Public Health
China city kills 36,000 dogs after rabies deaths
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A Chinese city has killed 36,000 stray and pet dogs in a bid to wipe out rabies, state media said on Tuesday, as the country considers a draft law recognising animal rights and making such a cull illegal.
Rabies has killed 12 people in Hanzhong, in the northern province of Shaanxi, where more than 6,000 people had been bitten or scratched since late May, the China Daily said.
“The monitoring data showed that the danger caused by the dogs which carried rabies virus has increased and epidemic prevention and control is urgent,” Xing Tianhu, deputy mayor of the city, was quoted as saying.
Companies urged to plan for H1N1 flu
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Many multinational companies do not have workable plans in place for when a pandemic hits, including the possibility that H1N1 flu may change into a much more dangerous virus, health experts warned on Friday.
Dr. Myles Druckman, disease outbreak expert at International SOS, also said working out how to respond to potential outbreaks that may hit offices of a multinational company in some locations but not others was something firms needed to contend with.
“A gap for many is how can companies develop a more proportional response,” said Druckman, whose organisation has helped more than 100 Fortune 500 companies develop pandemic plans.
“For the most part outbreaks are going to be a local phenomenon. That is going to be the challenge going forward.”
Program offers free eye care to America’s elderly
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Between June 1 and August 31, EyeCare America, a non-profit public service program of the Foundation of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, is offering no-cost medical eye care to qualified seniors.
By the age of 65, one in three Americans has some form of vision-impairing eye disease. The downturn in the U.S. economy has many seniors on fixed incomes struggling with health care costs, including eye care.
Last Updated: 2009-06-11 15:04:35 -0400 (Reuters Health)
Nations must remain on guard against H1N1 flu-WHO
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Countries where the H1N1 virus appears to have peaked need to remain vigilant and prepare for a second wave of infections because the flu is so unpredictable, WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said on Thursday.
“When you are over with the first wave, start preparing for the future,” Chan told reporters after the World Health Organisation raised its pandemic alert to phase 6 to indicate a flu pandemic is underway.
Officials said the move reflected the geographic spread of the virus but did not indicate the severity of the influenza (A) H1N1 pandemic. She said the WHO’s global assessment was that the pandemic was moderate.
Obama presses healthcare overhaul in US heartland
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President Barack Obama took his push for healthcare overhaul to the U.S. heartland on Thursday, calling the current system unsustainable and vowing not to tolerate “endless delay” before acting to fix it.
Hosting a Town Hall-style meeting, Obama stuck to his view that a government-sponsored insurance plan must be part of a healthcare revamp, despite opposition to the idea from Republicans, private insurers and even the influential American Medical Association doctors’ group.
“We have reached a point where doing nothing about the cost of health care is no longer an option. The status quo is unsustainable,” the Democratic president said. He insisted, however, he was not seeking a “government takeover” of the troubled system.
New Algorithm for Ruptured Aneurysms Improves Mortality Rate
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Researchers from the University of Washington in Seattle report that algorithms for the management of ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm (rAAA) with a preference for endovascular repair (EVAR), serve as surrogates for an organized approach to managing the disease process and reducing overall mortality. These findings are from a study presented today at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Society for Vascular Surgery®.
“The staff at Harborview Medical Center treat between 30 and 50 patients per year with rAAAs,” said Benjamin W. Starnes, MD, chief in the division of vascular surgery and associate professor of surgery at the University of Washington. “In this study we sought to evaluate the effect on mortality with the implementation of an algorithm to manage these patients with a preference for EVAR when feasible.”
During the study period, 187 patients with rAAA underwent attempted repair at Harborview Medical Center. Thirty-day mortality ratios were calculated and compared using Chi Square and Fisher’s Exact Test where appropriate, continuous variables were compared with a Mann-Whitney U test. Before implementation of the algorithm, (between July 1, 2002 and June 30, 2007) a total of 131 patients with rAAA were managed and treated. One-hundred and twenty-eight underwent surgical treatment and the 30-day mortality rate was 58 percent. Sixty-five percent of these patients were hypotensive at presentation.
WHO getting close to declaring H1N1 pandemic
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The World Health Organization is getting close to declaring a full H1N1 influenza pandemic but wants to make sure countries are well prepared for such a move to prevent a panic, its top flu expert said Tuesday.
Keiji Fukuda, acting WHO assistant director-general, voiced concern at the sustained spread of the new strain in countries, including more than 1,000 cases in Australia, following major outbreaks in North America where it was first detected.
The disease, widely known as swine flu, which has infected over 26,500 people in 73 countries, with 140 deaths, has also spread widely in Britain, Spain and Japan.
Kansas abortion clinic won’t reopen after murder
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The family of a murdered Kansas abortion doctor said on Tuesday they would not reopen his clinic, which was one of only a few in the United States willing to provide late-term abortions.
George Tiller, 67, died in the foyer of his church, shot once in the face as he served as an usher at Sunday services on May 31.
Police quickly arrested anti-abortion protestor Scott Roeder, 51, and have charged him with first-degree murder and aggravated assault in the killing.
Chinese researchers find way to make pig stem cells
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Researchers have found a way to transform ordinary cells from pigs into powerful stem cells in a move that may have implications for human health.
With these stem cells, they hope to modify porcine genes that are related to the immune system so that pigs’ organs may some day be used for people in need of transplants.
In an article published in the Journal of Molecular Cell Biology, the researchers from China described how they managed to re-programme ordinary cells taken from the ear and bone marrow of a 10-week-old pig using a virus.
“The cells changed and developed in the laboratory into colonies of embryonic-like stem cells,” wrote the researchers, led by Xiao Lei, who heads the stem cell lab at the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology.
Eighteen U.S. soldiers in Kuwait have H1N1 flu
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Eighteen U.S. soldiers in Kuwait have H1N1 flu, the first cases in the Gulf Arab oil-exporting region, a government official said on Sunday.
“(The soldiers) were confirmed with the virus upon their arrival from their country to the military base (in Kuwait),” Ibrahim al-Abdulhadi told Reuters.
Kuwait is a logistics base for the U.S. army for neighboring Iraq, where the U.S. military said there were no known cases yet of H1N1.
Insured immigrants spend less on health: study
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Insured immigrants have lower medical expenses than do U.S.-born citizens, even after accounting for lower levels of insurance coverage, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
They said the findings contradict the popular belief that immigrants are a drain on the U.S. health system.
“Many people claim that immigrants are using large health care expenditures in the United States and they are causing emergency room bills to soar,” said Leighton Ku, a health policy researcher at George Washington University, whose study appears in the American Journal of Public Health.
Can you see the emotions I hear? Study says yes
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By observing the pattern of activity in the brain, scientists have discovered they can “read” whether a person just heard words spoken in anger, joy, relief, or sadness. The discovery, reported online on May 14th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, is the first to show that emotional information is represented by distinct spatial signatures in the brain that can be generalized across speakers.
“Correct interpretation of emotion in the voice is highly important – especially in a modern environment where visual emotional signals are often not available,” for instance, when people talk on the phone, said Thomas Ethofer of the University of Geneva, Switzerland. “We demonstrated that the spatial pattern of activity within the brain area that processes human voices contains information about the expressed emotion.”
Previous neuroimaging studies showed that voice-sensitive auditory areas activate to a broad spectrum of vocally expressed emotions more than to neutral speech melody, the researchers explained. However, this enhanced response occurs irrespective of the specific category of emotion, making it impossible to distinguish different vocal emotions with conventional analyses.
Pills that are Gazans’ little helpers
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Palestinians struggling to cope with the Israeli blockade of Gaza and the trauma of war are turning to painkillers and tranquillizers at a rate that risks triggering a wave of addiction.
There is also evidence of mounting recreational drug use as Gaza drifts in limbo, with no clear political future.
Gaza residents reported health problems after a 22-day Israeli offensive last January, with most citing psychological problems and stress, according to a survey published by the United Nations Gender Task Force on April 21.
US reports 642 cases of new H1N1 flu
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The United States now has 642 cases of the new H1N1 flu, with two deaths, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.
CDC officials have said they expect the new swine flu to spread to all 50 states, to cause severe disease and some deaths, although most cases have been mild.
China to release Canadian students from quarantine
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China has decided to lift its flu quarantine on a group of Canadian students but the Canadian government said on Wednesday it would demand an explanation of why they had been confined.
The University of Montreal students had shown no flu symptoms but were nonetheless quarantined in the northeast Chinese city of Changchun after they arrived by plane last Saturday.
Canadian foreign affairs spokesman Alain Cacchione said he had just been informed the students would be released on Thursday morning. Canadian officials said there were 28 students in the group, 22 of them Canadian.
