Public Health
Games-First case of dengue reported in athletes village
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The first case of dengue fever in the athletes village has added to the woes of Delhi officials already facing criticism for shoddy preparations ahead of the biggest ever Commonwealth Games.
Ruptu Gogoi, a member of the Indian lawn bowling team contracted the mosquito-borne viral disease and has been admitted to hospital.
More than a 1,000 cases, including three deaths, have been reported in the city since June and organisers have tried a number of methods, including ‘mosquito fish’, to stop the spread of the disease before the Games open later on Sunday.
US CEOs wary of health costs, end of Bush tax cuts
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U.S. chief executives are becoming more confident about the economy, though many worry high employee health care costs and the possible end of Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans could hurt businesses.
Vistage International, an organization for chief executives, said on Monday its confidence index edged up to 95.1 in the third quarter from 94.4 in the prior three months. The index is 12 percent above its year-earlier level of 84.9.
The survey, which was conducted between Sept. 14-24 and covered about 1,800 CEOs of small-to-medium sized companies, found that 92 percent of the respondents expected health costs to rise as companies implement the healthcare reform plan, designed to provide insurance to 32 million Americans who don’t have coverage.
Oklahoma investigates salmonella outbreak
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Oklahoma health officials are investigating an outbreak of salmonella in several schoolchildren and some adults and say it may be connected to similar outbreaks in Iowa and Nebraska.
A total of 16 cases in three counties have been identified involving at least four elementary schools, according to Leslea Bennett-Webb, spokeswoman for the Oklahoma Department of Health.
No one has died, although one adult has been hospitalized due to the strain of Salmonella “Java” that can cause bloody diarrhea, abdominal cramps, fever and vomiting.
Black mothers cite lack of desire as top reasons for not breastfeeding
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While more American mothers are breastfeeding today, non-Hispanic Black/African American women are less likely to initiate and continue breastfeeding, primarily due to a lack of desire and lack of self-efficacy, according to research presented Monday, Oct. 4, at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) National Conference and Exhibition in San Francisco.
Fifty-four percent of black women initiate breastfeeding, compared to the 73 percent national average. In the study, “Barriers to Breastfeeding Reported by Exclusively Formula Feeding Mothers,” urban mothers who were exclusively formula feeding were interviewed about their breastfeeding perceptions and decision not to breastfeed.
More blacks than non-blacks reported “lacking a desire to breastfeed” (55 percent versus 27 percent). Black mothers were less likely to report other obstacles that are more easy to overcome, such as misinformation about breastfeeding and whether a contraindication truly exists.
McDonald’s, US say health insurance report false
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McDonald’s Corp and federal health officials denied on Thursday a newspaper report that the fast-food chain may drop health insurance for nearly 30,000 of its hourly workers.
The Wall Street Journal, citing a company memo, reported that McDonald’s might cut the insurance unless U.S. regulators waived a requirement of new U.S. healthcare laws.
McDonald’s officials called the report “completely false.”
Judge dismisses 2 charges in Anna Nicole drug trial
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A judge on Wednesday dismissed two charges against Howard K. Stern, the former lawyer and boyfriend of Anna Nicole Smith, in a trial over whether he and two doctors wrongly supplied prescription drugs to the model and TV actress.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert Perry threw out a charge against Stern of obtaining drugs for Smith by fraud and deceit, and he dismissed part of one conspiracy claim against Stern and Smith’s doctor, Sandeep Kapoor, saying there was not enough proof the two men had worked together to obtain drugs.
But the remainder of the 11 complaints against Stern, Kapoor and a second doctor, Khristine Eroschevich, will stand.
McDonald’s may drop health insurance
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McDonald’s Corp may cut health insurance for its nearly 30,000 hourly workers unless U.S. regulators waive a requirement of new health care legislation championed by President Barack Obama, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The restaurant chain is at odds over the new law’s stipulation that so-called “mini-med” insurance plans spend at least 80 percent of premium revenue on medical care, the newspaper said on its website on Wednesday.
McDonald’s told federal regulators it would be “economically prohibitive” for its insurance carrier to continue to cover hourly workers unless it receives a waiver to the 80 percent minimum requirement, the Journal reported, citing a company memo. Federal officials say there is no guarantee a waiver will be granted, it said.
Genetically altered trees, plants could help counter global warming
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Forests of genetically altered trees and other plants could sequester several billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year and so help ameliorate global warming, according to estimates published in the October issue of BioScience.
The study, by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, outlines a variety of strategies for augmenting the processes that plants use to sequester carbon dioxide from the air and convert it into long-lived forms of carbon, first in vegetation and ultimately in soil.
Besides increasing the efficiency of plants’ absorption of light, researchers might be able to genetically alter plants so they send more carbon into their roots—where some may be converted into soil carbon and remain out of circulation for centuries. Other possibilities include altering plants so that they can better withstand the stresses of growing on marginal land, and so that they yield improved bioenergy and food crops. Such innovations might, in combination, boost substantially the amount of carbon that vegetation naturally extracts from air, according to the authors’ estimates.
What next for the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic?
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Now that the H1N1 influenza pandemic is officially over, what will happen to the virus? In a perspective article published today in the online open-access journal mBio®, scientists from the National Institutes of Health delve into history and explore the fates of other pandemic influenza viruses in order to speculate on the future of the most recent pandemic virus.
“While human influenza viruses have often surprised us, available evidence leads to the hope that the current pandemic virus will continue to cause low or moderate mortality rates if it does not become extinct,” write Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and his NIAID coauthors, Jeffery Taubenberger and David Morens.
The impact of the virus in the upcoming influenza season will depend directly on the degree of existing immunity in the population, provided the virus does not undergo any changes. The authors currently estimate that approximately 59% of the United States population has some level of immunity due to either exposure to the pandemic H1N1 (pH1N1) virus, vaccination or exposure to a closely related influenza virus. That number will continue to increase through immunization with the 2010-2011 seasonal influenza vaccines, which will contain the pH1N1 strain.
China offers hope of easing one-child policy
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China marked the 30th anniversary of its controversial one-child policy with talk of relaxing rules, at least in some provinces, that have reined in population growth but caused heartache for millions of couples.
With a population expected to peak at 1.65 billion in 2033, China has been cautious about dropping an unpopular policy that was originally supposed to last one generation.
Central planners say the one-child policy has spared China from the pressures of hundreds of millions of additional people that would have strained scarce water and food resources as well as the nation’s ability to educate and employ them.
Beatrice Hahn and George Shaw, Pioneers in HIV Research, to Join Penn Medicine
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Beatrice Hahn, MD and George Shaw, MD, will be joining the faculty of the Penn Center for AIDS Research in the School of Medicine in 2011. Both are international leaders in human and simian immunodeficiency virus research and have made groundbreaking contributions to this field for over two decades. Hahn and Shaw have also contributed significantly to the study of the transmission of human infectious pathogens from non-human animals.
Hahn’s most recent work, reported in the cover story of the September 23, 2010 issue of Nature describes groundbreaking studies identifying the origin of Plasmodium falciparum, the most deadly form of malaria, in West African gorillas, findings that will spearhead new research to understand host/pathogen interactions that underlie the transmission and pathogenicity of malaria.
“Individually and together, Dr. Hahn and Dr. Shaw will bring additional depth to Penn Medicine in this critical area of science,” says Dr. Arthur H. Rubenstein, Executive Vice President of the University of Pennsylvania for the Health System and Dean of the School of Medicine.
Ingredient in soap points toward new drugs for infection that affects 2 billion
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The antibacterial ingredient in some soaps, toothpastes, odor-fighting socks, and even computer keyboards is pointing scientists toward a long-sought new treatment for a parasitic disease that affects almost two billion people. Their report on how triclosan became the guiding light for future development of drugs for toxoplasmosis appears in ACS’ monthly Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.
In the study, Rima McLeod and colleagues point out that toxoplasmosis is one of the world’s most common parasitic infections, affecting about one-third of the world population, including 80 percent of the population of Brazil. People can catch the infection, spread by the parasite Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii), from contact with feces from infected cats, eating raw or undercooked meat, and in other ways. Many have no symptoms because their immune systems keep the infection under control and the parasite remains inactive. But it can cause eye damage and other problems, even becoming life threatening in individuals with immune systems weakened by certain medications and diseases like HIV infection, which allow the parasite to become active again, and in some persons without immune compromise. Most current treatments have some potentially harmful side effects and none of them attack the parasite in its inactive stage.
New drug could help stop the spread of disease during cough: U of A research
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What if there was a drug that could completely eliminate airborne disease transmission that occurs when someone coughs? Researchers at the University of Alberta believe they have found a way to achieve this.
The idea behind this work came from Malcolm King and his research associate Gustavo Zayas, who work in the Division of Pulmonary Medicine at the U of A’s Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry. King and Zayas developed a drug that, when inhaled, would reduce or eliminate the amount of droplets, called bioaerosol, coming out of the mouth when a disease-infected person coughs. These airborne particles can stay in the air for minutes and sometimes even hours.
In order to help perfect this drug King and Zayas enlisted in the expertise of PhD student Anwarul Hasan and associate professor Carlos Lange, both from the Faculty of Engineering’s mechanical engineering department. It was Hasan and Lange’s role to find out how the size and amount of the cough-emitted droplets are affected by the new drug.
Combined impact of lifestyle factors on mortality among Chinese women
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In research published this week in PLoS Medicine, results from the Shanghai Women’s Health Study reveal the impact of lifestyle-related factors on mortality in a cohort of Chinese women – confirming the results from other Western research studies.
The large prospective cohort study by Wei Zheng and colleagues (from Vanderbilt University & Shanghai Cancer Institute) showed that lifestyle factors other than active smoking and alcohol consumption, have a major combined impact on total mortality on a scale comparable to the effect of smoking. For example healthier lifestyle-related factors, including normal weight, lower waist-hip ratio, participation in exercise, never being exposed to spousal smoking, and higher daily fruit and vegetable intake, were significantly and independently associated with a lower risk of total, and cause-specific, mortality.
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Funding: Supported by National Institutes of Health grant R37 CA070867. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Want to live longer? Get a grip!
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A firm handshake could be a sign of a longer life expectancy, according to British researchers.
Scientists at the Medical Research Council found that elderly people who could still give a firm handshake and walk at a brisk pace were likely to outlive their slower peers.
They found simple measures of physical capability like shaking hands, walking, getting up from a chair and balancing on one leg were related to life span, even after accounting for age, sex and body size.
