Public Health
Comic Gallagher suffers second heart attack
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Just days after being released from treatment following a heart attack and a medically induced coma, comedian Gallagher suffered a second heart attack Sunday.
His rep confirms to E! News that the 65-year-old funnyman is now awake and resting in an Arizona hospital.
The sledgehammer-wielding comedian was not feeling well Sunday and was taken by his son to the hospital. While there, he suffered a second heart attack.
Scientist who coined “Pink Slime” reluctant whistleblower
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Every time someone calls former U.S. government scientist Gerald Zirnstein a whistleblower, he cringes a little.
When he coined the term “Pink Slime” to describe the unlabeled and unappetizing bits of cartilage and other chemically-treated scrap meat going into U.S. ground beef, Zirnstein was a microbiologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
He made the slime reference to a fellow scientist in an internal - and he thought private - email. But that email later became public, and with it came an explosion of outrage from consumer groups.
Childhood hunger policies should target neighborhoods, not families
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Policies addressing childhood hunger should target neighborhoods, not individual families, according to new research from Rice University.
Sociologists found that children living in neighborhoods with higher poverty rates and in those with high foreign-born populations and non-English speakers are more likely to experience hunger.
“Policymakers should be thinking about targeting whole communities, instead of what is done now, which is offering public aid programs for individual families,” said Rice sociology professor Justin Denney. “Public aid works on a limited basis, reaching approximately 70 percent of eligible individuals. But unfortunately, the remaining 30 percent are unaccounted for.”
The study, published in the Journal of Applied Research on Children, was co-authored by Denney and sociology professor Rachel Tobert Kimbro, co-founders of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research’s Urban Health Program at Rice, and postbaccalaureate fellow Sarita Panchang. They used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, a nationally representative dataset of more than 20,000 kindergarteners in 1998-1999, to examine individual, family and neighborhood characteristics of children who are or are not affected by hunger. In the dataset, the children were clustered according to schools and neighborhoods.
New research about facial recognition turns common wisdom on its head
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A team of researchers that includes a USC scientist has methodically demonstrated that a face’s features or constituents – more than the face per se – are the key to recognizing a person.
Their study, which goes against the common belief that brains process faces “holistically,” appears this month in Psychological Science.
In addition to shedding light on the way the brain functions, these results may help scientists understand rare facial recognition disorders.
Humans are great at recognizing faces. There are even regions in the brain that are specifically associated with face perception – the most well-known one is the fusiform gyrus in the temporal lobe.
Comedian Gallagher still in medically induced coma
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Doctors have decided to wait before bringing the comedian Gallagher out of the medically induced coma he was put in after his heart attack last week in Texas.
Doctors had planned to wake the 65-year-old comedian on Saturday. But his promotional manager, Christine Scherrer, says he was trying to wake on his own. Doctors are keeping him sedated because they want to wake him slowly. She says they may try Sunday.
Scherrer says the comedian had two stents replaced after collapsing Wednesday before a performance at a bar in Lewisville, a Dallas suburb.
House GOP look to reshape birth control debate
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House Republican leaders are looking for a way to reshape the debate over the administration’s new rule on birth-control insurance coverage before moving ahead with a bid to nullify the requirement.
Representative Jeff Fortenberry, who has introduced legislation on the issue, acknowledged hesitation by some fellow Republicans to take on the incendiary issue. But he said a delay could give Republicans time to recast the issue as a question of religious freedom rather than women’s rights.
“We’ll keep trying to appropriately frame the debate about this core American principle,” Fortenberry said.
Representative Pete Sessions, who heads the House Republican campaign committee, said party leaders are not backing off. “We’re not hesitant to do anything,” Sessions said. “The successful rain dance has a lot to do with timing.”
U.S. appeals court finds DNA testing constitutional
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California law enforcement officers can continue collecting DNA samples from adults arrested for felonies, a federal appeals court ruled on Thursday.
A divided three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a 2004 California law requiring officials to collect the DNA samples does not violate the U.S. Constitution’s ban on unreasonable searches.
“DNA analysis is an extraordinarily effective tool for law enforcement to identify arrestees, solve past crimes, and exonerate innocent suspects,” Judge Milan Smith wrote for the 2-1 majority. The government’s interests in the genetic information outweigh any privacy concerns, the majority concluded.
Prevnar trial results needed for CDC recommendation
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Advisors to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday will wait for results from a trial of Pfizer Inc’s Prevnar 13 pneumonia vaccine before deciding whether to recommend its use in all adults aged 50 and older.
The trial results, expected next year, along with data on whether use of the vaccine in children is affecting rates of disease in adults, will be assessed before a recommendation is made, said CDC spokeswoman Alison Patti.
The Food and Drug Administration in December approved use of Prevnar 13 in older adults and Pfizer said it still expects to begin a marketing campaign in March.
Mixed progress made by US government and schools to improve food marketing influencing children’s diets
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New research has found that the US government and schools have made mixed progress to comprehensively address food and beverage marketing practices that put young people’s health at risk. A comprehensive review published in the March issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine finds that public sector stakeholders have failed to fully implement recommendations from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to support a healthful diet to children and adolescents.
“Evidence links the marketing of high-calorie, nutrient-poor branded food and beverage products to obesity rates. Our evaluation found that the prevailing marketing environment continues to threaten children’s health and the public sector has missed important opportunities to promote a healthful diet and create healthy eating environments,” says lead author Vivica Kraak, MS, RD, Research Fellow at Deakin University’s Population Health Strategic Research Center in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
In a study requested by Congress in 2004, the IOM determined that food marketing influences children and adolescents to prefer, request, and consume high-calorie and nutrient poor foods and beverages. In December 2005, an expert IOM committee issued a report with 10 recommendations to guide public- and private-sector stakeholders to promote healthy eating in children and adolescents. Kraak and colleagues Mary Story, PhD, RD, University of Minnesota School of Public Health, and Ellen A. Wartella, PhD, Northwestern University School of Communication, conducted a comprehensive literature review of the evidence to determine what progress had been made toward 5 of the report’s recommendations for the public sector. The other 5 recommendations directed at industry stakeholders, were examined in a separate publication released in September 2011. They evaluated 80 data sources, including published articles, enacted legislation, and media stories over 5 years (from late 2005 to early 2011). Their work was funded by Healthy Eating Research, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
10 rights and responsibilities of users of electronic health records
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Providing clinicians ten rights and responsibilities regarding their electronic health record use could serve as the foundation on which to build a new approach to health care in the electronic age, states an article in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).
Despite commitments to electronic health initiatives by governments in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, the United Kingdom and the United States over the past decade, clinicians experience challenges in adoption and use. Clinicians may still be unsure that the benefits of these systems outweigh the time and resources required to maintain and update electronic records. To overcome these challenges, two US researchers identified 10 topics that they propose as professional “rights,” along with corresponding responsibilities that if addressed, may help overcome the electronic health record use challenges facing clinicians.
“The 10 key issues discussed here form a set of features, functions and user privileges that clinician users require to deliver high-quality, safe and effective care,” write Dr. Dean Sittig, University of Texas Health Sciences Center at Houston and Dr. Hardeep Singh, Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Baylor College of Medicine.
White House open to compromise over contraception: adviser
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The Obama administration is willing to work with Catholic universities and hospitals in implementing new rules that require health insurance to cover birth control, a top adviser to the president’s re-election campaign said on Tuesday.
Signaling possible room for compromise on the issue, David Axelrod said such religious institutions have a grace period to find a way to include health insurance coverage for contraception as part of the U.S. healthcare overhaul without going against Catholic Church doctrine.
“We certainly don’t want to abridge anyone’s religious freedom so we’re going to look for a way to move forward that both guarantees women that basic preventive care that they need and respects the prerogatives of religious institutions,” Axelrod, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama’s re-election team, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
Kenya doctor fights mental health stigma in ‘traumatized continent’
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As Kenya’s leading psychiatrist, Frank Njenga has been championing the cause of better mental health care on the east African country and the continent for more than three decades.
He’s been working tirelessly to bring quality mental health care in a country where mentally disabled people receive little help from the state and face massive stigma from society.
“It’s a horrible indictment on what we’ve done but the truth and reality is that very little has been done systematically and deliberately by government or by ourselves to bring up the level of mental health in this part of the world,” says Njenga.
Monogamy reduces major social problems of polygamist cultures
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In cultures that permit men to take multiple wives, the intra-sexual competition that occurs causes greater levels of crime, violence, poverty and gender inequality than in societies that institutionalize and practice monogamous marriage.
That is a key finding of a new University of British Columbia-led study that explores the global rise of monogamous marriage as a dominant cultural institution. The study suggests that institutionalized monogamous marriage is rapidly replacing polygamy because it has lower levels of inherent social problems.
“Our goal was to understand why monogamous marriage has become standard in most developed nations in recent centuries, when most recorded cultures have practiced polygyny,” says UBC Prof. Joseph Henrich, a cultural anthropologist, referring to the form of polygamy that permits multiple wives, which continues to be practiced in some parts of Africa, Asia, the Middle East and North America.
“The emergence of monogamous marriage is also puzzling for some as the very people who most benefit from polygyny – wealthy, powerful men – were best positioned to reject it,” says Henrich, lead author of the study that is published today in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. “Our findings suggest that that institutionalized monogamous marriage provides greater net benefits for society at large by reducing social problems that are inherent in polygynous societies.”
Study examines research on overuse of health care services
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The overuse of health care services in the United States appears to be an understudied problem with research literature limited to a few services and rates of overuse varying widely, according to an article published in the January 23 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. This article is part of the journal’s Less is More series.
Overuse of medical services (those services with no benefit or where the harm outweighs the benefit) can contribute to high health care costs, with some estimates attributing as much as 30 percent of U.S. health care spending to overuse, the authors write in the study background.
“An understanding of the prevalence of overuse of health care services across the U.S. health system is needed to improve health care quality and eliminate waste,” the authors note.
India must be cautious over polio milestone: WHO
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India may be celebrating a milestone in its fight against polio with no new cases in the last year, but complacency should not set in as a resurgence of the infection can occur if efforts are not sustained, the WHO head in India warned on Friday.
The last case of the crippling disease was detected on January 13, 2011 in a two-year-old girl in India’s West Bengal state. A full year without any new cases will mean India will no longer be “polio-endemic,” leaving only Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria.
“We are all subject to relaxing a bit when we have achieved some goal but we simply cannot allow that to happen with polio,” Nata Menabde, the India head of the World Health Organization (WHO), told AlertNet in an interview.
