Company says bird flu vaccine working

Baxter International Inc. on Thursday said its bird flu vaccine is working for humans against several strains of the virus at low dosages, setting the stage for a final round of testing the company expects to complete by the end of this year.

The progress in testing Baxter's cell-based vaccine against strains of the H5N1 virus could help the Deerfield, Ill.-based medical products giant as it negotiates with countries around the world trying to protect their citizens from a possible bird flu pandemic. It has a few contracts, but some countries have been asking for more evidence the product works before signing any deals.

What's more, the continued progress of testing should provide consumers with more confidence, considering there is no commercially available bird flu vaccine. Bird flu vaccines being developed by Baxter and other companies and stockpiled have not been government-approved.

Baxter is among about a half-dozen vaccine makers in various stages of testing their products against the H5N1 strain of avian influenza that has killed 170 people, mostly in Asia. Baxter said its product is the first cell-based vaccine in clinical trials.

Baxter is leading the development of cell-based technology, which allows the company to make vaccines more quickly in larger quantities. For decades, technicians have injected strains of virus into millions of chicken eggshells by hand in a laborious, monthslong process.

"A good safety profile and cross immunity against multiple viral strains is critically important for governments considering the concept of using a vaccine before, or immediately after, a pandemic breaks out," said Dr. Hartmut Ehrlich, vice president of global research and development for Baxter's Bioscience business.

Baxter's trials have shown the vaccine to work in 76 percent of those tested.

The company also said its vaccine was tested without using so-called "adjuvant," an additive being used by some other companies that is believed to cause side effects. The findings unveiled Thursday come from study of 270 patients from Europe and Asia. Strains of the virus were taken from patients in Vietnam.

"What's important about Phase I/II data is that the results show that Baxter's vaccine works against many strains of the H5N1 avian flu virus without any additives (adjuvant) to boost effectiveness," said Baxter spokesman Chris Bona.

"Additives can add additional cost, and they are believed to cause side effects" such as headache and fever, he added.

At least one other company known to disclose results of its testing is British drug giant GlaxoSmithKline PLC, which said last year that an adjuvant helped its vaccine work against bird flu strains.

But Baxter said in a statement that side effects observed in the trial were "injection site reactions, headaches and fatigue." The company said there were "minimal" occurrences of such side effects, which were "similar to those reported for licensed egg-based, seasonal influenza vaccines."

In the next two months, Baxter will begin enrolling more than 600 patients in the final clinical trial. This time, each will get the same 7.5-microgram dosage without adjuvant, rather than past testing that has involved some patients receiving larger dosages as well as vaccine that includes adjuvant.

The lower dosage of vaccine is considered important should there be an outbreak because companies might be required to quickly ramp up manufacturing capacity and increase the possibility that a greater number of people can be immunized.

Last year, Baxter won a contract from the United Kingdom to make more than 2 million doses of a cell-based vaccine British health officials hope to use as a preventive measure for avian influenza. The company has also signed stockpile agreements with an undisclosed number of other countries, but said those health ministries do not want their names released publicly.

Baxter executives said other governments it has talked to are cautious about stockpiling because it is difficult to predict whether the product they are buying would work against the particular strain of the H5N1 virus that might hit their country. The progress of Baxter's vaccine in clinical trials will help in negotiating more contracts, said Noel Barrett, Baxter's vice president of research and development for the company's vaccine business.

The price of Baxter stock rose 46 cents a share, to $53.22, on the New York Stock Exchange. The company's share price has jumped more than 40 percent over the last year.

CDC says Easter chicks carry health risk

Easter is right around the corner and so is the threat of salmonella carried by baby chicks often given to children as springtime gifts, health officials warned Thursday.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 81 people in 22 states fell ill last spring after contracting salmonella from chicks. The record three outbreaks occurred around Easter, and at least some of the cases were believed to stem from birds given as gifts.

"This time of year, when everyone's wanting to give their kid a baby chick or baby duckling, that's when we start to see these outbreaks in people not accustomed to handling farm animals," said Charles Hofacre, a University of Georgia professor of veterinary medicine.

Salmonella is an infection that causes diarrhea, fever and vomiting. The bacteria live in the intestines of chickens and spread through their feces, which can cling to a bird's feet or feathers, even if it looks clean.

Children get sick by touching the birds and then putting their hands in their mouths. Young children are more susceptible than most adults, and those under 5 should not handle baby birds, officials said.

With Easter little more than a week away, many feed stores will be selling chicks in a prominently positioned cage or box with a heat lamp, Hofacre said.

Chicks cost as little as $1 or $2 each, according to the Web sites of some hatcheries and feed stores. Some stores give chicks away with the purchase of a large bag of fertilizer.

The 2006 illnesses were traced to three hatcheries in Michigan, New Mexico and Washington state. Sixteen people were hospitalized.

A few cases in Oregon were reported before Easter, and it was unclear how many of the 81 illnesses were tied to Easter birds.

"The sale of chicks is a springtime phenomenon," and not just Easter, said Dr. Nicholas Gaffga, a CDC epidemiologist.

The Michigan hatchery was also the source of salmonella outbreaks in that state in 1999 and 2000. The Washington hatchery was the source of outbreaks in 1995, 1996, 2003, 2004 and 2005, CDC officials said.

None of the hatcheries have been accused of any criminal wrongdoing.

Some states have passed laws to discourage giving small birds as Easter gifts. Four states set a minimum on how many birds an individual can buy. Twelve states limit the youngest age at which live poultry can be sold. Thirteen states and the District of Columbia ban the sale of birds that have been dyed.

Health departments in Oregon and Washington have asked feed stores to display warnings and offer educational materials to people who buy baby birds.

Smokers Take More Sick Leave, Make Poorer Workers

Smokers take an additional eight days of sick leave a year and are more likely to perform poorly in the workplace compared with non-smokers, according to two new studies published today.

Smokers in Sweden took extra days off sick compared with their non-smoking colleagues, researchers at the Free University of Amsterdam said. A separate analysis of the career progression of women entering the U.S. Navy found tobacco users performed worse than non-smokers.

Tobacco is the second major cause of death in the world, claiming one in 10 adults, and the fourth-most-common risk factor for disease, according to the World Health Organization in Geneva. People who smoke tend to choose riskier jobs and have poorer health, researchers said.

``Cigarette smoking might simply be a marker for other underlying factors such as non-conformity and high risk-taking, that contribute to poorer performance,'' San Diego State University researcher Terry Conway wrote in an article in the U.K. journal Tobacco Control.

In the Swedish study, Petter Lundborg and colleagues analyzed national data on sickness absence in 14,000 workers between 1988 and 1991. Smokers took an extra 11 days off compared to non-smokers, which was adjusted to eight days to account for the nature of their jobs and underlying health.

Sick Days

Smokers took an average of 34 sick days a year, compared with 20 days taken by those that never smoked, and 25 days taken by former smokers. At an average of 25 days a year, Sweden's sickness-absence rate is the highest of all countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The U.S. average is nine days.

``The results suggest that policies that reduce and/or prevent smoking may also reduce the number of days of sick leave,'' Lundborg and colleagues wrote in Tobacco Control.

Countries across the European Union have banned smoking in public places, including Ireland, Italy, Malta, Spain and Norway. A ban will be in place across the U.K. starting in July after England, Wales and Northern Ireland join Scotland, which barred the practice last year.

Lundborg recommends further research into the correlation between sick leave and smoking, as factors other than tobacco use may play a part in the absences.

In the U.S. Navy study, researchers reviewed the career progression of almost 5,500 women entering the U.S. Navy between 1996 and 1997, Conway said.

The smokers were more likely to be discharged for medical reasons, bad behavior, misconduct, drug misuse and personality disorders, compared to non-smokers. They were also more likely to leave before they had served their full term and be paid less.

The study was supported by the U.S. Department of Defense. There are currently around 59,000 women serving in the U.S. Navy.

Tobacco Control is produced by the BMJ Publishing Group Ltd., an arm of the British Medical Association. The association has no control over the journal's editorial policy or content.

To contact the reporter on this story: Etain Lavelle in London at at elavelle1@bloomberg.net

Hope Like Never Before For Asthma Sufferers

A newly developed technique could very well help people with asthma have more comfortable lives and rely less on medication.

While bronchial thermoplasty is not meant (at least for now) to replace inhalers and drugs, it can greatly improve the quality of an asthma sufferer’s life, reducing the frequency of those much dreaded asthma attacks and making the inhaler somewhat less of a desperately needed accessory.

Volunteers who have taken part in a study of the technique say their lives have improved significantly, allowing them to be more active and less afraid of an inevitable impromptu asthma attack.

According to the World Health Organization, there are 300 million asthma sufferers worldwide. While the treatment needs further trials and would only be suitable for perhaps 10 per cent of them, the potential is great.

Professor Paul Corris of the University of Newcastle, one of the specialists involved, said: “The results have been very successful and this is a real breakthrough for the treatment of this widespread problem.

“The treatment is not a replacement for drugs or inhalers, it is in conjunction with these treatments. But the use of drugs and inhalers would be reduced as asthma attacks would become less common.”

The Canadian study has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine. It suggests the procedure, which is a pioneer – the first non-drug therapy for asthma – can significantly improve the lives of many patients with moderate to severe forms of the disease.

“It brings a whole new energy to (asthma research),” says the study's co-author, Dr. Gerard Cox, a respirologist at St. Joseph's Healthcare in Hamilton and head of McMaster University's department of respirology.

The study, aimed at adults for now, shows that people receiving the treatment have, on average, 80 to 90 more symptom-free days a year than those who take medications alone. They also experienced about 10 fewer severe attacks a year.

Asthma symptoms are caused when the airways contract. During severe attacks, patients can die from the disorder.

With the thermoplasty procedure, doctors insert a thin tube down the throat into the bronchial airways and insert a catheter that carries an array of four electrodes at its end. This is heated, which in turn warms the inner surface of the airways.

“We're not dealing with heat that's enough to burn. When we do a treatment we can hardly see any effect on the airway wall ... the effect is microscopic,” Cox says. The new technique is given under light sedation as an outpatient procedure taking around an hour.

Researchers don't know yet why it works. It is possible, they say, that the slightly increased temperatures have an effect on bronchial muscles, preventing them from contracting enough to create an asthma attack.

At this stage it is too early to say how long the effects of bronchial thermoplasty last, but Cox says animal experiments show the results may well be permanent. A bronchoscopy costs £300-£400 ($730-$970), and the treatment requires three.

How to Live with Cancer

Sometimes it takes a stricken celebrity or two to bring home a new truth about a disease. In the course of a few days, both Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Presidential candidate John Edwards, and White House spokesman Tony Snow revealed that they are not just battling recurrences of cancer but also contending with malignancies that have spread and are no longer curable. Many Americans were stunned to hear that the Edwardses will continue their quest for the White House, with Elizabeth campaigning despite metastatic breast cancer. Snow, who was treated for colon cancer two years ago and now has tumor cells on his liver, will take time off but expects to return to his post.

Fellow cancer patients and their doctors are less surprised by such decisions to "push forward with the things you were doing yesterday," as Edwards put it in a 60 Minutes interview. Reason: in recent years the treatment of what used to be dismissed as terminal cancer has shifted from a win-or-lose battle against acute illness to something more akin to managing a chronic disease — in many cases with extended periods of feeling just fine, thanks.

"To us it's a great sea change in the way people look at cancer," says Dr. Daniel F. Hayes, clinical director of the breast oncology program at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center. Hayes says that he and fellow oncologists are enthusiastic about the example Edwards is setting. "From our standpoint, we spend a lot of time trying to make it clear that while cancer — especially metastatic breast cancer — won't just go away, you can still live a long and productive life with it."

The change in managing cancer reflects a series of hard-won improvements in treatment — not, alas, for every form of cancer, but particularly for breast, colon, prostate and even lung. The gains include an explosion of new drugs that are more targeted and less toxic than old-school chemotherapeutic agents. In addition, new tests are beginning to help doctors match drugs more precisely to the genetic and molecular makeup of an individual tumor. Finally, there are remarkable advances in managing the side effects of treatment, which, in the past, could be as debilitating as cancer itself.

The payoff is being seen in longer and better-quality survival. According to the American Cancer Society, the percentage of people living five years after a diagnosis of any type of cancer barely budged from 50% in the mid-1970s to 52% in the mid-'80s, but it shot to 66% for patients with a diagnosis after 1995 and is continuing to rise. For breast cancer patients the five-year survival numbers leaped, from 75% in the '70s to nearly 90% by 2002. Receiving a diagnosis of cancer — and seeing that cancer return — is always a terrible blow. But in fact, there is no better time to be living with the disease.

The idea that we might one day find a cure for cancer seems axiomatic to anyone trying to understand the disease. That was the goal, after all, of the War on Cancer promoted by President Richard Nixon in 1971. But given the enormous complexity and variety of malignancies and the ways they can evolve and migrate in the body, an all-embracing cure is a naive hope. Instead, cancer doctors now appreciate that wayward cells may not necessarily have to be destroyed, just corralled and contained in a safe and tolerable way, often with drugs that are taken for the rest of the patient's life. "There was a mind shift that happened in the 1980s," says Dr. John Glaspy, professor of medicine at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. "We realized that there is a power in the chronic-disease model where you can focus on a high quality of living with a disease instead of necessarily curing it. If we can have people alive, productive and happy, that's now viewed as a very wonderful outcome."

That new perspective provided fertile ground for the growth of new classes of cancer therapies. While older drugs were like heavy artillery — obliterating cancer cells but causing lots of collateral damage — newer drugs are more like smart bombs. Some of them target communication signals within malignant cells, some cut off supply lines by interfering with the growth of blood vessels around a tumor, and others block the chemical agents that enable tumors to expand into new territory. These more targeted therapies tend to focus on frantically proliferating cancer cells while leaving healthy cells intact.

Kenya: UN Wants Men 'Cut' Adopted in Prevention

World Health Organisation (WHO) says male circumcision must be part of HIV prevention package, which includes voluntary counselling and testing.Dr Kevin De Cock, director of WHO's HIV/Aids department, said the UNAids recommendation is a significant step towards HIV prevention.

"Countries with high rates of heterosexual HIV infection and low rates of male circumcision now have an additional intervention, which can reduce the risk of infection in heterosexual men," UNAids website quoted Cock on Wednesday.

Ms Catherine Hankins, director at UNAids, said a recommendation for another HIV prevention method is a move towards getting ahead of the epidemic.

Bu she added: "However, we must be clear. Male circumcision does not provide complete protection against HIV."

Late last year, results from trials done in the country showed that there was a 53 to 60 per cent reduction in HIV risk among circumcised men. Results from similar research in Uganda and South Africa replicated the two-year study on 2,784 young people in Kisumu.

It remains to be seen if the Ministry of Health will entrench the UN recommendations in its national policy.

About 665 million men -30 per cent of men population in the world - are circumcised.

The national HIV prevalence rate has gone down to less that six per cent.

However, the rates are much higher in some areas such as Suba Districts, where it stands at about 30 per cent.

Siaya's prevalence is 29 per cent, while it is 14 per cent in Migori District.

Big step forward for cancer vaccine

Medicine's arsenal against cancer could soon include a new class of treatments -- therapeutic vaccines -- now that the first of these products has cleared a major regulatory hurdle.

A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel on Thursday supported approval of Dendreon Corp.'s Provenge, the first cancer vaccine to get so far in the regulatory process. If the agency follows the panel's advice and approves Provenge for metastatic prostate cancer, Dendreon will become a trailblazer with the first product brought to market in the United States in this new drug category.

That could ease the path for other cancer vaccines, opening a whole line of commercial products for biotechnology companies.

"I think it's a positive event for the field as a whole,'' said Dendreon chief executive Mitchell Gold.

Early market reaction suggests that the panel's positive vote on Provenge could be a shot in the arm for the entire class of cancer vaccine developers, boosting the credibility of a field that has seen many failures. Trading in Seattle's Dendreon was halted Thursday pending the advisory panel's recommendation. But shares in Cell Genesys of South San Francisco, whose vaccine GVAX is also being tested in prostate cancer, leapt 8.7 percent after the vote was reported.

Biotechnology companies have struggled for years to develop a therapeutic cancer vaccine or cancer immunotherapy, the term many drug developers prefer. Such a treatment would act like a vaccine by sensitizing the immune system to recognize cancer cells as dangerous invaders and destroy them. Dendreon is the first in the class to reach the runway for FDA approval.

Although cancer vaccine development is considered an extremely risky investment, some big pharmaceutical companies are entering the arena. As the Provenge panel met, French drugmaker Sanofi-Aventis said it has signed a deal worth up to $690 million with the British company Oxford BioMedica to co-develop a therapeutic cancer vaccine. Oxford BioMedica has begun a late-stage trial of its experimental drug TroVax in kidney cancer.

The Bay Area hosts a cluster of cancer vaccine developers. Genitope Corp. of Fremont expects to have the results of a Phase III trial of its vaccine in follicular non-Hodgkins lymphoma by the end of the year, spokeswoman Marites Cristobal said. The company hopes to submit an application for approval for the vaccine, MyVax, to the FDA by spring 2008.

Like Provenge, Genitope's MyVax is a patient-specific immunotherapy tailored to attack an individual's specific tumor type. Genitope takes a tumor sample from the patient, isolates a protein from the cancerous cells, and adds components that signal the immune system to attack cells bearing that protein. The modified protein complex is then injected into the patient.

By contrast, Cell Genesys' experimental vaccine GVAX is an example of a treatment that is not patient-specific. GVAX, now in late-stage trials, includes prostate cancer cells that are genetically engineered to produce a compound that stimulates the immune system.

Cerus Corp. of Concord is conducting early-stage testing on its non-patient-specific cancer immunotherapy in collaboration with Medimmune.

Among the other companies testing experimental cancer vaccines are Antigenics Inc. of New York, Geron Corp. of Menlo Park, Favrille Inc. of San Diego and Progenics Inc of Tarrytown, N.Y.

These drugs are different from another class of vaccines designed to prevent cancer rather than treat it. One such vaccine is Merck's Gardasil, approved last year to suppress viral infections that can cause cervical cancer.

While the FDA advisory panel's endorsement of Provenge is a huge step for Dendreon, substantial questions remain about whether the vaccine works.

The panel concluded unanimously that Provenge is reasonably safe, while voting 13-4 that Dendreon had provided substantial evidence of the drug's effectiveness against metastatic prostate cancer. Some experts, however, are still betting that the agency will withhold approval.

While the drug apparently extended survival by about 4 1/2 months in one small trial, Dendreon's studies were designed to measure whether Provenge checked tumor growth. And in each of the two small trials submitted for FDA review, the drug failed to achieve that goal, called an endpoint.

In a briefing for the panel, FDA staffers said it's possible that the apparent survival benefit was due to chance, or to chemotherapy drugs taken by the trial subjects after Provenge.

"I don't believe the compound has a snowball's chance in hell of getting approved," said Robert Schwartz, senior director of oncology licensing at Bristol-Myers Squibb. "The FDA will be setting a bad precedent if it approves a drug that missed all clinical endpoints.'' Schwartz oversees research on additives that might boost the performance of cancer vaccines.

But Paul Latta, an analyst with McAdams Wright Ragen, said the chances of approval for Provenge now seem higher. Latta said he had previously thought the FDA was more likely to withhold final approval until Dendreon completes a larger trial with 500 subjects that is now in progress.

Dendreon's Gold said Provenge could provide a new option for men whose cancer has progressed after initial treatment followed by hormonal therapy, a stage when few treatments are available.

The FDA has until May 15 to make a final ruling on Provenge. Gold said the company has built a factory in New Jersey to produce the drug, but he could not say how soon after approval the drug could be available.

Although Schwartz, the Bristol-Myers executive, said there could be significant demand because patients have few alternatives, he predicts that the real heyday of cancer vaccines will come when they are paired with other drugs that amplify the immune response.

"I actually am very confident that we will get there,'' he said.

E-mail Bernadette Tansey at btansey@sfchronicle.com.

Indonesia defends bird flu vaccine deal

Indonesia has defended its decision to stop sharing samples of the deadly bird flu virus with the World Health Organisation after it signed an agreement with a US drug manufacturer.

The government said it would resume cooperation with the WHO only if it stopped providing samples to other commercial vaccine makers.

Last week Indonesia signed a deal with US-based Baxter Healthcare Corp to develop a human vaccine for the virus.

Indonesia has seen the highest number of human deaths from the disease of any country, recording at least 166 victims.

Officials said the deal with Baxter was designed to ensure the country’s 220 million people received access to a vaccine in the event of a human pandemic.

“We made the deal so we don’t have to purchase the vaccines at market price,” Dr Triono Soendoro, the head of Indonesia’s National Institute for Health Research and Development told the Associated Press.

Under the agreement with Baxter other organisations, including the WHO, would only have access to Indonesian flu samples provided they agree not to pass them on to commercial vaccine makers.

“We maintain that (the virus sharing mechanism) has been misused for commercial purposes,” said Soendoro.

Some experts sympathised with Indonesia but warned that the deal could jeopardise world-wide access to a pandemic vaccine.

Although the virus remains essentially an animal disease, experts fear it may mutate into a form which can jump species to humans and trigger a global pandemic.

Many fear that Indonesia will become the epicentre of a global outbreak.

Other countries including China, Thailand and Vietnam have previously stalled on the virus-sharing initiative for fear of rich countries stockpiling expensive vaccines and drugs and leave their populations vulnerable.

Source : http://english.aljazeera.net

Mothers ate beef while pregnant, tendency having low sperm counts on her son

While mothers having pregnancy and consumed beef tendency have a lower sperm count on her son suggesting the hormones given to cattle may make people less fertile, researchers wrote in a study.

The concentration of sperm in the semen of men whose mothers ate beef more than seven times a week was 24 percent lower than men whose mothers ate less, said researchers led by Shanna Swan, director of the Center for Reproductive Epidemiology at the University of Rochester in New York.

Men with low sperm counts were three times more likely to have mothers who ate beef more than seven times a week, the study found. The findings may be the “tip of the iceberg” of revelations showing the impact of hormone use among animals, said Frederick vom Saal, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Missouri.

“The risks associated with exposure during development to hormonal residues in beef should be revisited” by regulators, vom Saal wrote in a commentary accompanying the study.

Men whose wives were attending prenatal clinics in five U.S. cities, including Iowa City and Los Angeles, were asked to donate sperm and to question their mothers about eating habits. A total of 387 men born between 1949 and 1983 participated. The study was published on line today in the journal Human Reproduction.

Hormone Use

“It’s been known for a long time that very low levels of hormones can impact fetal development,” said Swan, the head researcher, in a telephone interview yesterday. Until now, “there have been no studies on the effect these hormones might have on reproduction.”

U.S. and Canadian cattle ranchers routinely use hormones in their livestock, including testosterone and progesterone, to encourage growth. The animals don’t metabolize or excrete all of the hormones before being slaughtered, so they remain in the meat in measurable levels. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration sets acceptable levels for the hormones.

“Growth promotant use in cattle production is safe, and nothing in this epidemiological study changes that fact,” said Mary Young, the executive director of nutrition for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, in a statement yesterday. “As a mother and registered dietitian, I can tell you that I am very confident in the safety of beef.”

Other Factors

Other factors such as pesticide use and lifestyle factors may have played a role in lowering sperm counts, and more research is needed, wrote Swan, who has studied environmental effects on reproductive health for two decades.

“Whether prenatal exposure to anabolic steroids is responsible for our findings in whole or in part could be clarified by repeating this study in men born in Europe after 1988, when anabolic steroids were no longer permitted in beef sold or produced there,” Swan said.

The men’s own diets didn’t have an impact on sperm quality, and the shape and mobility of the sperm were unaffected, the study showed. Any research relying on self-reported food consumption is prone to error in how that intake is measured.

“It is widely accepted that food recall can be notoriously poor from even a day or a week before, let alone multiple decades,” said Randy Huffman, vice president of scientific affairs for the Washington-based American Meat Institute, in a statement.

The study “should be viewed with a giant dose of skepticism,” he said. “This appears to be a health study in search of a health problem.”

Europe banned U.S. and Canadian beef because of concern that the hormones could affect human health, setting off a trade dispute in which the U.S. responded with trade sanctions of its own. Though the World Trade Organization sided with the U.S. and Canada, Europe has persisted with the ban.

“I want to make sure that women don’t read this and take away a message that they shouldn’t eat meat while pregnant,” Swan said. “It doesn’t hurt to look for organic beef, and it’s very important pregnant women get enough protein.”

Source : www.bloomberg.com

Indonesia seals WHO virus deal

Indonesia has announced three more deaths from the bird flu virus a day after agreeing to resume sharing virus samples for research in exchange for restricted access to drug companies.

The government agreed on Tuesday to resume sending virus samples to the World Health Organisation, ending a standoff that began late last year.

Indonesia had refused to share samples with WHO in December unless it was given a guarantee that they would not be sold to pharmaceutical companies.

On Wednesday, a health official said second tests had confirmed that a teenager, a 22-year-old woman and a 39-year-old man had died from bird flu.

At 69, Indonesia has the world’s highest human toll.

Restricted access

Under Tuesday’s agreement, the WHO will develop virus-sharing guidelines and any sharing outside of those “terms of reference”, including for vaccine development by drug companies, has to be with the consent of the virus-originating countries.

“We will take the recommendation to a WHO meeting in June to be formalised,” Siti Fadillah Supari, Indonesia’s health minister, said on Tuesday.

In welcoming Indonesia’s decision, the WHO said its collaborating centres “will continue risk assessment on H5N1 virus samples”.

“The centres will continue to transform virus into seed virus suitable for vaccine production,” it said in a separate statement.

“Other agreed uses of the virus will also be outlined in the terms of reference, including the standard procedures for providing these seed viruses to vaccine manufacturers … in a manner to be determined.”

Some experts, however, disagree with setting conditions on sharing virus samples.

William Chui, from the University of Hong Kong’s pharmacology department, said while high-risk countries should get priority access to drugs, “research should not be restricted in any way”.

“There should be no bargaining in this because the interest of the world is at stake,” he said.

The prolonged row over the sharing of virus samples revealed an imbalance in which developing countries are saddled with costly drugs.

Mutate

Indonesia and some other developing nations such as Thailand want to ensure that their people have access to vaccines at reasonable prices.

Bird flu has swept through poultry across Asia to Africa and Europe.

Experts say it may mutate into a form that can be passed easily from human to human, possibly killing millions.

Indonesia has had difficulty controlling the disease because so many people keep chickens, ducks and other birds to eat or sell.

Source : http://english.aljazeera.net

Fatty livers

Increasingly, millions of those livers belong to children — though most of them don’t know it, and neither do their parents and doctors.

Usually, no symptoms show up until damage has been done, damage that may ultimately lead to cirrhosis of the liver, liver cancer and end-stage liver disease.

Until the 1990s, no one knew that fatty livers were a problem in children, and now, doctors say, the situation has become serious. “If you were to go into any large California high school with a couple thousand students and screen, you’d expect 200 children with fatty livers,” says Dr. Jeffrey Schwimmer, director of the Fatty Liver Clinic at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego and associate professor of pediatrics at UC San Diego.

Schwimmer was lead author of a study published in the journal Pediatrics in October 2006 that found evidence that nearly 10% of children between 2 and 19 years old in San Diego County have fatty livers. If that percentage holds throughout the U.S., 6.5 million children are affected.

The data show that fatty livers in children are highly correlated with weight. About 80% of kids with the condition are obese or overweight. Nearly 40% of obese children have fatty livers.

“It’s the most common serious complication of childhood obesity,” Schwimmer says. And doctors fear it may cause serious problems for these children as adults. In a study published in the October 2006 issue of the journal Hepatology, researchers in Sweden followed up on adult patients an average of 14 years after they were diagnosed with fatty livers and found that most of them had diabetes or impaired glucose tolerance. Many had end-stage liver disease.

Experts say it is likely that children with fatty livers have a head start on these problems and may be at risk for developing them while still young.

To date, biopsies are the only effective diagnostic test for fatty livers. Diet and exercise are the only effective treatments. And it’s a mystery why the condition can be harmless for many, yet dangerous for others.

*

Under-the-radar disease

People with fatty livers are said to have nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. By definition, this disease occurs when 5% or more of the liver is fat. Often no damage is done, but in about 20% to 25% of cases, excess fat in the liver results in cell destruction and inflammation. At that point it becomes a condition known as nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, a form of hepatitis caused not by a virus but by too much fat.

People can have nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, even nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, without symptoms. “And they won’t have until they show up in the emergency room with a life-threatening problem,” Schwimmer says.

Nonalcoholic steatohepatitis can sometimes lead to cirrhosis of the liver, a scarring of tissue that impairs function. These days, doctors have even seen cases of 8-year-olds with cirrhosis of the liver.

Besides weight, the disease is related to age, ethnicity and gender. It’s more prevalent in adolescents than in younger children, most prevalent in Latinos (12%) and least in blacks (less than 2%) and more prevalent in boys than girls.

Schwimmer’s study, the only prevalence study to date, was done by reviewing autopsy records over 10 years, which is perhaps the only way to obtain that kind of data right now. Some screening for fatty liver disease is possible with blood tests that look for elevated levels of liver enzymes, as well as ultrasound or magnetic resonance imaging. But these methods are very imprecise. Accurate diagnosis requires a biopsy.

“We need a good diagnostic test that’s simple, cheap and reliable,” says Dr. Ariel Feldstein, assistant professor of molecular medicine at Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic. Feldstein heads a team that may have developed such a diagnostic, at least for nonalcoholic steatohepatitis: a simple blood test that proved accurate in a small study published in the journal Hepatology in July 2006.

The test is based on the discovery that patients with nonalcoholic steatohepatitis have a fragment of a protein called cytokeratin-18 in their blood, as a byproduct of the type of liver cell death that nonalcoholic steatohepatitis causes. A larger study of this test is ongoing.

Research also is underway at UC San Diego to develop accurate, noninvasive diagnostic methods for nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, including the use of spectroscopy.

So far, diet and exercise are the only effective treatments for correcting fatty livers so that more damage, at least, isn’t done. “Unfortunately, people aren’t good at doing those things,” says Dr. Jean Molleston, clinical professor of pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine/Riley Hospital for Children.

But several studies of possible medications for children are planned or in progress, including large clinical trials to test vitamin E and metformin, a drug used to treat diabetes.

*

Search for treatment

The two treatments are directed at different aspects of fatty liver disease. Excessive fat in liver cells is known to cause oxidative stress that, in turn, can lead to scarring. Vitamin E’s antioxidant properties may decrease that stress.

Almost all children with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease are insulin resistant — their body cells don’t respond to normal amounts of insulin the way they should. Metformin makes cells more responsive.

In pilot studies, both treatments improved patients’ blood chemistry, and metformin also lowered fat content in the liver.

There are currently no data to show what the long-term prognosis is for children with fatty livers. But there’s concern that, with a lifetime ahead of them, they’ll have plenty of time for bad consequences to develop.

Researchers are looking for ways to predict who will luck out and avoid those consequences, and who won’t. They’re finding that there is some correlation between bad outcomes and just how fatty the liver is.

“If someone has 40% fat, they are more likely to have [nonalcoholic steatohepatitis] than someone with 5% fat” in their livers, Schwimmer says. “But there are some people with [nonalcoholic steatohepatitis] and even cirrhosis with relatively small amounts of fat. I saw a child recently with cirrhosis and only 8% fat.”

Schwimmer believes that nonalcoholic fatty liver disease has a large genetic component, and he’s studying it in families. He’s also comparing groups of children with different likelihoods of having fatty liver disease — whites, blacks and Latinos, both male and female. Using blood tests and total-body MRIs to see how the children store fat, he hopes to find similarities within and across groups that might explain the different rates.

It’s known, for example, that girls store fat in their bodies differently from how boys do. That might be related to why boys are more likely to get the disease.

Meanwhile, many experts say screening for nonalcoholic fatty liver disease should be standard practice — at least with obese patients — even though current methods aren’t perfect.

“We ought to be doing it,” Molleston says. “That’s my personal opinion — I think I’m right about it, though.”

Source : www.latimes.com

Hope for life than survival

It will be nine years this December that Geraldine Ferraro, who came from 1148 Longfellow Ave. in the South Bronx to be a woman running for vice president of the United States, was diagnosed with a blood cancer known as multiple myeloma.

Ferraro had just made her last big run in politics, trying to beat out Charles Schumer and be the Democratic nominee from New York for the Senate. She couldn’t get out of bed when it was over and thought it was the campaign that had laid her out. It was cancer instead. She was 63, six years older than Elizabeth Edwards is today.

All Geraldine Ferraro has done since then is what Edwards, wife of a man now running for President, says she plans to do: Ferraro has lived her life. She has done this without asking anybody except the doctors and the people who love her how to do it.

“I don’t stop,” Ferraro was saying yesterday from her office at Blank Rome, a national law firm where she works full time in public affairs. “I’ve kept my day job here, I’ve kept my television job [with Fox News]. I’ve kept my job as a wife, as a mother, as a grandmother.”

She is as she has always been, a smart, tough woman out of New York, the second-grade teacher who made it through Fordham Law at night, who made it to Congress after that and finally to a spot on Walter Mondale’s ticket in 1984. Nine years for her now living with cancer and chemotherapy and all the other drugs and a stem-cell transplant two years ago. She will be 72 in August. Here she is.

And smart with Gerry Ferraro means smart enough to know that she is not Elizabeth Edwards and that Edwards is not her. Ferraro doesn’t tell anybody else what the rules are, how they should do it. It doesn’t mean she can’t stand on the sidelines of this presidential race and root for one of the candidates’ wives. They are in the same club. Famous American women trying to beat cancer.

“When I first found out,” Ferraro said, “I thought short-term. I think everybody does. But I don’t think that way anymore. I’ve found out that a disease that’s incurable but treatable doesn’t have to be a death sentence. When I was first diagnosed, my doctor kept telling me I’d live long enough to see my grandchildren go to college.” She laughed here and said, “Now he says I’m going to live long enough to pay for them to go.”

Elizabeth Edwards, though, is told toquit, mostly by people who know asmuch about her situation as they know about flying jets. Edwards is told by Rush Limbaugh, that phony, thatmost people turn to God when faced with cancer, but John Edwards and his wife turn to the campaign. When Limbaugh was in pain, ofcourse, he turned to his maid andtold her to go find some Vicodin.

It is fascinating watching people, especially ones from Limbaugh’s side of the field, come after John and Elizabeth Edwards, talk about their marriage and their values and their ambition. You wonder how these people would see things if Edwards were some big Republican front-runner from the far right. Or how they would come after Rudy Giuliani - six weddings in his marriage that we know about - and the frisky Newt Gingrich, another phony, if Giuliani and Gingrich were Democrats.

The President tells his press secretary Tony Snow, another whose cancer has returned, to “stay strong.” Elizabeth Edwards is supposed to stay home.

“You know what the worst part would be for her?” Geraldine Ferraro said. “And what would have been the worst part for me? Sitting at home and having my husband sitting there staring at me.”

Ferraro paused then and said, “You know what I believe hurts you as much as anything when you’re trying to live with cancer? Stress. You know what I believe can cause stress? Giving up something you believe in. Or asking somebody you love to give up something they believe in.”

“I will tell you this,” she said. “If I didn’t carry on with my life, I wouldn’t feel as good as I do now. I would not be as good as I am now.”

Maybe Elizabeth Edwards is one of those fighting a fight she cannot win. Maybe she loses, no matter how brave she is, and her husband loses, whether she is at his side or not.

You don’t have to cheer for him to cheer for her.

“There is no question she is doing the right thing,” Gerry Ferraro said yesterday. “I see people who find out they have what I have and decide they’re going to die. And you know what? They die. She wants to live, with cancer, on her own terms. And she will.”

Ferraro is no more heroic than any other cancer patient. Neither is Elizabeth Edwards. They both can afford medicine not everybody in this country can. But you read and hear that this issue, about whether John Edwards should quit the campaign or not, has divided the country. It hasn’t. If there is a division, it is here:

Those who celebrate Elizabeth Edwards for choosing to live her life with cancer as she sees fit, and those who try to live it for her. She absolutely should get on with things. The ones who think she shouldn’t should just get lost.

Source : www.nydailynews.com

Effectively detecting breast cancer using MRI than standard mammography

Scientist said tuesday, newly diagnosed with cancer in one breast in women had found an MRI that can find the disease in the opposite breast more effectively than standard mammography or clinical examination. MRI stands for magnetic resonance imaging, detected cancers that had been missed by the other methods in 3.1% of patients in a large clinical study.

That’s why according to the report which published online by the New England Journal of Medicine that Dr. Constance D. Lehman, lead study author and professor of radiology at the University of Washington School of Medicine said nearly 180,000 women diagnosed with breast cancer in the U.S. each year should receive an MRI.

The additional screening could help spare women unnecessary mastectomies or repeated treatments because of the inaccuracies of conventional methods.

“What this has the potential to do is help women make better decisions about the course of their treatment,” said Robert A. Smith, director of cancer screening for the American Cancer Society and author of an accompanying editorial.

Dr. John Glaspy, director of the outpatient oncology clinic at UCLA’s Jonsson Cancer Center who was not involved in the research, said the study would change medical practice — but at a cost of many millions of dollars. Each MRI costs $1,000 to $2,000, he said, about 10 times the expense of a mammogram.

“The tough issue it raises is that as technology gets better and the cost of healthcare rises higher, more people are going to be left behind and widen the disparity between the haves and have-nots,” he said.

The study coincided with the release Tuesday of the American Cancer Society’s new breast cancer screening guidelines, which for the first time recommend an annual MRI for high-risk women — those with at least a 20% to 25% lifetime risk of developing the disease. Average lifetime risk for all women is 12% to 13%.

The high-risk group includes women who had received chest radiation between ages 10 and 30, had a genetic mutation making them susceptible to breast cancer, or had a relative with one of the key mutated genes.

The society said MRI screening was cost effective for the approximately 650,000 women in the high-risk group.

These women account for about 1% of the 65 million women older than 40 urged to get mammograms every year.

The society, however, did not recommend regular MRI screening for women who have had breast cancer, saying the risk of developing a second breast cancer was not high enough to justify the added screening cost.

Breast cancer is the second most common cancer in women, next to skin cancer.

The American Cancer Society estimates that 178,480 women will be diagnosed with the disease this year, and 40,460 will die of it.

Most patients have cancer in a single breast at the time of diagnosis, but about 10% will develop cancer in the opposite breast. When that happens, patients face a second round of treatment, which can include surgery, chemotherapy or radiation.

Mammography has long been the primary tool for detecting breast cancer in its earliest stages — before tumors are large enough to detect in a clinical breast exam. Widespread use of mammography is largely responsible for the 24% drop in the breast cancer death rate from 1989 to 2003.

More recently, clinicians have debated the role of MRI. Although the technology is better at finding cancer than a mammogram, it is expensive and produces a relatively high number of false positive results that lead to unnecessary biopsies.

But the trade-offs make sense for newly diagnosed breast cancer patients anxious to know the extent of their disease, Smith said.

If an MRI found cancer in the opposite breast, a woman could treat the disease in each breast at the same time, he said.

On the other hand, a woman with a negative MRI could decide against a prophylactic mastectomy, which some women with cancer in one breast choose as a precautionary step.

The study, conducted at 25 U.S. test sites and paid for by the National Cancer Institute, looked at 969 women with recently diagnosed cancer in one breast but no cancer in the opposite breast based on a mammogram and clinical exam.

All women received an MRI of the opposite breast, which detected possible cancer in 121 women. A biopsy confirmed cancer in 30 women, or 3.1% of those in the trial. For the remaining 91 women, biopsies were negative.

Women in the study were followed for one year to see if cancer developed in the opposite breast that had not been detected by MRI.

Three women, or 0.3% of those in the study, had tumors in the opposite breast that had been undetected.

Researchers cautioned that MRI was not a substitute for mammography because MRI could not detect calcifications, one of the earliest signs of breast cancer.

Lehman said researchers were planning an economic analysis that would weigh the cost of MRI in all newly diagnosed women against the potential savings from second surgeries that were no longer needed.

Glaspy predicted that women would demand MRIs and that private insurers would cover them — whether the tests saved money or not.

“This is a top-drawer journal, and the data is excellent,” he said. “It’s kind of a no-brainer.”

Source : www.latimes.com

Black people having higher risk on heart failure, diabetes, hypertension

According to scientists racial disparities have long been known to exist in who actually develops risk factors for the condition, compared with Caucasian Americans, African Americans nearly twice as likely to be diagnosed with diabetes and more than a third as likely to have high blood pressure than .

But researchers have only now determined the precise role played by race in comparison to other risk factors, including socio-economic factors, age, gender, smoking, family history, and other health problems, as well as diabetes and hypertension.

The Hopkins team will present its findings March 27 in New Orleans at the American College of Cardiology’s annual Scientific Sessions in New Orleans.

In the study, researchers monitored nearly 7,000 men and women, age 45 to 84, of different ethnic backgrounds and with no existing symptoms of heart disease. African Americans developed heart failure at significantly higher rates (4.6 cases per 1,000 per year) than all other races, including Hispanics and Caucasians. Their rate was almost five times that of Chinese Americans (1 case per 1,000 per year) and almost twice that of Caucasians (2.4 cases per 1,000 per year).

However, these apparent risk differences among races almost disappeared (dropping from twice as likely, a significant difference, to no more than one-and-a-half times as likely, an insignificant difference) when researchers used statistical techniques to exclude the two traditional risk factors for heart disease.

“When all major factors are taken into account, the differences between races for heart failure largely evaporate in the absence of diabetes and hypertension among African Americans,” says senior study investigator João Lima, M.D.

According to Lima, an associate professor of medicine and radiology at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and its Heart Institute, these early results add to other interesting findings from the so-called Multiethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA).

Source : www.spiritindia.com

Propranolol (Hypertension drug) might muddle war memories

It’s not the miraculous memory-erasing device from the 1997 hit movie “Men in Black,” but it has a similar goal.

Propranolol, a generic drug used to fight hypertension and now being considered to reduce memory consolidation, could provide potential relief for post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers. But it’s not the “flashy memory thingy” from the movie.

“That’s the fantasy,” said University psychology professor Jonathan Gewirtz. “We know it doesn’t do that.”

In early clinical trials, the widely prescribed drug showed an ability to disrupt painful memories, though not erase them entirely - if taken immediately after traumatic episodes.

Although doctors can already issue the drug to PTSD patients, such as emergency medical technicians or soldiers, few if any do, according to Gewirtz. If the Food and Drug Administration approves the drug for mental-health purposes, a likely scenario because a recent study at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston produced favorable results, it could become a common treatment for the illness.

Even if the drug works, it’s going to take some more time and a lot more research before it is widely distributed, said Dr. Roger Pitman, the study’s principal investigator, emphasizing that the group’s results are still very preliminary.

William Elmquist, a University pharmaceutics professor, said propranolol’s knack for infiltrating the brain doesn’t surprise him.

Given the drug’s makeup, he said, it can easily cross over a protective layer of cells called the “blood-brain barrier.”

The barrier blocks the gateway to our gray internal control panel, but propranolol can successfully penetrate it, Elmquist said. Psychotropic drugs, such as valium, also have this capability.

“Its ability to go through the cell instead of around the cell is very good,” Elmquist said. “It definitely can get in to where it might have an effect.”

University neuroscience professor William Engeland said there is a part of the brain known as the amygdala, which helps to interpret the emotional significance of events.

“It’s kind of like a key fitting into a lock, with the lock being a receptor,” he said. “So, what propranolol does is it blocks certain receptors for noradrenaline or norepinephrine.”

By disrupting these chemical messages, he said, the drug could limit the body’s response - or in this case, the symptoms of PSTD.

University combat veterans gathered Tuesday at the Bell Museum for a reintegration conference offered varied and complicated opinions on the proposed use for propranolol, which has spurred a mini media frenzy, especially in the past week.

Andrew Huff, an anxiety disorder sufferer who spent 2005 in the Sunni Triangle of Iraq, said he doesn’t know much about the drug but is skeptical.

“If it does end up working, there might be some positive aspects,” the University psychology junior and employee of the St. Paul Veterans Resource Center said. “But I wouldn’t label it as a solution to the problem.”

However, he said, “It might be right for some people,” if combined with therapy and other treatments.

Gewirtz emphasized that propranolol is not a cure-all. Rather, it would be one element in a comprehensive treatment plan.

The idea of muddling tough memories doesn’t appeal to Andrew Borene, who served during the 2003 Iraq invasion. The recovering alcoholic and third-year law student said he prefers nonchemical treatment methods.

“There are more conventional means,” the most effective being therapy, he said.

While Borene dropped out of a 2006 suburban legislative race to go to treatment, University geography junior Andy Davis narrowly lost his own race for State House in Mankato.

At least for his own experience, the combat veteran rejects the term PTSD in favor of “post-traumatic growth.” He was treated for “combat/operational stress.”

“I don’t know if it’s healthier to scatter the traumatic memories than it is to have them,” Davis said as he and fellow veterans enjoyed a short break outside the museum Tuesday. “They shape us, make us who we are.”

At a student veteran panel, Borene punctuated that point. He reflected on his time in rehabilitation, where he found his higher power and acknowledged his trauma-induced mental health issues.

“I would not take back a day I had on active duty, as hard as it was,” he said to an auditorium of veterans sitting alongside University faculty and staff. “I wouldn’t change a thing about it.”

Source : www.mndaily.com

Nursing blow in Aids fight

In sub-Saharan Africa, the dire shortage of professional healthcare workers is one of the greatest obstacles to rolling out life-saving medical treatment for diseases such as HIV/Aids, TB and malaria. While donor support to address these diseases has increased, providing funding for salaries and other “recurrent” costs to address the human resource crisis, it has remained largely taboo.

In our daily work in Lesotho, Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) witnesses the consequences of such funding gaps: scores of nurses are leaving for “greener pastures” and patients are left in understaffed, overcrowded clinics.

One donor that seemed to be an exception to the rule was the Global Fund to Fight Aids, TB and Malaria. In 2005 a specific “window” was created to support health systems, including human resource costs. This was a welcome development. But, in Geneva, a committee of the Global Fund board is considering removing this, a move that may prove to be a tragic mistake.

Lesotho is a case in point.

Lesotho has the third-highest HIV prevalence in the world with almost a quarter of adults infected, a staggering 270 000 people. Lesotho’s ministry of health and social welfare reports that 17 000 of these are now receiving antiretroviral drugs (ARVs). Yet the country’s catastrophic human resource situation threatens to make improvements and continuity of HIV care and treatment impossible.

At present, 15% to 20% of all nursing posts are vacant. South Africa, which is also facing a human resources crisis, still has proportionally eight times more nurses than Lesotho.

In January last year, MSF launched a programme in Lesotho in Scott Hospital Health Service Area, a rural health district. In the past year, nearly 4 000 people have been enrolled in HIV care and more than 1 000 had started on ARVs. The World Health Organisation recommends that nurses should have a workload of no more than 20 patients per day. But nurses in this health district are conducting up to 45 consultations each day, before they even start to see HIV cases.

As a result, nurses are leaving. In Scott Hospital HSA today, about a quarter of nursing posts are vacant. MSF is trying to overcome these shortages by providing mobile MSF medical teams to bring “in-service” support to nurses, filling in gaps where necessary, training community health workers to take on new tasks to reduce nurses’ workload and introducing measures to improve staff retention. But ultimately, a major initiative will need to be developed at the national level to recruit, train and retain skilled nurses and other professional healthcare workers. According to the nurses we work with, a critical first step to retain nurses and attract new ones is salary increases.

Donors, including the Global Fund, often argue that they cannot pay for fixed human resource costs because it is not “sustainable”. Yet, after years of pressure from activists and NGOs, they are paying for ARVs, which need to be taken for life, with no such requirement for “sustainability”. The same emergency approach needs to be taken to address the human resource crisis.

The question for the Global Fund should not be whether to fund salaries, but how to more rapidly disburse funds to strengthen the health workforce so that patients are not left without the urgent medical care they need.

Source : www.mg.co.za

Sleep disruptions link with increase blood clot risk

According news reports quoting medical journal Chest Wednesday, sleep disruptions at night may have an increased risk associated with development of a blood clot, also referred to as a thrombus.

“There is an extensive literature demonstrating that sleep disruption is associated with increased coronary artery disease risk, but the possible mechanism for that association has been unclear,” said lead author Dr. Joel E. Dimsdale, of the University of California San Diego.

“In previous work, we have found that sleep disruption was associated with pro-coagulant activity in patients with obstructive sleep apnea and in patients facing major life stress,” he continued. “The current study reports similar findings even in a relatively healthy population.”

Dimsdale and colleagues examined whether sleep disruptions were associated with increased levels of prothrombotic factors previously shown to predict the risk of coronary artery disease.
A polysomnograph, conducted in a sleep laboratory, involved the measurement of brain waves to record sleep cycles and stages, plus monitoring muscle activity, eye movement, breathing rate, blood pressure, blood oxygen levels and heart rate. The patient was also directly observed during sleep.

A total of 135 unmedicated subjects with an average of 37 years in age, without a history of sleep disorders underwent full-night polysomnography. The researchers also recorded blood levels of factors associated with blood clotting and oxygen saturation. In their analyses, they accounted for the effects of age, gender, ethnicity, body mass index, blood pressure, and smoking history.

The investigators found that a higher score on total arousal index and longer periods of wakefulness interrupting sleep were associated with higher levels of the von Willebrand Factor antigen and soluble tissue factor antigen, respectively, both of which are linked with blood coagulation.

An association was also observed between average oxygen saturation levels of less than 90 percent and the plasminogen activator inhibitor antigen, also involved in coagulation, although this relationship was not statistically significant.

Source : http://news.xinhuanet.com

Who Foots the Huge Free Condom Bill?

Condoms galore were distributed in Rio de Janeiro before and during an annual carnival last month. When religious authorities protested, President Lula da Silva accused them of hypocrisy. Lula has done some good things and championed the poor of Brazil, but in this he was way off the mark. Shortly before that, two US bishops criticised the New York authorities for giving out condoms free of charge on February 14.

Once, the day was known as St Valentine’s Day and then just Valentine’s Day. Now, it is simply an annual excuse for all kinds of pagan indulgence. In Washington DC, the health authorities distributed 250,000 condoms in the weeks running up to the February 14.

In Scotland, the Edinburgh Evening News mentioned that condoms were being distributed to children as young as 13, and in 2005, 53,638 condoms were given to children between ages 13 and 15. Anyone with minimum business sense is likely to ask: Who can afford to give all this free of charge? Who is footing the bill? What is their agenda?

A recent report in the Washington Post, on HIV/Aids prevalence in southern Africa, and Botswana in particular, concludes that sexual relations with multiple partners is ‘the most powerful force propelling a killer disease through a vulnerable continent’.

This area has 38 per cent of the total HIV infections in the world. Yet, the population is not even a tiny fraction of the world total. How has this come about? Botswana has for many years followed a policy recommended by international experts to promote condoms and distribute anti-retroviral drugs.

Condom use increased HIV infection

And what has been the outcome? The contagion rate is among the fastest in the world, with 25 per cent of the population infected. Abstinence and fidelity campaigns were never seriously promoted, whereas condom campaigns and condoms were. A $13.5 million (Sh945 million) campaign for condom promotion was launched in the country, thanks to the financial support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Merck pharmaceutical company.

For many people, the founder of Microsoft is a real hero, for his skill in making money. Now we know how he spends some of it! The amount spent on promoting condoms was 25 times more than that spent on abstinence programmes. And the not-so-unpredictable conclusion is this: Soaring rates of condom use have not brought HIV infection down. Instead, it rose to the highest in Africa.”

A study carried out among Zimbabwe’s rural population, between 1998 and 2003, Understanding HIV Epidemic Trends in Africa, found that the reduction of HIV prevalence was achieved due to changes in sexual behaviour. This included delaying the onset of sexual activity and the reduction in the number of sexual partners.

An article in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, Adolescent Sexual Debut and Later Delinquency, shows that premature initiation of sexual activity increases the risk of delinquency. Delaying sexual activity ‘offers a protective effect and reduces the risk of engaging in subsequent delinquency’.

Those who carried out the surveys were honest enough to say things as they are. But our parents and grandparents knew these things all along.

Source : http://allafrica.com

Dracunculiasis (worm disease)

Guinea worm disease, or dracunculiasis, now only affects around 25,000 people in nine countries according to The World Health Organisation, an estimated 3 million people were infected in over 20 countries in the early 1980s. the worm disease causes crippling leg ulcers, sometimes the size of tennis balls. These ulcers burst, releasing a spaghetti-like parasitic worm that can be 0.8 metres long.

Victims experience a pain so excruciating they say it feels as if their leg is on fire, and often they jump into water to seek relief. At this point the worm in their leg releases thousands of larvae, contaminating the water, and putting anybody who drinks from it at risk.

The disease was found in Egyptian mummies, and is thought to be the “fiery serpent” often referred to in texts from ancient Egypt and Assyrian Mesopotamia.

Lorenzo Savioli, WHO director of Neglected Tropical Diseases, said: “This is the culmination of years of efforts by local and international groups to see this disease eradicated.”

Twelve countries were declared Guinea worm-free in early March. If progress continues at this rate, the disease could be eradicated in less than two years.

At present, the disease is still endemic in certain villages in sub-Saharan Africa.

There are a number of low-cost methods to prevent people from becoming infected.

These include providing safe drinking water supplies, filtering drinking water using fine-mesh cloth, and preventing infected people from wading into water sources to relieve the pain.

It is also possible to gradually pull out the worm, and clean the ulcer to prevent bacterial infection.

Source : http://news.bbc.co.uk

Capital Health officials encouraging young women to get vaccinated

Capital Health officials are urging virgin to get vaccinated against human papillomavirus, a common sexually transmitted disease linked to cervical cancer.

Until the province decides whether to fund a vaccination program, Capital Health is administering Gardasil shots at $175 a pop. It takes three doses for women to be fully vaccinated. The vaccine can also be prescribed by a physician.

It’s licensed for use on girls aged nine to 26 and is especially recommended for those who are virgins.

The drug has been endorsed by the National Advisory Committee on Immunisation, which in January recommended that all virgin girls aged nine to 13 get immunized.

“Our hope is that this vaccine decreases the incidence of cervical cancer by more than 70%,” Dr. Marcia Johnson, deputy medical officer of health for Capital Health, told Sun Media.

She said of the more than 100 strains of HPV, two are known to cause cervical cancer. Gardasil protects against those two strains, plus two others.

“HPV infection is tremendously common among women who are sexually active,” Johnson said.

An estimated 75% of women will become infected with it during their lifetime. The virus is cleared within a year or two by all but 10% of them.

“It’s that 10% who are most at risk of cervical cancer,” Johnson said.

About 400 women per year die from cervical cancer in Canada.

It kills an estimated 290,000 women annually worldwide.

Johnson also reminded all sexually active women to go for annual pap smears.

Source : www.edmontonsun.com

Exploring the life expectancy gap

As long as anyone has kept statistics, and with a range of speculative explanations, what has always been irrefutable is that white people in America live longer than black people.

Called the black-white life expectancy gap, it has widened, narrowed and widened again during the last 100 years. Now that gap has narrowed to a historically low level, from a 7.1-year gap in 1993 to a 5.3-year gap in 2003, the latest year for which national statistics are available.

In a study in last week’s Journal of the American Medical Assn., researchers from Canada, England and the U.S. parsed the numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics to explain the trend — and why a longevity difference remains.

They found some bad news, some good news and considerable challenges ahead in bringing African American life expectancy in line with that of whites. “With a century-long view, it looks like a lot of progress,” says Sam Harper, an epidemiologist at McGill University in Montreal and lead author of the study. “But there still remains a pretty substantial gap in 2003. Despite the improvements we’ve seen in homicide and HIV, the gap in heart disease still remains.”

That, he says, is the chief culprit behind the shorter life expectancy for black people.

Although HIV/AIDS, which disproportionately affects black people in America, added to the gap until 1996, life-saving drugs then became available and more people — regardless of race — began living with it as a chronic disease.

The high homicide rate of the 1980s also disproportionately affected young African Americans, contributing to an overall decrease in black life expectancy. The homicide death rate for all Americans has dropped from 10.4 per 100,000 in 1980 to 5.9 per 100,000 in 2004. While young black men, ages 15 to 24, are still victims of homicide in staggeringly high numbers — 77.6 per 100,000 in 2004 — those numbers have fallen from a high of 137 per 100,000 in 1990.

African Americans continue to face some sobering health challenges. Among them, the death rate from heart disease is about 30% higher than whites, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The prevalence of diabetes is about 70% higher, and diabetes significantly increases the risk of heart disease.

“African Americans have greater coronary disease, it happens earlier, and the mortality rate is higher,” says Dr. Karol Watson, cardiologist and co-director of preventive cardiology at UCLA and spokeswoman for the American Heart Assn. “There are a whole lot of theories about why, but no one knows for sure.”

High blood pressure is the leading risk factor for heart disease in African Americans, and some speculate that the cause is genetic. But while American blacks have higher rates of hypertension — 41% of blacks compared with 27% of whites— blacks living in African countries have few blood pressure problems, casting doubt on a genetic link.

Doctors know from their practices that black people often respond differently to some medications, yet there’s a dearth of scientific information on why. Cholesterol-lowering drugs, studied primarily in white people, lower cholesterol in people of all races, but they bring the numbers down less in black patients, Watson says. ACE inhibitors are also less effective at lowering blood pressure in blacks than in whites.

A 10-year study called the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis, begun in 2000 by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, was begun to answer some of those questions and could eventually do so. “So far, every bit of data we have on treating African Americans is extrapolated from studies of whites,” Watson says.

When it comes to race, disease theories can become controversial. “Black women aren’t getting mammograms at the same rate as white women,” says Faith Mitchell, senior program officer on health disparities at the Institute of Medicine. “Is it that they don’t know they should be doing breast self-exams? Are they leery of doctors? Are they being offered the appropriate tests?”

Most controversial, do doctors treat black people differently than they treat white people? “It’s tricky,” Mitchell says. “No one is going to stand up and say, ‘Yes, I make distinctions based on gender and race.’ But there’s a continuing pattern of care that’s hard to explain.”

Studies have shown that black people with diabetes, for example, are more likely to have limbs amputated than are whites, even when the disease shows similar progression.

And one classic 1997 study, by Dr. Kevin Schulman of Georgetown University, created videotapes using actors who were men and women, black and white. All of them feigned similar heart disease symptoms. When the tapes were shown to 720 physicians, researchers found that women and blacks were less likely to be referred for cardiac catheterization than were men and whites.

The life expectancy gap is getting smaller, but it persists.

“What our study shows is that we can do a better job,” Harper says. “We already know a lot about how to prevent and treat cardiovascular disease. If we can do a better job focusing on how to treat heart disease in minority communities, we can continue to close the gap.”

Source : www.latimes.com

Childhood obesity rise has Commons committee urging feds to join the battle

The epidemic of childhood obesity in Canada needs an Olympic effort to reverse the catastrophic trend suggesting today’s kids won’t live as long as their parents, a House of Commons committee says.

In a report, Healthy Weights for Healthy Kids, the Commons health committee calls on the federal government to take action in order to stop the rising incidence of overweight and obese children by the time of the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010.

The situation has reached epidemic proportions as obesity rates among kids have risen almost threefold (to 8% from 3%) between 1978 and 2004. More than one in four (26%) Canadians aged 2 to 17 are now considered either overweight or obese, the report states, citing Statistics Canada figures.

Even so, polling shows that only 9% of parents believe their child is overweight.

“For the first time in recorded history, today’s younger generation will live shorter lives than their parents, yet parents … do not recognize the problem,” said Conservative MP Rob Merrifield, the committee’s chairman. “We are killing our kids with kindness.”

Obesity leads to increased rates of diabetes, heart attacks and other serious health impacts down the road. The health costs already are estimated to exceed $4.3 billion a year, Merrifield said.

The committee called for a comprehensive public awareness campaign on issues such as healthy weights, food choices and physical activity.

It ties its short-term 2010 goal as an opportunity to dramatically boost awareness and shift people’s perception in the same way the public mindset accepted seatbelts in the 1970s.

By 2020, childhood obesity rates should drop to at least 6%, the report recommends.

It also calls for the elimination of trans fats from foods, easy-to-read, front-of-package nutritional information and several other initiatives to benchmark and monitor issues such as physical activity and body-size measures.

The report has no costing for its proposals, but committee member and NDP MP Penny Priddy argued that the costs of letting the problem grow would be far higher.

The report was immediately praised by organizations such as the Canadian Medical Association and the Heart and Stroke Foundation.

Source : www.edmontonsun.com

unhealthy trans fats consumed may link to heart disease risk

A new study finds unhealthy trans fats intakes on women may having great chances in the risk of heart disease three times as those with the lowest intake

“This study just reinforces the idea that trans fat is bad — worse than saturated fat — and we need to make a concerted effort to reduce trans fats, including individuals, food manufacturers and policy-makers,” said Dr. Frank Hu, senior author of the study and an associate professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.

Results of Hu’s study are expected to be published in the April 10 issue of the American Heart Association’s journal, Circulation.

Trans fats, also called hydrogenated fats, are man-made compounds made from processed liquid oils. These harmful fats will raise bad cholesterol and could lower a person’s good cholesterol levels. Because these fats are so thick and stiff, they can also clog up arteries and blood vessels, which can lead to heart attack or stroke.

Trans fats are commonly found in processed foods such as potato chips, cookies, doughnuts, cakes and many fast foods.

Previous research had already implicated dietary trans fat as a major player in the development of heart disease. However, past research had been done using self-reported dietary information. The current study includes an objective measure of trans fat intake — trans fat levels in red blood cells. Hu explained that because red blood cells live for six months or more, trans fat levels in those cells are a good indicator of average trans fat intake.

The Harvard team examined blood samples collected from almost 33,000 women participating in the ongoing Nurse’s Health Study. During the six-year study period, 166 women developed heart disease. The researchers then pulled information on 327 healthy women to serve as controls.

The women were grouped into four different quartiles based on the levels of trans fats in their blood.

The researchers found that women in the fourth quartile — those with the highest trans fat levels — had three times the risk of heart disease when compared to women with the lowest levels — those in the lowest quartile. Women in the second and third quartile had a 60 percent greater risk of heart disease.

Hu and his colleagues also estimated the average daily trans fat intake from the trans fat blood levels. Women in the lowest quartile were estimated to have an average daily trans fat intake of 2.5 grams, while women in the highest quartile were estimated to take in 3.6 grams per day intake of trans fats. Hu stressed that these averages should be considered rough estimates.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) estimates that the average American diet contains about 5.8 grams of trans fat daily. The American Heart Association advises that trans fat should make up no more than one percent of your daily caloric intake.

Although no men were included in this study, Hu said he believes the findings are also applicable to men.

“Trans fats are a dangerous and unnecessary component of our diet. When you look at data like this, it’s scary. Just a small change gives you a great increase in risk,” said Dr. Nieca Goldberg, medical director of the Women’s Health Program at New York University Medical Center and author of The Women’s Healthy Heart Program: Lifesaving Strategies for Preventing and Healing Heart Disease in Women.

“People really need to be aware of trans fat and take it out of their diets,” she said, adding that the FDA’s recent labeling change — introduced in January 2006 — makes it easier for people to know what’s in packaged foods. It’s still difficult to know what’s in restaurant or fast foods, however.

But Goldberg believes that a law recently passed in New York City to ban restaurants from serving foods containing trans fat after 2008 may “have a domino effect” across the country. However, until that law takes effect, she suggests avoiding fried foods and ordering fruit for dessert when eating out.

When buying packaged goods, look for foods that have no trans fat. However, under current rules, products with 0.5 grams or less trans fat can label their products as having zero grams of trans fat. That means if you have four foods with 0.5 grams of trans fat each, you’ve unwittingly eaten two grams of trans fat. Given that this study found that averaging just one extra gram daily can significantly increase your heart disease risk, Hu said the labeling is probably “something we should consider.”

In the meantime, if a product is labeled zero grams of trans fat, but the ingredient list includes “partially hydrogenated vegetable oil,” the food does contains some trans fat, Hu noted.

Source : www.forbes.com

Walking miracle after surgery

LAST week Sydney teenager Luke MacMahon was resigned to life in a wheelchair.

Diagnosed five years ago with dystonia - a rare neurological disorder that causes muscles to contract and spasm involuntarily - he had become trapped in a body over which he had little control.

Strangers would stare. Service staff frequently mistook him as intellectually impaired. But last Wednesday, within 48 hours of undergoing a radical new surgical procedure, Luke, 17, walked out of Royal North Shore Hospital and kept walking - for five hours.

“I walked and walked. I hopped on a train. I strolled through Chatswood Mall. I window-shopped while wondering, ‘Is this for real?’ ” he said. “I hadn’t walked properly in three years. Now suddenly I was able to do all the simple things people take for granted.”

Caught up in the moment, Luke didn’t consider his disappearance would trigger a man-hunt.

“I’d just had brain surgery and the nurses were naturally tearing their hair out by the time I finally arrived back,” he said. “I said, ‘I’m really sorry, but I’ve woken up to a miracle. My feet are working! I can walk!’ ”

Luke and his family gambled on deep brain stimulation, in which electrodes are attached to a pacemaker-type device implanted in the brain. More commonly used on Parkinson’s patients, the device delivers electrical impulses, affecting the brain signals that control muscle movement.

DBS costs up to $30,000 and is not subsidised by the Government. It is invasive and, as with any brain surgery, it carries enormous risk.

Dystonia denied Luke the pleasure of typical teenage activities such as playing football and using a computer.

“I couldn’t use crutches because my hands wouldn’t support them,” he said. “I used a stick but it would only get me across a classroom.

“I was offered the use of a wheelchair. It was only a matter of time before I needed one permanently. But I was too proud to say yes.”

When surgeons warned Luke - who aspires to be a lawyer - that his spine would soon start to buckle, his family knew they had to act.

“That was that. My family pulled together, took out loans and borrowed everything they could to make the operation happen,” he said.

Dystonia Australia spokeswoman Nicola Dawson said a plan for funding was before the NSW Government.

Knifeless Surgery for Kids

Kenny Tinsley and his mom love to play the board game Life, now that his own life isn’t in jeopardy. A year ago, Kenny had an excruciating headache that left him in a coma for three weeks. The cause? A tangle of blood vessels in his brain.

“They took him up for an MRI, and came back and told me he had a bleed on the brain,” says Kenny’s mother, Veronica. “[They said] it was quite serious, and that he might not make it through the night.”

Kenny’s brain malformation was so deep it was inoperable, so doctors suggested gamma knife treatment. The radiation treatment has been used on adults, but it’s brand new for kids.

“It’s a very easy treatment for the children. They don’t really experience any pain, any fear, any discomfort,” Amanda Yaun, M.D., a pediatric neurosurgeon at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, tells Ivanhoe.

While the patient lies still, 201 beams of gamma radiation connect on a target. They destroy the problem area without damaging surrounding healthy tissue.

Kenny was just the second patient to receive gamma knife treatment at Children’s National Medical Center.

“It’s hard to believe that one sweep of gamma knife will fix it, but if it does that really is a revolutionary way to get rid of it,” Kenny says. After the gamma knife treatment, he had some brain swelling. And unlike surgery, which immediately removes a tumor, it will take months or even years for doctors to know if the gamma knife worked on him. But it has a 90 percent success rate.

Adults aren’t sedated during the procedure, but children are. Side effects can include nausea and tiredness and doctors say if the first attempt at gamma knife isn’t fully successful, another procedure dramatically increases a child’s odds.

Kenny says, “I feel blessed. I feel lucky. I’m going to live my life to the fullest.” His doctors are optimistic, and now Kenny’s back to playing Life instead of fighting for it.

Source : www.wsiltv.com

The gamma knife may be key to stopping brain tumors

An arterio-venous malformation, or AVM, is an abnormal tangle of blood vessels in the brain. Some doctors describe an AVM as a short circuit. The blood going through this tangle does not get to the brain to deliver oxygen and nutrients to the affected area. An estimated 3 million people in the United States are born with a vascular malformation, 10 percent of which are AVMs.

Most patients will be unaware of the malformation, though some patients have seizures or persistent headaches. The blood vessels are weakened by the condition and can rupture. Bleeding in the brain is a very serious condition and may cause a stroke or even death. Each year, about 1 percent of people with an AVM will die.

There are not many treatments for AVMs. Doctors can prescribe medication to help some of the symptoms, like headache, back pain and seizures. Surgery is an option if the malformation is in a location suitable for surgery. Sometimes, the problem spot will be deep within the brain or next to an important area of the brain.

Surgeons may recommend focused irradiation therapy to treat hard-to-reach areas. The high dose of radiation damages the walls of the blood vessels making up the lesion. Over several months, the irradiated vessels gradually degenerate and eventually close, and hopefully the AVM will no longer be a problem.

Although the treatment has been used on adults for more than 20 years, it is a new treatment for children. The gamma knife has been used on more than 200,000 patients. The surgery is much safer than typical surgery and requires reduced hospital, quicker recovery and rehabilitation time.

No incision is required. It uses precisely targeted beams of radiation that converge on a single point to painlessly “cut” through brain tumors, blood vessel malformations, and other brain abnormalities. Patients have less discomfort and shorter recovery periods. The risk for infection, hemorrhage and reactions to anesthesia is minimal. Gamma radiation is focused on the tumor in 201 intense beams.

Depending on the size of the area being operated on, the surgery generally takes less than one hour. Because there are no moving parts, the rays destroy the problem area without damaging the surrounding healthy tissue. The procedure is covered by most insurance plans.

The gamma knife can be used on a variety of conditions:

Benign brain tumors
Malignant brain tumors
Metastatic brain tumors
Acoustic neuromas
Vascular malformations
Trigeminal neuralgia
Functional neurological disorders

Source : www.news8austin.com

Remove Coronary Blockages’ Surgery

Percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI) are performed more than 1 million times a year. Surgeons use the procedure to open blocked arteries and improve blood flow to the heart. However, new research reveals the procedure is no more effective than non-surgical medical interventions at preventing the deaths of people with heart disease.

When a patient has a blocked heart artery, doctors can remove the blockage using a catheter snaked to the heart through an artery in the arm or leg. A small balloon is inflated at the tip of the catheter, clearing the blockage and allowing blood to flow freely. Often, surgeons leave behind a stent, a small mesh tube, which supports the blood vessel like a lattice. The stent is often loaded with medications designed to prevent the formation of new blockages.

Researchers from Buffalo General Hospital/Kaleida Heath in Buffalo, N.Y., compared patients who received PCI plus optimal medical therapy to patients who received optimal medical therapy alone. Optimal medical therapy usually includes intensive treatments with medications like aspirin, statins, blood thinners, ACE inhibitors, beta-blockers and calcium channel blockers. Often, patients are guided through lifestyle changes, like quitting smoking and exercise programs.

After seven years, researchers report similar numbers of death, heart attack and stroke in both groups. The only benefit found in the PCI group was less angina, or chest pains.

Study authors conclude adding PCI to optimal medical therapy does not prevent further cardiovascular health problems.

Source : www.ivanhoe.com

Smaller chocolate bars healthy life

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) has said that smaller portions could be the key to a healthier lifestyle.

Smaller chocolate bars and crisp packets could help people to lose weight and curb the rising obesity levels of British consumers, according to the watchdog.

The packaging changes are one of four proposals being made by the agency as part of a new scheme to get adults and children across the UK living healthier lives.

Other suggestions include reformulating foods such as cakes, biscuits, butter, chocolate, cheese, pizza, crisps, soft drinks and breakfast cereals to make them less fatty.

A spokesman for the Medical Research Council said: ‘There is a real opportunity to improve the health of the nation, if we can develop an integrated approach to refine the nutrient content of food, together with changes in consumer purchasing habits.’

According to the FSA, smaller sized portions are often only available in supermarket multi-packs which was reducing consumer choice and encouraging people to eat more.

Meanwhile, chief executive of TGI Friday’s in the US Richard Snead has cut portion sizes at the restaurant chain claiming that ‘many consumers are tired of huge portions, especially on weeknights or at lunch when they do not want to indulge’.

Source : www.allaboutyou.comSmaller chocolate bars ‘key to healthy lifestyle’

Discover How Easily Soy Foods Fit into a Healthy

The Soyfoods Association of North America (SANA) announces its eleventh annual “Soyfoods Month” celebration throughout the month of April. Soyfoods Month 2007 activities will educate consumers about how easy soy foods are to find, prepare and incorporate into a healthy lifestyle and haute cuisine.

“Today, the average American is becoming more aware of the effects of diet on overall health, especially in light of recent studies about the obesity epidemic,” says Nancy Chapman, RD, MPH, Executive Director of SANA. “Soy foods are perfect to manage weight and boost health for children, teenagers, and adults. Soy foods are low in saturated fat, cholesterol-free, and packed with essential nutrients. Of all the beans found in nature, soy is the only one that has high quality protein equal to animal protein, a vital part of the nutrition equation and possibly weight control.”

Health Benefits of Soy Are For All

“These are exciting times for soy foods because breaking scientific developments bring us closer to better understanding the nutrition of soy foods,” said Ted Nordquist, SANA President. Research demonstrates that soy foods benefit people from ages one to one hundred. For lactose-intolerant and dairy sensitive children and adults, soymilk and cheeses, yogurt, and frozen desserts made from soymilk have become popular dairy substitutes. Soy nut butter is a great substitute for children and adults who have peanut allergies. For baby boomers and their parents, soy foods may increase the vitality of skin, hair, and nails as well as protect against heart disease and bone loss. Many women have found soy eases post-menopausal symptoms. Initial findings suggest soy foods may help prevent some types of cancer, especially when introduced during childhood or adolescence.

One of the most compelling reasons to include soy in your diet remains the FDA-approved health claim for soy protein, which states that “25 grams of soy protein a day as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol may reduce the risk of heart disease.” Several recently released studies confirm the well-known heart health benefits of soy foods in any form. Dr. Walter Willett from Harvard University and co-investigators found that both soy nuts and processed soy-protein products, as part of a low saturated, low cholesterol diet, lowered LDL-cholesterol levels 10-14%.

Now That I Want It, Where Do I Get It?

News of soy’s health benefits has increased the demand for soy foods. In the past 15 years, soy sales have climbed from $300 million in 1992 to $4 billion in 2006, according to the latest market statistics from Soyatech. The number of products containing soy has also grown significantly from the hundreds just ten years ago to well close to 3,000 today. From 2000 to 2006, food manufacturers in the U.S. introduced over 2,500 new foods with soy as an ingredient, including 479 new products introduced in 2006 alone, according to the Mintel’s Global New Products Database. Mintel indications from the partial year 2006 data are that overall soy product launches will rebound strongly in the coming year.

As a result of increasing demand and production, consumers can now find soy products in ninety-nine percent of mainstream supermarkets and buying clubs as well as the natural food stores and Asian food markets. Soy foods are often next to the products they resemble (such as soymilk in the dairy case) as well as in the natural and health sections of supermarkets. The refrigerator case also includes soy-based cheeses, yogurts, tofu, nondairy cream cheese, and soy deli meats. In some stores, these foods are also near the produce section. The freezer section contains dairy-free frozen soy desserts, meat alternatives, edamame, as well as tempeh and miso. Next to peanut butter is soy nut butter and along with other cereals are those with added soy. Among snacks are roasted soy nuts, soy chips, soy crisps, soy bars, and soy trail mix. The baking section stocks soy flour, soy or vegetable oil, soy brownie and biscuit mixes. Soymilk in the TetraPak box is available in many sections, including the Natural Food Section, the International Foods Section, and the Baking Section.

Source : http://sev.prnewswire.com