10 infants die in Andhra hospital |  |
- 10 infants die in Andhra hospital
- Treat poor free, apex court tells 10 Delhi hospitals
- More than half of Jharkhand's kids underweight, women anaemic
- Sex hormones impact career choices
- Faster progress through puberty linked to behavior problems
- Hubble movies reveal solar-system-sized traffic jams
- Signs of aging may be linked to undetected blocked brain blood vessels
- Study shows World Trade Center-exposed NYC firefighters are 19% more likely to have cancer than
| 10 infants die in Andhra hospital Posted: 02 Sep 2011 12:40 PM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Hyderabad, Sep 2 - Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Kiran Kumar Reddy Friday ordered a probe into the deaths of 11 infants in two days at a government-run hospital, allegedly due to clinical negligence. He asked two ministers from Kurnool district to visit the Government General Hospital and take necessary action. Seven babies died at the hospital Thursday, a day after four infants lost their lives, allegedly due to a defective oxygen supply system. All the babies were one to five days old. The parents of the babies alleged that they died due to lack of oxygen supply through the ventilators. A pipeline that supplies oxygen to the neonatal ward was allegedly not working properly because of the negligence of hospital authorities. Health Minister D.L. Ravindra Reddy said a team of officials and experts had been sent to Kurnool to ascertain the facts. He said action would be taken against the concerned officials if any lapses were found. The hospital officials termed the deaths as 'routine'. Denying any negligence, they claimed that infants died due to post-natal complications. According to them, every day six to 10 newborn babies die at the hospital due to health complications. http://www.rxpgnews.com    |
| Treat poor free, apex court tells 10 Delhi hospitals Posted: 01 Sep 2011 07:23 PM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) New Delhi, Sep 1 - The Supreme Court Thursday directed 10 multi-specialty private hospitals in the national capital to provide free treatment to poor patients and recover the cost from sponsorship and endowments. An apex court bench of Justice R.V. Raveendran and Justice A.K. Patnaik said the hospitals will provide free treatment to poor patients -- 25 percent of Out Patient Department patients and 10 percent of the indoor category. The order is applicable to 10 hospitals which have been allotted land by the Delhi government at concessional rates. The court direction came after it dismissed petitions by these 10 hospitals challenging the Delhi High Court verdict of March 2007 directing them to provide free treatment to the poor. Advocate Ashok Agarwal, representing NGO Social Jurist, said that for a 'walk-in and walk-out' free treatment, a patient had to show that his or her total monthly family income did not exceed Rs.6,422 - the minimum wage for an unskilled worker in the city. He said that the apex court decision for providing free treatment to poor patients would benefit all people in Delhi irrespective of the state they hail from. Agarwal referred to the observation of the court which wondered why this facility should not be extended even to foreign nationals residing in Delhi, if they satisfied the economic criterion, for getting free treatment. The petitioner initially pleaded for 40 hospitals in the city to be covered under the scheme for giving free treatment to the poor. Three hospitals contended that they could not be covered under the court's direction as they were not allotted land for their hospitals at concessional rates. Of the remaining 37 hospitals, 27 institutions were providing free treatment in accordance with the high court's verdict of 2007. But 10 hospitals challenged the verdict before the apex court http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| More than half of Jharkhand's kids underweight, women anaemic Posted: 01 Sep 2011 07:18 PM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Ranchi, Sep 1 - Around 55 percent of children under three years in Jharkhand are underweight and 70 percent of women and adolescent girls anaemic, Unicef says. Job Zachariah, Jharkhand chief of Unicef, said here Thursday: 'Around 55 percent children of below three are underweight against the national average of around 40. In addition, more than 80 percent of children between six and 35 months and about 70 percent of women and adolescent girls in Jharkhand are anaemic.' He further said: 'Around 50,000 children below five years die every year in the state. Out of this, at least 25,000 deaths are indirectly caused by malnutrition and, therefore, can be prevented.' Zachariah was speaking here at the inauguration of the National Nutrition Week which is being observed Sep 1-7. All the 60,000 'anganwadis' - in the state will initiate 'annaprasan' - for children who have completed six months. A statewide awareness campaign will also be organised. 'Under-nutrition among children could be reduced by improving breastfeeding, strengthening immunisation, preventing child marriage -, and ensuring better hygiene and clean drinking water.' Jharkhand Social Welfare Minister Vimla Pradhan said: 'The issue of malnutrition needs to be tackled at the community and family levels, using easily available remedies.' She also stressed the need to use the local language in awareness campaigns. http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| Sex hormones impact career choices Posted: 01 Sep 2011 05:00 AM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Teacher, pilot, nurse or engineer? Sex hormones strongly influence people's interests, which affect the kinds of occupations they choose, according to psychologists. Our results provide strong support for hormonal influences on interest in occupations characterized by working with things versus people, said Adriene M. Beltz, graduate student in psychology, working with Sheri A. Berenbaum, professor of psychology and pediatrics, Penn State. Berenbaum and her team looked at people's interest in occupations that exhibit sex differences in the general population and are relevant to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) careers. The researchers studied teenagers and young adults with congenital adrenal hyperplasia -- a genetic condition -- and their siblings who do not have CAH. People with CAH are exposed to more androgen -- a type of male sex hormone -- than is normal while in the uterus. Females with CAH are genetically female and are treated as females, but their interests tend to be more similar to stereotypically male ones. The researchers report in the current issue of Hormones and Behavior that females with CAH were significantly more interested than females without CAH in careers related to things compared to careers related to people. The researchers also found that career interests directly corresponded to the amount of androgen exposure the females with CAH experienced -- those exposed to the most androgen in the uterus showed the most interest in things versus people. We took advantage of a natural experiment, said Berenbaum. We're suggesting that these interests are pretty early developing. Females without CAH had less interest than males in occupations related to things, such as engineer or surgeon, and more interest in careers focused on interacting with people, such as social worker or teacher. There was no significant difference reported between males with CAH and males without the... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| Faster progress through puberty linked to behavior problems Posted: 01 Sep 2011 05:00 AM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Children who go through puberty at a faster rate are more likely to act out and to suffer from anxiety and depression, according to a study by researchers at Penn State, Duke University and the University of California, Davis. The results suggest that primary care providers, teachers and parents should look not only at the timing of puberty in relation to kids' behavior problems, but also at the tempo of puberty -- how fast or slow kids go through puberty. Past work has examined the timing of puberty and shown the negative consequences of entering puberty at an early age, but there has been little work done to investigate the effects of tempo, said Kristine Marceau, a Penn State graduate student and the study's primary author. By using a novel statistical tool to simultaneously model the timing and tempo of puberty in children, we present a much more comprehensive picture of what happens during adolescence and why behavior problems may ensue as a result of going through these changes. The team -- led by Elizabeth Susman, the Jean Phillips Shibley Professor of Biobehavioral Health at Penn State -- created a unique nonlinear mixed-effects model that incorporated data from 364 white boys and 373 white girls that had been collected as part of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, which had an initial goal of determining how variations in the environment are related to children's development. The data included information about breast and pubic hair development in girls and genital and pubic hair development in boys as assessed by nurses, as well as weight and height for both boys and girls. The data also included information on internalizing and externalizing behavior problems as reported by boys' and girls' parents or other caregivers, and risky sexual behaviors as reported by the kids themselves. We found that earlier timing for girls was related to a slew... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| Hubble movies reveal solar-system-sized traffic jams Posted: 01 Sep 2011 05:00 AM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) When it comes to big-budget action movies, Rice University astronomer Patrick Hartigan prefers Hubble to Hollywood. Using Hubble Space Telescope images collected over 14 years, Hartigan has created time-lapse movies that offer astronomers their first glimpse of the dynamic behavior of stellar jets, huge torrents of gas and particles that spew from the poles of newborn stars. An analysis of the movies that was published in The Astrophysical Journal is forcing astronomers to rethink some of the processes that occur during the latter stages of star birth. And in an effort to learn even more, Hartigan and colleagues are using powerful lasers to recreate a small-scale version of the solar-system-sized jets in a lab in upstate New York. The Hubble's given us spectacular images, said Hartigan, professor of physics and astronomy at Rice. In the nebulae where stars are born, for instance, we can see beautiful filaments and detailed structure. We know these images are frozen snapshots in time, but we would need to watch for hundreds of thousands of years to see how things actually play out. Hartigan said stellar jets are different because they move very quickly. Stellar jets blast out into space from the poles of newly formed stars at about 600,000 miles an hour. Astronomers first noticed them about 50 years ago, and they believe the sun probably had stellar jets when it formed about 4.5 billion years ago. Hartigan began using Hubble to collect still frames of stellar jets in 1994. The jets emerge from each pole of a young star, and Hartigan used Hubble to revisit the jets from three stars in 1994, 1998 and 2008. All three stars are about 1,350 light years from Earth. Two are near the Orion Nebula, and the third is in the southern sky in the constellation Vela. By lacing the images together and using a computer to fill in what occurred between still frames, Hartigan and his collaborators created time-lapse movies. The movies clearly... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| Signs of aging may be linked to undetected blocked brain blood vessels Posted: 01 Sep 2011 05:00 AM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Many common signs of aging, such as shaking hands, stooped posture and walking slower, may be due to tiny blocked vessels in the brain that can't be detected by current technology. "This is very surprising," said Aron S. Buchman, M.D., lead author of the study and associate professor of neurological sciences at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. "There is a very big public health consequence because we're not capturing this 30 percent who have undiagnosed small vessel disease that is not picked up by current technology. How would you even get them on your radar? We need additional tools in our toolkit." In 1994, the researchers began conducting annual exams of 1,100 older nuns and priests for signs of aging. The participants also donated their brains for examination after death. This study provides results on the first 418 brain autopsies (61 percent women, average 88 years old at death). Although Parkinson's disease occurs in only 5 percent of older people, at least half of people 85 and older have mild symptoms associated with the disease. Before the study, researchers believed that something more common, such as microscopic blocked vessels, might be causing the physical decline. The study's autopsies found the small lesions could only be seen under a microscope after participants died. The lesions couldn't be detected by current scans. During the annual exams of the nuns and priests, researchers used the motor skills portion of a Parkinson's disease survey to assess their physical abilities. "Often the mild motor symptoms are considered an expected part of aging," said Buchman, who is also a member of the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center. "We shouldn't accept this as normal aging. We should try to fix it and understand it. If there is an underlying cause, we can intervene and perhaps lessen the impact." http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| Study shows World Trade Center-exposed NYC firefighters are 19% more likely to have cancer than Posted: 01 Sep 2011 05:00 AM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) A study published in this week's 9/11 Special Issue of The Lancet shows that a higher proportion of World Trade Center-exposed New York City male fighters have been diagnosed with cancer compared to both their non-exposed colleagues and a comparable sample of the New York City general population. 263 cases of cancer occurred compared with 238 expected from the general population data. In the non-exposed group, 135 cancers were diagnosed compared with 161 expected from the general population. The findings are reported in an Article by Dr. David J. Prezant, Chief Medical Officer, Fire Department of the City of New York (FDNY), USA, colleagues from FDNY and Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx, NY, USA. The study involved 9853 male firefighters, all of whom had health records dating back to well before 9/11. The authors looked at cancer incidence and its potential association with exposure in the first 7 years after 9/11. They compared the cancer incidence rates in WTC-exposed firefighters with cancer incidence in non-exposed firefighters, adjusted for age, race and ethnic origin, and secular trends, and with the US National Cancer Institute Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) reference population. The authors excluded data from 576 firefighters out of the 10000+ original study population who would have been aged 60 years or older on September 11, 2001, because their small number could have generated statistically unstable age-adjusted rates. For the same reasons, they excluded data from 32 women, 13 Asians, and 8 Native Americans. Finally, they excluded 85 individuals who had a cancer diagnosis before 1996*,resulting in a final cohort of 9853 non-Hispanic white (94%), non-Hispanic black (3%), and Hispanic (3%) male firefighters, who had a mean age of 44 years on 11 September 2001. In the WTC-exposed group, 263 cases of cancer occurred compared with 238... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
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