Public Health
First Dutch “mad cow” disease patient dies
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A 26-year old woman who had recently been diagnosed with the human variant of “mad cow” disease died on Tuesday, the first Dutch victim of the brain wasting illness, her hospital said.
The Mesos hospital in the central Dutch city of Utrecht declined to give further details at the request of the woman’s family.
The hospital had made a diagnosis of probable variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), the human form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), on April 15. Specialists at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam confirmed the diagnosis on April 18.
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.
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.
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”.
Major polio epidemic hits Yemen, 22 infected
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A polio epidemic has infected 22 children in Yemen, and the paralyzing virus is threatening to spread further, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday.
The United Nations agency, which reported four cases around the Red Sea port city of al-Hudaydah last week, said 18 more children had contracted the disease in the poor Arab state.
It is the latest setback to the WHO’s campaign to wipe out transmission of polio worldwide by year-end. An epidemic that originated in Nigeria has swept across Africa since mid-2003.
U.S. navy hospital ship ends Indonesia mission
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A U.S. navy hospital ship will leave Indonesia’s quake-hit Nias island on Saturday, marking a final farewell by U.S. troops involved in Indonesian disaster relief work, the U.S. embassy said.
The 270-metre (890-ft) Mercy arrived in Indonesia with the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln after the December 26 Indian Ocean tsunami that left more than 160,000 Indonesians dead or missing.
