Zimbabwe court frees U.S. health workers on bail
|
|
A Zimbabwe court released on bail on Monday six health workers, including four from the United States, accused of dispensing AIDS drugs without a licence.
The six, who were each freed on $200 bail, are members of a Californian-based Christian volunteer health service which runs two clinics in Zimbabwe working with AIDS orphans and HIV positive patients.
Zimbabwe has one of the highest HIV rates in the world and the destruction of its public health system during a decade of economic crisis has left it largely dependent on donor organisations and church-based institutions for essential health services.
Artificial “skin” materials can sense pressure
|
|
New artificial “skin” fashioned out of flexible semiconductor materials can sense touch, making it possible to create robots with a grip delicate enough to hold an egg, yet strong enough to grasp the frying pan, U.S. researchers said on Sunday.
Scientists have long struggled with a way to make robotic devices capable of adjusting the amount of force needed to hold and use different objects. The pressure-sensitive materials are designed to overcome that challenge.
“Humans generally know how to hold a fragile egg without breaking it,” said Ali Javey, an electrical engineer at the University of California Berkeley, who led one of two teams reporting on artificial skin discoveries in the journal Nature Materials.
Two men “ran illegal sperm donor agency”
|
|
Two men earned 250,000 pounds through an unlicensed fertility company matching sperm donors with women trying to conceive, a court heard on Monday.
Under the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, a licence is needed by anyone wanted to “procure, test or distribute” any sperm or eggs.
The two defendants are the first to be prosecuted under the Act, the Press Association reported.
Walking helps keep body and brain young
|
|
Everyone knows that walking limbers the aging body, but did you know it keeps the mind supple as well?
Research shows that walking can actually boost the connectivity within brain circuits, which tends to diminish as the grey hairs multiply.
“Patterns of connectivity decrease as we get older,” said Dr. Arthur F. Kramer, who led the study team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
US again funding controversial stem cell research
|
|
The U.S. government said it was resuming work on controversial human embryonic stem cell research on Friday after an appeals court ruled in its favor.
In the latest legal back-and-forth on the issue, a U.S. appeals court on Thursday granted an Obama administration request to temporarily lift a judge’s ban on federal funding of research involving human embryonic stem cells.
More legal action is pending but the National Institutes of Health said it would resume work that had been suspended.
USDA knew of problems at egg recall farm: report
|
|
U.S. Department of Agriculture experts knew about sanitary problems at one of the two Iowa farms at the center of a massive nationwide egg recall, but did not notify health authorities, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Bacteria found in chicken feed used at the two Iowa farms was linked to a salmonella outbreak that prompted the recall of more than a half billion eggs, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said last month.
The Journal said USDA daily sanitation reports viewed by it underscored the regulatory gaps that may have contributed to delays in discovering salmonella contamination.
Magnetic fields won’t up kids’ brain cancer risk
|
|
Exposure to extremely low-frequency magnetic fields (ELF-MFs)—emitted by anything from power lines to appliances or improperly grounded wiring—is not likely to increase children’s risk of developing brain tumors, the authors of a new analysis conclude.
Researchers have been investigating the health risks of these magnetic fields since 1979, Dr. Leeka Kheifets of the University of California, Los Angeles, and her colleagues note in the American Journal of Epidemiology. There is some evidence that exposure at certain levels may be related to childhood leukemia, they add.
Evidence for a link between ELF-MF exposure and childhood brain tumors is weaker, according to Kheifets and her team, but to date a pooled analysis investigating the association has not been performed. Pooled analyses involve taking data from several different studies of the same topic and analyzing them as a whole, using a variety of statistical techniques to take as many differences between the studies into account as possible.
More doctors no panacea for healthcare: report
|
|
Medicare patients with more doctors to choose from do not necessarily get more or better care, researchers reported on Thursday in an analysis demonstrating how complicated U.S. healthcare reform will be.
The Dartmouth Atlas analysis questions the Obama administration’s hopes that health insurance reform legislation passed in March will do much to improve U.S. healthcare by helping 32 million more Americans get health insurance and providing more primary care.
They found huge variations in the quality of medical care across the country and even patients who should in theory have plenty of opportunity to see a doctor are not faring better health-wise.
Do kids, men need folic acid from a pill?
|
|
With the advent of folic-acid supplementation of certain foods, few Canadians are now getting too little of the B vitamin, a new study estimates—in findings that question the need for children and men to get additional folic acid from vitamins.
The study does not challenge the need for women of childbearing age to take folic acid supplements, researchers say, since they need extra amounts of the vitamin to reduce the risk of having a baby with neural tube defects—birth defects of the brain or spine, including spina bifida.
Nor should women older than 70 feel a need to cut back on folic acid: they were the one group the study found to have a high rate of inadequate folate/folic acid intake. (Folate is the natural form of the B vitamin, found in foods such as spinach, asparagus, dried beans and peas, and orange juice; folic acid is the synthetic form used in vitamin supplements and added to certain “fortified” foods, including wheat flour and breakfast cereals.)
Scientists make leap forward in early detection for Alzheimer’s and cancer
|
|
Scientists at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory have developed a new strategy for quicker and more precise detection of biomarkers – proteins which indicate disease. The work could pave the way for new tools to detect early stages of Alzheimer’s and cancer at the molecular level.
All diseases have proteins specifically linked to them called biomarkers. Identifying these in body fluid such as blood can be a powerful tool in identifying diseases in their early stages. This would help doctors increase the success rate of treatment through early intervention and help drug companies develop more effective drugs for these diseases.
The search for new diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers to underpin targeted medicines is of growing priority. However the potential of biomarkers is currently hampered by technical difficulties in detecting them. They are often present at very low levels, in amongst many other different proteins. Reducing a sample down to a concentration where they could be identified is difficult and time-consuming.
Can money buy happiness? Maybe, up to $75,000
|
|
Can money really make you happy? Not really, but up to about $75,000 a year can ease the pain of life’s stresses, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.
A survey of 1,000 Americans shows they are overall fairly happy, and more money equals more satisfaction up to a point, Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton of the Center for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University in New Jersey found.
“More money does not necessarily buy more happiness, but less money is associated with emotional pain,” they wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Fines of $7 in “tough” new China anti-smoking rules
|
|
China’s “toughest” ever smoking ban, which aims to stop people lighting up during November’s Asian Games, will carry fines of $7, state media said on Wednesday, a limited deterrent to smokers in one of China’s richest cities.
People found smoking in offices, conference halls, elevators and certain other public spaces will be fined 50 yuan ($7.36), though “businesses not meeting their obligations” will be fined up to 30,000 yuan, the official Xinhua news agency said, calling it “the nation’s toughest smoking ban.”
Guangzhou is one of China’s wealthiest cities, with a per capita GDP of more than $10,000, so individual 50 yuan fines are unlikely to have much impact on most residents unless there are armies of enforcers combing the city.
Study finds more Americans bypassing their personal physician when immediate treatment required
|
|
Only 45 percent of the 354 million annual visits for acute care in the United States are made to patients’ personal physicians, as Americans increasingly make busy emergency departments, specialists or outpatient care departments their first point of contact for treatment of new health problems or a flare up of a chronic condition like asthma or diabetes.
The findings, which appear in the September edition of Health Affairs, do not bode well for the nation’s already busy and frequently undermanned emergency rooms. While fewer than five percent of doctors across the U.S. are emergency physicians, they handle more than 28 percent of all acute care encounters - and more than half of acute care visits by the under-and uninsured.
According to co-authors including Steven Pitts, MD, associate professor of medicine in the Emory School of Medicine and a staff physician at Emory University Hospital Midtown, and Arthur Kellermann, MD, the Paul O’Neill Alcoa Chair in Policy Analysis at the RAND Corporation and previous associate dean for health policy at Emory University, health reform provisions in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that advance patient-centered medical homes and accountable care organizations are intended to improve access to acute care. However, the challenge for reform, according to study authors, will be to succeed in the complex acute care landscape that already exists.
Memory problems more common in men?
|
|
A new study shows that mild cognitive impairment (MCI) may affect more men than women. The research is published in the September 7, 2010, print issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
Mild cognitive impairment is a condition in which people have problems with memory or thinking beyond that explained by the normal rate of aging. The study found that MCI was 1.5 times higher in men compared to women. MCI often leads to Alzheimer’s disease.
“This is the first study conducted among community-dwelling persons to find a higher prevalence of MCI in men,” said study author Ronald Petersen, MD, PhD, with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. “If these results are confirmed in other studies, it may suggest that factors related to gender play a role in the disease. For example, men may experience cognitive decline earlier in life but more gradually, whereas women may transition from normal memory directly to dementia at a later age but more quickly.”
Exercise shoes focus attention on walking
|
|
Call them toners, shapers, or rocker bottoms, those exercise shoes with the distinctive thick, rounded soles are flying off the shelves and onto the feet of even the most clodhopper-averse walkers.
Experts don’t agree on whether these shoes are any better than regular running shows, but they concur that whatever gets you moving is a good thing.
“I tell people to make your bottom half your better half,” said Denise Austin, a fitness expert and spokesperson for Skechers Shape-ups. “They make you feel like you’re walking on sand. The second you put them on you think ‘good posture. They make you more aware than regular shoes.”
