Health & WellnessS


Wine

US: Alcoholism Gender Gap Is Closing

Drinking and alcohol dependence has increased substantially among women, particularly white and Hispanic women born since 1945, new study finds.

Alcohol use and dependency appeared to remain stable for men, while young Americans report having more lifetime alcohol problems than older Americans, despite having had less time to develop issues with drinking.

The findings were published in the May issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

Attention

Report Says Basic Medical Care Could Save Lives of 6 Million Children a Year

A new report says the lives of millions of young children could be saved each year if basic medical care and medicine are made available to the poor.

The report by the U.S. organization Save the Children says about 10 million children die every year from easily preventable and treatable diseases. About six million of those could be saved with basic services.

Those services include immunizations, antibiotics, skilled care at childbirth and treatment for diarrhea and pneumonia.

Comment: The money spent to kill and destroy in Iraq by the Bush government would be enough to provide medical care for those children many times over.


Attention

New disease outbreaks in China; 12K children infected

Beijing - New outbreaks reported Tuesday in three Chinese provinces and Beijing put the number of children infected with hand, foot and mouth disease above 12,000 and the death toll has risen to at least 26 across the country.

Health

Anxiety, mood disorders put cancer patients at risk for PTSD

Breast cancer patients who have a prior history of mood and anxiety disorders are at a much higher risk of experiencing posttraumatic stress disorder following their diagnosis, new research suggests.

A study of 74 breast cancer patients at the Ohio State University Medical Center found that 16 percent of them (12 women) suffered from PTSD 18 months after diagnosis.

Health

Pharmaceutical employees plead guilty to violating Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act

Four people pleaded guilty Thursday to breaking federal law by marketing the drug Loprox to Kansas doctors as a diaper-rash treatment, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.

Health

Scientists identify 'gatekeepers' of breast cancer transition to invasive disease

Scientists have made a significant discovery that clarifies a previously poorly understood key event in the progression of breast cancer. The research, published by Cell Press in the May issue of the journal Cancer Cell, highlights the importance of the microenvironment in regulating breast tumor progression and suggests that it may be highly beneficial to consider therapies that do not focus solely on the tumor cells but are also targeted to the surrounding tissues.

Progression of breast cancer begins with abnormal epithelial proliferation that progresses into localized carcinoma, called ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS); invasive carcinoma; and eventually, metastatic disease. DCIS is believed to be a precursor to invasive ductal carcinoma, but comprehensive molecular profiling studies comparing DCIS and invasive ductal carcinomas have not yielded tumor-stage-specific genetic signatures. "These studies have focused mainly on the tumor epithelial cells and have not explored the role of the microenvironment in tumor expression," says lead study author Dr. Kornelia Polyak from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

Health

Mental disorders in parents linked to autism in children

Parents of children with autism were roughly twice as likely to have been hospitalized for a mental disorder, such as schizophrenia, than parents of other children, according to an analysis of Swedish birth and hospital records by a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researcher and colleagues in the U.S. and Europe.

The study, "Parental psychiatric disorders associated with autism spectrum disorders in the offspring," appears in the May 5, 2008, issue of the journal Pediatrics.

"We are trying to determine whether autism is more common among families with other psychiatric disorders. Establishing an association between autism and other psychiatric disorders might enable future investigators to better focus on genetic and environmental factors that might be shared among these disorders," said study author Julie Daniels, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the UNC School of Public Health's epidemiology and maternal and child health departments.

Attention

New disaster preparedness strategy announced

New disaster proposal could legally protect physicians.

In an unprecedented initiative, US and Canadian experts have developed a comprehensive framework to optimize and manage critical care resources during times of pandemic outbreaks or other mass critical care disasters. The new proposal suggests legally protecting clinicians who follow accepted protocols for the allocation of scarce resources when providing care during mass critical care events. The framework represents a major step forward to uniformly deliver sufficient critical care during catastrophes and maximize the number of victims who have access to potential life-saving interventions.

"Most countries, including the United States, have insufficient critical care resources to provide timely, usual care for a surge of critically ill and injured victims," said Asha Devereaux, MD, FCCP, Task Force for Mass Critical Care. "If a mass casualty critical care event occurred tomorrow, many people with clinical conditions that are survivable under usual health-care system circumstances may have to forgo life-sustaining interventions due to deficiencies in supply, staffing, or space." As a result, the Task Force for Mass Critical Care developed an emergency mass critical care (EMCC) framework for hospitals and public health authorities aimed to maximize effective critical care surge capacity.

Health

Heparin Contamination May Have Been Deliberate, F.D.A. Says

WASHINGTON - Federal drug regulators believe that a contaminant detected in a crucial blood thinner that has caused 81 deaths was added deliberately, something the Food and Drug Administration has only hinted at previously.

"F.D.A.'s working hypothesis is that this was intentional contamination, but this is not yet proven," Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the Food and Drug Administration's drug center, told the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations in written testimony given Tuesday.

A third of the material in some batches of the thinner heparin were contaminants, "and it does strain one's credulity to suggest that might have been done accidentally," Dr. Woodcock said.

Health

Heparin Contamination Fiasco Reveals Dirty Secret of Drug Industry: Their Pills are Made in China!

Remember a couple of years ago how the FDA warned Americans not to buy prescription drugs from Canada because they might be "contaminated by terrorists?" I'm not making that up: That was the official announcement of an FDA spokesperson, and it was part of their fear strategy for enforcing a monopoly on U.S. consumers so that Big Pharma could continue engaging in rampant price fixing.

The implication in that warning is that drugs purchased in the United States are therefore safer, correct? What the FDA didn't tell anyone, however, is that most pharmaceuticals purchased in the United States are manufactured outside the U.S.; many from China or Puerto Rico. So they're not even made in the U.S. anyway, and drug companies are simply importing them from other countries just like a consumer might do if she drove across the border and bought her medications in Canada or Mexico.