Wal-Mart offers to help fix US health care
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Wal-Mart Stores Inc., at the center of debate over corporate responsibility for health care, said on Tuesday that it wants to use its cost-cutting expertise to help make the U.S. health care system more efficient.
Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer, has become a lightning rod for labor unions, environmentalists, anti-sprawl groups and others who contend that the retailer pays poverty-level wages, pushes employees onto government-funded Medicaid health insurance, and devours green space for its massive stores.
Maryland recently passed legislation that requires Wal-Mart to spend more on employee health care, and similar bills have been proposed in dozens of other states as they try to defray rising costs.
Teens not learning lesson from mom’s skin cancer
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Teenagers whose mothers have been diagnosed with skin cancer are not much more likely than their peers to protect themselves effectively from the sun, a new study shows.
Having a parent with skin cancer increases a person’s own risk of the disease, Alan C. Geller of the Boston University School of Medicine and colleagues note in the medical journal of Pediatrics.
For the more-treatable basal cell and squamous cell cancers, risk is at least doubled, while having a family history of melanoma, the most deadly type of skin cancer, increases risk from two- to eight-fold. This means effective sun protection is even more important for individuals with a family history of skin cancer, Geller and his team write.
U.S. FDA plans tracking of drug safety reviews
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration needs a way to track the hundreds of internal safety reviews completed each year about drugs already on the market, an agency official said on Tuesday.
Dr. Paul Seligman said building such a system would be one of his priorities as he takes the newly created position of associate director for safety policy and communication in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.
Analysts in the FDA’s Office of Drug Safety provide about 600 reports a year about potential concerns from marketed prescription drugs to officials in another office, the Office of New Drugs.
Smoking May Cause Far More Cancer Deaths in Asian Americans than Recognized
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Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese American males living in California die of cancer at three times the rate of South Asian females in California, whose cancer mortality rate is one of the lowest in the world.
According to a new study by UC Davis Cancer Center researchers, such disparities between genders and Asian and Pacific Islander ethnic groups can be explained almost entirely by tobacco smoke exposure—suggesting that if smoking were eliminated, Asian and Pacific Islander Americans all would have very low cancer mortality rates, with minimal variation from group to group.
“Among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, non-lung cancer death rates, like lung cancer death rates, correlate very closely with their smoke exposures,” said Bruce N. Leistikow, associate professor of public health sciences at UC Davis and a leading expert on the epidemiology of smoking-related illnesses. “If all Asian and Pacific Islander Americans had as little smoke exposure as South Asian females in California, our work suggests that their cancer mortality rates across the board could be as low as that of the South Asian females.”
Engineers Creating Small Wireless Device to Improve Cancer Treatment
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Engineers at Purdue University are creating a wireless device the size of a rice grain that could be implanted in tumors to tell doctors the precise dose of radiation received and locate the exact position of tumors during treatment.
Researchers at Purdue’s Birck Nanotechnology Center have tested a dime-size prototype to prove the concept and expect to have the miniature version completed by the end of summer, said Babak Ziaie (pronounced Zee-Eye-Eee), an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
“Currently, there is no way of knowing the exact dose of radiation received by a tumor,” Ziaie said. “And, because most organs shift inside the body depending on whether a patient is sitting or lying down, for example, the tumor also shifts. This technology will allow doctors to pinpoint the exact position of the tumor to more effectively administer radiation treatments.”
Ginger shown to zap ovarian cancer cells
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According to U.S. scientists ginger may help to fight ovarian cancer.
Researchers from the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center have found in a study that ginger kills cancer cells and has the added benefit of stopping the cells from becoming resistant to treatment.
They found the ginger caused the cells to die in all the tests carried out and it was the way in which the cells died which has created the optimism; two types of death were demonstrated in the tests - apoptosis, which is basically cell suicide, and autophagy, a kind of self-digestion.
Clinical web site may be target of porn seekers
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It seems that online dermatological images, intended as a references for doctors, are sometimes being used pruriently.
The idea that a searchable archive of clinical photographs was being misused first occurred to the site’s curators when they noticed a marked jump in queries for images of genital areas.
In light of this, Dr. Christoph U. Lehmann and colleagues, from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, emphasize in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology that “anonymous misuse of collaborative archives must be anticipated, addressed and prevented to preserve their integrity and the integrity of the learning communities they support.”
Drug trial victim may lose fingers and toes
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A man who fell into a coma in London last month during a clinical trial of TeGenero’s monoclonal antibody TGN1412 has said he may lose parts of his fingers and toes, the UK’s News of the World newspaper reported on Sunday.
“I’m told it’s like frostbite and my fingers will just fall off,” Ryan Wilson told the newspaper in an interview.
Photographs in the newspaper showed Wilson in bed at Northwick Park Hospital, in northwest London, where the trial took place, with his blackened feet and hands.
Unhappy marriage may harm older adults’ health
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A troubled marriage may speed the decline in health that comes with age, a study has found.
While research shows that married people often enjoy better health than singles do, a number of studies have suggested that an unhappy marriage can take a major health toll. Some, for example, have found a higher rate of heart disease among people who are dissatisfied with their marriage.
This latest study, published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, suggests that marital strain may be particularly damaging to older adults’ health.
Excessive adiposity, calorie restriction, and aging
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Can eating a low-calorie yet nutritionally balanced diet extend human life? Preliminary research suggests it might, so researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis are launching a long-term study to find out.
In an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Luigi Fontana, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine at Washington University and an investigator at the Istituto Superiore di Sanita in Rome, Italy, says calorie-restricted diets point to possible mechanisms of aging and suggest ways to intervene and modify its effects.
In January, Fontana and colleagues found that after an average of six years on calorie restriction, people’s hearts functioned like the hearts of much younger people. And a team from the Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge is reporting that six months of calorie restriction reduces two key markers of aging: fasting insulin levels and body temperature.
New Gene Reduces Retinal Degeneration in Fruit Flies
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Johns Hopkins researchers have discovered a gene in fruit flies that helps certain specialized neurons respond more quickly to bright light. The study, published in the April 4 issue of Current Biology, also has implications for understanding sensory perception in mammals.
In teasing apart the molecular interactions and physiology underlying light perception, the researchers studied a gene they dubbed “Lazaro” that is expressed 15 times higher in the fly eye than the rest of the fly head. They found that this gene is required for a second biochemical pathway that controls the activity of a protein called the TRP channel. TRP channels are found in fruit fly neurons responsible for sensing light. The fly TRP channel is the founding member of a family of related proteins in mammals that are essential for guiding certain nerves during development and for responding to stimuli including heat, taste and sound.
Pakistanis on alert as bird flu crops up on another farm
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According to authorities in Pakistan there has been another outbreak of the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus on a poultry farm.
The Agriculture Ministry has confirmed that laboratory tests have established the latest case of the bird flu virus has occurred on a chicken farm in Sihala, 15 miles east of Islamabadon.
Health officials have reportedly destroyed 3,600 chickens at the farm and are testing poultry at nearby farms.
Sleep-wake mix-up may lead to near-death sensation
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The brain’s tendency to occasionally blur the line between sleep and wakefulness may help explain the phenomenon of near-death experience, preliminary research suggests.
It’s been an open question as to why some people see bright light, feel detached from their bodies or have other extraordinary sensations when they are close to dying or believe they might die.
Some people view these so-called near-death experiences as evidence of life after death, and many neurologists have considered the phenomenon too complex for scientific study.
Abdominal obesity may boost heart failure risk
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Older adults who carry their fat around the middle may be at risk of chronic heart failure, even in the absence of other serious health conditions, research suggests.
In a study of more than 2,400 older men and women, researchers found that those with large waistlines were at increased risk of chronic heart failure - regardless of whether they had major risk factors like high blood pressure, diabetes or a history of heart attack.
The findings suggest that excessive abdominal fat, in and of itself, can contribute to heart failure, according to the investigators, led by Dr. Barbara J. Nicklas of Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Calcium’s Impact on Weight Reduction, Bone Loss in Decade After Menopause
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Armed with an $840,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the latest in world-class body scanning technology, a Florida State University researcher in the College of Human Sciences soon will begin the largest, longest study to-date on the efficacy of calcium - through dairy products, supplements or both - for weight reduction and bone preservation in overweight or obese postmenopausal Caucasian women.
Along the way, the comprehensive four-year project at FSU will include nutritional outreach efforts to disadvantaged communities and also will take a look at longstanding assumptions about lactose intolerance in African-Americans.
Department of nutrition, food and exercise sciences Professor Jasminka Ilich will spearhead the calcium research targeting Caucasian women who are two to ten years past menopause and classified as overweight or obese based on a body mass index (BMI) of 26 or greater. Results are expected to shed additional light on calcium’s cell-level role in the overall functioning of bone and adipose (fat) tissue in such women.
