Today has been a fantastic day.  One of those ones that go from good to brilliant to fantastic.  It started off with absolutely gorgeous weather outside, and just improved from there.

It started off with one piece of news I honestly didn’t think I would ever see.  New drug ‘hits melanoma’s Achilles heel’ read the headline.  A drug for tumors rather than chemotherapy?  Surely not.  But it’s true.  It is in the third stage of clinical testing stages at the moment, but it is doing extremely well, shrinking 70% of tumors which appear in over half of all melanoma cases.  Some are saying it could be on shelves in a couple of years.

This is very exciting news for Australians in particular as we are a very outdoors and beach centred culture, so melanoma rates are higher here than in most other parts of the world.  This drug once released (pray tell it does) will do wonders for this country.

The second extremely exciting piece of news is that the H1N1 vaccine is less than a week away.  Wednesday the 30th is when they expect it to be available in most of Australia.  I know that day I will be calling my local medical centre to find out the chances of getting it should I drop in on my way home from work.

21 million doses have been ordered for Australia, 2 million of which will be available on that day in New South Wales.  Awesome stuff!

Finally, another piece of news that I never thought I would ever see, a breakthrough has been made in the fight against HIV!  An experimental vaccine has been trialled in the US Army and the Thailand Ministry of Public Health.  Quite funny that they teamed up with Thailand, what does that say in regards to what American soldiers get up to there?  But back on topic, this was a MASSIVE trial with well over 16,000 volunteers used.  How could anybody possibly complain about those numbers?

Amongst those vaccinated they saw a reduction by 31.2% which although not a huge number, is still amazing considering how long HIV has been studied for with so little progress.

What an awesome day.  Some people say science is boring and this is what attracts people to woo, alt-med and anti-vax lies.  It’s a real wonder this happens when we can get three such exciting and amazing things happen in science based medicine in one day.