will be the 18 October against the Portland Trail Blazers. At this moment we can see the team’s real level of the Lakers and what they can do on the ground. This team is like a white sheet with a new story to write.

Everybody talks a lot about LeBron James but, like when he was on the Cleveland team, he can’t do all the work alone. So now we’ll take a look at the rest of the team.

Indeed, to strengthen the King, the Lakers’ staff has searched some players with play making skills, speed, experience, motivation and high level of competitiveness. Let’s see the result. We have a team of 15 players. There are Lonzo Ball, the youth, and Rajon Rondo, the experience, as point guard. Lonzo Ball who suffered an operation of the knee last July. LeBron James even said that he was impressed by Lonzo’s form and vivacity in so little time after his operation. Is it a good sign to see Lonzo Ball as a headliner? In any case, it’s good news for the pro-Lonzo fans, conversely for the pro-Rondo team.

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Moreover, Los Angeles Lakers’ shooting guard Kentavious Caldwell-Pope is like a new player coming into this season. He seems to be a pillar member of the team, alongside Lebron James, thanks to his impressive 3-point shooting and defense. Another shooting guard arrived in the Lakers team for this season, Lance Stephenson, who is really excited to play on this team but mainly with the King. Despite this enthusiasm, Stephenson has to improve his performances compared to his last season (28.9 % at 3-points with the Pacers last year). The last shooting guard for this new team is Josh Hart, who was a really good deal for the Lakers with Kyle Kuzma during the 2017 Draft. Josh Hart has really good statistics as a 3&D player, but he doesn’t want to stay at this place. So let us see what you can do, Boy.

Then Brandon Ingram, small forward in the Lakers since 2016, looks like he will be a team’s pillar for this season with LeBron James at power forward. Finally, JaVale McGee joined the Lakers as main center of the team. Indeed, the 30-year-old led the Warriors in true shooting percentage (64.1 percent), which was among the top-10 in the NBA last year among players that appeared in at least 60 games.

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So the new season means a new great team for The Lakers. Indeed, the Lakers’ staff put a lot of money this year in recruitment.

But, you know that a team also needs a good coach. And what coach? Luke Walton, a guy who played 10 season in the NBA, who won two NBA championships with the Lakers and won one with the Golden State Warriors as an assistant coach. This year is his third season with the Lakers team as head coach. The start will probably be difficult for Walton. In fact, he had to find a fine mix between youthfulness and experience. This team is really eclectic so it will be a real puzzle for Walton to compose the starting line-up.

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To finish how can we describe this team : crazy, versatile, promising, overvalued? In any case, they are intriguing on the basketball planet. Can’t wait to see their evolution and how they will mark this year.

I think that this new Lakers’ team will suprise us. I believe in this group, they can do great things and why not win the NBA championship this year?

You can find below a video about their first preseason game.

 

The Earthquake in Indonesia

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Cedric Dauteuil.France.

Indonesia’s death toll from the earthquake and tsunami which struck  last Friday has risen to 1,234, according to officials.

The figures come after the bodies of 34 students were found in a destroyed church which was hit by a landslide during a bible camp in the mountainous Sigi Biromaru region.

The Indonesian government has begun mass burials for victims – most found in the city of Palu.

On Monday, about 3,000 residents flocked to Palu’s airport, trying to board military aircraft or one of the few commercial flights using the facility only partially operating due to damage.

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“Nearly 50,000 people have been displaced from their homes in Palu alone,” Nugroho said,” and hospitals were overwhelmed.”

Many people are believed trapped under shattered houses in the area, where the earthquake caused the ground to heave up and down violently. One official described the twisted buildings and rubble as looking like the town had been “blended”

 

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The Indonesian Air Force confirmed a Hercules aircraft carrying an unspecified number of survivors were able to leave Palu for South Sulawesi’s capital of Makassar.

More than 100 police officers from the capital, Jakarta, were sent to Palu and additional Hercules aircraft carrying soldiers and supplies, including food and water, from East Java were en route, local television reported.

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My opinion about that :

I think all of these people need our help. We need to send a food and money for helping all of these people because they have lost everything.

We can create an association for them or just check this association :

https://www.directrelief.org/

 

 

A Letter to My Future Self

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Dear Future Self,

You are probably reading this, maybe ten years later from the day you’ve written it to yourself. You might remember the day you were sitting in class at the EF school in Santa Barbara, and got the assignment to write about something you’d like. Then you came up with the idea to write about the most exciting experience of your life so far, to give yourself something to look back on when you’re older.

When you were only fourteen years old, you first visited the United States. After growing up in such a small country as the Netherlands, coming to the States was a huge eye- opener; it was the real experience of seeing everything big, bigger and biggest. You loved it, and from the first visit on you already knew you’d be coming back to this country one day. That whole plan started to come together during your last year of high school. You really din’t know what to study after your graduation, so you decided to take a year off from school. First a few weeks of hard work to make some money, then off to the USA for three months to take an English language course with EF.

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That’s where we are now. Let’s help you out a little: the day you wrote this letter, was your 12th day in Santa Barbara. The arrival wasn’t completely as expected; you had some struggles with your visa at the border and the welcome in your host family was not what you’d hoped for. Anyways, the first week of school was full of fun activities and you already met lots of new people, so there wasn’t any moment left to actually think about home. The second week you slowly started to settle in; the jetlag was over and you started to get familiar with the everyday school routine. You couldn’t believe that almost two weeks had already passed, and that you’d be flying to Miami Beach in five weeks to stay there for another seven weeks.

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And after that? I can’t tell you yet. I decided to take every day as it comes, and to not worry too much about ‘what will happen next.’ I can only tell you about my hopes. I hope my time in the States will be so memorable, that when you are reading this in the future, you will still look back on this time as the best time of your life. I also hope, that this year off from school helped you to figure out what you wanted to study at university in the next school year, and I hope that this trip helped you to become the person you are today. In this moment, I have already met a lot of people, but I believe there are way more people to get to know, and more beautiful places to be explored. I truly hope that all these new connections will slowly turn into true friendships that will last for a lifetime. How amazing would it be, if you can say that you’re still seeing people you’ve met during your time in the USA? I can only hope for the best.

Lot Steenvoorden, The Netherlands

 

Dark Side of K Pop Industry

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Luna Speidel, Belgium

Although K Pop generally classifies “popular music” within South Korea, the term is often used in a narrower sense to describe a modern form of Korean pop that is influenced by styles and genres from around the world. The Asian pop singers are becoming more and more popular and, therefore, the music industry is pushing them harder so they can be at their best on stage, which is understandable. CDs, music videos and interviews have been taking their lives to a point where it becomes too much. Is it normal that at almost every concert at least one of the group members faints? Is it normal that they are doing more then 30 different dance routines per night for many months? We should take a deeper look and see if this is human abuse or not.

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The multi-million dollar industry that is controlling the lives of the big stars, makes everything look so glamorous and nice. But what the fans and the outside world in general doesn’t know, is that behind that fake image the artists are working 12 hours and maybe more a day every day to make everything look perfect. This leads to a form of abuse and is often hidden by the industry itself. You can’t force someone to stay on their feet and give everything they’ve got on a stage in front of millions of their fans. The fainting and collapsing on stage is a message and gives all the hidden darkness away. The industry can’t control everything and certainly not health.

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When you become someone famous in that industry, your whole life is being controlled and getting out of it is almost impossible. Things like dating and getting married are not allowed, unless the significant other is approved by the industry. Everything is made for the artists to become more famous and for that to happen every detail counts. Most of the Kpop singers need to have plastic surgery to maintain their beauty and achieve the perfect look that the fans want. But again, this is something that the entire industry keeps secret so the performers look like natural perfection. Their diets are really strict and can go to a point where these celebrities starve themselves to keep up with their perfect body image. That’s also one of the things that causes the lack of energy and fainting on stage.

 

 

With all that negativity that’s hidden, you would think that the artists make a lot of money out of it so it’s at least worth something to them, but even on that level, the Kpop stars are victims of financial exploitation. For one show, a regular Kpop group generally earns $4000, 90% of which goes to the company and 10% gets divided between the singers. The singers are also threatened with blackmail so they don’t break the contracts, which are often for long terms, and stay in the groups. In the end, it’s a really dark industry that’s is created to give people what they want so the company gets to make as much money as they can.

Anti-Fans Sometimes Try To Kil is listed (or ranked) 12 on the list The Dark Side Of The K-Pop Industry And Idol GroupsAfbeeldingsresultaat voor dark side of kpop industry

Santa Barbara: a New Home

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Francesca Vinciguerra, Italy

“One’s destination is never a place, but always a new way of seeing things,” said Henry Miller, an American writer. My destination was not Santa Barbara, but was seeing a different culture. I came here to improve my English and to become more fluent in speaking, but now that I am almost at the end of my trip, I can say I had learnt much more.

I understood that, wherever you go, you will find a new home where you feel yourself. Home is not just a pretty building, but also an ensemble of friends and people that take care of you. I have been living in Carpinteria for a month with other four lovable multicultural girls, Anna from Germany, Solene from France, Didem from Turkey, Hikari from Japan, and with a big family composed by Michael, Lucy, their daughter, her husband and their three grandsons.

Before coming here, I was afraid of leaving my family and my country completely alone. I was longing for years to come to America, but I have never thought my dream would be concretely realized. America is the many European students’ big dream because someone says that here every dream could come true. My dream is to reach my personal success: becoming a biotechnologist and helping the research to find new solutions for diseases such as Alzheimer Disease, Obesity or Infertility.

Why right in California and not in Italy? I love Italy, but no sooner had I entered in University than I had understood that I would have to move abroad to practice my lab skills.

In just one month, I have recognized that I fit well with the way of living and working. People here are open-minded, out-going and like talking with foreigners. The weather is warm and you can go hiking and tanning at the same time because there are both mountains and seaside. The only flaw is food. People here love fast food and rarely sit down to eat. In Italy, we are used to sitting down around a table for lunch and dinner and the mealtime is a sacred moment. I enjoy high-quality cookery and sharing the mealtime with friends and with my family. I prefer simple and not too spicy food where you can distinguish each different flavor and tastes rather than a mix of a hundred ingredients. Except for food, in Santa Barbara I feel at home. I suppose that the reason why nobody makes me feel as a stranger or a tourist is that in California there is a mix of people coming from all over the world, accustomed to live and work together.

I hope to come back soon to be part of this “big American team”.

How Social Media Influence Our Lives and Why That Should Stop

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Lucija Krmpotic, Germany

“There is no need to do what others are doing. You must do what truly matters to you” (Unknown) is something we have to keep in mind to live happy lives.

There are more and more people all over the world thinking that they have to be like someone else to be accepted and loved in this world. That is the reason why so many of us are pretending to be someone else and not truly who we are. When we open our social media profiles we just see a perfect world with perfect pictures of perfect looking people living a perfect lives. We start to think about ourselves and how much we would like to be like one of these “perfect” people. This is a big problem nowadays because it can and actually leads to many dangerous trends and lifestyles. Some of these dangerous trends are the Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge where people have to suck the lips in a glass until having a vacuum inside to get lips like Kylie Jenner or the Sunburn Art Challenge where challengers have to create a pattern on an area of your body and let the sun burn the unprotected skin. By following all those trends and doing all those challenges you get nothing for yourself but dangerous risks about your own life.

In my opinion, it is totally the wrong way to live your life by pretending to be someone you are not and you will never be. In reality, nobody’s life is perfect and there is no “perfect” person. So before you start pretending to be someone else, you have to ask yourself if this is the right way to live. Is it really worth it to spend your whole time thinking about who you want to be like and what you want to pretend to like? But wouldn’t it just feel better to be the person you really are doing things you really like? Every person is unique on its own way. So why wouldn’t we just stay what and who we are and start enjoying our lives with things that truly matter in life? I really hope that people will realize that it is not worth it to spend the time you have to do nice things on thinking about how you could change your life for everybody but yourself. You just have one life so do the things you love and try the things that really interest you.

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Could Venice Be Cleaner Like It Used To Be Once?

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Arianna Ferrari, Italy

I’m sure you all have heard about Venice and how amazing is, which is true, but it’s also true that Venice is overrun with tourists and that could be a problem for people who live there. I’m just an Italian girl who lives in a small city near Venice, like 30 minutes by car and that’s why I often go to Venice. I love the city, but sometimes it’s hard to stay there. I mean, there are a lot of tourists who don’t respect the city and the environment; they just forget that they are in a city that it’s not theirs.

This year, I graduated and I had to decide where I would go for my studies at university and Venice has a great university for what I would like to do, but the thing is that I refused to go there just because of the chaos of the city. Sometimes people think that  local people overreact about the tourists and sometimes I also heard about people who said that local people treated them ruedly, but in my opinion, for a person who lives there and has to deal with that problem everyday, it’s not so easy.

I just ask one thing to the tourists: be more respectful. Venice is a really beautiful and a unique city in the world and it’s bad to ruin the city in this way.

Social Networking Sites, Positive and Negative Aspects

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Virginia Carrara, Italy

Before talking about positive and negative aspects of social networking sites, I would like to explain what a social networking site is.

A social networking site is an online platform which people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people who share similar personal or career interests, activities, background or real life connections.

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Today, using social networking sites is becoming for many people, especially for the new generation like me, a daily activity. Through them, we can make friends with people from all around the world, sharing their cultures and learn about the other ones.

So, in my opinion, there are many positive things about social networking sites: I think it’s good not only for people who are too shy to make friends, but also to stay in touch with friends met on internet or face to face, and with relatives who live far away from us.

In my personal experience, for example, I’ve met people from many different countries thanks to EF, so I’ll surely keep in contact with them when I go back to my country, and that’s only thanks to social networking sites, such as Whatsapp, Instagram and Facebook.

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But, of course, there are also some negative things to keep in mind. For example, when you meet a person on Internet, she might not be who she says she is, so you might be the victim of antisocial behaviour or bullying. Another negative thing, but less important in my opinion because it all depends on you, is about the time spent on networking sites that might interfere with work or studies.

In conclusion, I think social networking sites are a very good way to make friends and keep in contact with them, but at the same time we have to be careful knowing all the risks.

When and Why Is International Day of Friendship Celebrated?

THE AQUARIUS

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The Aquarius is a big boat for the immigrants rescued at sea.

The Aquarius is the last private rescue ship operating in the area used for crossings from Libya to Europe It has been at the center of a row about Europe’s approach to migration since Italy refused to allow it to dock on its shores in June. Last month it spent 19 days docked in the French port of Marseille after Gibraltar revoked its flag. It set sail again last week after first acquiring Panamanian recognition.

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The two charities that operate the Aquarius migrant rescue ship in the Mediterranean have urged European governments to step in to secure its future after its Panamanian flag was revoked following alleged pressure from the Italian government.

Médecins Sans Frontières and SOS Méditerranée described the decision by the Panama Maritime Authority to deflag the vessel as “a major blow” to the ship’s humanitarian mission.

They claimed the PMA was forced to revoke the registration after coming under “blatant economic and political pressure from the Italian government”.

The charities are urging European governments to either call on the PMA to reconsider or issue a new flag to allow the Aquarius to continue its work

Italy’s anti-immigration interior minister, Matteo Salvini, has denied that his government was behind the decision to deflag the Aquarius. Writing on Twitter he claimed he did not know the telephone dialing code for Panama

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My reaction about that :

I think we need to help  The minors are aged between 13 and 17 and come from Eritrea, Ghana, Nigeria and Sudan, because they need to have a future.

And we need to help them if they are very sick because we have the resources for that.

But i think all the country must participate.