Russia’s Putin slams ministers over alcohol deaths
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Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday demanded his government end Russia’s plague of alcohol-linked deaths, saying it was neglecting a problem that caused tens of thousands of deaths a year.
He told Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev to deliver suggestions to halt the sale of widely available bootleg spirits, which can kill if badly distilled.
“Do you remember how many people die every year from drinking counterfeit alcohol? What do you think we should do?” Itar-Tass news agency quoted him as asking Gordeyev at a meeting of ministers.
Job cuts, HIV add to southern Africa food woes
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Late drought has devastated crops in much of southern Africa and may threaten the worst food shortages in more than a decade, but in parts of the region residents say the real problems are AIDS and job losses.
Poor rains in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi and parts of Mozambique have all but destroyed the staple maize harvest, aid workers say. But further south in the mountain kingdoms of Swaziland and Lesotho, the weather is less to blame.
“The drought is not as bad as last year,” resident Mothibeli Seala told Reuters in a village in southern Lesotho. “But the food will not be enough. The HIV scourge is very bad. It is hitting production at village level, killing the strongest.”
Drug shortage, delays in Africa, slow malaria drive
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A shortage of drugs and funds and delays in distributing mosquito nets in Africa are hampering a campaign to reduce Malaria’s annual death toll of one million worldwide, the United Nations said on Tuesday.
Some 350 million to 500 million people in more than 100 countries each year catch the deadly disease, which can kill in hours, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said in their World Malaria Report 2005.
The joint report follows a scathing editorial in The Lancet medical journal last month accusing an international partnership of more than 90 organisations and countries of failing to control malaria, saying they may have done more harm than good.
EU clears aid to Dutch health insurance system
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The Dutch government won a green light from the European Union on Tuesday to put 15 billion euros ($19.30 billion) into a fundamental reform of the health insurance system in the Netherlands.
Health care spending has been on the rise in the Netherlands and is likely to climb further due to an ageing population, which is why the government wants a reform that involves state subsidies to private insurers.
The European Commission decision comes less than a month before the Dutch vote in a referendum on the bloc’s first constitution, with opinion polls suggesting a majority of voters may reject the new EU treaty.
Baseball-players reject tougher steroids penalties
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The head of the Major League Baseball players’ union on Monday rejected Commissioner Bud Selig’s proposal to significantly increase penalties for steroid use, saying the current policy was working out fine.
In an open letter to union chief Donald Fehr, Selig proposed a 50-game suspension for players testing positive for steroids for the first time, a 100-game suspension for second-time offenders and a lifetime ban for any player caught a third time.
Selig also called for more random testing and a ban on amphetamines.
Indonesia fights polio after first case in a decade
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An 18-month-old infant in Indonesia has contracted polio, the first case in the country in a decade and a fresh setback to the global drive to eradicate the disease, the World Health Organisation and Jakarta said on Tuesday.
Several other cases of paralysis in the same village in the province of West Java are under investigation, WHO spokesman Oliver Rosenbauer told Reuters.
A top Indonesian health official said a drive would be launched later this month to vaccinate more than five million children on the main island of Java within two months.
Recent decline in SIDS deaths illusory
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Deaths attributed to sudden infant death syndrome, commonly known as SIDS, dropped by half in the 1990s due to a campaign to put babies to sleep on their backs, but recently reported declines are likely illusory, a study said on Monday.
Medical examiners, coroners and others charged with determining cause of death have been classifying more of the mysterious infant deaths as by suffocation or from unknown causes rather than from SIDS, which itself is a general term for unexplained infant death.
“There’s been this general feeling out in the community of pathologists and people who certify deaths (of) reticence to assign SIDS as the cause of death,” study author Dr. Michael Malloy of the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston said in a telephone interview.
Transplantation effective for intestine failure
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Intestine transplantation has become the definitive treatment for patients with end-stage disease of the intestines who cannot tolerate intravenous nutrition, according to data from the Intestinal Transplant Registry.
All 61 programs that perform intestine transplants and are enrolled in the registry responded to a survey conducted by Dr. David Grant, at Toronto General Hospital in Canada, and his associates.
The responses provided data on 989 transplants performed between 1985 and 2003.
Numico says settlement reached in ephedra cases
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Dutch food group Numico NV said on Monday it had reached a tentative settlement in 36 cases concerning the food supplement ephedra, sold by its former GNC unit before it was banned in the United States.
Numico, Europe’s largest maker of baby formula, said that a group of defendants in the cases had agreed to pay $19.7 million and that its own portion of those costs was covered by product liability insurance.
The supplement, used to promote weight loss and enhance sports performance, was banned in 2004 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, citing concerns about an “unreasonable risk of illness or injury”.
