UCLA STUDENT NEWSPAPER: WOMEN CAN EARN BIG MONEY FOR EGGS
The Daily Bruin, the student newspaper at UCLA, reported that college students seeking to pay their bills may be tempted by egg donor agency advertisements with five-figure compensation values. With the tantalising title "Women can earn big money for eggs" referring to the tendency of egg donor agencies and donor banks to target young women with advertisements in college newspapers, it might as well have been an advertisement for egg donation.

William Freije, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UCLA says "We like the donors to be young because we get the best response with younger donors". This suggest that young female students are being targeted as more likely to succumb to the financial inducement and are not necessarily as well equipped as more experienced women who are less enthusiastic about volunteering to understand the possible risks to their health and properly consent to these procedures. The egg donation advertisements specifically target younger college-age women who maybe need a little help with their tuition and young mothers.

However William Freije acknowledges the undeniable risks of the cocktail of powerful hormone drugs that are given to the donor to stimulate egg growth and the subsequent invasive retrieval process which involves collecting the eggs under general anesthesia. He says "Any time you put a needle in a structure you risk infection and bleeding. If someone were to bleed a lot, a transfusion of blood would be necessary…. There is also the risk associated with the general anesthesia". Although the article plays down the percentage risk to "fewer than one in 1,000 women will need major surgery due to complications during the egg retrieval process", according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine Web site, it is unclear whether women are fully aware that they are undergoing such a serious risk to their long term health. One student said "I didn't connect the risk to the compensation".  
   
SOURCE: www.dailybruin.ucla.edu TOP

NATURE MEDICINE/GLOBE AND MAIL: A SOBERING SET BACK IN STEM CELL RESEARCH (October 23, 2006) Researchers at the University of Rochester have found that embryonic stem cells have caused brain tumours in every rat treated 10 weeks into the trial. The lead investigator Steven Goldman said "no matter how you look at it, it's an expanding mass and that's bad news." He has spent four years on the experiment and a 23-year career building up to it. This article indicates how hyped up stem cell research is and how premature it is for women to give eggs for research that is unlikely to yield any benefits. As Tim Caulfield, director of the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta, points out "A lot of the representations of stem-cell research have resulted from the initial excitement and speculation of what can be achieved. But we're still in that early stage, we haven't seen real clinical breakthroughs". Scientists such as Mick Bhatia, the scientific director of the Cancer and Stem Cell Research Institute at McMaster University, note that much more basic biology needs to be done.

SOURCE: GLOBE AND MAIL TOP

NEW SCIENTIST: REPRODUCTIVE REVOLUTION AND EGG DONATION DANGERS (20 October 2006)
The October version of the New Scientist magazine features an article asking whether the science movie Gattaca could become a reality in the future as IVF methods improve with artificial conception becoming the normal and responsible option compared to the risks of natural conception. However, it acknowledges that the inconvenience, pain and risk involved in harvesting eggs for IVF is unlikely to make assisted conception attractive "since women have to inject themselves for weeks with expensive hormones that stimulate their ovaries to produce more eggs than normal and then have the eggs extracted, with only a 1 in 3 chance of getting pregnant."

Significantly, the article states that "in up to 10 per cent of IVF cycles the extra hormones trigger ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, in which fluid leaks from blood vessels, causing symptoms such as bloating and pain. Around 5 per cent of cycles cause moderate or severe OHSS, with a risk of disabling strokes or even death. For every 100,000 women undergoing IVF, about six die."

As a result it concludes that it would be best to avoid ovary-stimulating drugs altogether, not least because there are fears that they might slightly increase the risk of some cancers. It suggests than an alternative to egg harvesting might be in vitro oocyte maturation, or IVM. This involves harvesting nearly mature eggs and incubating them for one or two days to complete their development. Despite follow up safety studies on several hundred children who have been created using IVM, it acknowledges that long term health consequences will remain unknown for decades as these children grow up.

SOURCE: NEW SCIENTIST: Reproductive revolution: Sex for fun, IVF for children Exclusive  20 October 2006 TOP

DAILY MAIL (UK): THE IVF COCKTAIL THAT COULD HARM MOTHER AND BABY (Oct 9, 2006)
The Daily Mail reports that women undergoing IVF treatment could be receiving unnecessary and dangerous drugs, which could be harmful to both the woman and the baby, including ovarian hyperstimulation. Dr Geeta Nargund, head of reproductive medicine at St George's Hospital in London, said: 'There is currently no regulation for drugs used in IVF treatment and that is both worrying and wrong.   In August this year, Nina Thanki died after a routine IVF procedure at Leicester Royal Infirmary she is thought to be the first Briton whose death has been linked to the treatment.

SOURCE: dailymail.co.uk TOP
 
EVENING STANDARD (UK): SCIENTISTS TO CREATE FRANKENBUNNY (Oct 5, 2006)
An article in the Evening Standard highlights how little scientists understand about women's eggs and suggests that far from being essential research, it is very likely that thousands of women will donate eggs without any useful gain to science. As Chris Shaw, at the Institute of Psychiatry acknowledges "I'd much rather know that if we were going to ask women to donate eggs that we were very likely to get stem cells as a result. We know this is a huge challenge after Dr Hwang in South Korea failed to get stem cells despite having 2,000 human eggs." It also reveals disturbingly, that scientists in the UK plan to create embryos from women's eggs and rabbit or cow DNA.

SOURCE: www.thisislondon.co.uk TOP

WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL (US): INTERVIEW WITH JAMES THOMSON, STEM CELL PIONEER: (Oct 5, 2006)
James Thomson acknowledges in an interview with Wisconsin State Journal reporter David Wahlberg  that embryonic stem cell research has been so overhyped because of the impracticality and ethics of obtaining the quantities of eggs. He says: "My personal bet is that so-called therapeutic cloning will not be therapeutically useful in terms of applying those cells for transplantation. It's not that they couldn't be theoretically. I think there's no reason why the procedure won't work. It's more about cost and where the technology's likely to go in the next 10 years or so. I could be wrong because again my colleagues disagree with me on this. But I believe that there ultimately will be other technologies to accomplish the same thing, that don't require a human oocyte. It's the cost of the human oocyte and the ethics of obtaining those oocytes in reasonable numbers. If you look at a population of Parkinson's patients in the United States with over a million people, there's such a mismatch between the availability and the demand that I think other technologies would be more suitable."

SOURCE: http://www.madison.com TOP

DAILY MAIL (UK): IVF WITHOUT DRUGS: LESS RISKY FOR MOTHER (Oct 3, 2006)
The Daily Mail reports on the dangers of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome in IVF treatment which causes the ovaries to swell, causing pain, nausea and vomiting which can be fatal and reports that up to 6 per cent of women undergoing IVF are affected and that women are better off opting for IVF without drugs.

SOURCE: www.dailymail.co.uk TOP

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE (US): STEM CELL PANEL PONDERS EGG DONATION HAZARDS (Sept 29, 2006)
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that a panel organised by the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine has concluded that the health risks of egg donation are significant but not so serious as to stymie the field of stem cell research. Despite this conclusion, the Chronicle's catalogues the many dangers associated with egg donation at length including the invasive process of insertion a thin needle through the vagina and the accompanying course of hormone injections. It acknowledges that the greatest complication involves "hyperstimulation" of the ovaries which involves hospitalisation and death. The Chronicle also reports that "the experts agreed there is no way to eliminate all the potential dangers".

The Chronicle also highlights the exploitation involved in women involved in unpaid donation which risks their health while giving them no personal gain. In fact, it notes that even the research using eggs is highly experimental: "It's unclear, in fact, whether human embryonic stem cell research will produce any medical benefits anytime soon."

The Chronicle reports that Susan Berke Fogel, coordinator of a group called the Pro-Choice Alliance for Responsible Research who attended the meeting said "They're finally focusing on women. Every other slide show until this showed us the eggs as if they just magically appeared." Given the dangers associated with egg donation and the hypothetical benefit, it is questionable how far the panel of experts was convened simply to pacify women's groups and justify egg donation by playing down the risks.

SOURCE: SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE : Sept 29 TOP

BRITISH MEDICAL ASSOCIATION MEDICAL ETHICS COMMITTEE DEBATES EGG DONATION (Sept 21, 2006)
The British Medical Association (BMA)'s Medical Ethics Committee recently debated whether women should be able to donate eggs for research and concluded that the risks associated with egg donation do not justify preventing women from donating to research if that is their wish and they are not subjected to pressure causing them to act contrary to their own better judgement. Although it recognised that consent must be voluntarily given and free from pressure and therefore women should not be allowed to donate if they are in a dependent relationship with the researcher, it considered that subject to those safeguards, there should be no barrier to women donating eggs to research where that was their wish. In the online published report of the meeting on BioNews, there was no mention of any of the dangers to women involved in egg donation.

SOURCE: BioNews TOP