Health & WellnessS


Toys

Babies in classroom cut aggressive behaviour among pupils

Nigel Bunyan
The Telegraph
Mon, 23 Feb 2009 16:07 UTC
Mothers are being invited to take their newborn babies into schools as part of a nationwide scheme to help cut aggressive behaviour among pupils.

The programme, Baby Matterz, was pioneered in Liverpool but is now being introduced to primary and secondary schools in England and Wales.

Teachers have already reported that pupils become calmer and more mature when newborn babies are introduced to their classrooms.

They are prepared to follow rules such as taking it in turns to speak to avoid upsetting the baby.
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Syringe

Flashback Baxter, Other Drug Firms Accused of Knowingly Selling AIDS Contaminated Drugs to Kids

Monifa Thomas
Chicago Sun Times
Mon, 25 Apr 2005 18:22 UTC
Baxter International Inc. and other drug companies sold blood-clotting medicine for hemophiliacs that carried a high risk of transmitting AIDS to markets in Europe more than a year after switching to newer, safer products in the United States, according to a lawsuit filed here Friday.

The suit names as plaintiffs several dozen people in Italy and the United Kingdom who claim they, or a now deceased relative, contracted HIV from blood factor concentrates manufactured in the late 1970s and mid 1980s by six pharmaceutical companies and their subsidiaries. The suit says some plaintiffs also contracted Hepatitis C from the contaminated concentrates, called Factor VIII and Factor IX.

Baxter's co-defendants in the suit are Bayer AG, and Immuno-US Inc.

Cutter Biological, a division of Bayer, introduced a safer medicine heat-treated to kill HIV in 1984, the same year a report from the Centers for Disease Control found 74 percent of hemophiliacs who received blood factors made from the plasma of U.S. donors were HIV positive.

Yet Cutter and other companies continued shipping the old products overseas for more than a year and "refused to recall old stocks of products they knew to be contaminated," the suit said.
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Health

Nanoparticle tattoo lets diabetics monitor blood glucose

Gillian Shaw
Cosmos
Wed, 25 Feb 2009 01:53 UTC
Image
© iStockphotoPainful prick: Diabetics currently have to monitor their glucose level by drawing blood and testing it manually, sometimes several times a day. A new tattoo could make this a thing of the past, say researchers.
Sydney: Scientists are developing unique tattoo ink for diabetics that changes colour depending on glucose concentrations in the body and would allow continuous monitoring of blood sugar levels.

Researchers at Charles Stark Draper Laboratories in Boston, USA, said that the ink could ultimately save lives and would mean that diabetics no longer need to painfully prick their fingers to draw blood and manually measure glucose levels.
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Heart

Suicide: When It Hurts Too Much to Live

Erika Krull
PsychCentral
Tue, 24 Feb 2009 12:00 UTC
Sunset
© Unknown
What happens when it hurts too much to live? Can it really be too painful to live one more moment with emptiness, depression, and despair? Yes, for some people suicide seems like the only way out.

Not every person who contemplates killing themselves is truly interested in ending their time on earth. For many, suicidal thoughts are about escape - musing about the idea of leaving the bonds that bind them to other people, responsibilities to burdens, and the despair of what they can't change. If they could just escape it, maybe they still could go on somehow. Not right now, but after a while. They just need to get away from it.

Suicidal thoughts and actions are also sometimes paired with strong impulses and low inhibitions. This can happen with drugs and alcohol, bipolar disorder, or any personality style that leans more toward action than consideration. When a depressed or desperate mood gets legs, a person could be in real physical danger.
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Bell

Salmonella in Peanut Butter, Melamine in Milk, Mercury in Corn Syrup: How Do We Know What's Safe to Eat?

Jill Richardson
Alternet
Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:00 UTC
As the news headlines appear, one by one, about salmonella in peanut butter, antibiotics found in vegetables, melamine in milk, mercury in high fructose corn syrup and the potential of clones in the U.S. food supply, consumers have more and more reasons to be wary of our industrial food system.

One can go vegetarian, buy organic, or avoid processed foods, but it is hard to truly avoid all of the dangers that lurk in our food. For these reasons and others, many choose to buy their food from local, sustainable farmers. But with economic trouble hitting seemingly every sector, how long will these farmers be able to hold on?

In many ways, the family farmer is an endangered species in America, made even more precious by the daily influx of bad news about food produced by the alternative -- industrialized agriculture.
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X

British tainted-blood report stops short of placing blame


New Zealand Herald
Wed, 25 Feb 2009 04:00 UTC
The first extensive report into a tainted-blood scandal in Britain stopped short of blaming individual doctors or companies for what is widely viewed as the National Health Service's worst treatment disaster.

House of Lords member Peter Archer's report yesterday called the scandal a "horrific human tragedy" but did not name any specific medical workers or pharmaceutical companies as being responsible for the deaths of around 2000 haemophiliacs since the 1970s.
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Bell

Cholesterol-reducing drugs may lessen brain function

Yeon-Kyun Shin
Iowa State University
Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:08 UTC
Research by an Iowa State University scientist suggests that cholesterol-reducing drugs known as statins may lessen brain function.

Yeon-Kyun Shin, a biophysics professor in the department of biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology, says the results of his study show that drugs that inhibit the liver from making cholesterol may also keep the brain from making cholesterol, which is vital to efficient brain function.

"If you deprive cholesterol from the brain, then you directly affect the machinery that triggers the release of neurotransmitters," said Shin. "Neurotransmitters affect the data-processing and memory functions. In other words -- how smart you are and how well you remember things."

Shin's findings will be published in this month's edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Comment: Statins are not "very healthful" at all. Evidence shows that the lower cholesterol levels are, generally speaking, the higher the risk of cancer. Cholesterol levels below 160 have been linked to depression and low testosterone levels. Statins block the body's production of CoQ10, an important nutrient and antioxidant which protects the heart among other organs as demonstrated by hundreds of studies. Coenzyme Q10 (also called ubiquinone: "occurring everywhere") plays an important role in the manufacture of ATP, the fuel that runs cellular processes. Low levels of CoQ10 are found in nearly all cardiovascular diseases, including angina, high blood pressure, cardiomyopathy, and congestive heart failure; and other diseases like Parkinson's disease. Statins deplete the body of CoQ10 by a 40%.

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Health

Hot Chili Peppers Help Unravel The Mechanism Of Pain


Science Daily
Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:47 UTC
red chili pepper
© iStockphoto/Chris Bence

Capsaicin, the active ingredient in spicy hot chili peppers such as the jalapeno, is most often experienced as an irritant, but it may also be used to reduce pain. A new work published by Drs. Feng Qin and Jing Yao in this week's PLoS Biology uses capsaicin to uncover novel insight into how pain-receptor systems can adapt to painful stimuli.

Sensory systems are well known to adapt to prevailing stimuli. For example, adaptation happens when your eyes adjust from a dark movie theater during a matinee to the bright sunlight outside. Whether pain receptors truly adapt or rescale their responses (versus simply desensitizing) has been an open question.

Capsaicin acts by binding to a receptor in the cell wall of nerve endings and triggering an influx of calcium ions into the neuron. Eventually, the nervous system interprets this cascade of events as pain or heat, depending on which nerves are stimulated. Scientists had previously linked the pain-relieving effects of capsaicin to a lipid called PIP2, found in cell membranes. When capsaicin is applied to the skin it induces a strong depletion of PIP2 in the cell membrane.
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Arrow Up

Health spending takes rising share of U.S. economy


Reuters
Tue, 24 Feb 2009 07:54 UTC
Health spending will hit $2.5 trillion this year, devouring 17.6 percent of the economy, as the White House and Congress consider major changes to the healthcare system, U.S. government economists said on Tuesday.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, known as CMS, forecast that the share of the economy devoted to health spending will jump a full percentage point from 2008. That would mark the biggest one-year increase recorded since the government began tracking the data in 1960.

Thanks to the recession, public health spending in programs such as the Medicaid program for the poor is ballooning, while private health insurance spending is slowing as more people lose employer-provided coverage, CMS reported.

"We project that the health share of the economy will increase steadily through 2018," CMS economist Christopher Truffer told reporters.
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No Entry

Anger really can kill you, U.S. study shows

Julie Steenhuysen
Reuters
Tue, 24 Feb 2009 07:34 UTC
Anger and other strong emotions can trigger potentially deadly heart rhythms in certain vulnerable people, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

Previous studies have shown that earthquakes, war or even the loss of a World Cup Soccer match can increase rates of death from sudden cardiac arrest, in which the heart stops circulating blood.

"It's definitely been shown in all different ways that when you put a whole population under a stressor that sudden death will increase," said Dr. Rachel Lampert of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, whose study appears in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
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