Health & WellnessS


Health

Buried Secrets: Is Natural Gas Drilling Endangering U.S. Water Supplies?

Abrahm Lustgarten
ProPublica
Thu, 27 Nov 2008 14:42 UTC
Drill Rig
© Credit: Abrahm Lustgarten/ProPublicaA drill rig near the town of Pinedale, Wyo.
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Info

'Barcode Chip' For Cheap, Fast Blood Tests Developed


Science Daily
Wed, 26 Nov 2008 18:58 UTC
Image
© J. Heath, R. Fan, and H. AmadThis figure represents an artist's drawing (more or less to scale) of the channel through which the whole blood is flowed, and three of the plasma-skimming channels. The cells shown are mostly red blood cells, with a few white blood cells and platelets. Barcodes are shown in each of the three plasma-skimming channels, and the expanded view of a barcode illustrates some of the salient aspects of the assay. The different colors of the stripes correspond to different stripes of ssDNA.
A new "barcode chip" developed by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) promises to revolutionize diagnostic medical testing. In less than 10 minutes, and using just a pinprick's worth of blood, the chip can measure the concentrations of dozens of proteins, including those that herald the presence of diseases like cancer and heart disease.

The device, known as the Integrated Blood-Barcode Chip, or IBBC, was developed by a group of Caltech researchers led by James R. Heath, the Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor and professor of chemistry, along with postdoctoral scholar Rong Fan and graduate student Ophir Vermesh, and by Leroy Hood, president of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington.
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Bell

Publication Bias Found Among Trials Submitted To FDA


Science Daily
Wed, 26 Nov 2008 18:20 UTC
A quarter of drug trials submitted in support of new drug applications to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) remain unpublished five years after the fact, says new research published in the open access journal PLoS Medicine.
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Health

U.S. finds trace of melamine in baby formula

Susan Heavey
Reuters
Wed, 26 Nov 2008 16:28 UTC
Washington - U.S. health officials have found trace amounts of the chemical melamine in one sample of infant formula sold in the United States, a Food and Drug Administration spokeswoman said on Tuesday.

"There's no basis for concern because we're talking about trace levels that are so low ... that there's absolutely no risk," FDA spokeswoman Judy Leon said.

Melamine-tainted formula was found earlier this year in China, where thousands of children fell ill and several died. In September, the FDA sought to assure parents and said there was no similar contamination threat in the United States.

The chemical, normally used to make plastics, has been found in milk power, wheat gluten and other Chinese-made ingredients used in products ranging from pet food to candy.

Melamine's ability to make foods appear to have higher amounts of protein during testing has made it a cheap but dangerous substitute that can damage the kidneys.
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Health

3,000 dead from cholera in Zimbabwe

Basildon Peta
The Independent
Wed, 26 Nov 2008 14:55 UTC
Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's President, is trying to hide the real extent of the cholera epidemic sweeping across his nation by silencing health workers and restricting access to the huge number of death certificates that give the same cause of death.

A senior official in the health ministry told The Independent yesterday that more than 3,000 people have died from the water-borne disease in the past two weeks, 10 times the widely-reported death toll of just over 300. "But even this higher figure is still an understatement because very few bother to register the deaths of their relatives these days," said the official, who requested anonymity.

He said the health ministry, which once presided over a medical system that was the envy of Africa, had been banned from issuing accurate statistics about the deaths, and that certificates for the fraction of deaths that had been registered were being closely guarded by the home affairs ministry.

Yet the evidence of how this plague is hurting the people of Zimbabwe is there for all to see at the burial grounds in this collapsing country. "When you encounter such long queues in other countries, they are of people going to the cinema or a football match; certainly not into cemeteries to bury loved ones as we have here," said Munyaradzi Mudzingwa, who lives in Chitungwiza, a town just outside Harare, where the epidemic is believed to have started.
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Magnify

New Cases of Cancer Decline in U.S.

Roni Caryn Rabin
The New York Times
Wed, 26 Nov 2008 04:30 UTC
The incidence of new cancer cases has been falling in recent years in the United States, the first time such an extended decline has been documented, researchers reported Tuesday.
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Magnify

Can some breast cancer tumors regress if left untreated?

Kate Stinchfield
CNN.com
Wed, 26 Nov 2008 04:26 UTC
Do more frequent mammograms pick up some breast cancer tumors that might have gone away without treatment? Possibly, according to a controversial study published this week in Archives of Internal Medicine. However, experts caution that the research raises an interesting question, but can't definitively answer it.
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Syringe

Out of Africa and Into Autism: More Evidence Illuminates the Somali Anomaly in Minnesota

Mark F. Blaxill
Age of Autism
Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:07 UTC
Amidst the furor over autism in America, some very simple facts are getting lost in the rhetorical fog of medical denial, corporate self-dealing and civic irresponsibility. They're worth repeating. Autism was once very rare in the United States and required "discovering" by Leo Kanner among a small group of children born in the 1930s. When researchers first measured American autism rates, they were lower than surveys coming from other parts of the developed world, sometimes less than 1 in 10,000. Today, it's nearly impossible to find an American who doesn't know a family touched by autism and rates are over 1 in 100 in some areas of the country. It doesn't take a genius to derive a short list of broad-based environmental exposures that have changed rapidly enough to give us some pretty good ideas about causation.
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Attention

Arsenic in Water Linked to Heart Disease

Sherry Baker
Natural News
Mon, 24 Nov 2008 03:25 UTC
What comes to mind when you think of arsenic? For most people, it conjures up a deadly poison used by killers in fictional mystery novels and some real-life murderers, too. But the danger of this toxic substance most often comes not from some evil-doer but simply from exposure to it through our environment, including the water we drink. Unwittingly taken into the body over many years, arsenic can result in lung, bladder and skin cancers, as well as heart disease, diabetes and neurological damage.
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Info

Researchers call for fragile X testing

Phyllis Brown
University of California
Tue, 25 Nov 2008 03:18 UTC
Writing in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association, UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute researchers urge physicians to test for mutations of the fragile X gene in patients of all ages. That's because, after decades of research, it is clear that mutations in this gene cause a range of diseases, including neurodevelopmental delays and autism in children, infertility in women and neurodegenerative disease in older adults.
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