God accused of selling cocaine near Tampa church

Police say a man named God was arrested near a Tampa church for selling cocaine. Authorities began investigating God Lucky Howard in April, and he was arrested on Saturday. Police say he sold the cocaine to undercover detectives in his neighborhood. When officers searched his home, they reported finding another 22 grams of cocaine and a scale.

Jail records show Howard was charged with several counts drug possession and distribution, which include increased charges for being within 1,000 feet of a church, a school and public housing.

He was being held on a bond of $86,500.

AP

Students move out, but leave human skull behind

Police say some students who moved out of an apartment near the University of Pennsylvania cleared it out down to the bare bones. An assistant manager who cleaned up found a human skull on the kitchen counter.

Police don't know which of the seven students who lived in the West Philadelphia apartment left the skull behind.

Authorities say there is no indication any crime has occurred, but Lt. Frank Vanore says even for police it is "kind of a weird story."

Vanore says the skull may have been a learning tool for medical students. Or it may have been left as a prank.

Spokesman Jeff Moran of the Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office says a forensic anthropologist will check out the abandoned headbone to see if he can learn more.

AP

Skunks under Ohio family's home reek havoc

A family's dream home became a stinky nightmare after skunks moved in. They chewed underneath Kerry McCullough's house in Sheffield Lake, about 20 miles west of Cleveland, and started their own family.

McCullough said the odor from the four skunks is like the stench of burning plastic, so bad that it hurt his lungs.

The squatters went unnoticed until the heat was turned on last winter. The McCulloughs' house uses hot water heat with exposed pipes running under the floors. When a skunk brushed up against the pipes, it would spray.

"It would be 30 degrees, and I'd have the windows open," said Karen McCullough, 46. "I'd go to the grocery store and people would say, 'It smells like skunk.'"

What's really foul is how much damage the critters can cause. The McCulloughs had to replace doors and walls and take their kitchen apart, for a total cost of about $75,000.

Kerry McCullough said at least his insurance doesn't stink: It covered most of the bills.

Man with deadly skin cancer saved by new treatment

An Oregon man, given less than a year to live, had a complete remission of advanced deadly skin cancer after an experimental treatment that revved up his immune system to fight the tumors.

The 52-year-old patient's dramatic turnaround was the only success in a small study, leading doctors to be cautious in their enthusiasm. However, the treatment reported in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine is being counted as the latest in a small series of successes involving immune-priming treatments against deadly skin cancers.

"Immunotherapy has become the most promising approach" to late-stage, death-sentence skin cancers, said Dr. Darrell Rigel, a dermatology researcher at the New York University Cancer Institute in New York who had no role in the research.

Still, the immune-priming experiments have yet to yield a consistent therapy. Even researchers who worked on the experiment involving nine patients and just one success are quick to couch the result. "This is only one patient," said study co-author Dr. Cassian Yee of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

And two years after his remarkable recovery, the patient fell out of contact with researchers and scientists do not know his current condition. The man, who lives in a small town in Oregon, has declined media interviews, Yee said.

Melanoma is a cancer in the skin cells that make pigments and cause skin to tan, as part of the body's attempt to protect itself from ultraviolet radiation in sunlight. Cancer begins when radiation overloads and damages the cells, causing mutations.

About 62,000 news cases are diagnosed in the United States each year, and there are about 8,000 melanoma deaths.

When caught early, melanomas can be easily treated by surgically removing the cancerous patch of skin. But "once it has spread, basically nothing works," Rigel said.

Recently, however, scientists began thinking they might have another option - helping the body's immune system.

Doctors had long thought that immune system cells, which so effectively attack foreign threats like viruses, were giving a pass to cancer cells. The theory was that because cancers cells are generated by the body, the immune system perceived them as part of the body.

But about 20 years ago, some scientists discovered that immune cells could latch onto and attack skin cancers.

"There's a long history behind all of this," said Dr. Steven Rosenberg of the National Cancer Institute, a pioneer in that research.

In recent experiments, Rosenberg and other researchers have focused on souping up a certain kind of immune system cell - the "killer T cells" that envelop and kill foreign agents. Experiments have also involved giving patients chemotherapy or other drugs that are toxic to patients but can help the immune system's ability to fight cancer.

The new research took a different approach. The Hutchinson center scientists focused instead on specific helper T cells that are adept at locking onto a cancer cell and guiding the killer cells to their target.

The researchers drew blood from patients, located the special helper cells and then grew more of them in the laboratory. They then infused roughly 5 billion of the cells back into the patients - without chemotherapy or the other harsh drugs.

"It's a simpler and less toxic approach to melanoma than had been previously employed," said Dr. Louis Weiner, director of the cancer center at Georgetown University.

The fourth patient they treated was the Oregon man, who had a melanoma on his back before it had spread to his groin and right lung. He was treated in July 2005. Two months after the treatment, advanced scans of his body revealed no tumors. Two years after the treatment, he had no symptoms.

Genetically modified mosquitoes may combat malaria

In a cramped, humid laboratory in London, mosquitoes swarming in stacked, net-covered cages are being scrutinized for keys to controlling malaria.

Scientists have genetically modified hundreds of them, hoping to stop them from spreading the killer disease.

Faced with a losing battle against malaria, scientists are increasingly exploring new avenues that might have seemed far-fetched just a few years ago.

"We don't have things we can rely on," said Andrea Crisanti, the malaria expert in charge of genetically modifying mosquitoes at London's Imperial College. "It's time to try something else."

Malaria kills nearly three million people worldwide every year, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. Millions of bed nets have been handed out, and villages across the continent have been doused with insecticide. But those measures haven't put a significant dent in malaria cases.

After a string of failed initiatives, the United Nations recently announced a campaign to provide bed nets to anyone who needs them by 2010.

The malaria-causing parasite, which mosquitoes then transmit to humans, is simply too good at evading anything scientists might devise to protect the mosquito, argued to Jo Lines, a malaria expert at London's School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Some environmentalists worried that genetically modified mosquitoes might wreak havoc in the ecosystem.

Over the next year, Crisanti hopes to finalize plans for a test release of genetically modified mosquitoes in southern Italy. There, millions of the insects will be set loose in large cages to determine things like how they might interact with wild mosquitoes and how many would be needed to knock out malaria.

The scientist said it was a risk worth taking.

"I think there is a moral good to doing it," he said. "If we do this right, the mosquitoes will get rid of malaria for us."

AP