Since its founding in 1881, the American Red Cross has provided humanitarian disaster relief and education both in the United States and internationally. Similarly, the Mount Holyoke College American Red Cross Chapter holds the mission of “[providing] a service to the community and [spreading] awareness on campus.”
Cancer patients worldwide could soon be offered a new, less painful form of treatment that makes use of the body’s built-in arsenal to combat the disease. Doctors and researchers have been studying the human body’s immune system as a method to treat and prevent serious disease for centuries, but it wasn’t until the development of immunology that immunotherapy could be considered as an alternative to traditional cancer treatments.
BY SABRINA EDWARDS '20
From 2014 to 2016, West Africa endured the largest known outbreak of the Ebola virus, a devastating viral infection which causes bleeding and organ failure. In Sept. 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report stating that the worst of the pandemic was still to come as local healthcare systems, international health groups and medical professionals all rushed to catch up to the disease. This report predicted that with "every 30-day delay in increasing the percentage of patients in [Ebola Treatment Units]... was associated with an approximate tripling in the number of daily cases that occur at the peak of the epidemic."
BY HALEY LUCIAN ’17
On Jan. 4, 2017, NASA announced two new exploratory space missions, Lucy and Psyche. The goal ofthese two missions is to shed light on the period of time after the sun's birth. Each mission is estimated to cost roughly 450 million, which – according to NASA – is relatively inexpensive. The Lucy spacecraft will be launched in 2021 and will travel to Jupiter's Trojan asteroids that orbit with Jupiter around the sun. The Psyche spacecraft will follow in 2023 to explore a metal asteroid that, NASA said, has not been previously visited.
BY SABRINA EDWARDS '20
Google “IQ test” and hundreds of online examples of IQ, or intelligence quotient, tests pop up. Even when searching “IQ” questions pop up, like “What is a good IQ?” and “What was Einstein’s IQ?” These searches show modern culture values intelligence and enjoys quantifying it in order to better compare people and their success. However, this concept of IQ comesfrom dubious sources and may not actually determine success, either in the classroom or in the real world.
BY HALEY LUCIAN '17
Two weeks ago the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released their 2015 STD Surveillance Report, which details “statistics and trends for sexually transmitted diseases in the United States through 2015.” The principal diseases tracked by the CDC in this report are chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis, all of which reached unprecedented levels of incidence in the 2015 United States population.
BY MEGHA PATEL '20
Performing monthly breast self-exams allows you to familiarize yourself with both the look and the feel of your breasts, helping you to easily recognize any abnormalities when the time comes. According to the nonprofit Breastcancer.org, three-quarters of breast cancer patients have no family history and are therefore not considered high risk, so it is important to check frequently, even if there are no other warning signs. There are several ways to complete a breast self-exam, so feel free to choose which one works best for you.
