Airlines need to qualify aircraft for passenger-carrying transoceanic operations.
Northwest Airlines would often use their new wide body aircraft for domestic operations to meet the qualification requirements to operate long distances.
I was a participant in a trial of the TIL therapy at NIH in 2012 for stage 4 melanoma. I chose to participate in this trial because it was retraining my own immune system to fight my cancer.
Within three months of treatment, 99% of my tumor load was gone (with the remaining was unknown if it was active malignant cells or scar tissue). By 15 months, there was no evidence left.
In the last 11+ years, I've had no further treatment and the melanoma has not returned. I'm very lucky to be a complete responder and have a long-term remission.
When TIL adoptive cell therapy works, it works well. It's amazing, and I'm thankful for Dr. Steven Rosenberg's life work in developing this.
Now that it's FDA approved, many other melanoma patients will have a shot to try a therapy that, for all practical purposes, can be a cure for a disease that not too long ago was a terminal death sentence.
Interesting. I had zero issues using my Amex in France and Switzerland this past summer. In fact, there was only one restaurant that I visited that wouldn't take it. I must have been lucky.
Yes, such treatments have been in trial for a couple decades at NIH, showing complete response in a segment of the patients for certain cancers. The therapies harness each individual's immune system to direct it's attack to the mutations specific to their tumors.
Iovance is on the brink (should have been approved in the next month or two, but has been delayed because of "staffing shortages" at the FDA) of getting FDA approval for Tumor Infiltrating Lymphocytes adoptive cell therapy.
Besides the special labs used for the cell processing (managed by Iovance), the therapy is not a whole lot different from stem cell transplants, so any hospital that helps patients with blood-bourn cancers can provide this new therapy to melanoma (and soon, other cancer) patients.
P.S. I'm an 11-year survivor post-TIL therapy for Stage 4 melanoma at NIH.
In elementary school in Wisconsin in the 70s, we lost our milk cartons in favor of the bagged milk.
Although it may have been sold as eco-friendly, the real driving reason was cost reduction: it was less expensive to package and transport milk in plastic bags than in small waxed cardboard cartons.
I'm not sure how someone could get through with the incorrect identity unless their eye scan results in the record of someone with the same name.
The process for CLEAR is:
1. Stand next to the kiosk for recognition. For whatever reasons, the machines always seem to have problems with me, but eventually get a good scan and bring up the correct record.
2. Scan your boarding pass at the kiosk, which (supposedly) validates that you're on a flight at this airport and that your name matches what's on the boarding pass.
3. You're escorted to the TSA agent, the CLEAR agent vouches for you, and you just wave your boarding pass in the air to the TSA agent (no scanning).
Often (including this week), I get flagged to show my identification to the CLEAR agent and to the TSA agent. Ultimately, I could have gone through less hassle with simply the TSA Precheck line.
Many times the TSA Precheck line is actually faster. However, when that line is backed up (usually at certain airports like DCA), having CLEAR is a winner. YMMV
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