Iraq resumes oil production
London: Production resumed at Iraq's southern oil fields after authorities reached an accord with militant Shiites who had threatened to attack the country's vital export pipelines for crude, according to an Iraqi oil official.

The cleric's followers had warned they might attack pipelines in southern Iraq unless the government halted crude exports.

Iraq exported 1.75 million barrels a day before South Oil curtailed production. Global oil markets already worried about possible supply constraints from Russia and Saudi Arabia - were jittery about the sharp reduction in Iraqi output.
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Samsung's DDR2 SDRAM chips sell 10 million by July
Seoul, Korea: Samsung Electronics sold its 10 millionth (256Mb equivalent) DDR2 SDRAM chip in July, leading the latest transition in the mainstream memory market.

Dataquest forecasts DDR2 to represent 11 percent of the overall DRAM market but predicts it will emerge as the market leader, with a share of around 50 percent next year. Samsung's DDR2 SDRAM sales milestone confirms its role in leading the introduction and further expansion of the DDR2 SDRAM market. The company expects DDR2 SDRAM to reach 34 percent of its total DDR sales this year.

Samsung Electronics will continue to apply cutting-edge technologies to further its leadership in DDR2s as well as other next-generation memory devices including DDR3. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. is a global leader in semiconductor, telecommunication, digital media and digital convergence technologies with 2003 parent company sales of US$36.4 billion and net income of US$5.0 billion.
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ReValving treatment for aortic heart valve regurgitation
Paris, France: CoreValve S.A., a privately held medical technology company, has announced that its proprietary self-expanding stented aortic heart valve has been implanted successfully in a second human, using the CoreValve percutaneous ReValving system in the cardiac catheterization laboratory of a hospital in Asia. As a result, the 30-year-old male patient was able to avoid open-heart surgery to treat his aortic regurgitation.

This event represents the first-ever percutaneous replacement of an aortic heart valve in a 'non-compassionate' case. According to the company the success associated with their second patient suggests that the 'CoreValve ReValving' approach has widespread potential to non-surgically treat the two most common diseases of the aortic valve--stenosis and regurgitation--regardless of whether the patient presents with life-threatening co-morbidities or is a very-high-risk surgical candidate or has just the single medical condition of a diseased valve.

The company says that the results of the second successful human implantation using the ReValving approach show a perfect implantation, absence of transvalvular gradient, and absolutely no valvular regurgitation, either centrovalvular or paravalvular. In fact, this patient's left ventricle had already improved within 48 hours of the intervention.

According to the company CoreValve's self-expanding stented heart valve and universal catheter-based delivery system have numerous advantages for the patient:

• Self-expansion avoids the need for lengthy aortic-ballooning — which interrupts blood flow to the brain and the coronaries — and also ensures stability during implantation by reducing hemodynamic pressure on the delivery catheter;
• Self-expansion is able to adapt to a non-tubular (i.e., not perfectly round) aortic anatomy, which ensures continually persistent radial force despite varying annulus diameters during the cardiac cycle;
• Self-expansion protects the replacement heart valve by avoiding the possibility of balloon-related leaflet trauma;
• The self-expanding stent reduces dramatically the risk of paravalvular leaks.

Aortic regurgitation occurs when there is a leakage of the valve backward into the left ventricle during diastole. Chronic aortic regurgitation may be present for decades before any symptoms occur. The left ventricle is able to compensate for the large volume of blood that flows backward by enlarging the cavity and increasing the thickness of the muscle. This mechanism allows the heart to pump out both the amount of blood required by the body and the blood that has gone backward into the left ventricle. When symptoms do occur, patients usually experience shortness of breath or chest discomfort. Long-standing aortic regurgitation may result in irreversible damage to the muscle of the left ventricle, even in the absence of symptoms.

Aortic stenosis is a narrowing of the heart valve that causes the heart to work very hard in order to eject blood from the heart, resulting in shortness of breath and, in advanced cases, fainting and heart failure.

Today, symptomatic patients are typically treated by traditional open-heart surgery; about 220,000 patients worldwide have surgery on their heart valves. About 60 percent of valve replacement surgeries are for the aortic valve. Aortic stenosis occurs predominantly in men and women over 70 years of age. Many of these patients are at high risk of surgical complications because of other complicating illnesses, or co-morbidities.

Privately held CoreValve, S.A., headquartered in Paris, France, has developed a proprietary delivery system for percutaneous heart valve replacement, based on a novel catheter-and-self-expanding-stent approach on a beating heart, thus avoiding open-heart surgery. The CoreValve Percutaneous ReValving System can be adapted to any biological valve currently marketed or synthetic valve in development. The CoreValve procedure can be performed in a cardiac "cath lab" just like angioplasty and stenting, resulting in fewer traumas to the patient and substantial cost-savings to the healthcare system.
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