Exercise test spots trouble ahead for healthy men
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While apparently healthy men don’t routinely undergo exercise stress testing, it may be useful for raising a red flag about impending health problems, Norwegian investigators report based on a study of middle-age men.
Exercise stress tests are usually reserved for assessing cases of suspected Heart Disease. However, the new study shows that men who seem healthy but who terminate an exercise test only because they have trouble breathing actually have a high long-term risk of dying early from Heart Disease or lung disease.
Petrol sniffing continues to kill Aborigines
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Petrol sniffing played a part in the deaths of up to 60 Aborigines in Australia’s outback Northern Territory in the past seven years, a coroner was told on Tuesday as an inquest began into three of the deaths.
Outback health workers say there has been a dramatic increase in the number of Aborigines sniffing petrol since the last inquest in 1998, as black outback communities struggle to combat the habit in the face of poverty, disease and abuse.
Bird flu kills another Vietnamese
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Bird flu has killed another man in Vietnam, taking the number of deaths in Asia caused by the virus to 62, officials said.
The 35-year-old man died in the Mekong Delta province on July 31, a day after he was taken to hospital with a high fever, state newspapers said on Tuesday.
The Pasteur Institute in Ho Chi Minh City had confirmed the man slaughtered and ate two chicken that had the H5N1 virus, the Thanh Nien newspaper said.
US senator seeks probe of drug researcher payments
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A top Republican senator on Monday urged the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department to look into a report that Wall Street investors paid researchers to reveal confidential information about ongoing drug studies.
“Selling drug secrets violates a trust that is fundamental to the integrity of both scientific research and our financial markets,” Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa said in a letter to SEC Chairman Chris Cox and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
The Seattle Times on Sunday said some medical researchers received up to $500 per hour to tell brokerages and hedge funds about the likelihood of a drug’s success and marketability.
Dutch doctors grant 44 percent of requests to die
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Dutch doctors whose patients asked for their help in dying assisted in their suicide nearly half the time and turned them down just 12 percent of the time, researchers said on Monday.
Doctors granted patient requests to die in 44 percent of the cases, 13 percent withdrew their requests and 26 percent of patients died either before the decision was made or before euthanasia could be carried out, according to study author Marijke Jansen-van der Weide of VU University Medical Center, Amsterdam.
S. African business slowly wakes up to AIDS challenge
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When Martin Vosloo told his work colleagues that he was infected with the virus that causes AIDS, some spat in his face and threatened to kill him.
That was about six years ago, soon after Vosloo, 48, joined South Africa’s power utility Eskom.
“They spat in my face. I was called names and on two occasions I had to flee because I was threatened with death,” said Vosloo, a healthy-looking white South African.
Russian bird flu epidemic to fade soon
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A bird flu epidemic in Russia is subsiding and should disappear by late August, a World Health Organization official said Tuesday.
But Russian health officials were less optimistic, suggesting birds migrating from the five Siberian regions where the deadly virus has been raging since mid-July could spread the disease as far afield as the United States.
WHO in talks with Roche on bird flu stockpile
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The World Health Organization is in talks with Swiss drug maker Roche on building a stockpile of the anti-bird flu drug Tamiflu capable of treating at least one million people, its director general said on Tuesday.
“What I am expecting to have is initially one million, and I hope that that can be multiplied,” Lee Jong-wook told reporters in Thailand, one of the countries worst hit by the virus which has killed 62 people in Asia since 2003.
Drug cuts fractures in Alzheimer, stroke patients
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People with Alzheimer’s Disease or certain types of Stroke are at increased risk for breaking a hip, but investigators in Japan have found that the bone-strengthening drug Actonel reduces this risk in both patient groups.
Vitamin D deficiency ultimately leads to bone thinning in female patients with Alzheimer’s, Dr. Yoshihiro Sato and colleagues note in their report.
Trust fosters correct drug use when cash is tight
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When strapped for cash, it is not uncommon for people to cut back on taking their prescribed medications. Now, new research indicates that this tendency—which can have obvious adverse health consequences—is offset by a high degree of trust between patients and doctors.
“In our study of over 900 diabetic patients in a VA health system, we found that medication costs were a problem for everybody, regardless of whether they trusted their doctors or not,” lead author Dr. John D. Piette, from the VA Ann Arbor Health Care System in Michigan, told Reuters Health. “Nevertheless, when people didn’t trust their doctors, they were much more likely to cut back on medications because of cost pressures.”
Brain disease may cause death during sleep
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When an elderly person dies in his or her sleep, cessation of breathing related to the loss of neurons in a particular area of the brain could be a possible cause of death, if animal experiments are any indication.
A brain region called the ventrolateral medulla is critical for generating regular, rhythmic breathing, and neurons in this area show high levels of a receptor termed NK1R. Dr. Leanne C. McKay and colleagues at the University of California Los Angeles theorized that a lack of NK1R-carrying neurons could underlie central sleep apnea.
Tests show promise for bird flu vaccine in humans
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Human tests of an experimental vaccine show it is effective at stimulating the immune system to fight the bird flu strain that experts worry could spur a worldwide pandemic, a top government scientist said on Saturday.
The findings are a step forward but do not overcome the major hurdle of producing enough vaccine to meet demand in the event of a flu pandemic, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The vaccine is grown in chicken eggs and production can take months.
EU authorizes GMO maize type by legal rubberstamp
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The European Union authorized imports of a genetically modified (GMO) maize on Monday, the third GMO product to win approval since the EU ended its unofficial biotech ban last year, officials said.
The maize, known as MON 863, is engineered by U.S. biotech giant Monsanto to resist the corn rootworm insect.
UN fears epidemic as malaria sweeps Ethiopia
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A sharp increase in Malaria cases and deaths across Ethiopia has raised fears of an epidemic in the east African country, the United Nations said on Monday.
Health experts say most of the one million deaths caused annually by Malaria occur in Africa, costing the continent more than $12 billion every year.
Polio cases hit 205 in Indonesia, two in capital
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Health workers have identified 205 children infected with polio in Indonesia since the disease resurfaced this year, and two of the cases are in the densely populated capital Jakarta, officials said on Monday.
Polio, a water-borne disease that can cause irreversible paralysis in hours, reemerged in May in the world’s fourth most populous country, which had been polio-free since 1995.
