HD families might want to read and share this latest news article:

BOGUS STEM CELL THERAPIES SOLD ON INTERNET
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/03/AR2008120301484.\
html
By Amanda Gardner HealthDay Reporter Wednesday, December 3, 2008; 12:00 AM

See above link for the article. Why? Because many of us know for a fact
that China's Beike Biotech is one of the unscrupulous sites mentioned in
this article that has been touting a cure for Huntington's Disease and that
some US HD patients have sought this treatment.

A couple of reasons, beside the above article, why HD families should be
cautioned about these sites:

Chinese doctors themselves don't wait for results of rigorous testing before
treating patients and they offer what they say are stem cell or other cell
treatments to those willing to pay. What is known about the procedures being
performed comes from material on their Web sites or from patients who give
detailed accounts of their visits. Little has been published in scientific
journals for other doctors to scrutinize.

Dr. Michael Okun, medical director of the National Parkinson Foundation
[also a specialist in HD] in the US, says his group discouraged patients
from seeking out experimental treatments unless they're being done under the
most rigorous research protocols. "Stem cell therapy is a really interesting
area that has a lot of promise for therapeutic approaches. But we're just
not ready to be putting stem cells into people's brains at this point in
time," said Okun. The Food and Drug Administration "would never allow us to
use those virally modified cells in patients," said Dr. Robert Lanza, the
chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology.

There's a patient handbook on the new guidelines at the International
Society for Stem Cell Research website that you might want to download and
share with HD families:


PATIENT HANDBOOK ON STEM CELL THERAPIES
http://www.isscr.org/clinical_trans/pdfs/ISSCRPatientHandbook.pdf
(Appendix I. ISSCR Guidelines for the Clinical Translation of Stem Cells)
The Handbook addresses frequently asked questions about clinical therapies
using stem cells.
Published December 3, 2008

Source: International Society for Stem Cell Research
http://www.isscr.org/public/index.htm