ISME survey shows 49% refusal rate for Irish businesses bank credit
The Irish Small and Medium Enterprise organisation claims that 49% of small and medium firms have been refused bank credit in the last three months.
It reveals a slight improvement on the 54% in the previous quarter.
Their Quarterly Bank Watch Survey, conducted in the week ending September 7, shows that demand for bank credit was steady at 38% in the same period.
The association has called on the Government “to immediately demand full and complete disclosure from the bailed out banks on lending to SMEs”.
They siad that the report backs up the recent report from the Central Bank “that access to bank finance is being denied to viable but vulnerable businesses”.
The survey attracted 862 responses.
Stigma still persists on mental health in Ireland
New figures have shown that lack of understanding of mental health problems is still fuelling stigma and preventing people from getting the support they need.
The findings from St Patrick’s Hospital in Dublin show that one-fifth of people surveyed believe that those suffering from mental health problems are of below average intelligence.
In addition, nearly one-in-three respondents said they would not willingly accept someone with a mental health problem as a close friend.
The findings were published to coincide with World Suicide Awareness Day.
The survey also found that nearly two-in-three people would discriminate against hiring someone with a history of mental illness on the grounds that they may be unreliable and 42% felt that undergoing treatment for a mental health problem is a sign of personal failure.
St Patrick’s Hospital CEO Paul Gilligan said the findings highlight the critical requirement to reduce stigma and barriers to accessing mental healthcare.
“It’s also essential that those looking for help are provided with adequate high quality services they can trust in.”
The survey was conducted among 300 members of the public.
The results show that exposure to mental health problems is very widespread, with 40% of respondents revealing that a close member of their family has been treated for a mental health issue.
Tom Maher, head of clinical servics at St Patrick’s, stressed that we need to prioritise the promotion of mental health literacy among the general population. The hospital is organising a free series of mental health information evenings for families and carers.
Meanwhile, the HSE is marking World Suicide Prevention Day by gathering together over 130 participants from various agencies and orgnisations at a conference in Dublin today to share evidence-based best practice on suicide prevention.
The HSE says the conference will discuss oppprtunities for better coordination of suicide prevention initaitives.
The meeting will highlight a research study carried out by the Headstrong organisation and UCD recently which shows that rates of suicidal thoughts and self-harm were higher in young adults who did not seek help or talk about their problems.
The HSE says early intervention programmes in GP practices and hsotpitals targeted at people at risk will help prevent suicides in Ireland.
Transgender legislation pledged by Irish Government soon
Joan Burton said legislation to provide for the legal recognition of transgender people is to come before a joint Oireachtas committee
Legislation to provide for the legal recognition of transgender people would be put before the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Social Protection in coming weeks, the Minister Joan Burton has said.
Speaking at the opening session of the fourth European Transgender Council meeting in Dublin today she said the enacting of such legislation was a priority for her, though she was unable to give reassurances on a number of key issues to trans people.
Transgender delegates from across Europe are in Dublin for the council meeting, which continues through the weekend and is hosted by the Transgender Equality Network Ireland (Teni).
It is 15 years since the Free Legal Advice Centres (Flac) issued legal proceedings to assert the right of transgender woman Lydia Foy to legal recognition of her gender. Though the High Court ruled against her in 2002 it ruled in her favour, in new proceedings, in 2007.
Michael Farrell, senior solicitor with Flac, who led Ms Laffoy’s case, said it was was “unacceptable” that Ireland remained the only country in Europe where there was no legal recognition of transgender people.
Legislating for recognition of transgender people was “not an option for the Irish Government”, given its acceptance in 2010 that it was in breach of the European Convention of Human Rights, he said.
“The jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights is clear and unambiguous. Trans people are legally entitled to recognition in their own gender,” he said. The absence of such legislation means trans people cannot have their birth certificate reissued to indicate their true gender.
Ms Burton said her legal section had received guidance from the Attorney General’s office in the past week.
Delegates voiced concerns that the legislation may include a compulsory medical examination before trans people could access legal recognition and that married trans people would have to divorce their spouse before accessing recognition. This is due to the constitutional protection of marriage.
Asked about the question of “forced divorce”, Ms Burton said the Attorney General’s report “deals specifically with that issue and of course for the groups it is an issue, but the Irish Constitution and its position on marriage is a matter of fact”.
Ms Burton faced protest from eight members of the audience who held up placards, with “Shame on you Minister Burton”, “Same Old Story” “Not Good Enough” and “15 years and still waiting” as she finished speaking.
Broden Giamrone, director of Transgender Equality Network Ireland, said legislation was needed that respected the community and did not pathologise trans people or tear their families apart.
Senator Katherine Zappone said if Ireland introduced a legislation incorporating a forced divorce clause, “requiring an individual to choose between their family and their identity we will inevitably see more legal challenges, costing more money to the State”.
Molecular milestone: scientists unravel the human genome
The 46 human chromosomes, where DNA resides and does its work. Each chromosome contains genes, but genes comprise only 2 percent of DNA.
In a milestone for the understanding of human genetics, scientists just announced the results of five years of work in unraveling the secrets of how the genome operates.
The ENCODE project, as it is known, dispensed with the idea that our DNA is largely “junk,” repeating sequences with no function, finding instead that at least 80 percent of the genome is important.
The new findings are the latest in a series of increasingly deep looks at the human genome . Here are some of the major milestones scientists have passed along the way.
1. An understanding of heredity, 1866
The realization that traits and certain diseases can be passed from parent to offspring stretches back at least to the ancient Greeks, well before any genome was actually decoded. The Greek physician Hippocrates theorized that “seeds” from different parts of the body were transmitted to newly conceived embryos, a theory known as pangenesis. Charles Darwin would later espouse similar ideas.
What exactly these “seeds” might be was destined to remain a mystery for centuries. But the first person to put heredity to the test was Gregor Mendel, who systematically tracked dominant and recessive traits in his famous pea plants. Mendel published his work on the statistics of genetic dominance in 1866 to little notice. [Genetics by the Numbers: 10 Tantalizing Tales ]
2. Chromosomes come to light, 1902
But the painstaking work of cross-breeding pea plants wouldn’t languish for long. In 1869, Swiss physician Johannes Friedrich Miescher became the first scientist to isolate nucleic acids, the active ingredient of DNA. Over the next several decades, scientists peering deeper into the cell discovered mitosis and meiosis, the two types of cell division, and chromosomes , the long strands of DNA and protein in cell nuclei.
In 1903, early geneticist Walter Sutton put two and two together, discovering through his work on grasshopper chromosomes that these mysterious filaments occur in pairs and separate during meiosis, providing a vehicle for mom and dad to pass on their genetic material.
“I may finally call attention to the probability that the associations of paternal and maternal chromosomes in pairs and their subsequent separation … may constitute the physical basis of the Mendelian law of heredity,” Sutton wrote in the journal The Biological Bulletin in 1902. He followed up with a more comprehensive paper, “The Chromosomes in Heredity ” in 1903. (German biologist Theodor Boveri came to similar conclusions about chromosomes at the same time Sutton was working on his chromosome discovery.)
3. What genes do, 1941
With the link between chromosomes and heredity confirmed, geneticists delved deeper into the mysteries of the genome. In 1941, geneticists Edward Tatum and George Beadle published their work revealing that genes code for proteins , explaining for the first time how genes direct metabolism in cells. Tatum and Beadle would share half of the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery, which they made by mutating bread mold with X-rays.
4. DNA structure decoded, 1953
Now scientists knew that DNA was the molecule responsible for carrying genetic information. But how? And what did this molecule look like?
The pieces of the puzzle were beginning to come together throughout the 1940s. In 1950, biochemist Erwin Chargaff figured out that the nucleotides, or building blocks, of DNA occur in specific patterns. These nucleotides are represented by four letters (A, T, G and C), and Chargaff was the first to discover that no matter the species, A and T always appeared in equal measures, as did G and C.
This discovery would be crucial to James Watson and Francis Crick, the scientists who would describe the structure of DNA for the first time in 1953. Combining Chargaff’s work with studies by Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin and other scientists, the pair worked out the iconic double helix shape of DNA, a discovery Crick reportedly called “the secret of life.”
5. Human Genome catalogued, 2001
With DNA becoming an increasingly open book, scientists began to tackle genomics, the study of the complete genetic library of organisms. In 1977, researchers sequenced a complete genome for the first time, starting with a rotund little bacteriophage known as Phi X 174. By 1990, science was ready to start something much bigger: a complete cataloguing of the human genome. [Animal Code: Our Favorite Genomes ]
The result was the Human Genome Project, a 13-year international effort that resulted in the complete sequencing of the human genome in 2001. (More detailed analyses of the initial sequence continued after the release of this first draft.) The project revealed that humans have about 23,000 protein-coding genes, a mere 1.5 percent of the genome. The rest is made up of what has been called “junk DNA ,” including fragments of DNA that don’t code for any proteins and chunks of genes that regulate other portions of the genome.
6. Junk DNA de-junked (2012)
Now, the ENCODE project has looked deeper into this “junk DNA” than ever before. And junk it is not: According to more than 30 research papers published today (Sept. 5) in a number of journals including Science and Nature, at least 80 percent of the genome is biologically active, with much non-protein-coding DNA regulating nearby genes in a complex dance of influence. [Mysteries of Human Evolution ]
The findings reveal that the genetic basis of many diseases may not be in protein-coding genes at all, but in their regulatory neighbors . For example, genetic variants related to metabolic diseases pop up in genetic regions that activated only in liver cells. Likewise, regions activated in immune cells hold variants that have been associated with autoimmune disorders such as lupus.
“These breakthrough studies provide the first extensive maps of the DNA switches that control human genes,” study researcher John Stamatoyannopoulos, associate professor of genome sciences and medicine at the University of Washington, said in a statement. “This information is vital to understanding how the body makes different kinds of cells, and how normal gene circuitry gets rewired in disease. We are now able to read the living human genome at an unprecedented level of detail, and to begin to make sense of the complex instruction set that ultimately influences a wide range of human biology.”
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