Posts for 'Healthcare' Category

Business groups reacted warily Sunday to the Senate's first stab at overhauling the nation's health care system, a rift that could complicate President Obama's goal of achieving bipartisan support for his top domestic priority.
Meanwhile, a key Republican in the health care debate said via Twitter on Sunday that he thought Obama had "nerve" to pressure Congress for quick action while he was traveling in Europe.

After weeks of behind-the-scenes negotiations and friendly exchanges, debate over health care appeared to fall into familiar territory after a draft proposal by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee began circulating late last week.

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Grave concerns remain over the A/H1N1 flu outbreak even though studies suggest that the virus is less lethal as previously anticipated while Mexico is set to allow most businesses to reopen on Wednesday.

 Mexican Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova said on Monday that four new deaths from the A/H1N1 flu have been confirmed, bringing the death toll to 26, with 727 total confirmed infections.  However, Cordova said that the disease had a comparatively low R0 number, which means it is not much more contagious than normal seasonal flu.

"The studies which we have, based on the tests which are being confirmed and ruled out, have shown epidemiologists that the trend is lower, towards a decline in cases," said Cordova.  Mexican President Felipe Calderon announced on Monday that Mexico, the epicenter of the outbreak, will return to "normalcy" on Wednesday, ending a five-day nationwide shutdown of the country's most businesses. Universities and high schools will reopen on Thursday, and younger schoolchildren should report back to school early next week, he said.

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A Minnesota woman in her 80s died after she was infected with the salmonella strain suspected in a nationwide outbreak that has killed seven and sickened hundreds.State health officials said the woman lived in a nursing home. They have not released her name or the date of her death.

Most of the other deaths that salmonella may have contributed to also involved the elderly. Exact causes of death haven't been determined, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the salmonella may have contributed.

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A KEY anti-smoking group has called for bigger warnings on cigarette packets, after finding nearly half of smokers do not know their habit causes lung cancer.

The research from the Cancer Council of Victoria showed 21.5 per cent of the state's smokers think the dangers of smoking are exaggerated and 49 per cent do not identify lung cancer as a smoking-caused illness.

Almost two thirds of those surveyed did not spontaneously identify smoking as a cause of emphysema, heart disease or heart attack.The Quit anti-smoking group wants the federal government to force cigarette companies to display larger warnings on packets.

Currently cigarette packets in Australia must have 30 per cent of the front of the pack dedicated to health warnings and 90 per cent of the back.Quit policy manager Kylie Lindorff said it wanted 90 per cent of the front of the pack to be dedicated to anti-smoking messages.

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I don't want to provoke the ire of the pros or the antis (I managed to anger both after doing a story about alternative medicine in January), so please heed: This post is not about the clincial merits of herbals, acupuncture, homeopathy, and other forms of complementary and alternative medicine. It's about the intellectual dishonesty of the surveys that appear every few years purporting to show CAM use.

 Invariably, very, very large numbers of Americans say they use CAM, and this year's report is no exception. Released earlier this week by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (part of the National Institutes of Health) and the National Center for Health Statistics, it shows that almost 40 percent of all American adults used some form of CAM in 2007.

Spin, folks. The kind that would do a political consultant proud. It started almost 20 years ago with the first large survey in 1990. That one found 34 percent of U.S. adults used alternative medicine (as it was then called). "Used" was defined so generously, however, that it's hard to understand how almost every person surveyed didn't qualify. You were a user if one time in the previous year you used one of the 16 listed therapies, which included such marginal entries as "self-help group," "commercial diet," and "lifestyle diet." The 1997 survey was the same except more so; usage was up to 42 percent.

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Healthcare professionals are putting sensitive patient information at risk by storing records, medical images, contact information and other data on unprotected mobile devices.

A survey of around 1,000 workers from the healthcare industries in the US and the UK found that over a third keep confidential information on laptops, BlackBerrys and USB sticks without adequately securing the data.

AdvertisementThe Mobile Device Usage in the Healthcare Sector report was conducted by mobile security firm CredentTechnologies, together with E-Health Insider in the UK and Outpatient Surgery Magazine in the US. A fifth of respondents admitted to using their own devices to transport patient information, meaning that they are not controlled by IT departments and often breach existing security policies.

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Healthcare costs for retired Boston city workers are expected to top $3 billion over the next 30 years, and the city is coming under increasing pressure to start setting aside more taxpayer money to cover the costs.

Over the last two years, city officials have placed $45 million into a reserve fund to cover future health insurance premiums, less than half the $111 million a city consultant said Boston would need this year to be on pace to meet the obligation.Councilor Sam Yoon proposed a home-rule petition yesterday that would require the city to set up a trust fund for the money and establish a firmer schedule for cash contributions.

"To ensure that we are able to fulfill our promises to our retirees we need to start putting money aside to fulfill those obligations now," Yoon said. "We can't just put our hands over our eyes and cover our ears and assume and hope that this problem is going to go away."Yoon made his proposal as legislators consider a bill that would require cities and towns to set up trust funds for future retiree healthcare costs. The House bill, sponsored by Representative Jay R. Kaufman, could be presented at an informal session as early as this year, legislative aides said.

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Large doses of vitamin C supplements may substantially reduce the effectiveness of cancer drugs, a new research suggests. The Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center findings have been reported by Cancer Research.

To reach the conclusion, the US research team tested the impact of a form of vitamin C on the effectiveness of a range of anti-cancer drugs in tests on cancer cells in the lab. The analysis revealed that every drug they tested did not work as well if cells were pretreated with vitamin C as they did on untreated cancer cells. Between 30 pc and 70 pc less cancer cells treated with vitamin C were killed, depending on the drug tested.Follow-up tests on mice showed that while chemotherapy kept untreated cancer in check, tumours grew more rapidly in mice that were given cancer pretreated with vitamin C.

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Health authorities in Australia's far north are concerned about what they're calling an HIV cluster among men who work in Papua New Guinea.Six men have recently been diagnosed with the virus in Cairns and authorities say it could be the beginning of a large outbreak.

Authorities are warning men travelling to Papua New Guinea to practice safe sex after the recent spate of dignosies of HIV among men travelling there to work. Area Health Service Co-ordinator for the Cairns Sexual health service Cathy O'Mullan says they were alarmed by the outbreak.

"In 2007 for example 20 per cent of all the new HIV diagnosies in Cairns were acquired by heterosexual males who'd actually reported sexual contact in Papua New Guinea so that's quite an unusual and dramatic increase, previously during 2006 only six per cent were reported among that target group," she said.The State government plans to launch an education campaign among men travelling to PNG in November.

The U.S. Census Bureau put out a new report on Tuesday which revealed that the number of Americans living without health insurance in the U.S. has declined in the past year.

U.S. Census Bureau report is called ‘Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2007,” and looked at the number of uninsured Americans from 2006 to 2007.Overall, from 2006 to 2007 they saw a 3% decrease in the number of Americans without health insurance.

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