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WHO: Millions Of People Die Each Year Due To Medical Errors


redOrbit
Fri, 22 Jul 2011 13:27 UTC
Dead Person
© redOrbit

The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday that millions of people die each year from medical errors and infections linked to health care, and going into hospital is far riskier than flying, according to a recent Reuters report.

"If you were admitted to hospital tomorrow in any country... your chances of being subjected to an error in your care would be something like 1 in 10. Your chances of dying due to an error in health care would be 1 in 300," Liam Donaldson, the WHO's newly appointed envoy for patient safety, told a news briefing.

According to Donaldson, this compared with a risk of dying in an air crash of about 1 in 10 million passengers.

"It shows that health care generally worldwide still has a long way to go," he told reporters.

Over 50 percent of acquired infections can be prevented if health care workers clean their hands with soap and water or an alcohol-based handbag before treating patients.

According to the U.N., seven hospitals in developed and 10 in developing countries will acquire at least one health care-associated infection.

"The longer patients stay in an ICU (intensive care unit), the more at risk they become of acquiring an infection," it said.
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Butterfly

Miraculous! Dolphin Healing Powers May Help Humans


Live Science
Fri, 22 Jul 2011 10:06 UTC
Image

His smile gives it away: This bottlenose dolphin seems to know he holds healing secrets!

What miracles is Mother Nature hiding from us? Look no further than the bottlenose dolphin for a little bit of inspiration. At least that's what a researcher at the Georgetown University Medical Center suggests.

Michael Zasloff has published a letter in the July 21 issue of the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, in which he recounts several documented incidents of serious injuries to dolphins, presumably inflicted by sharks. These bites, some larger than a basketball, healed in weeks without leaving the dolphins disfigured, without causing them apparent pain, and without becoming visibly infected.

"If I saw this in a human being, I wouldn't believe it," Zasloff said. "It should awe us. You have an animal that has evolved in the ocean without hands or legs, which swims faster than we can, has intelligence that perhaps equals our social and emotional complexity, and its healing is almost alien compared to what we are capable of." [See images of healing dolphins]
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Wolf

Walnuts Are Drugs, Says FDA!

Michael Tennant
The New America
Thu, 21 Jul 2011 20:04 UTC
Image
© Diamond Walnut Nutrition Information

Seen any walnuts in your medicine cabinet lately? According to the Food and Drug Administration, that is precisely where you should find them. Because Diamond Foods made truthful claims about the health benefits of consuming walnuts that the FDA didn't approve, it sent the company a letter declaring, "Your walnut products are drugs" - and "new drugs" at that - and, therefore, "they may not legally be marketed ... in the United States without an approved new drug application." The agency even threatened Diamond with "seizure" if it failed to comply.

Diamond's transgression was to make "financial investments to educate the public and supply them with walnuts," as William Faloon of Life Extension magazine put it. On its website and packaging, the company stated that the omega-3 fatty acids found in walnuts have been shown to have certain health benefits, including reduced risk of heart disease and some types of cancer. These claims, Faloon notes, are well supported by scientific research: "Life Extension has published 57 articles that describe the health benefits of walnuts"; and "The US National Library of Medicine database contains no fewer than 35 peer-reviewed published papers supporting a claim that ingesting walnuts improves vascular health and may reduce heart attack risk."

This evidence was apparently not good enough for the FDA, which told Diamond that its walnuts were "misbranded" because the "product bears health claims that are not authorized by the FDA."
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No Entry

Philippine Govt Warns Against Geckos Treatments


redOrbit
Fri, 15 Jul 2011 14:30 UTC
Gecko
© redOrbit

The Philippines government warned on Friday that using geckos to treat AIDS and impotence could put patients at risk.

Environmental officials expressed alarm about the growing trade in the wall-climbing lizards in the Philippines. An 11-ounce gecko reportedly sells for at least $1,160.

Geckos are reportedly exported to Malaysia, China and South Korea to be used as aphrodisiacs and as traditional medicine for asthma, AIDS, cancer, tuberculosis and impotence.

A health department statement said their use as medical treatments has no scientific basis and could be dangerous because patients might not seek proper treatment for their diseases.

"This is likely to aggravate their overall health and put them at greater risk," it added.
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Question

HIV Drug Grown in Genetically Engineered Plant Approved for Human Testing


Live Science
Wed, 20 Jul 2011 15:36 UTC
GMO Plant
© Dreamstime

Cocaine. Aspirin. Caffeine. Heroin. Ginseng. Nicotine. The list of powerful medications naturally produced by plants goes on and on. Unfortunately, no plant makes a drug capable of combating HIV. That is, no plant did until researchers at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute genetically engineered tobacco plants to produce specially designed antibodies that prevent transmission of the deadly virus.

Yesterday, the U.K. approved antibody therapy derived from Fraunhofer's genetically engineered tobacco for use on 11 human test subjects. The trial will test the safety of a plant-derived antibody designed to stop the transmission of HIV between sexual partners when applied directly to the vaginal cavity. This marks the first instance of such testing in Europe, where both governments and citizens remain largely skeptical of genetic modified products.

"This is a red letter day for the field," said Julian Ma, a Professor of Molecular Immunology at St George's, University of London, and researcher on the tobacco project. "The approval from the MHRA for us to proceed with human trials is an acknowledgement that monoclonal antibodies can be made in plants to the same quality as those made using existing conventional production systems. That is something many people did not believe could not be achieved."
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Magnify

Birth Defects Linked to Coal and Pesticides

Deborah Braconnier
MedicalXpress
Wed, 20 Jul 2011 11:35 UTC
According to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pregnant mothers who are exposed to pesticides and smoke are as much as four times more likely to give birth to infants with serious birth defects.

The researchers, led by Tong Zhu from the State Key Joint Laboratory for Environmental Simulation and Pollution Control at Beijing University, looked at 80 infants and aborted fetuses that had brain and spinal cord defects. They discovered that the mother's placentas contained high amounts of chemicals in comparison to placentas from babies born without birth defects.

The researchers detected significantly high levels of synthetic pesticides including DDT, hexachlorocyclohexane (HCH) and endosulfan as well as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from inhaled coal smoke.

Neural tube defects, or NTDs, are brain and spinal cord defects with the most common of them occurring when the spinal column does not close during the first trimester and results in nerve damage and paralysis. They are common and can occur in one of every 1000 live births in the United States.
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Family

Study: Kids Safer in Crashes With Grandparent Drivers

Kathleen Doheny
WebMD Health News
Wed, 20 Jul 2011 00:55 UTC
Kids With Grandparent Drivers at Half the Risk of Injuries as Kids With Parent Drivers Who Crash

Children driven by grandparents may be safer in a crash than children driven by parents, according to a new study.

Researchers looked at five years of crash data.

''Children in grandparent-driven crashes were at one-half the risk of injury as those in crashes driven by parents," says study researcher Flaura Koplin Winston, MD, PhD, director of the National Science Foundation Center for Child Injury Prevention Studies at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Exactly why the kids fared better when their grandparents were at the wheel is not known, she says. Grandparents may drive more carefully with the grandchildren on board, she says.

Although the news on grandparent drivers is good, Winston says grandparents as well as parents can improve in their proper use of child safety seats.

The study is published online in the journal Pediatrics.
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Attention

An Unexpected Actor in Vaccination: Our Own DNA


ScienceDaily
Mon, 18 Jul 2011 00:00 UTC
The teams of Doctor Christophe Desmet and Professor Fabrice Bureau, of the Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Physiology within the University of Liège's GIGA-Research centre, and of Professor Ken Ishii at the University of Osaka in Japan have just discovered an unexpected mode of action for the vaccine adjuvant alum. When a vaccine containing alum is injected, contact with alum apparently pushes certain cells of the body to release their own DNA.

The presence of this DNA outside the cells, a place where it is not to be found in normal conditions, thus acts as a stimulant of the immune system and strongly boosts the response to the vaccine.

Alum, a salt of aluminium, is currently by far the most widely used vaccine adjuvant. Developed in the middle of the 20th century, alum has largely demonstrated its effectiveness and safety of use. That it is why it is found in numerous vaccines. Tens of millions of doses of alum are thus administered each year, and each person in our Western societies has probably received alum at least once in their life. Nevertheless, alum was developed in a relatively empirical manner; the way it helps the immune system to respond to vaccines had not been properly understood up until now.

Comment: Far from being a benign curiosity, this mechanism by which a commonly used adjuvant works may well responsible for the link between vaccines and autoimmune diseases, as well as for the overall toxicity of vaccines.

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Sun

Salt - Is It Really the Problem It Is Made Out to Be?

Dr. Peter Dingle
drpeterdingle.blogspot.com
Mon, 30 May 2011 00:00 UTC
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© Photo courtesy of www.naturallygreen.co.uk
Is salt the real problem that it is made out to be? It seems that by oversimplifying the information on salt and its relationship to health we complicate what is a really simple and important issue. After reviewing more than 100 scientific papers it became clear that salt is not the public enemy that it is made out to be, rather it appears to be an imbalance of minerals as a result of eating processed foods. And some very simple changes can make a lot of difference. This does not mean you go out and lather salt on all your food and justify it from my article, instead it means back to some common sense dietary changes.

Salt, in the form of sodium chloride, has been consumed by humans since the late Palaeolithic period, when it was used to preserve and flavour food. In modern times, however, some very limited studies and an incomplete understanding of nutrition have led to salt being labelled "public enemy number one" when it comes to blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. But is salt really so bad?

Salt in the human diet has been the subject of a great deal of research. Health professionals have, for many years, recommended reduction or even elimination of salt intake. This is mainly due to findings that link the excessive salt in the modern human diet to health problems such as high blood pressure. Yet it would be shortsighted to simply accept or reject such recommendations, as there are other factors involved requiring further investigation.

Salt intake is widely recognised by public health and medical organisations as the leading cause of blood pressure disparities (1). However, it is simply not valid to state that reducing salt intake will lower our prevalence of hypertension; the truth is that a number of factors, including lifestyle and nutrition, play an important role.
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Bacon

Idiotically Dangerous Diet "Reverses Diabetes" but So Does Moderate Carb Restriction Without Calorie Restriction

Janet Ruhl
Diabetes Update
Fri, 24 Jun 2011 09:56 UTC
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All last night and this morning my email inbox has been filling up with notes pointing me to this story:

Crash Course Diet Reverses Type 2 Diabetes in a week.

It is yet another example of the tragically flawed pseudo-science that damages the health of people with diabetes.

There's no mystery here, nor is the effect reported a result of "reducing fat in the pancreas" as the doctor who came up with this "cure" suggests. All he has done is craft a "balanced" diet that has so few calories it is also low in carbohydrates.

As all my readers know, most people with Type 2 diabetes--especially those recently diagnosed--can recover normal blood sugar control simply by cutting back their carbohydrate intake to somewhere between 30 and 100 grams of carbohydrate a day. The actual number varies with the size of the person, their gender (men can usually tolerate more carb), and the ability of the individual's beta cells to secrete insulin.

But a low carb diet with normal calories is a high fat diet, and doctors have been brainwashed to believe that high fat/low carb diets cause heart disease. They don't. You can read the research that has proven this HERE.
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