Insecurity fans spread of pneumonic plague in Congo
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Medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) urged its international partners to help contain an outbreak of the highly contagious pneumonic plague in north-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo that has already killed 22 people, but where insecurity is fanning the spread of the disease.
“We urgently need all actors present in the field who have the capacity to conduct active searches for suspected cases and identification of individuals in contact with suspected cases to mobilize resources,” said Jerome Souquet, MSF Head in Ituri district.
“Otherwise, we risk being confronted with an outbreak spiralling out of control. We have already seen the epidemic outbreak spreading to new areas in the last few days,” Souquet said.
New theories on world’s obesity pandemic
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Fatty hamburgers, sugar-laden sodas and a couch-potato lifestyle: these are the familiar villains in the crisis of obesity sweeping developed countries.
But what if they had been convicted without fair trial?
What if the global fat explosion had other causes?
Surgeon general warns of secondhand smoke
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Breathing any amount of someone else’s tobacco smoke harms nonsmokers, the surgeon general declared Tuesday — a strong condemnation of secondhand smoke that is sure to fuel nationwide efforts to ban smoking in public.
“The debate is over. The science is clear: Secondhand smoke is not a mere annoyance, but a serious health hazard,” said U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona.
Diet Pattern More Important than Specific Food Choices
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Making changes to what you eat is difficult. Often the barrier to change is a preoccupation with specific choices: Can I have eggs for breakfast? Is oatmeal better than raisin bran? Individual choices are meaningful, but if they fit into a sound overall dietary pattern, there will be plenty of wiggle room, says the July issue of Harvard Men’s Health Watch.
A report from Harvard’s Health Professionals Follow-up Study examined the effect of dietary patterns, rather than individual foods, on men’s health. The results: Men who ate a lot of red meat, processed meat, refined grains, and sweets were 64% more likely to develop heart disease than men with the most prudent diets.
Merck says Vioxx risk unchanged by data correction
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Merck & Co said on Monday that it stands by the original findings of the study that led to the withdrawal of its pain drug Vioxx from the market, despite a correction to the description of how some of the data were analyzed.
Merck said it still believes the data from the study confirm that the increased risk of heart attack and stroke from Vioxx begins only after the medicine has been taken for 18 months. However, The New England Journal of Medicine cast doubts on that conclusion earlier on Monday by issuing an early release of a paper by a Harvard biostatistician. He concluded that the data were misinterpreted and the 18-month risk cut-off point for increased cardiovascular risk was not valid.
Combo therapy may help celiac disease patients
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Early tests suggest that therapy with a combination of two enzymes inactivates gluten in the gut and may someday benefit patients with celiac disease.
In two papers appearing in the journal Chemistry and Biology, Dr. Chaitan Khosla and colleagues, from Stanford University in California, describe the creation of this oral enzyme therapy, which they believe could alleviate many of the symptoms and complications of celiac sprue.
First, the researchers explain that they genetically engineered EP-B2, an enzyme found in barley seeds. They then created a compound in which EP-B2 was attached to Escherichia coli, a bacterium normally present in the gut that is frequently used to transport the active agent in gene therapies. Further testing of the EP-B2/E. coli compound showed that it efficiently inactivated a wheat gluten protein at regions toxic to celiac disease patients.
Reported child abuse up nearly 26 percent in Japan
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The number of child abuse cases reported in Japan shot up nearly 26 percent in the year to March 2005, topping 30,000 for the first time, with almost half the cases involving preschool children.
Japan had long boasted that its stable family structure made the idea of child abuse inconceivable, but reports of parents starving or beating their children to death have appeared in the news more often in recent years.
According to a white paper released by the government on Tuesday, the number of child abuse cases reported in that year jumped to 33,408 from 26,569 the year before, a rise of 25.7 percent.
X-rays raise breast cancer risk in women with BRCA
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X-rays may double or triple the risk of breast cancer in women who carry a mutation in the BRCA1 or BCRA2 gene, which makes them more susceptible to the breast as well as ovarian cancer, researchers reported on Monday.
The findings are not clear-cut and it is not known which type of chest X-ray poses the greater risk, said Dr. David Goldgar of the University of Utah School of Medicine, who helped lead the research.
“The results from this study raise potentially significant clinical considerations,” the researchers wrote in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. “The absolute risk of breast cancer by age 50 years is in the order of 40 percent in BRCA1 carriers and 15 percent in BRCA2 carriers.”
Thunderstorms plus mobile phones equal a dangerous combination
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According to British doctors people who use mobile phones outdoors during a thunderstorm, put themselves at risk of being struck by lightning.
Consultant surgeon Ram Dhillon along with two colleagues Swinda Esprit and Prasad Kothari, say using a mobile phone or an iPod during a thunderstorm can kill you.
According to the doctors from Northwick Park Hospital in northwest London, when someone is struck by lightning the high resistance of human skin results in lightning being conducted over the skin without entering the body; this is known as flashover.
China scraps move to criminalise gender selection
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China has scrapped plans to make sex-selective abortion a crime, state media said on Monday, more than a year after announcing penalties were necessary to correct gender imbalances among newborns.
China has 119 boys born for every 100 girls, an imbalance that has grown since it introduced a one-child policy more than 25 years ago to curb population growth—a restriction that bolstered traditional preferences for boys.
But lawmakers could not agree on the amendment to the criminal law, the China Daily said, citing Zhou Kunren, the vice-chairman of the parliamentary Law Committee.
Journal corrects conclusion of Vioxx risk study
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A critical study showing the heart attack and stroke risk of Merck and Co.‘s now-withdrawn arthritis drug Vioxx contained statistical errors that incorrectly showed that the risk changes over time, The New England Journal of Medicine reported on Monday.
The journal and the authors, including a team at Merck, are issuing a correction to the May 2005 study to show the risks do not, as originally shown, greatly increase after 18 months.
In fact, it is not possible to tell when the risk of heart attack or stroke shoot up, Journal editor Dr. Jeffrey Drazen said.
Maternal smoking linked with severe tic disorder
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Women who smoke during pregnancy appear to have a very strong risk of having a child with severe symptoms of Tourette’s syndrome and the risk of having obsessive-compulsive disorder is also increased in these children.
Tourette syndrome is a neurological disorder that develops in childhood or adolescence in which patients have involuntary tics involving sudden movements or vocalizations that are rapidly repeated. The symptoms usually occur several times a day, every day or intermittently and are usually mild, but can be severe.
The condition is believed be to associated with many genetic and environmental factors, Dr. Carol A. Mathews and her associates note. While few studies have examined the role of environmental factors, there are suggestions that incidents before or just after birth, as well as the mother’s prenatal habits, effect the development of the disorder, its severity, and the risk of having another neurologic condition.
Coffee drinking may lower diabetes risk
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Consumption of coffee, particularly the decaffeinated variety, is associated with a reduced risk of diabetes, according to a report in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
The study is not the first to document this association. However, in previous studies it was unclear if the relationship was true among people of different ages and body weights and if the caffeine component was the ingredient primarily responsible for the anti-diabetes effect.
Dr. Mark A. Pereira, from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and colleagues addressed these uncertainties by analyzing data from 28,812 women enrolled in the Iowa Women’s Health Study, which ran from 1986 to 1997. All of the women were free from diabetes and heart disease when the study began.
China and bird flu - the plot thickens
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The plot has thickened when it comes to China and bird flu.
It appears one of the researchers who reported that a Chinese man may have died from avian influenza before anyone else in China was known to have the disease, has denied trying to retract the article.
Dr. Wu Chun Cao of the State Key Laboratory of Pathogens and Biosecurity in Beijing says that e-mails bearing his name sent to the The New England Journal of Medicine were not written or sent by him.
New Hope for Wet Macular Degeneration Patients
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New imaging technologies for the eye pioneered at The New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, coupled with advanced medical treatments, are rapidly changing the outlook for many patients with macular degeneration, a retinal disease that in its worst form is a major cause of blindness in the United States.
“OCT-SLO in an innovative imaging technology that vastly improves our ability to manage the care of patients with ‘wet’ macular degeneration, the worst form of the disease,” said Richard Rosen, MD, a retina specialist at the Infirmary. “This leap in diagnostic capabilities, combined with the recent success of anti-angiogenic drugs, such as Avastin, which halt the progression of ‘wet’ macular degeneration, and in many cases improve eyesight, heralds new opportunities for treating a devastating disease.”
OCT-SLO, in addition to exceptionally high-resolution images of the retina, provides a way to precisely localize aberrant blood vessels which cause the disease. As a result, treatments can be localized and better monitored, as well. (Colorful diagnostic images are available).
