What is Vitiligo???????

Vitiligo is a chronic, unpredictable disease causing a loss of skin colour in patches. People of all ages and from all ethnic backgrounds can develop the disease.

What are the Symptoms?

Vitiligo does not cause physical symptoms but because of its unsightly appearance, particularly on dark or tanned skin it can have considerable impact both psychologically and socially.

About the Treatment:

Many ways of restoring normal colour to the skin have been tried but improvement is usually short‐lived.

The causes of vitiligo are not yet clearly understood, so many treatments have been developed on the basis of limited scientific evidence.

Skin may be moved (grafted) from normally pigmented areas and placed onto areas where there is pigment loss.

Several cover-up makeups or skin dyes can mask vitiligo.

Who is affected by vitiligo?

About 0.5 to 1 percent of the world's population, or as many as 65 million people, have vitiligo.
In the United States, 1 to 2 million people have the disorder. Half the people who have vitiligo develop it before age 20; most develop it before their 40th birthday.
The disorder affects both sexes and all races equally; however, it is more noticeable in people with dark skin.
Vitiligo seems to be somewhat more common in people with certain autoimmune diseases, including hyperthyroidism (an overactive thyroid gland), adrenocortical insufficiency (the adrenal gland does not produce enough of the hormone called corticosteroid),  alopecia areata (patches of baldness), and pernicious anemia (a low level of red blood cells caused by the failure of the body to absorb vitamin B12).
Scientists do not know the reason for the association between vitiligo and these autoimmune diseases. However, most people with vitiligo have no other autoimmune disease.

Vitiligo may also be hereditary; that is, it can run in families. Children whose parents have the disorder are more likely to develop vitiligo. In fact, 30 percent of people with vitiligo have a family member with the disease. However, only 5 to 7 percent of children will get vitiligo even if a parent has it, and most people with vitiligo do not have a family history of the disorder.

Prevention - Cure:

There is no cure, and no way of limiting the spread of the disease has so far been found.

A personal experience

The Hardest Part

           I am not sure about the exact day that we met each other, but I think it was around the middle of April, of course, at EF School NYC. Oh my God, what a could day! Because of that, everybody went to Rita Hall to get warm and try to talk with somebody, mainly because most people were newcomers, who had just arrived a few days before.

         Tired of facebook, I decided that I should do something more dynamic, like play ping pong. That's when I finally met Sarah, one of the nicest people I've met. From that day, we simply could not be more close; our friendship really happened in a very spontaneous way.

           Those two weeks were really funny, we really had a lot of empathy, we could talk about anything and we always had fun.

           Well, Sarah unfortunately had to return to France. She only had those two weeks off. Since that day, I discovered that one of the toughest parts of life is saying goodbye.

2011 Natural Disasters

               Recently many natural disasters have been occurred, the first one there I am going to talk about is the Earthquake that destroyed part of Japan in March of this year, with 9.0 magnitude in the Richter scale, that tremor caused an enormous damage in the coastal cities near to the epicenter that were flooding by tsunami waves, like we can see in the pictures below:

                            

           In addition to the devastation caused by the tsunami waves, in the northeast of the country, the Japanese government declared its first-ever state of emergency at a nuclear power plant and ordered 3,000 residents to leave the area after the quake caused a problem in the plant's cooling system. Radiation in a reactor at the plant rose to 1,000 times normal, Japan's nuclear safety agency said, and some radiation was reported to have seeped out of t he reactor.

          After the explosion of the nuclear plants, the radiation were spread out through the near area (about 50 kilometers), prompting the health authorities to inspect the radiation level in the population.

           Another consequence of the disaster was thousands of homeless people, that were moved to shelters.


               

         

The expressionism of Frida Kahlo - When the pain became art

                 In this post I am going to talk about one of my favorites artists in the 20th century and one of the surrealism icons: Frida Kahlo - a woman who turned a painful life in art!  

          Frida Kahlo de Rivera was born on July 6th of 1907 been called by the name Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón. The Mexican surrealist or expressionist painter   

Animal Farm Essay

            From the hope of the anthem "Beasts of England" to an wrong ending

          In this current essay I am going to talk about the novel Animal Farm, written by George Orwell in 1945, that tells the story of an animal revolution on a farm located somewhere in England. My main objective is to analyze a little fragment of the most important anthem in the story, called Beasts of England: "Beasts of England, Beasts of Ireland / Beasts of every land and clime, hearten to my joyful tiding of golden future time", and explain the reasons that led the animals, so full of hope, ending in wrong way.

           Giving a brief explanation of what the story is about, I can say the Animal Farm portrays on a group of oppressed animals that lived in a normal farm, controlled by humans, that decided to make a revolution. 
            With the implementation of the revolution the animals formed and implemented a system of government, called Animalism, on they new farm, Animal Farm. Now in the commandments of Animal Farm, the animals tried to form a government where everyone was dependent upon everyone else, and if they continued working that way, would be possible to implement the dreamed equality to rule their farm.

               In conclusion, I could identify some of the reasons that led to the collapse of the Animalism in the farm. Wickedness, indifference, ignorance, greed and short shortsightedness notoriously destroyed any possibility of functionality of the utopic system that Napoleon (the pig that auto-declared himself the president of the farm) wanted to impose, disguised as a "perfect and fair political regime", showing that no matter what laws and equality bind the citizens, corruption and power will seek to destroy that delicate balance.