Pakistan turns to scholars in birth control bid
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Pakistan’s prime minister is seeking the help of Islamic scholars to gain public support for the use of birth control in the deeply conservative country—a policy opposed by hardline Muslims.
Shaukat Aziz made the plea on Wednesday at a three-day international conference of Islamic scholars on population issues in Pakistani’s capital, Islamabad.
Some in the Islamic world believe Islam does not permit contraception but others disagree, Aziz said.
U.S. to begin voluntary anthrax shots for troops
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The Pentagon said on Tuesday it was resuming giving Anthrax vaccinations to troops on a voluntary basis under terms set by a federal judge who last fall ordered a halt to mandatory shots.
The vaccinations primarily will be limited to military units designated for homeland bioterrorism defense and to troops deploying to Iraq, Afghanistan and South Korea, the Pentagon said.
The Pentagon said it will inform troops about the vaccine’s benefits and side effects before they are asked to decide about whether to get the vaccination. Anthrax spores can be used in germ warfare to give victims the deadly bacterial disease.
Indonesia finds second polio case, WHO urges action
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Indonesian health officials said on Wednesday they had found a second case of polio as the World Health Organisation (WHO) called on Jakarta to speed up a vaccination drive to prevent an outbreak of the deadly disease.
A top Indonesian health official said the second case was a 20-month-old infant in the same village in the province of West Java as the first child, the first case in Indonesia in a decade.
“This is a follow up investigation from the first case. We found several suspected cases of polio, and this morning we could confirm that there was another one,” Umar Fahmi, director general of communicable diseases eradication at the Health Ministry.
Flight attendant loses second-hand smoke verdict
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A Florida state jury on Tuesday ruled against a flight attendant who claimed her chronic Sinusitis was caused by exposure to cigarette smoke on airplanes, attorneys in the case said on Tuesday.
The six-person jury answered “no” to the only question it posed to it, which was whether the second-hand smoke was the legal cause of Lorraine Swaty’s sinus condition, Steven Hunter, one of her attorneys, said.
Vaccine safety concerns may discourage parents
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Most parents who choose not to vaccinate their kids do so out of fear that the vaccine will cause more harm than the disease it prevents, according to a new study.
However, study author Dr. Daniel A. Salmon of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland cautioned that vaccines are “extremely safe and effective,” and parents who don’t vaccinate their children are leaving them—and other children—vulnerable to deadly diseases.
For instance, Salmon noted that many parents in England and Scotland have chosen not to vaccinate their children against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR), causing outbreaks of these life-threatening illnesses.
Air travel can rob the body of oxygen
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If flying makes you breathless, there may be good reason. New research suggests that air travel can diminish the blood’s oxygen supply to levels that, on the ground, might require treatment.
The study of 84 airline passengers found that when flights were at maximum altitude, more than half of the passengers had “oxygen saturation” levels at or below 94 percent. This means that less than 95 percent of their red blood cells were fully loaded with oxygen, a level at which many doctors would give a person supplemental oxygen, according to the study authors.
All of the passengers, whether on short or long flights, showed declines in their blood oxygen levels, with the average oxygen saturation descending from 97 percent on the ground to 93 percent at cruising altitude, the authors report in the journal Anaesthesia.
Workplace gun policies linked to employee homicide
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Employers who permit guns in the workplace may inadvertently be increasing their employees’ risk of homicide, new study findings suggest.
“Our data suggest that, much as residents of households with guns are more likely to become victims of homicide, workers in places where the employer’s policy allows guns may have a higher chance of being killed at work,” write researchers in this month’s American Journal of Public Health.
While most Americans may keep guns on hand as a means of protecting themselves and their families, various researchers have shown that possessing a gun may actually increase a person’s risk of becoming a victim of violence.
Florida ends fight against abortion for 13-yr-old
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Florida dropped its fight on Tuesday to prevent a 13-year-old girl in state care from having an abortion in a case that marked the state’s second recent foray into controversial personal rights issues.
Weeks after it unsuccessfully tried to intervene in the bitter dispute over the fate of a brain-damaged woman, Terri Schiavo, the state’s Department of Children & Families said it would not appeal a ruling from a Palm Beach state court allowing the teenager to have an abortion.
“There will be no further appeals and we will respectfully comply with the court’s decision,” DCF District Manager Marilyn Munoz said in a written statement.
Group B strep infection of newborns persists
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Even though the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended since 2002 that expectant mothers be screened for carriage of group B strep, a few cases of early-onset group B streptococcal disease still occur in infants each year in the US, new research shows.
Group B strep used to be a leading cause of serious infection in newborns. It has a 10-20 percent mortality rate, and leaves many survivors with brain damage.
Most of the cases that still occur involve infants whose mothers screened negative for colonization with the microbe, according to a report in the medical journal Pediatrics.
US approves GlaxoSmithKline whooping cough vaccine
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The United States approved a new vaccine for adolescents on Tuesday to fight a rise in whooping cough, a disease that is creeping back despite decades of immunizing children.
GlaxoSmithKline Plc’s Boostrix vaccine is the first to combine a booster shot against whooping cough, also known as Pertussis, with the tetanus and diphtheria boosters routinely given to adolescents.
Whooping cough is a highly contagious bacterial infection marked by severe coughing spells and a “whoop” sound when patients inhale. The disease can kill young children.
Sirna drug helps vision in blindness-risk patients
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Sirna Therapeutics Inc. on Tuesday said its experimental drug to treat the leading cause of Blindness improved vision in almost half of patients in a small, early-stage trial, without causing any drug-related side effects.
The phase I trial results for the company’s lead experimental drug, Sirna-027, are the first human clinical data ever presented for a medicine that employs a technology called RNA interference. Such drugs are designed to prevent disease-causing genes from making their designated proteins.
Dr. Roberto Guerciolini, chief medical officer of the tiny San Francisco-based biotechnology company, said the phase I data involved 14 patients with the Blindness-causing “wet” form of age-related macular degeneration.
First Dutch “mad cow” disease patient dies
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A 26-year old woman who had recently been diagnosed with the human variant of “mad cow” disease died on Tuesday, the first Dutch victim of the brain wasting illness, her hospital said.
The Mesos hospital in the central Dutch city of Utrecht declined to give further details at the request of the woman’s family.
The hospital had made a diagnosis of probable variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), the human form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), on April 15. Specialists at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam confirmed the diagnosis on April 18.
Russia’s Putin slams ministers over alcohol deaths
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Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday demanded his government end Russia’s plague of alcohol-linked deaths, saying it was neglecting a problem that caused tens of thousands of deaths a year.
He told Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev to deliver suggestions to halt the sale of widely available bootleg spirits, which can kill if badly distilled.
“Do you remember how many people die every year from drinking counterfeit alcohol? What do you think we should do?” Itar-Tass news agency quoted him as asking Gordeyev at a meeting of ministers.
Job cuts, HIV add to southern Africa food woes
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Late drought has devastated crops in much of southern Africa and may threaten the worst food shortages in more than a decade, but in parts of the region residents say the real problems are AIDS and job losses.
Poor rains in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi and parts of Mozambique have all but destroyed the staple maize harvest, aid workers say. But further south in the mountain kingdoms of Swaziland and Lesotho, the weather is less to blame.
“The drought is not as bad as last year,” resident Mothibeli Seala told Reuters in a village in southern Lesotho. “But the food will not be enough. The HIV scourge is very bad. It is hitting production at village level, killing the strongest.”
Drug shortage, delays in Africa, slow malaria drive
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A shortage of drugs and funds and delays in distributing mosquito nets in Africa are hampering a campaign to reduce Malaria’s annual death toll of one million worldwide, the United Nations said on Tuesday.
Some 350 million to 500 million people in more than 100 countries each year catch the deadly disease, which can kill in hours, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said in their World Malaria Report 2005.
The joint report follows a scathing editorial in The Lancet medical journal last month accusing an international partnership of more than 90 organisations and countries of failing to control malaria, saying they may have done more harm than good.
