GERD label helps make parents more likely to would like medication.

Telling the particular mothers and fathers regarding little ones whom throw in place and meow regularly which the youngster possesses gastroesophageal reflux ailment, or even GERD, creates these individuals very likely to want treatments : even when there're furthermore explained to it is not more likely to aid considerably, the latest examine implies. Most babies who spit up don't have an acid reflux problem, researchers said, just a not-quite-developed upper stomach valve. Still, an increasing number of those kids are being labeled as having GERD - even though a definitive diagnosis normally requires an invasive test. "Roughly 50 percent of babies during the first six months are spitting up enough to bother their parents," said Dr. William Carey from The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, who wrote a commentary published Monday with the new study. "I never offered medication for a kid who was just spitting up and gaining weight well and happy," he told Reuters Health. "I could confidently tell the mother, 'Look, it's going to be a nuisance until about six months, and then it's gradually going to get better.' It's an irritating variation of normal." For their study, Laura Scherer from the University of Missouri in Columbia and her colleagues handed out surveys to 175 parents with a hypothetical scenario: their one-month-old infant was spitting up and crying a lot. The researchers asked parents what they would do if the doctor diagnosed their child with GERD versus if the condition wasn't labeled, as well as what they would do if the doctor told them the medication to treat the condition was ineffective - as research suggests it is - or didn't say anything about its efficacy. Survey participants were more likely to want medication if their hypothetical infant was given a GERD diagnosis. Even when parents were told the medicine probably wouldn't work, they rated their interest in treatment at about 2.5 out of 5. However, with no disease label and with information about the medicine's lack of efficacy, parents rated their desire to treat below 1.5 out of 5, the researchers reported in Pediatrics. "It shows how these kinds of labels can influence how people respond to symptoms," Scherer told Reuters Health. "Words can make an otherwise normal process seem like something that requires medical intervention." She said current guidelines say the case of an irritable infant who cries and spits up frequently should probably not be treated as GERD - but that if doctors rule everything else out, they can try a two-week course of acid-reducing medication. That caveat could further confuse doctors and parents into thinking medicine is likely to help, Scherer said. "It's really becoming pretty clear that GERD in infants is overdiagnosed and overtreated. One reason for this could be that doctors' use of this GERD label could unintentionally increase people's (desire) for medications," she said. Carey compared what's happening with GERD symptoms to the rising number of very active kids being diagnosed with and treated for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). "Parents need to know that there are some annoying or insignificant variations of normal which one really needs to just put up with and not treat as a disease," he said. "Be darn sure that there is an abnormality before treating it as such."

 

Continue reading →

In China, 2 died from bird flu strain not previously seen in humans

Two people in Shanghai, one of China's largest cities, died this month after contracting a strain of avian influenza that had never been passed to humans before, the official Xinhua News Agency reported on Sunday.

The two men, aged 87 and 27, became sick late February and died in early March. Another woman in nearby Anhui province also contracted the virus in early March and is in a critical condition, Xinhua said, quoting the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC).

The strain of the bird flu virus found in all three people was identified as H7N9, which had not been transmitted to humans before, the commission said.

The three cases were confirmed to be human infection of the H7N9 strain by experts from the NHFPC, based on clinical observation, laboratory tests and epidemiological surveys, Xinhua said.

All three cases showed symptoms of fever and coughs that later developed into pneumonia.

Calls to the NHFPC on Sunday were not answered.

It is unclear how the three victims were infected. The virus does not seem highly contagious because no health abnormalities were detected among 88 of the victims' close contacts, Xinhua quoted the commission as saying.

There are no known vaccines against the H7N9 virus.

Continue reading →

New York City marks 10th anniversary of smoking ban

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg marked the tenth anniversary on Wednesday of his ban on smoking in bars and restaurants with a report saying the ban and subsequent anti-smoking measures had prevented 10,000 premature deaths.

"Ten years ago when New York City prohibited smoking in restaurants and bars, many predicted the end of the hospitality, restaurant and tourism industries," Bloomberg said in a statement.

"Yet ten years later, fewer New Yorkers are smoking, we are living longer, our industries are thriving and nobody longs for a return to smoke-filled bars and restaurants."

Critics of the move feared banning smoking would hurt the restaurant and bar business, but the Health Department report said there are now some 6,000 more restaurants and bars in the city than there were a decade ago.

The city's Smoke-Free Air Act came into effect a little over a year into Bloomberg's first term as mayor in 2003 and prohibited smoking inside bars, restaurants and most workplaces.

The following year, the city began providing free nicotine replacement therapy to smokers trying to quit and in 2011 expanded the smoking ban to the city's parks and beaches.

According to the report released on Wednesday, the proportion of adult smokers dropped by about a third to 15 percent in 2011 from 21.5 percent in 2002. The report, released by the city's Health Department, also said the proportion of youths under age 18 who smoke dropped by about half to 8.5 percent.

Bloomberg's tenure, which will end this year, has been marked by his efforts to improve New Yorkers' health by trying to induce them to eat less salt, trans fats and calories in general, among other measures.

Bloomberg has been criticized by some as paternalistic but his efforts have coincided with an increase in New Yorkers' life expectancy, including a decline in tobacco-related deaths.

Bloomberg's attempt to limit the size of sugary drinks sold in the city was derailed this month only hours before the new rules were to take effect when a judge ruled that they were "arbitrary and capricious". The city is appealing that decision.

A week later, Bloomberg announced his plan to require shops to hide cigarettes and tobacco products from public view, arguing that would shield young people from marketing efforts.

Some shop owners and cigarette manufacturers have criticized the plan as unnecessary extra regulation that would infringe the free speech provision of the U.S. Constitution.

Bloomberg also proposed a minimum price of $10.50 for a pack of cigarettes, in the hope that some smokers would find the habit too expensive to maintain. The two bills are now before the city council.

Smoking remains the leading preventable cause of premature death in the city, according to the Health Department.

Ronald Beyer, a professor of public health at Columbia University, called Bloomberg's health initiatives a "major achievement" and said his efforts to make smoking less socially acceptable were an effective and legitimate use of his office.

He said it remains an open question how much further government could go to discourage smokers to quit.

Continue reading →

UK scientists develop safer foot-and-mouth vaccine

British scientists have developed a new vaccine against foot-and-mouth disease that is safer and easier to manufacture, an advance they believe should greatly increase production capacity and reduce costs.

The technology behind the livestock product might also be applied to make improved human vaccines to protect against similar viruses, including polio.

The new vaccine does not require live virus in its production - an important consideration as foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is extremely infectious and vaccine facilities handling virus samples are difficult to secure.

"It spreads like wild fire," said David Stuart, a professor of biology at the University of Oxford, who led the research.

A 2007 outbreak of FMD in southeast England, for example, was traced to a nearby vaccine site. The same facility, ironically, is home to some of the researchers behind the new vaccine.

In contrast to standard FMD livestock vaccines, the new product is made from synthetic empty protein shells containing no infectious viral genome, scientists reported in the journal PLOS Pathogens on Wednesday.

This means the vaccine can be produced without expensive biosecurity and does not need to be kept refrigerated.

"One of the big advantages is that since it is not derived from live virus, the production facility requires no special containment," Stuart said.

"One could imagine local plants being set up in large parts of the world where foot and mouth is endemic and where it still remains a huge problem."

Worldwide, between 3 billion and 4 billion doses of FMD vaccine are administered every year but there are shortages in many parts of Asia and Africa were the disease is a serious problem.

Current standard vaccines are based on 50-year-old technology, although U.S. biotech company GenVec last year won U.S. approval for a new one.

The purely synthetic British vaccine has so far been tested in small-scale cattle trials and found to be effective.

Stuart said the research team from the universities of Oxford and Reading and two state-funded bodies - Diamond Light Source and the Pirbright Institute - would now conduct larger tests while discussing the vaccine's commercial development.

"We are talking to a potential commercial partner," Stuart told Reuters, adding that it would probably take around six years to bring the new vaccine to market. He said it was too early to give an indication of how much the vaccine would cost.

He declined to name the company involved but said it was not Merial, the animal health division of Sanofi that shares Pirbright's site in southeast England.

Stuart and his colleagues were able to produce empty protein shells to imitate the protein coat that surrounds the FMD virus using Diamond's X-ray system to visualize images a billion times smaller than a pinhead.

The same approach could in future be used to make empty shell vaccines against related viruses such as polio and hand-foot-and-mouth, a human disease that mainly affects infants and children, the researchers said.

Continue reading →

Efforts to Resuscitate Extinct Species May Spawn a New Era of the Hybrid

A bird that once darkened the skies of the 19th-century U.S. no longer exists, except as well-preserved museum specimens bearing bits of DNA. An ambitious new effort aims to use the latest techniques of genetic manipulation to bring the passenger pigeon back, as North Dakotan Ben Novak, a would-be de-extinction scientist working on the Revive & Restore project at the Long Now Foundation, told the crowd at the TEDxDeExtinction event here on March 15.   "This [pigeon flock] was a biological storm that was rejuvenating resources and allowing other animals to thrive," Novak said of the storms of Ectopistes migratorius feces that used to fall like rain on the landscape of eastern North America. Plus, with the regrowth of forest on the east coast "there is more passenger pigeon habitat every year."   But if a bird looks like an extinct passenger pigeon, has some of the genetic code of the passenger pigeon, but does not act like a passenger pigeon because it is raised by other breeds and few in number: is it a true passenger pigeon? That is just one of the questions posed by the idea of de-extinction—deliberately resurrecting species killed off by human activity or inactivity. And that question may just challenge one of the fundamental concepts of biology: what determines a distinct species.   Welcome to the new era of the hybrid. Species have always been promiscuous and enjoyed porous boundaries, but synthetic biologists and other scientists seem set to blur those boundaries out of existence.   Tainted animals The bison now repopulating the U.S. West's plains bear the genetic traces of their cattle forebears, residue of an effort that began in the 19th century to breed an animal that could survive the brutal Great Plains winters and drink less water than European cows. Wolves racing through the western landscape with black coats instead of the traditional gray can thank ancestors that got frisky with dogs. And does a Florida panther that carries genes from the Texas cougar count as less of a panther, even if the effort is all that stands between the species and extinction?   "Purity is not found in species," argued Kent Redford, a conservation biologist and former chief scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society at the DeExtinction event. "We ourselves are not pure," bearing traces of genetic intermixing with Neandertals, Denisovans and perhaps other extinct hominids.   So what counts as a species then? Per the dictionary, a species is "a class of individuals having common attributes or designated by a common name." But biologists more precisely count species as a group of organisms that can interbreed to produce fertile offspring. So the horse and donkey are species, although those aren't their species names, and the mule is—well, it's been a little unclear since Carl Linnaeus came up with the species designation in 1753. As a (usually) sterile hybrid, the mule doesn't count.   But mules certainly do live and cases of mule fertility have been reported from antiquity down to the present day. Mules have even been cloned—and now, with the development of techniques to cut and splice DNA almost at will, scientists might be able to remake the mule into a fertile hybrid. But first they would rather apply the technique to endangered or extinct animals, like the Pyrenean ibex known as the bucardo or the Asian wild cattle called the banteng.   Rise of the hybrid When a new animal is born it bears a mixture of both parents' genetics. So what then is an animal that has parents from two different species? The term hybrid was first used to describe the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar. Or, as Redford put it, "something humans wanted." But now hybrids often bear a linguistic taint, neither fish nor fowl—almost as bad as a genetically modified organism, which, of course, all commercial species now are to one extent or another.   But purity still exists in the wild. Or does it? Traffic fatalities have caused swallow wings to shorten to enable quicker takeoffs just as fishing pressure has caused many wild-caught fish species to shrink in size. Bacteria rapidly evolve resistance to our best antibiotics. Humanity directs evolution unconsciously—except when we do it consciously, introducing useful suites of genetic information like the ability to produce a toxin poisonous to insects inserted into crop plants that was originally made by a bacterium.   With crude technologies such as cloning, where an entire cell nucleus is swapped from one species to another, this has already been done to revive an endangered species. An ordinary cow gave birth to a banteng—Bos javanicus, a species of wild cattle from Asia—in 2003. Although the scientists involved were worried that the hybrid might look more like an ordinary cow, out popped a banteng that lived at the San Diego Zoo for seven years—a diminished life span but a life nonetheless. "It was surreal to see this exotic animal from the jungles of Southeast Asia born in an Iowa field that reeked of cow manure," recalled Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology, the company that helped achieve the feat.   Now new technologies such as an enzyme that can precisely cut DNA, known as Cas9 (for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats-associated system 9) and also derived from a bacterium, may enable scientists to stitch strands of DNA in and out of the genetic code. Find the genes that make a mammoth different from an elephant—say, sebaceous glands, hair growth, extra hemoglobin in the blood to withstand cold temperatures, among other traits—insert those into a strand of elephant DNA, and begin to make mammoth sperm and eggs. Then impregnate the mammoth's closest living relative, the Asiatic elephant, and wait for a baby mammoth to be born.   Only it won't be a true mammoth, because its mother will have something to say about how those genes are expressed, from epigenetics to the micro biome. "A gene doesn't tell you how to read it and make an organism," noted biologist David Ehrenfeld of Rutgers University at the DeExtinction event. "The genetic code is more like a database than an instruction manual." In other words, even the best genetic transcript—something still out of reach for many extinct animals and plants—will not provide the detailed source code needed to build version 2.0 of the extinct organism. He added: "All the words of Hamlet are in the dictionary, but if I scan the dictionary, Hamlet does not fall out of it. A strand of DNA can be read in hundreds or even thousands of ways."   And then there's the danger of the favoritism of humans that could lead some artifact "species" to predominate. "Who would have dreamed that genetic engineering in agriculture would diminish the biodiversity of agriculture? We lost tens of thousands of genome diversity from plants," Ehrenfeld added. As he noted, it's hard to predict the ultimate impact of a given technology. Different species, different ecology When he was just 13, Long Now's Novak was already putting together an award-winning science fair project detailing the prospects for cloning the dodo and bringing it back to life. Although that prospect has proved elusive, his passion for bringing back extinct birds remains undiminished. He now hopes to spend his professional life to bringing back some version of E. migratorius, a bird once so numerous in the U.S. that no one bothered to count them until the population had collapsed by the end of the 19th century.   The obstacles are many. "We can't clone birds," said developmental biologist Michael McGrew of the University of Edinburgh at the event. The problem is that a bird's egg yolk constitutes one enormous cell. Swapping nucleus at that scale has proved impossible, to date, according to McGrew.   But there is nonetheless reason for Novak to hope. In order to help with the biosecurity of the chicken eggs humanity relies on to manufacture vaccines (as well as eat), the stem cells of chickens have been put into a duck embryo that was bred as an adult with a chicken. The resulting eggs produced live chicks, proof of principle that although birds cannot be cloned, they can be made to carry the genes of other birds, potentially including extinct ones. With enough back breeding, in which bird after bird is bred together to derive a more complete version of the desired genetic code, the passenger pigeon's close relative, the band-tailed pigeon (Columba fasciata) might be made to lay eggs that result in passenger pigeon offspring, a generation of replacements.   "Breeding [the passenger pigeon] is the greatest technical challenge," Novak said. But it "pales in comparison to making this a natural passenger pigeon." After all, who will teach this novel baby bird to fly—or all the other roles parents of a given species play?   Novak's solution for that challenge starts with painting domestic homing pigeons—luring yet another pigeon species into boxes and airbrushing them to look like passenger pigeons—as well as building aviaries in the woods of eastern North America to protect the few, rare, newly non-extinct fledglings from predators like falcons. The painted homing pigeons would lead the newly created passenger pigeon replacement young from spot to spot as trained by human handlers, theoretically re-creating the flitting behavior of the extinct flocks. "Eventually, we would witness the passenger pigeon rediscovering itself in the forests of New England and the Great Lakes," Novak enthused.   But will those birds be the same as their ancestors? "The banded pigeons fly differently, mate differently, have different goals," Ehrenfeld said of the new passenger pigeon's putative parents, adding that key traits will be forever lost to this new hybrid creature. Not least of which will be the fact that even a few thousand artifact pigeons would still not match the sheer numbers of their genetic ancestors or even hope to fulfill the role they once played in the bygone forest ecosystems of an earlier North America.   Even sheer numbers still failed to protect the abundant bird from going extinct under hunting pressure, the loss of its habitat as farmers cleared eastern lands of trees, and the terminal decline once its population fell below a certain threshold. The eastern forest is also not the same one the passenger pigeon knew before going extinct. Whereas forest cover has rebounded since the 1920s, the American chestnut is largely gone—a victim of a fungal blight that nearly eliminated the once copious tree. "If you're going to bring back species like the passenger pigeon, what are you bringing them back to?" asked forestry scientist William Powell of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry at the DeExtinction talks. "You might want to bring back the chestnut before anything else."   Powell is working on genetically engineering a version of the American chestnut to be resistant to the fungus—but even that new version will be some kind of hybrid, bearing new genetic information either bred into it from its relative the Chinese chestnut or inserted whole by scientists like Powell.   Then there are the risks, such as the restored flocks of hybrid passenger pigeons turning into a new way to spread bird flu. "The passenger pigeon could be the vector for some terrible disease," said Hank Greely, a bioethicist and lawyer at Stanford Law School at the event. "No one wants to be responsible for an avian version of kudzu or, sticking to birds, starlings."   If people do not like squawking, flocking starlings that chew up the landscape, what will they think when a rain of pigeon droppings starts falling on them?   Unique pets Releasing any replacement hybrid species back into the wild to replace an extinct species or augment the numbers of a threatened species would be another kind of experiment that calls for the invention of an entirely new branch of science, dubbed "resurrection ecology" by Stanley Temple, an ecology professor emeritus from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. "We need to think carefully before the saber-tooth cat is out of the bag," he noted.   So, for example, the pressures that lead to the extinction of the original species in the first place would need to be gone, whether hunting, in the case of the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger), or habitat loss, in the case of the ivory-billed woodpecker. Candidate species for hybrid replacements will also have to be weighed by specific criteria that might include (for birds like the passenger pigeon, for example) relatively recent extinction, minimal parental care, small egg size and nonmigratory habits. "If you only have one or two and they fly away, you're going to cry," noted ornithologist Susan Haig of the U.S. Geological Survey.   More fundamentally, scientists remain unsure why changing conditions can cause one species to disappear whereas another similarly adapted species flourishes or changes with the times. For example, when the ice age ended, "why do some species like the cave lion go extinct while caribou thrive today?" asked Beth Shapiro, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.   There's also the question of whether such an expensive effort to re-create and reintroduce a once extinct species could divert funds from ongoing conservation efforts to save species still extant but dwindling fast. And the relative expense of this project means it might find its first use creating glorified pets, like the rare animals in zoos. "If it had not been illegal to keep thylacines as pets, then would it be extinct now?" asked paleontologist Michael Archer of the University of New South Wales, who is attempting to resurrect the marsupial tiger. "I'm positive it wouldn't."   Biological control "By the end of this century we will have much more control over life than we ever dreamed," Greely said at the event—and that seems set to be true, one way or another.   But control is almost as tricky a concept when it comes to science as species. The newly extant hybrid species will need to be further genetically armored against the causes of their extinction, such as American chestnuts or resurrected gastric brooding frogs tweaked to resist fungal threats. Scientists will be making a long-lived commitment to certain species, like the booster shots against West Nile virus that veterinarians still dispense to all captive and pseudo-wild California condors extant. "It's a rather momentous undertaking we have to do," said bird curator Michael Mace of the San Diego Zoo. A similar effort might be needed to bring back a new version of the Hawaii 'O'o bird, whose habitat still exists but is now plagued with avian malaria that even a new hybrid bird might not survive.   More philosophically: Is de-extinction a project in search of some artificial stasis, more commonly dubbed a "balance of nature," that has never existed? Will we turn nature into a well-curated museum of artifact creatures while we let other, less glamorous species dwindle and disappear? Or will this new technology be used to preserve those species that perform some critical function, such as the wild bees that pollinate many different species of plant?   And how have we changed? The Carolina parakeet died out in 1918 because it interfered with crops and had the unfortunate behavior of flocking to fallen comrades, enabling hunters to decimate the population. "What we have left is remorse and remains," noted nature artist Isabella Kirkland. That remorse might drive us to use the remains to resurrect lost plants and animals, albeit in a new hybrid form.   Novak, for one, hopes that with enough money and determination a living hybrid passenger pigeon could be created within a decade, a kind of second coming of E. migratorius. "We don't have extinct species brought back to life yet," said environmentalist Stewart Brand, an instigator of Revive & Restore who hopes to bring back the passenger pigeon, "but it will be soon." We just don't know what species they will be

 

Continue reading →

Can You Smell Obesity?

According to the latest research, it may be on your breath.

It turns out that obesity may be detectable as a gas, thanks to organisms that inhabit our gut. In a study published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, researchers extend our knowledge about the hidden universe of the microbes that live within us to show that obesity is associated with certain populations of microbes that give off a distinctive gas.

To be more specific, obesity may smell a lot like…methane, which is to say, like not much at all, since methane in its naturally-occurring state is actually odorless. In the study. Dr. Ruchi Mathur, director of diabetes in the department of medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and her colleagues analyzed the breath of 792 men and women of various ages. Mathur focused on detecting methane in the breath, since animal studies found that the presence of a certain family of organisms called archaea, which are older than bacteria and colonize the gut, was linked with weight gain and conveniently released small amounts of methane gas. Mathur also knew from her own work analyzing the gas makeup of the breath from bariatric surgery patients that those releasing higher levels of methane in their breath tended to have a body mass index (BMI) nearly 7 points higher on average than those with lower levels.

And sure enough, Mathur found that among the nearly 800 participants she tested, those with higher levels of methane (3 or more parts per million over 90 minutes) and hydrogen gases (20 or more parts per million) in their breath also tended to be heavier, with a BMI about 2.4 points greater than those with normal levels of the gases and about six percent more body fat on average.

"Our hope is that this is one piece of the complex puzzle that is obesity," says Mathur, "and that by identifying people who are obese because they have this microorganism, we can manipulate and work with the gut microbiome to lead to benefits in weight loss in that subgroup."

The culprit, she believes, is a member of archaea known as Methanobrevibacter smithii, which is present in the intestinal tract of about 70% of people, but elevated in about 30%. It's that smaller group of individuals who might be genetically predisposed to harboring levels of M. smithii that might put them at higher risk of developing obesity. M. smithii harvests hydrogen molecules from neighboring microbes in the gut, which it then transforms into methane gas. The more it scavenges hydrogen from its environment, the more other microbes produce. But all of that activity is focused on extracting energy and nutrients from food, so along with the hydrogen gas, the microbes are also packing in more calories for the host, which can lead to weight gain. It's also possible, says Mathur, that the release of methane slows the transit of digested food through the intestinal tract, and that could increase the time for additional calories from digested food to be absorbed and added to the body's tally.

In order for M. smithii to thrive, it needs the hydrogen from surrounding microbes, and that may be why people with higher levels of both hydrogen and methane gases in their breath were heavier than those with elevated levels of methane or hydrogen alone.

So how does this help control the obesity epidemic? For those whose weight gain may be due in part to the activity of M. smithii, controlling the organisms with antibiotics or other medications could slow down the rate at which they pack on the pounds, and these individuals could easily be identified with a relatively simple breath test.

Mathur and her colleagues are also working with the American Diabetes Association to test a group of people with prediabetes who are overweight or obese and have elevated levels of methane in their breath. The researchers will test the participants' glucose tolerance, the time it takes for digested food to transit through the intestinal tract, and the amount of calories in the patients' stool. Then they volunteers will be given an antibiotic to essentially wipe out the population of M. smithii and the same parameters will be measured again, to see if eliminating the microbes will help change the patient's weight profile and alter their trajectory toward diabetes.

She is also studying a group of children to see how early M. smithii buildup occurs, and how soon in development it starts to set up a pattern of weight gain that might then be interrupted by changing the composition of the gut microbial world. "From an evolutionary perspective, our relationship with the microorganisms that live in us has basically been symbiotic, and we have evolved together," she says. "We've had that relationship for millenia, but it is just now being explored and discovered in more detail." And, when it comes to controlling the obesity epidemic, could lead to the (sweet?) smell of success.

 

Continue reading →

FW: China's "black clinics" flourish as government debates health reform

A one-room shack with a single, bare light bulb on a non-descript Beijing side street is 29-year-old Chinese migrant worker Zhang Xuefang's best recourse to medical care. Not recognized as a Beijing resident, she does not qualify for cheaper healthcare at government hospitals, and her hometown is too far away to take advantage of medical subsidizes there. Like millions of other migrant workers, Zhang, on whose labor China's economic boom depends, is forced into a seedy and unregulated world of back ally "black clinics" if she falls ill. The issue highlights the two-tier nature of China's overburdened health care system and goes to the heart of a heated debate about how to reform the contentious "hukou" system of household registration, a cornerstone of government policy for decades which essentially legalizes discrimination between urban and rural residents. The hukou system, which dates to 1958, has split China's 1.3 billion people along urban-rural lines, preventing many of the roughly 800 million Chinese who are registered as rural residents from settling in cities and enjoying basic urban welfare and services. China's new government has vowed to change this divisive system with reforms aimed at sharing more equally the bounty of China's economic growth and consumption-led growth. Newly-appointed Premier Li Keqiang vowed at his debut news conference earlier this month to press ahead with reforms to narrow China's urban-rural gap, including giving migrant labor more equal access to medical insurance. No details have yet been announced, so black clinics will remain the affordable last resort for migrant workers. "Health care insurance and other social insurances are closely linked to hukou. Providing better social insurance is, I believe, an incentive to reform hukou system", said Zhang Shuo, a senior Health Specialist with the World Bank's Beijing office. "China's urbanization will be unprecedented in speed and scale," Zhang explained, "Portable social insurances is key to encourage labor migration, but it will take some time for a country as big as China." DARK CORNER OF HEALTH SYSTEM "Black clinics are the dark corner of China's medical system," said Jiao Zhiyong, a professor at Beijing's Capital University of Economics and Business. "Migrant workers are their main patrons largely due to flaws in the health insurance system." World Bank's Zhang also pointed out that China's health care insurance system is a fragmented one, mostly coordinated within counties. But migrant workers usually have to seek medical treatment outside their home counties. The Beijing government has shut down about 1,000 black clinics a year since 2010, according to government figures. Many, however, reopen nearby or at the same place only days after being closed. While China has never published numbers for how many black clinics exist, every so often state media reports deaths at these unlicensed health centers. In January, Chinese newspapers reported that a migrant worker from Fujian province died from a cardiac arrest hours after receiving an intravenous drip to relieve her cold symptoms in a black clinic in one of Beijing's gritty outer suburbs. Migrant worker Zhang has seen the dangers of black clinics close up. On one occasion, out of fear that authorities might be nearing the illegal clinic, Zhang's doctor locked her inside the clinic, still hooked up to an intravenous drip, as he fled. "We don't want to go to those places, knowing that the substandard hygienic conditions affect us, but we really can't afford big hospitals," said Zhang, who once paid 800 yuan, a quarter of her monthly salary, for treatment of a common cold at a government hospital in Beijing. China has beefed up spending on health care reform with last year's overall expenditure at 719.9 billion yuan, a 12 percent increase from the previous year. Yet last year's figures from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security showed that only about 20 percent of migrant workers have health insurance. "To build a country-wide healthcare reimbursement system is our goal, but there is still quite a long way to go," Hu Xiaoyi, vice minister of Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security told reporters this month. For those who are insured, reimbursement only comes after payment, and is often complicated by bureaucratic red tape, putting families at risk of bankruptcy when major health problems strike. "Health insurance works locally, but when we go work in other places, only some provide health insurance, which still requires a lot of procedures. And each could take months and still wouldn't come through," Cao Yong, a migrant worker delegate to parliament, told state radio.

 

Continue reading →

Early number sense plays role in later math skills

We know a lot about how babies learn to talk, and youngsters learn to read. Now scientists are unraveling the earliest building blocks of math — and what children know about numbers as they begin first grade seems to play a big role in how well they do everyday calculations later on. The findings have specialists considering steps that parents might take to spur math abilities, just like they do to try to raise a good reader. This isn't only about trying to improve the nation's math scores and attract kids to become engineers. It's far more basic. Consider: How rapidly can you calculate a tip? Do the fractions to double a recipe? Know how many quarters and dimes the cashier should hand back as your change? About 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. lacks the math competence expected of a middle-schooler, meaning they have trouble with those ordinary tasks and aren't qualified for many of today's jobs. "It's not just, can you do well in school? It's how well can you do in your life," says Dr. Kathy Mann Koepke of the National Institutes of Health, which is funding much of this research into math cognition. "We are in the midst of math all the time." A new study shows trouble can start early. University of Missouri researchers tested 180 seventh-graders. Those who lagged behind their peers in a test of core math skills needed to function as adults were the same kids who'd had the least number sense or fluency way back when they started first grade. "The gap they started with, they don't close it," says Dr. David Geary, a cognitive psychologist who leads the study that is tracking children from kindergarten to high school in the Columbia, Mo., school system. "They're not catching up" to the kids who started ahead. If first grade sounds pretty young to be predicting math ability, well, no one expects tots to be scribbling sums. But this number sense, or what Geary more precisely terms "number system knowledge," turns out to be a fundamental skill that students continually build on, much more than the simple ability to count. What's involved? Understanding that numbers represent different quantities — that three dots is the same as the numeral "3'' or the word "three." Grasping magnitude — that 23 is bigger than 17. Getting the concept that numbers can be broken into parts — that 5 is the same as 2 and 3, or 4 and 1. Showing on a number line that the difference between 10 and 12 is the same as the difference between 20 and 22. Factors such as IQ and attention span didn't explain why some first-graders did better than others. Now Geary is studying if something that youngsters learn in preschool offers an advantage. There's other evidence that math matters early in life. Numerous studies with young babies and a variety of animals show that a related ability — to estimate numbers without counting — is intuitive, sort of hard-wired in the brain, says Mann Koepke, of NIH's National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. That's the ability that lets you choose the shortest grocery check-out line at a glance, or that guides a bird to the bush with the most berries. Number system knowledge is more sophisticated, and the Missouri study shows children who start elementary school without those concepts "seem to struggle enormously," says Mann Koepke, who wasn't part of that research. While schools tend to focus on math problems around third grade, and math learning disabilities often are diagnosed by fifth grade, the new findings suggest "the need to intervene is much earlier than we ever used to think," she adds. Exactly how to intervene still is being studied, sure to be a topic when NIH brings experts together this spring to assess what's known about math cognition. But Geary sees a strong parallel with reading. Scientists have long known that preschoolers who know the names of letters and can better distinguish what sounds those letters make go on to read more easily. So parents today are advised to read to their children from birth, and many youngsters' books use rhyming to focus on sounds. Likewise for math, "kids need to know number words" early on, he says. NIH's Mann Koepke agrees, and offers some tips: —Don't teach your toddler to count solely by reciting numbers. Attach numbers to a noun — "Here are five crayons: One crayon, two crayons..." or say "I need to buy two yogurts" as you pick them from the store shelf — so they'll absorb the quantity concept. —Talk about distance: How many steps to your ball? The swing is farther away; it takes more steps. —Describe shapes: The ellipse is round like a circle but flatter. —As they grow, show children how math is part of daily life, as you make change, or measure ingredients, or decide how soon to leave for a destination 10 miles away, "We should be talking to our children about magnitude, numbers, distance, shapes as soon as they're born," she contends. "More than likely, this is a positive influence on their brain function."

 

Continue reading →

Doubt over Sanofi drug in EU may hurt wider MS market

Uncertainty over European exclusivity for Sanofi's new multiple sclerosis (MS) pill Aubagio could disrupt the wider market and impact other companies, according to a leading industry analyst. The French drugmaker won an approval recommendation on Friday for the medicine from the European Medicines Agency, but the regulator refused to give it a "new active substance" (NAS) designation because it is very similar to a much older drug. Without this designation, Tim Anderson of brokerage Bernstein said generic copies could be launched in Europe in as little as three years - the time required for brief clinical studies of generics and to review applications for approval. That might not be a disaster for Sanofi, since most of the drug's sales are expected to come from the United States, but Anderson said in a research note it could wreak "havoc" on the rest of the European MS market because of the price disparity that would suddenly exist between generic Aubagio and rivals. Products that could be hit include injectable MS drugs like Teva's Copaxone and Biogen Idec's Avonex and Tysabri, as well Novartis's MS pill Gilenya. It could also hurt Biogen's new tablet, known as Tecfidera or BG-12, which was recommended for approval in Europe last week. Sanofi said it was very disappointed by the European regulator's decision on the NAS designation for Aubagio and planned to request a re-examination of the case.

 

Continue reading →

AstraZeneca settles Crestor patent row

AstraZeneca has seen off a remaining threat to its top-selling cholesterol drug Crestor by settling a U.S. legal case with generic firms Watson Laboratories, a unit of Actavis , and Egis . The settlement follows a U.S. appeal court ruling in December involving other firms upholding the patent on the medicine, which AstraZeneca is relying on as sales of other products tumble. AstraZeneca said on Monday that Watson and Egis had both conceded the Crestor substance patent was valid under the latest deal. The two companies had been trying to skirt round the patent by developing an alternative chemical version of Crestor. The agreement allows Watson to begin selling a generic form of Crestor on May 2, 2016, at a fee to AstraZeneca of 39 percent of net sales, until the end of pediatric exclusivity on the drug on July 8, 2016. Egis, Watson's partner, will also benefit from sales of the product. The entry date may be earlier, and the fee eliminated, under certain circumstances, details of which were not given. Crestor had worldwide sales of $6.25 billion in 2012, making it AstraZeneca's biggest seller, and $3.16 billion of that was generated in the United States. AstraZeneca said the deal with Watson and Egis would now be filed with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice. AstraZeneca's partner Shionogi is also a party to the latest settlement agreement. Such agreements, under which big drug companies settle patent litigation with generic rivals by making deals to keep cheaper products off the market, are commonplace in the drugs industry but they are gaining greater scrutiny from governments. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments on Monday over the legal basis of such so-called "pay for delay" deals, which have been criticized for pushing up drug bills. While generic competition to Crestor is unavoidable from mid-2016, protecting the brand up until then in the all-important U.S. marketplace is crucial to AstraZeneca. It is already struggling with falling sales of other blockbuster medicines that have lost patent protection or will do so soon, posing a major challenge to new CEO Pascal Soriot. Soriot last week laid out his strategy for turning the company around by cutting jobs and overhauling its research operations, while at the same time seeking bolt-on deals.

 

Continue reading →

Joe Weider, fitness mentor to Schwarzenegger, dies

Joe Weider, a legendary figure in bodybuilding who helped popularize the sport worldwide and played a key role in introducing a charismatic young weightlifter named Arnold Schwarzenegger to the world, died Saturday. He was 93. Weider's publicist, Charlotte Parker, told The Associated Press that the bodybuilder, publisher and promoter died of heart failure at his home in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley. "I knew about Joe Weider long before I met him," Schwarzenegger, who tweeted the news of his old friend's death, said in a lengthy statement posted on his website. "He was the godfather of fitness who told all of us to be somebody with a body. He taught us that through hard work and training we could all be champions." A bodybuilder with an impressive physique himself, Weider became better known in later years as a behind-the-scenes guru to the sport. He popularized bodybuilding and spread the message of health and fitness worldwide with such publications as Muscle & Fitness, Flex and Shape. Schwarzenegger himself is the executive editor of Muscle & Fitness and Flex. He created one of bodybuilding's pre-eminent events, the Mr. Olympia competition, in 1965, adding to it the Ms. Olympia contest in 1980, the Fitness Olympia in 1995 and the Figure Olympia in 2003. He also relentlessly promoted Schwarzenegger, who won the Mr. Olympia title a then-record seven times, including in 1980 and every year from 1970 through 1975. "Every sport needs a hero, and I knew that Arnold was the right man," he said. Weider brought Schwarzenegger to the United States early in his career, where he helped train the future governor of California as well as aided him in getting into business. Schwarzenegger also said Weider helped land him his first movie role, in the forgettable film "Hercules in New York," by passing off the Austrian-born weightlifter to the producers as a German Shakespearean actor. "Joe didn't just inspire my earliest dreams; he made them come true the day he invited me to move to America to pursue my bodybuilding career," the actor said in his statement. "I will never forget his generosity. One of Joe's greatest qualities is that he wasn't just generous with his money; he freely gave of his time and expertise and became a father figure for me." Weider also mentored numerous other bodybuilders. Born in Canada in 1919, Weider recalled growing up in a tough section of Montreal. Just like the apocryphal tale of the skinny kid who starts working out after a bully kicks sand in his face, Weider said he was indeed a small, skinny teenager picked on by bullies when he came across the magazine Strength. He had tried to join a local wrestling team, he said, but was turned down by the coach who feared he was so small he'd be hurt. Inspired by the magazine, he built his own weights from scrap parts found in a railroad yard and pumped them relentlessly. Word of his efforts got around and he was invited to join a weightlifting club. "When I saw the gym, saw the guys working out, supporting one another, I was mesmerized," he recalled. He won his first bodybuilding ranking at age 17, and soon after began to publish his first magazine, Your Physique. Later he started a mail-order barbell business, and in 1946 he and his younger brother staged the first Mr. Canada contest in at Montreal's Monument National Theater. At the same time, they formed the International Federation of Bodybuilders. In recent years, Weider donated much of his bodybuilding memorabilia to the University of Texas at Austin, which opened the Joe and Betty Weider Museum of Physical Culture in 2011. He is survived by his wife.

 

Continue reading →

Feds raid 17 Calif. businesses for nitrous oxide

Hundreds of law enforcement officers on Friday raided Southern California auto parts shops and other businesses suspected of illegally selling nitrous oxide for use as a recreational drug, in what federal authorities said was the nation's largest such raid to date. Authorities served search warrants on 17 businesses and nine delivery vehicles during the simultaneous raids in Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties, and three people were arrested on misdemeanor charges of misbranding a drug in violation of the federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. A fourth person named in a federal warrant was being sought by authorities. The operation was the result of a year-and-a-half-long joint investigation dubbed "No Laughing Matter" by the Food and Drug Administration's Office of Criminal Investigations and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. During the operation, federal agents seized 367 tanks or 36,000 pounds of nitrous oxide with a street value of $20 million, said Andre Birotte Jr., U.S. attorney for the Central District of California. "Our investigation has revealed and uncovered evidence that many of these shops don't contain any auto supplies at all, just tanks of nitrous oxide," Birotte said. The FDA has recently focused on the illegal use of nitrous oxide, and this was its largest case to date, said special agent Lisa Hartsell. Though nitrous oxide, also known as "laughing gas" or "noz," has long been a rave phenomenon, it has recently grown into more mainstream use, propelled by the ease of social media to reach young people and spread the word. "This is a very cheap drug, can be had very easily, it is not a controlled substance, so your big members of the law enforcement community don't have the ability to control it," Hartsell said. The gas is legally used by dentists for anesthesia, to pressurize whipped cream canisters and to speed up race cars. But authorities say its illegal use has spurred fatal car accidents, rapes and teen deaths — all in the name of a temporary high. "We believe these individuals are selling this nitrous oxide knowing full well that it's not going to be used to accelerate a race car or for a dental office, it's being used for the party scene," Birotte said. If ingested at high levels, nitrous oxide can cause death from lack of oxygen; it can also lead to spasms, convulsions and other health problems. Nitrous oxide is also considered a greenhouse gas and is 310 times more dangerous to the Earth's ozone layer than carbon dioxide, said Joseph Johns, chief of the U.S. attorney's environmental crimes section. "The amount of gas that was taken off the streets today, is equivalent to one year's worth of carbon dioxide emissions from a small petroleum refinery in the heart of Los Angeles," Johns said. He said the investigation is ongoing. "These (raids) are the initial baby steps," and more charges would likely be filed in the next weeks, Johns said. Los Angeles County sheriff's officials have zeroed in on the recreational use of nitrous oxide since September, cracking down on more than 350 illegal parties, spokesman Mike Parker said Thursday. The operations are part of a new team set up by the Sheriff's Department over the last six months to monitor social media around the clock. The team has found many public posts that target teens and advertise alcohol and illegal drugs such as nitrous oxide. "They're doing the social media equivalent of standing outside the front doors of a high school at 3 o'clock as school lets out with a megaphone announcing that there'll be drugs, noz and alcohol for children, and then handing out fliers to all the kids that are interested," Parker said. These parties can be lucrative for those provisioning them. Sheriff's deputies have been tracking one distributor who is making more than $60,000 a month in the bulk sale of nitrous oxide, said Sgt. Glenn Walsh, who works in the Sheriff's Department's narcotics bureau. Hartsell said the drugs have also spurred armed robberies as gangs steal tanks from each other. Part of the problem for law enforcement officers going after the illegal use of nitrous oxide is that its distribution or use as a recreational drug is only a misdemeanor, officials said. Sheriff's Lt. Rod Armalin said the department is working on legislation to increase the penalties. Nitrous oxide isn't the only dangerous substance teens are turning to for a quick and cheap high. On Monday, a 14-year-old Los Angeles honors student died after inhaling computer keyboard dust cleaner, apparently to get high. Aria Doherty's sister found her in bed with a can of compressed air cleaning product attached to her mouth. Earlier this month, a 12-year-old San Bernardino County girl, Kristal Salcido, died after inhaling Freon from an air conditioner.

 

Continue reading →

U.S. proposes charging compounding pharmacies for oversight

The head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has proposed charging compounding pharmacies fees to pay for the oversight needed to prevent a recurrence of the meningitis outbreak that killed 50 people and sickened hundreds more. FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said in an official blog post on Friday that serious problems continue to take place at compounding pharmacies and she is hopeful that the Senate committee with jurisdiction over the issue "will yield strong legislation for patients across the nation." The post can be found at: http://blogs.fda.gov/fdavoice/index.php/2013/03/fda-must-have-new-authorities-to-regulate-pharmacy-compounding/?source=govdelivery Hamburg said a possible mechanism for funding the additional oversight could include registration or other fees of the kind Congress has authorized in other instances. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, pay fees to help fund the FDA's drug review process. Hamburg would like to explore more ideas with Congress, including requiring compounded drugs to have clear labels identifying the nature and source of the product. The meningitis outbreak was linked to a tainted steroid shipped last year by the New England Compounding Center (NECC), which filed for bankruptcy protection in December after U.S. authorities shut down its pharmacy operations in Framingham, Massachusetts. Since the NECC case came to light, the FDA has insisted that its authority over specialty pharmacies is too limited. "Even during this time of heightened awareness, our inspectors are being delayed in their work or denied full access to records at some of the facilities we are inspecting," Hamburg said. She added that serious problems at compounding pharmacies continue to occur. This week, there had been two recalls of sterile compounded and repackaged drug products. In one, the presence of floating particles later identified to be a fungus were reported in five bags of magnesium sulfate intravenous solution, resulting in a nationwide recall. In the other, all sterile drug products from a second pharmacy were recalled after reports that five patients suffered serious eye infections associated with a repackaged product.

 

Continue reading →

Supreme Court to decide on deals to delay cheaper drugs

The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Monday over whether big drug companies can settle patent litigation with generic rivals by making deals to keep cheaper products off the market. U.S. and state regulators say the practice costs consumers, insurers and government billions of dollars annually. The Federal Trade Commission, which has dubbed these arrangements "pay for delay," has fought them in court for more than a decade with mixed success, culminating in the case now before the Supreme Court. "The continuing stream of monopoly profits is large enough to pay the generic competitors more than they could hope to earn if they entered the market at competitive prices," the FTC said in a brief. At the same time, the brand-name manufacturer receives greater profits than it could earn in the face of generic competition, the regulatory agency argued. The Justice Department, the European Union and more than two dozen U.S. state attorneys general view the deals as illegal, but drug companies defend them as a way to avoid potentially lengthy patent litigation. "In every case that we've been in involved in that resulted in a settlement, it has resulted in years being taken off the patent life," added Paul Bisaro, chief executive of generic drug maker Actavis, Inc. Actavis was formerly Watson Pharmaceuticals. "It's very unsophisticated to say 'Oh, they get paid a bunch of money to stay off the market,'" said Bisaro. In the case before the court, Solvay Pharmaceuticals Inc, now owned by AbbVie, sued generic drug makers in 2003 to stop cheaper versions of AndroGel, a gel used to treat men with low testosterone. These payments, as high as $30 million annually, went to rivals Watson, Paddock Laboratories Inc and Par Pharmaceutical Cos, and were intended to help Solvay preserve annual profits estimated at $125 million. Under the deal, the three would stay off the market until 2015. The patent expires in 2020. AbbVie was confident that it would win. "The federal district and appellate courts have both previously ruled that the plaintiff's allegations lacked merit. We are confident that these decisions will be upheld," Adelle Infante, an AbbVie spokeswoman, said in a statement. The Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision by the end of June. AbbVie's arrangement is similar to the 40 deals made in the 2012 fiscal year, which ended on September 30. That was up from 28 the previous year despite FTC efforts to stop them. The FTC said the agreements involved 31 different brand name drugs with total U.S. sales of more than $8.3 billion annually. The FTC sued to stop the AndroGel arrangement, arguing that it was illegal under antitrust law because the companies divided up the market. The FTC lost at the district court level and lost an appeal as well. But another appellate court has said the deals were illegal, prompting the Supreme Court to step in to resolve the split. The FTC also sued Cephalon Inc, accusing it in 2008 of blocking a generic version of the anti-sleep drug Provigil. The case has been stayed pending the Supreme Court's decision. In 2001 the FTC sued Schering-Plough Corp., later bought by Merck and Co Inc, because of payments to rivals to delay generic versions of its potassium supplement, K-Dur 20. The FTC lost that case. But in a private case that also involved K-Dur, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in New Jersey, backed the FTC position and found the deals to be illegal. BATTLES ON CAPITOL HILL, EUROPE Opponents of pay-for-delay deals in the United States and Europe are not waiting for a high court decision, though. Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota and chairwoman of the Senate Judiciary Committee's antitrust panel, and Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, introduced legislation in February to make the deals illegal. Previous bills have failed in part because of opposition from the drug industry, both branded and generic. In Brussels, EU regulators have eight investigations under way involving more than a dozen drugmakers. The European competition regulator says the deals violate antitrust law. The decision will be made by an eight-member court. Justice Samuel Alito recused himself, without giving a reason. The case is Federal Trade Commission v. Watson Pharmaceuticals Inc et al, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 12-416.

 

Continue reading →

EU's planned tobacco curbs break WTO rules, Malawi says

The European Union's plans for tough new anti-smoking rules would break international trade rules, Malawi has told the World Trade Organization, signaling a potential legal challenge from the developing world. Malawi, one of the world's poorest countries, is concerned that EU plans to make cigarettes less attractive to new smokers will hurt a sector which provides more than 60 percent of its foreign exchange earnings, according to a WTO survey in 2010. "Malawi is deeply concerned that the EU's proposed Tobacco Products Directive (TPD) will significantly restrict trade, and is inconsistent with the EU's binding obligations under the TBT (technical barriers to trade) Agreement," the southern African country said in a statement posted on the WTO website on Friday. It made the statement at a WTO committee meeting earlier this month, where it was one of nine countries - including Indonesia, Mexico, Cuba and the Philippines - to voice concerns about the EU's plans. The EU policy proposals came after Australia, last December, enforced a ban on cigarette logos and required packets to be plain olive green with graphic health warnings. To bring in the world's toughest rules on tobacco packaging, it had to win a court fight against cigarette makers British American Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco, Philip Morris and Japan Tobacco. The Australian law was seen as a precedent for other countries considering a similar move, including India, Norway, South Korea and Canada. But it could still face an upset at the WTO, where Ukraine, Dominican Republic and Honduras have launched litigation in a bid to force Australia to overturn it. Malawi has taken an interest as a third party observer in that case but it has never launched a WTO dispute in the 18 years since it joined. It did voice objections to a Canadian tobacco law in 2010, without taking legal action to stop it. The EU's draft tobacco law, which aims to prevent young people from taking up smoking, was published in December, just weeks after Australia's rules came into force. It needs to be approved by EU governments and the European Parliament, which could take two years. Malawi said it was not questioning the EU's right to protect health, but Brussels' plan broke the rules in four respects: by banning ingredients such as flavourings and additives, by imposing costly labeling requirements, by insisting on cuboid-shaped packaging with no lid or a fliptop lid and by banning "slim" cigarettes. It said the EU needed to provide scientific evidence to show that its plans would reduce tobacco consumption and not just introduce barriers to trade. It also cited WTO rules that require technical regulations "take account of the special development, financial and trade needs of developing country members" to avoid creating unnecessary trade obstacles for poorer countries. "The onerous new obligations of the TPD will clearly create new, unnecessary obstacles to the tobacco exports of developing countries ... (which) will disproportionately hit least-developed tobacco exporters such as Malawi," it said.

 

Continue reading →

One More Reason to Rein in Childhood Obesity: It's a Threat to National Security

 

 

Feed: HEALTH News Yahoo
Posted on: Saturday, March 16, 2013 05:28
Author: HEALTH News Yahoo
Subject: One More Reason to Rein in Childhood Obesity: It's a Threat to National Security

 

The ramifications of an overweight population—adults, teens, and kids alike—just keep on coming: We know now, for example, that the health effects of being very overweight don't begin adulthood; kids suffer plenty by carrying around so many extra pounds.  In an unexpected turn this week, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack went so far as to say that America's obesity epidemic is hurting not just our health but the country's security. In a speech in Portland, Maine, Secretary Vilsack said that "we must continue to take action today to ensure that today's young people grow up healthy and strong, or we will see more challenges—everything from soaring health care costs to diminished national security and decreased business competitiveness." Reducing Childhood Obesity—One Cupcake At a Time   Why the call-out connecting obesity to national security? Because many Americans are simply too overweight to serve in the military.  In 2010, Military Readiness, an organization of retired military leaders, released its "Too Fat to Fight" report, citing Department of Defense statistics showing that 75 percent of adults 17 to 24 wouldn't be accepted into any branch of the U.S. military simply because they couldn't meet the armed forces' weight requirement; three-quarters of young adults would exceed that requirement.  The organization focuses on getting junk food and sugary drinks out of schools, increasing funding for school lunches, and supporting proven interventions to end childhood obesity. Should Obese 7-Year-Olds Be Put on a Diet? A 22 year-old, 6-foot man who wants to join the Army can't exceed 195 pounds, for example. A 5-foot-4 woman who's the same age must not weigh more than 147 pounds. "The military has strict body fat guidelines that are enacted through an initial BMI [body mass index] screen, followed by a body fat measurement confirmation," explains Jacob C. Warren, Ph.D., co-executive director of the Rural Health Research Institute, at Georgia Southern University, in Statesboro, and co-author of the forthcoming Always the Fat Kid: The Truth About the Enduring Effects of Childhood Obesity. "What's alarming is the fact that nearly three out of every four adults aged 20 or over have BMIs that would fail that initial BMI screen.  With childhood obesity tripling in the past generation, we are quickly running out of individuals who are even eligible to serve." Want to Keep Your Kids Fit and Healthy? Just Look at the Clock So the question quickly becomes a pressing one: Who will join the military to protect the U.S. both domestically and abroad? "This is not smoke and mirrors—it is a hard and honest fact," stresses K. Bryant Smalley, Ph.D., co-executive director of the Rural Health Research Institute and co-author of Always the Fat Kid.  "Childhood obesity has reached such a scale that it is impacting each and every one of us—not just the children it so directly affects.  Secretary Vilsack's comments highlight just one of the ways in which this epidemic is impacting our entire society."

 

Continue reading →