YnetTue, 08 Jan 2008 14:57 UTC
More than 75 of 201 passengers aboard Air Canada flight 085 from Tel Aviv to Toronto placed in quarantine at Pearson Airport after a number of travelers fall ill with flu-like symptoms.
More than 75 of the 201 passengers aboard Air Canada flight 085 from Tel Aviv to Toronto were placed in quarantine immediately upon their arrival at Pearson Airport Tuesday night after a number of travelers fell ill, the Toronto Star reported.
"They didn't tell us anything," said passenger of the ordeal. "They totally kept us in the dark."
Air Canada representative Angela Mah was quoted by the Star as saying that during the flight, three people traveling with an organized group fell ill with flu-like symptoms.
"It is our standard operating procedure to have health officials meet the aircraft on arrival in cases like this," said Mah.
However, passenger Matt Coleman Coleman told the newspaper that health officials did not meet the travelers until they reached customs. "They did not separate the sick people from the ones who weren't sick. We were all just put in a room, given 'bunny suits' and told to stay put," he was quoted as saying.
An international study of dialysis patients shows that although U.S. residents have the highest out-of-pocket drug costs, even those who can afford their prescription drugs are far less likely to take them than patients in other countries.
France, Japan and Australia rated best and the United States worst in new rankings focusing on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions in 19 leading industrialized nations, researchers said on Tuesday.
If the U.S. health care system performed as well as those of those top three countries, there would be 101,000 fewer deaths in the United States per year, according to researchers writing in the journal Health Affairs.
The same vitamin D deficiency that can result in weak bones now has been associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, Framingham Heart Study researchers report in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.
"Vitamin D deficiency is associated with increased cardiovascular risk, above and beyond established cardiovascular risk factors," said Thomas J. Wang, M.D., assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Mass. "The higher risk associated with vitamin D deficiency was particularly evident among individuals with high blood pressure."
In a study of 1,739 offspring from Framingham Heart Study participants (average age 59, all Caucasian), researchers found that those with blood levels of vitamin D below15 nanograms per milliliter (ng/mL) had twice the risk of a cardiovascular event such as a heart attack, heart failure or stroke in the next five years compared to those with higher levels of vitamin D.
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A new study by two York University researchers estimates the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spends almost twice as much on promotion as it does on research and development, contrary to the industry's claim.
Julie Steenhuysen
ReutersTue, 08 Jan 2008 01:42 UTC
A drug that exploits the benefits of a component in wine proved safe and showed signs that it might improve blood sugar control in people with the most common form of diabetes, Sirtris Pharmaceuticals Inc said on Monday.
The results come from the first human study of a drug that targets a family of genes called sirtuins that control the aging process in humans.
Michael Kahn
ReutersTue, 08 Jan 2008 01:34 UTC
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| File photo shows athletes running up the moraine of the Eiger glacier during the Jungfrau-Marathon near Kleine Scheidegg in the Bernese Alps September 8, 2007.
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A little more sunshine might help you live longer, according to a study published on Monday suggesting that for some people health benefits from the sun outweigh the risk of skin cancer.
Editor's Note: With a poor understanding of mental health and the tendency to categorize those suffering as "crazy," patients and their families become reluctant to seek help. When they do, only about one in three receive treatment that meets minimum standards of care. NAM contributor Christine Ferrer candidly discusses her own mother's struggle with paranoid schizophrenia.
Consumption of dairy products, especially milk, increases a man's risk of contracting Parkinson's disease, according to a recent study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
Using an integrative meta-analysis approach, researchers from the Center for Bioinformatics at Peking University in Beijing have assembled the most comprehensive gene atlas underlying drug addiction and identified five molecular pathways common to four different addictive drugs. This novel paper appears in PLoS Computational Biology on January 4, 2008.
Drug addiction is a serious worldwide problem with strong genetic and environmental influences. So far different technologies have revealed a variety of genes and biological processes underlying addiction. However, individual technology can be biased and render only an incomplete picture. Studying individual or a small number of genes is like looking at pieces of a jigsaw puzzle - only when you gather most of the pieces from different places and arrange them together in an orderly fashion do interesting patterns emerge.
