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).
A Possible Diagnosis for Dry Eyes and Mouth
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Most everyone can relate to an occasional bout of dry eyes or dry mouth. But if you live with both every day, it could be Sjo’gren’s (SHOW-grins) syndrome.
Typical signs and symptoms include dry, gritty or burning eyes, intermittent blurry vision, a dry mouth that causes difficulty swallowing, dental cavities and enlarged parotid glands. The parotids are a pair of salivary glands behind your jaw and in front of your ears. Other signs and symptoms may include dry skin or vaginal dryness in women, joint pain and stiffness and fatigue.
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.
Researchers Get to Heart of Tropical Disease
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A new study found that mice lacking a gene crucial to the normal functioning of their immune systems didn’t become ill when they were exposed to a pathogen that causes a horrendous infection in the liver and the spleen.
The pathogen, called Leishmania donovani, infects certain internal organs. The parasite causes visceral leishmaniasis which, if left untreated, is almost always fatal. Cases in the United States are extremely rare, but the disease, which is transmitted through the bite of a sand fly, is common in tropical and subtropical countries such as Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan.
The finding may lend insight into creating new drugs to treat different diseases that affect the liver, said Abhay Satoskar, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of microbiology at Ohio State University.
Blacks have poorer survival rate for skin cancer
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Researchers have found that among patients suffering from melanomas, those from a black or Hispanic background were more likely than whites to have the advanced stage of melanoma at the time of diagnosis.
Experts say that the skin cancer melanoma has become increasingly common in the last decade with incidence rates increasing 2.4 percent annually in the United States.
Because light-skinned individuals are at higher risk for melanoma, much of the prevention and early detection efforts have targeted white populations and this may explain improving survival rates which are up to 92 percent from 68 percent in the 1970 among whites.
Septum Induces Theta Rhythm, Reduces Epileptic Seizures
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The brain’s septum helps prevent epileptic seizures by inducing rhythmical electrical activity in the circuits of another area of the brain known as the hippocampus, according to a new study in the Journal of Neurophysiology. The researchers found that, by imposing a normal “theta” rhythm on chronically epileptic rats, they could reduce epileptic seizures by 86-97%.
The study “Septo-hippocampal networks in chronically epileptic rats: Potential antiepileptic effects of theta rhythm generation,” by Luis V. Colom, Antonio Garci’a-Herna’ndez, Maria T. Castan~eda, Miriam G. Perez-Cordova and Emilio R. Garrido-Sanabria, The University of Texas at Brownsville/Texas Southmost College, appears in the June issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology, published by The American Physiological Society.
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.
USDA trains foreign scientists on diagnostic testing for highly pathogenic Avian Influenza
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USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service Administrator Ron DeHaven today announced the training of 24 scientists from 19 countries on diagnostic testing for highly pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI).
The workshop is scheduled for June 19-23 at USDA’s National Veterinary Services Laboratories (NVSL) in Ames, Iowa. It is the third in a series of train-the-trainers workshops on HPAI testing and diagnostics.
“This is just one example of how we are working to prevent or slow the spread of high pathogencity avian influenza,“said DeHaven. “The goal is to assist senior-level veterinarians and poultry disease experts from countries that either have discovered HPAI, or are at high risk for the disease. When they return to their countries, they are better equipped to train their colleagues in lab procedures and protocols.”
In vitro fertilisation could be causing genetic errors in embryo
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The conditions in which embryos are cultured in the laboratory during in vitro fertilisation could be causing genetic errors that are associated with certain developmental syndromes and other abnormalities in growth and development, such as low birth weight.
Researchers told the 22nd annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology that preliminary work investigating genetic imprinting in mouse embryos had shown that certain culture media and concentrations of oxygen altered the expression of several imprinted genes.
Imprinting is the process by which some genes are activated or inactivated depending on whether they have been inherited in chromosomes from the mother or the father.
Older women get mammograms less often than thought
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Older U.S. women are less likely to undergo mammography breast cancer screening than experts have believed, according to a study published Tuesday.
The findings, based on Medicare claims data, show that in 2000-2001, fewer than half of women age 65 or older had a mammogram within a two-year period.
That figure is much lower than health officials have estimated based on federal surveys. In those surveys, as many as 80 percent of women in their late 60s said they’d undergone screening mammography in the past two years.
ROZEREM™ (ramelteon) Shown to be Effective in a First-Night-Effect Model
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Data presented at the SLEEP 2006 20th Anniversary Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies have shown that ROZEREMTM (ramelteon) reduced time to fall asleep with no evidence of next-day residual effects, including psychomotor and memory effects, in a first-night-effect model of transient insomnia. The results of this double-blind, randomized study were presented as a poster presentation.
“Some medications taken for sleep are associated with lingering effects the next day, which could make performing activities requiring mental sharpness difficult or dangerous,” said Gary Zammit, PhD, Director, Sleep Disorders Institute at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital, New York. “These data suggest that ROZEREM can promote sleep in patients with transient insomnia without evidence of next-day psychomotor or memory effects.”
Central nervous system can sometimes send out signals that invite hostile immune system attacks
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It may sound like a case of blame the victim, but researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have shown that cells in the central nervous system can sometimes send out signals that invite hostile immune system attacks.
In mice the researchers studied, this invitation resulted in damage to the protective covering of nerves, causing a disease resembling multiple sclerosis.
“It’s been clear for quite a while that our own lymphocytes (white blood cells) have the ability to enter the central nervous system and react with the cells there,” says John Russell, Ph.D., professor of molecular biology and pharmacology. “Under normal circumstances, the brain and the immune system cooperate to keep out those cells that might harm the brain. But in people with multiple sclerosis, they get in.”
Scientists find sleep hormone melatonin in red wine grapes
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Scientists in Italy say they have discovered that the grapes used to make some of the most popular red wines contain high levels of the sleep hormone melatonin.
Melatonin is naturally secreted by the pineal gland in the brain, especially at night. It tells the body when it is time to sleep.
The discovery of melatonin in grape skin could explain why so many of us hit the bottle in the evening to wind down after a day’s hard slog. ‘The melatonin content in wine could help regulate the circadian rhythm [sleep-wake patterns], just like the melatonin produced by the pineal gland in mammals,’ says researcher Iriti Marcello at the University of Milan.
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.
