Public Health
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.
4x4 Drivers More Likely to Flout Mobile Phone and Seat Belt Laws
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Drivers of four wheel drive vehicles are more likely to flout laws regarding mobile phones and seat belts than drivers of other cars, finds a study published on bmj.com today.
This is a major public health concern and greater efforts are needed to educate the public and enforce these laws, argue the authors.
The study took place at three different sites in Hammersmith, West London. Private passenger vehicles were observed Monday to Friday for one hour in the morning (9-10 am), afternoon (1-2 pm), and early evening (4-5 pm).
Tracking Computer-based Error Reports Improves Patient Safety
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To err is human, but asking nurses, physicians and other hospital staff to report medication errors and log them into a computer database can help improve patient safety systems as well as human error rates, according to a study from the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. Voluntary error-reporting systems are not new, but few studies have looked at the accuracy of the reporting and its impact, the Hopkins investigators say.
“Our goal was to explore the validity of this voluntary error-reporting system and whether front-line error-reporters were capturing the essence of the actual errors that occurred,” says author Marlene Miller, M.D., M.Sc., director of quality and safety initiatives for the Children’s Center. “There were some incorrect reports, but the overall trends were accurate, which allows us to say that this reporting system is a reliable index of problematic areas.” The findings are reported in the June issue of Quality & Safety in Healthcare.
Miller emphasizes that error data are valuable only if consistently monitored for patterns and used to create safety checks that prevent common errors from happening again.
Stalking Poses Serious Public Health Problem
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Stalking is as much a public health issue as a criminal justice problem, according to the authors of a new national study.
Of the nearly 10,000 adults surveyed, 4.5 percent reported having been stalked at some time in their lives, which extrapolates to more than 7 million women and 2 million men in the United States, say the authors in the August issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
Most stalkers aren’t strangers, said lead researcher Kathleen Basile, Ph.D., a behavioral scientist with the Division of Violence Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.
Louisiana gov. signs law that would ban abortions
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Louisiana Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco signed into law a ban on most abortions, which would be triggered if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns its 1973 ruling legalizing the procedure, a spokesman said on Saturday.
The ban would apply to all abortions, even in cases of rape or incest, except when the mother’s life is threatened. It is similar to a South Dakota law that has become the latest focus of the abortion battle.
The South Dakota law was enacted partly to invite a court challenge in the hope a more conservative Supreme Court would overturn its Roe v. Wade decision that established a woman’s right to abortion.
Medicare Could Save Money, Provide More Defibrillators
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Medicare beneficiaries with heart failure could benefit from new strategies to decide who qualifies for lifesaving implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs), according to a University of Iowa study.
The U.S. Medicare Program spends about $4.6 billion dollars each year providing ICDs to older Americans. The investigation, published in the June 16 online early issue of the journal Value in Health, explored what would happen if Medicare spent the same amount of money to provide more patients with less expensive, yet also less effective, automated external defibrillators (AEDs).
An ICD is a small, pager-sized device implanted beneath the skin that uses electric shock to restore normal heart rhythm and costs about $40,000. An AED is a briefcase-sized device that requires a bystander to use pads that deliver an electric shock to restore the victim’s heart rhythm and costs about $2,000.
Bahamas malaria outbreak causes concern
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A case of malaria which has cropped up in the Bahamas has caused concern and raised many questions for health officials and has worried local residents.
Health officials are currently screening illegal immigrants for malaria after the outbreak of the potentially fatal disease was confirmed on the Exuma islands, a sandy chain of islands southeast of Nassau.
Malaria has not been endemic in the Bahamas and apart from what are termed “sporadic” cases by the health ministry, almost all cases have been imported into the country.
New hope for Huntington disease cure
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Researchers at the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics (CMMT) have provided ground-breaking evidence for a cure for Huntington disease in a mouse offering hope that this disease can be relieved in humans.
Published in Cell journal, Dr. Michael Hayden and colleagues discovered that by preventing the cleavage of the mutant huntingtin protein responsible for Huntington disease (HD) in a mouse model, the degenerative symptoms underlying the illness do not appear and the mouse displays normal brain function. This is the first time that a cure for HD in mice has been successfully achieved.
“Ten years ago, we discovered that huntingtin is cleaved by ‘molecular scissors’ which led to the hypothesis that cleavage of huntingtin may play a key role in causing Huntington disease”, said Dr. Michael Hayden, Director and Senior Scientist at the Child and Family Research Institute’s Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics. Dr. Hayden is also a Canada Research Chair in Human Genetics and Molecular Medicine.
Scientists reveal two paths of neurodegeneration
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Wiring the developing brain is like creating a topiary garden. Shrubs don’t automatically assume the shape of ornamental elephants, and neither do immature nerve cells immediately recognize the “right” target cell.
Abundant foliage, either vegetal or neuronal, must first sprout and then be sculpted into an ordered structure.
Neurons extend fibers called axons to target cells in an exuberant manner—some branch to the “wrong” cells while others shoot past their target cells. Axon pieces that went astray degenerate, effectively being “pruned” back. Similarly, when axons are forcibly severed or seriously injured by disease in adults, they die and are removed by degeneration.
India tightens laws to stop destruction of females
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India plans to tighten laws banning prenatal tests to determine the sex of the fetus in a bid to curb the killing of thousands of female fetuses, Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss said on Wednesday.
India’s Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques Act—which outlaws doctors from carrying out sex determination tests—has been in force since 1994 but social activists say local authorities lack the will to combat female infanticide.
Besides, families seek sons over daughters and unscrupulous doctors attempt to get around the law, making enforcement difficult, they say.
Roulette wheel can aid treatment decisions
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Researchers from the University of California Los Angeles have developed a tool that they hope will help ease the burden of making difficult treatment decisions. It’s a roulette wheel that allows patients to visualize the probable outcomes associated with different treatment options for different diseases.
The roulette wheel can be adapted to represent any current clinical question and is based on “best current evidence,” according to its developers, Dr. Jerome R. Hoffman and colleagues.
For illustration purposes, Hoffman and colleagues describe inn the journal PLoS Medicine how a healthy 65-year-old man might use the roulette wheel to decide whether or not to be screened for prostate cancer with a standard PSA blood test.
Physicians can’t ethically interrogate prisoners
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Psychiatrists and other physicians should not help the military or police to interrogate prisoners, according to a new report from the American Medical Association’s Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs (CEJA).
Helping to plan or monitor prisoner interrogations with the “intention of intervening in the process” are actions outside the bounds of ethical behavior, CEJA said here Sunday.
Dr. Priscilla Ray of Houston, who serves as chair of CEJA said: “Physicians must neither conduct nor directly participate in an interrogation, because a role as physician-interrogator undermines the physician’s role as a healer and thereby erodes trust in the individual physician interrogator and in the medical profession.”
More doctors can use computers, gaps remain
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U.S. doctors increasingly have access to computers to look up information on their patients, but more than half still don’t have digital health records or the ability to write electronic prescriptions, a study released on Wednesday found.
Twenty-two percent of doctors surveyed by the Center for Studying Health System Change last year had access to electronic prescription tools compared with 11 percent in 2001.
About half can use computers to access notes on their patients or exchange data with other doctors, up from about 37 percent and 41 percent, respectively, four years earlier.
Researchers create process to inhibit proteins important in HIV and cancer
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Using small molecules containing platinum, Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center researchers have created a process to inhibit a class of proteins important in HIV and cancer.
The findings may help researchers develop new drugs to fight HIV or cancer by selectively targeting proteins known as zinc fingers.
In the journal Chemistry & Biology, researchers reported that a zinc finger protein, known as HIV NCp7, can be inhibited when it is exposed to a platinum complex. They observed that when the HIV NCp7 protein interacts with platinum, the zinc portion of the molecule is ejected from the protein chain. This causes the protein to lose its tertiary structure or overall shape. For these molecules, shape is an important property that enables the protein to carry out certain biological functions.
