The UN’s health agency said on Tuesday it has confirmed 10 polio cases in northeast Syria, the first confirmed outbreak of the diseases in the country in 14 years, with a risk of spreading across the region.

 Officials are awaiting lab results on another 12 cases showing polio symptoms, said World Health Organization spokesman Oliver Rosenbauer.

Rosenbauer said the confirmed cases are among babies and toddlers, all under 2, who were “under immunized”.

The polio virus, a highly contagious disease, usually infects children in unsanitary conditions through the consumption of food or liquid contaminated with feces. It attacks the nerves and can kill or paralyze, and can spread widely and unnoticed before it starts crippling children.

“This is a communicable disease — with population movements it can travel to other areas,” said Rosenbauer. “So the risk is high of spread across the region.”

Syria had launched a vaccination campaign around the country days after the Geneva-based WHO said it had received reports of children showing symptoms of polio in Syria’s Deir el-Zour province, but the campaign faces difficulty with lack of access in many parts of the war-torn country.

Nearly all Syrian children were vaccinated against the disease before the civil war began more than 2 years ago. Polio was last reported in Syria in 1999.

The Syrian conflict, which began as a largely peaceful uprising against President Bashar Assad in March 2011, has triggered a humanitarian crisis on a massive scale, killing more than 100,000 people, driving nearly 7 million more from their homes and devastating cities and towns.

UN officials have warned of the spread of disease in Syria because of lack of access to basic hygiene and vaccinations.

Source: http://bit.ly/1hpRza0

A federal judge has declared that recently passed Texas abortion restrictions, which are some of the strictest in the country, are unconstitutional, and the Associated Press reports.

The judge has blocked enforcement of the laws, which were passed in July despite the efforts of State Sen. Wendy Davis (D) and her epic 13-hour filibuster.

The bill was revived weeks after Davis’ filibuster and approved by the Texas Senate.

The bill would have banned most abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy while creating new regulations for abortion clinics and doctors. Critics of the bill said it would have shut most abortion clinics in Texas. Supporters said it would have improved women’s health.

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It stands to reason that just as adult males compete for survival and preferred mates, females will, too. But the evolutionary significance of female competition and aggression has been largely overlooked by the scientific world, according to a new study published by The Royal Society.

In a collection of papers across a range of disciplines, the latest issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, compiled and edited by Anne Campbell and Paula Stockley, explores how and why females compete.

The papers suggest that female competition may be more subtle than that of males, and has therefore been largely overlooked by researchers focusing on males’ “conspicuous competitive attributes.”

And while women appear to favor strategies that reduce the risk of physical harm, the importance of their competitiveness should not be underestimated.

Competing for men

The themed issue explains that as a general rule, competition between young women is “about men and the resources they can provide” and suggests that as a consequence of this, “it is perhaps unsurprising that women compete about the qualities that are highly valued by men: youth and attractiveness.”

Campbell and Stockley explain that other papers in the issue show:

Campbell says that women in Western societies may behave differently to perceived threats or competition, depending on where they live. While indirect aggression is the most common, “ecological factors in inner city areas may conspire to escalate levels of competition to physical confrontations.”

She continues: “Levels of endemic poverty combined with an unfavorable sex ratio and high variance in male income puts a premium on well-resourced men, increasing competition for even short-lived relationships with them.”

Living in a society and sharing resources greatly enhances a woman’s chances of raising children, but it clearly marks who we view as competitors and who as friends, Joyce Benenson explains in her paper published in the issue.

And, in inner city gangs, the concept of friend or foe can lead to tension when new girls arrive. Established friends may use “coalitionary agression” against newcomers, as Campbell points out:

“Aware of men’s taste for novelty, gang girls are extremely sensitive to the arrival of new girls in the neighborhood. This can lead to group-level attacks on girls they perceive as ‘stealing’ their men.”

The devastating power of words

Threats and fear of isolation are powerful weapons in situations involving competition or aggression. Girls and women who fail to modify their behavior to fit the norm face social exclusion and loss of friendships rather than physical violence.

Indirect aggression uses minimal energy and usually provides the least risk of injury. But its power to harm is still considerable – pejorative gossip coming from many members of a group protects the majority but can be devastating to the individual – sometimes leading to depression or even suicide.

Medical News Today reported on a study about the importance of successful social contact earlier this year. Researchers from University College London argued that unsatisfactory human contact could result in premature death.

Michael Cant and Andrew Young argue in their paper, Resolving social conflict among females without overt aggression, that women are more susceptible to peer pressure than men and are more sensitive to punishment. And while women have enhanced social skills, performing better in tests of mind reading and empathy, these leave them more vulnerable to subtle threats of rejection.

Fear and anger play a big part in deciding whether or not to engage in physical violence, says Campbell.

“While sex differences are not found for anger, they are consistently present for fear, and women’s higher levels of fear may be an adaptation to ensure their survival on which their children’s lives depend.”

The studies conclude that intrasexual (same gender) competition is linked to social behavior.

They explain that their aim is “to promote interdisciplinary exchange, thereby generating new synergy and ideas for future research on female competition and sex differences in behavior.”

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Food produced for domestic pets and other animals will have to follow strict new standards under a proposed rule issued Friday by the Food and Drug Administration.

The new regulation, part of the FDA’s Food Safety Modernization Act, would require for the first time that companies that make pet food and animal feed follow good manufacturing practices that encompass basic issues such as sanitation and hazard analysis.

“We have been pushing feed safety for a number of years,” said Daniel McChesney, director of the office of surveillance and compliance at the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine. “It’s not, ‘Oh, we’re just making food for animals.’ They’re the first part of the food chain. We’re a part of the overall food industry.”

The new rules will be open for public comment for 120 days, and would be adopted as law within 60 days after the comment period closes.

They would apply to all domestic and imported animal food, including pet food, pet treats, animal feed, and the raw ingredients that make those products.

That means, for instance, that the producers of chicken, corn and sweet potato jerky treats made in China and blamed for the deaths of 600 pets and illnesses in about 3,600, will have to meet strict new requirements before their products can be sold, officials said.

FDA has always had rules in place that prohibit adulterants in pet food. That’s why the agency has issued company-initiated recalls for salmonella-tainted bird food, for instance, or dog food contaminated with aflatoxin, a naturally occurring mold by-product.

But, until now, there’s been no requirement that companies analyze the potential food safety hazards of their products or that they follow current good manufacturing practices, or CGMPs, that specifically address animal food.

“We’re not starting completely from scratch,” said Michael Taylor, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for Foods and Veterinary Medicine. “What’s important is that FDA take a comprehensive approach to food safety that covers the food supply comprehensively.”

The challenge for firms that produce animal foods and pet products will be in meeting the deadlines for compliance, McChesney said. Times will vary according to the size of an operation, with small and very small businesses being allowed more leeway.

The FDA will hold three public meetings in November and December to seek input on the proposed rule.

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The world has eradicated just one human disease: smallpox. But another illness is getting tantalizingly close to elimination.

No, we’re not talking about polio; that virus also has its back against a wall. But a report Thursday puts a parasitic worm ahead of polio in the race to extinction.

The world recorded just 89 cases of Guinea worm in the first six months of 2013, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in the journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. That’s a 77 percent reduction in cases over the same period last year.

In contrast, more than 300 polio cases have occurredso far in 2013, compared with just 223 reported in all of 2012.

Guinea worm gets little attention in the media, perhaps because of its stomach-churning life cycle. The parasite grows up to 3 feet inside a person’s tissues and then emerges from a painful wound in the skin. The worm isn’t deadly, but it cripples a person for several weeks while the worm emerges.

The disease is also known as dracunculiasis, or “affliction with little dragons,” because the worm feels like hot coals as it exits from the skin.

Back in 1986, more than 3.5 million people got infected with Guinea worm each year. A campaign led by The Carter Center has slashed the number of cases in the past decade. There were only about 1,000 cases recorded worldwide in 2011, and 542 cases in 2012.

If 2013 follows the trend, then the prevalence of the disease will reach an all-time low.

The worm is now endemic in just four countries: Chad, Ethiopia, Mali and South Sudan. The vast majority of cases occur in South Sudan, and that country has made the most progress in eradicating the Guinea worm in the past several years.

South Sudan has reported an 80 percent reduction in cases so far in 2013 compared with 2012, despite a slew of challenges for health workers. A key bridge collapsed on the only road to a part of the country, slowing transportation of vital supplies. Cattle raiding caused populations to move around unpredictably, the CDC’s Dr. Sharon Roy and her colleagues wrote in the report.

The biggest challenges, however, to eradicating the parasite are probably in Mali. The country has reported just one case of Guinea worm in 2013. But violence after a coup d’etat has kept health workers out of some parts of Mail since April 2012, Roy and her colleagues write.

People get infected with dracunculiasis through contaminated drinking water. So teaching people to filter water and installing wells have been two key methods to reduce new infections.

If local health workers can’t reach people because of violence, then just one infection could quickly spread through drinking water and multiply into 50 to 100 cases.

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London may be famed for its historic sites, double-decker buses and West End shows, but it now has a more dubious distinction: It has become the tuberculosis capital of Western Europe.

In response, health officials are taking to the streets in an effort to stop the spread of the infectious lung disease, with a high-tech white van equipped with an X-ray machine that drives around London offering free check-ups. Similar vans were once commonly used in Europe and the US in the 1950s but most disappeared about two decades later when TB rates dropped. But in recent years, the disease has surged in the UK.

Last year, London had more TB cases than the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece and Norway combined. It also had more TB than African countries including Eritrea and Gambia.

“We kind of took our eye off the ball and now TB has become a big problem again,” said Dr. Alistair Story, who runs the mobile TB van for University College London Hospitals. He said the vast majority of TB in the UK is among the homeless, drug users and prisoners because they live in cramped, close conditions, which makes them susceptible to infections. Despite the belief that TB is being imported into the UK by recent immigrants, Dr Story said their rates of infection are low.

“It’s certainly not the case that we could have closed the borders and avoided the problem,” he said, pointing out that other European countries with high levels of immigration, including France and Germany, have not had similar spikes of TB. Last year, London had about 3,500 TB cases.

Tuberculosis is a highly infectious bacterial disease often spread by coughing or sneezing and kills more than 1 million people worldwide every year. It most often attacks the lungs and is highly treatable. More than 95 per cent of TB deaths occur in developing countries and experts are increasingly concerned about the rise of drug-resistant strains, which require more toxic drugs to treat.

London’s Dh2.8 million (UK pound 460,000) TB van has an X-ray machine whose scans can be instantly read by a radiographer. On average, the van picks up about one new TB case per week and screens about 10,000 people a year. If an X-ray looks worrying, staffers call a hospital to arrange confirmatory tests. The entire process of getting an X-ray and its results takes about 90 seconds.

On a recent weekday morning, a steady trickle of patients streamed into the van after getting a ticket for a free X-ray from a nearby homeless shelter. To convince homeless people to get tested, the van relies on former TB patients including Horace Reid. In 2009, Reid got tested on the van after he and several friends ran to catch a bus.

“I didn’t know anything was wrong until I missed the bus and couldn’t breathe,” he said. “(The doctors) told me I had TB and that I could die,” he said. Reid, 58, eventually recovered and now tries to convince skeptics to get an X-ray.

Dr. Norman Edelman, senior medical adviser at the American Lung Foundation, said the van is a practical attempt to curb TB.

“The people most likely to get TB are the hardest to find, so it’s good to go out looking for them,” he said.

Danny Hastie, 20, said despite getting sick numerous times last year, he didn’t bother seeing a doctor. Hastie was recently in prison and has been living on the streets for more than a year.

“I heard about this van and thought I would give it a go,” he said. “It’s (scary) at first because you’re thinking, ‘oh, I might have a chest infection,’ but when they say that you’re clear, it puts your mind at rest.”

British experts said the van was a good way of finding cases of TB among the homeless but said wider screening tests were needed to tackle the problem.

Dr. Ajit Lalvani, chair of infectious diseases at Imperial College London, said 70 per cent of people with latent TB who arrive in Britain are missed. They aren’t currently infectious, but Lalvani said the TB bacteria could sicken them in the future and cause them to infect others. Catching these patients would require a more expensive blood or skin test that isn’t commonly used.

“There is a vast reservoir of TB that comes into this country silently,” he said. “The mobile van is providing a great service, but until we test more widely, we will never get rid of TB in the UK.”

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Vision researchers and eye care professionals are working on defining and managing the causes of contact lens discomfort (CLD) which is the leading cause of patient dissatisfaction with, and discontinuation of, contact lens wear throughout the world.

Jason J. Nichols, OD, MPH, PhD, Professor at the University Of Houston College Of Optometry, said up to half of all contact lens wearers experience CLD, but, there is no global consensus concerning the definition, classification, epidemiology, pathophysiology, diagnosis, management and the proper design of clinical studies for CLD.

To lay the groundwork for defining and treating this widespread issue, the Tear Film and Ocular Surface Society organized the TFOS International Workshop on Contact Lens Discomfort (CLD), which was chaired by Nichols.

The CLD Workshop took 18 months to complete and involved 79 experts from around the world.

“Workshop participants used an evidence-based approach and a process of open communication, dialogue, and transparency in order to achieve a global consensus concerning multiple aspects of CLD,” Mark Willcox from School of Optometry and Vision Science, University of New South Wales, said.

Meanwhile, David A. Sullivan, organizer of the TFOS CLD Workshop, said that this TFOS report will significantly increase awareness of factors that may, and may not, contribute to the generation of CLD. Ideally, this TFOS report will stimulate innovative research in this very important field.

The study is published in journal Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science.

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A Taliban ban on vaccination is exacerbating a serious polio outbreak in Pakistan, threatening to derail dramatic progress made this year towards wiping out the disease worldwide, health officials say.

Health teams in Pakistan have been attacked repeatedly since the Taliban denounced vaccines as a Western plot to sterilise Muslims and imposed bans on inoculation in June 2012.

In North Waziristan, a region near the Afghan border that has been cordoned off by the Taliban, dozens of children, many under the age of two, have been crippled by the viral disease in the past six months.

And there is evidence in tests conducted on sewage samples in some of the country’s major cities that the polio virus is starting to spread beyond these isolated pockets and could soon spark fresh polio outbreaks in more densely populated areas.

“We have entered a phase that we were all worried about and were afraid might happen,” Elias Durry, head of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) in Pakistan, told Reuters in a telephone interview.

“The risk is that as long as the virus is still circulating, and as long as we have no means of reaching these children and immunising them to interrupt virus transmission, it could jeopardise everything that has been done so far – not only in Pakistan, but also in the region and around the globe.”

CORNERING THE VIRUS

Polio is a highly infectious disease that invades the nervous system and can cause irreversible paralysis in a matter of hours. A $5.5 billion global eradication plan was launched in April with the aim of vaccinating 250 million children multiple times each year to stop the virus finding new footholds, and stepping up surveillance in more than 70 countries.

The virus has been cornered to just a handful of areas in Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the three countries where polio is endemic. Global cases have dropped by more than 99.9 percent in less than three decades, from 350,000 in 1985 to just 223 last year, according to the GPEI.

But so far in 2013, there have already been 296 cases worldwide. Forty-three were in Pakistan, the vast majority in children in the semi-autonomous Pashtun lands along the Afghan border known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), which include North Waziristan.

Accusations that immunisation campaigns are cover for spies were given credence when it emerged that the United States had used a Pakistani vaccination team to gather intelligence about al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who was found and killed by U.S. special forces in Pakistan in 2011.

The Taliban ban, and associated security threats, mean the polio virus could easily escape and spread back into previously cleared areas.

Tariq Bhutta of the Pakistan Paediatric Association said there was little prospect that the militant Islamist group would change its stance. He said attacks on health teams attempting to reach children to immunise them were becoming both more frequent and more violent.

“The vaccination teams are still going out, but at risk to their lives,” he told Reuters. “People can come up on motorbikes and shoot them, and they’ve also started attacking the police put there to protect the vaccination teams.”

A Taliban bomb that exploded earlier this month near a polio vaccination team in the northwestern city of Peshawar killed two people and appeared to target police assigned to protect the health workers.

“This will only be solved if the polio teams can get access to those children – either inside FATA, or when the children move out into other areas,” Bhutta said. “Without that I don’t see how things can improve. Rather I think things might get more serious when the polio virus gets out into settled areas.”

The GPEI says the FATA is the area with the largest number of children being paralysed by wild poliovirus in all of Asia.

Four polio cases in children in Pakistan were reported in the last week. Because the virus spreads from person to person, the World Health Organization says as long as any child remains infected, children everywhere are at risk.

Source: Reuters.com

Fewer than one in 10 people hospitalized for an unexplained nosebleed requires invasive treatment to stop the bleeding, a review of nationwide data has found.
About 38 percent of people with nosebleeds so bad they are admitted to the hospital wind up having their nosebleed resolved with little or no treatment, according to the study published online Oct. 17 in the journal JAMA Otolaryngology — Head & Neck Surgery.
Clinicians successfully treated another 53 percent of nosebleed patients either by stuffing the nose with cotton or by cauterizing a broken blood vessel using heat, electricity or chemicals.
Only about 8 percent of hospitalized nosebleed patients needed treatment through surgery or by embolization, a process in which doctors seal off the bleeding vessel from within, the researchers found.
The small minority of patients who needed invasive treatment faced increased risk and expense, the data showed. For example, the odds of patients suffering a strokefollowing embolization were significantly higher than in patients who were treated by packing their nose with cotton.
Study co-author Dr. Jennifer Villwock said the results show why doctors like to proceed slowly when treating a bad nosebleed, giving the more conservative options a chance before opting for more invasive treatments.
“Sometimes it seems like we are putting patients through a lot, but we are doing it with their best interests in mind because the more invasive treatments are not without risk,” said Villwock, an otolaryngologist with the State University of New York-Upstate Medical University, in Syracuse. “If we can get it stopped at the bedside, that’s going to be best for all involved, but that can seem frustrating when your nose has been bleeding for hours.”
Three of every five people will suffer a nosebleed — also known by the medical term epistaxis — in their lifetime, Villwock said.
The nose contains many small blood vessels, and these can be ruptured easily, she said. Just the act of breathing can dry out and irritate the lining of the nose, particularly in low humidity or if a person is suffering from a cold or allergies.
Seasonal changes can also have an impact, an expert explained.
“This is the beginning of nosebleed season, as the weather gets cold and the heated air is on in most people’s houses,” said Dr. Lisa Liberatore, an ear, nose and throat specialist at the New York Head & Neck Institute at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. “We’re going to see several patients a day, and I’m sure the emergency room is going to get their fair share of nosebleeds.”
People also can suffer nosebleeds if they have taken a blow to the nose, are on a blood-thinning medication or have a cancerous lesion in their nose

Read More at http://www.webmd.com

Wireless medical devices are potentially vulnerable to being remotely controlled by hackers and should be tracked more closely, according to a Government Accountability Office report.

The investigation into electronic medical-device safety was initiated after computer-security researchers found dangerous vulnerabilities in insulin pumps. Diabetics rely on the pumps, which are worn next to the skin, to dispense insulin, a life- saving hormone.

Even the human body is vulnerable to attack from computer hackers,” Representative Anna Eshoo, a Democrat from California, said in a statement on her website. “Implantable medical devices have resulted in tremendous medical benefits for the patients who use them, but the demonstrated security risks require a renewed emphasis by the FDA and manufacturers to identify, evaluate and plug the potentially rare but serious security holes that exist in these devices.”

Eshoo, along with Democratic Representatives Edward Markey and Donna Edwards, had asked last year for the GAO report, which called on the Food and Drug Administration to oversee better identification and investigation of security problems in electronic medical equipment such as insulin pumps, pacemakers and defibrillators.

Remote Control

Computer-security researcher Jay Radcliffe, a diabetic who found dangerous vulnerabilities in his own insulin pump, and another Barnaby Jack, who worked separately as a professional hacker for McAfee, both demonstrated ways to manipulate the wireless capabilities on devices made by Minneapolis-based Medtronic Inc. (MDT) to remotely take over the pumps and dispense fatal doses of insulin.

Congress members called for the GAO investigation following a report by the Associated Press on Radcliffe’s research, which he presented at a security conference in Las Vegas. More vulnerability were later uncovered by Jack, Bloomberg.com reported on its Tech Blog.

Earlier research bolstered their claims. A 2008 study from a consortium of academics found that a popular pacemaker- defibrillator could be reprogrammed to deliver deadly shocks.

A key issue is that the FDA has not evaluated risks from hacking attacks as part of its screening of new devices until recently, the GAO report said.

“The FDA’s focus has always been on the safety of medical devices, rather than the security of these devices,” Jack wrote in an e-mail. “They simply don’t have the expertise on staff to conduct a worthwhile security audit for every device that requires their approval.”

Security Risks

The FDA said breaches involving medical devices are not currently a widespread issue. The agency has taken steps to improve screening for security risks and agrees with the GAO that more efforts are necessary, it said in a statement today.

“FDA shares the concern over the security and privacy of medical devices, and emphasizes security as a key element in device design,” the agency said. “Any system with wireless communication can be subject to interception of data and compromised privacy as well as interference with performance that can compromise the safety and effectiveness of the device.”

Although medical-device manufacturers are becoming more aware of security risks affecting their products, they have been reluctant to spend the time and money fixing issues that in some cases have a low likelihood of happening outside of research labs, according to Radcliffe.

“I can very much sympathize with the manufacturers’ concerns,” Radcliffe said in an interview today. “When you’re dealing with this much vagueness, and you’re dealing with a security vulnerability where the risk is really, really low, you go to the FDA and say you want to change this device and it could be $500,000 and four years of time. In some cases, smaller manufacturers could go out of business.”

The recommendations, he said, should help create a shorter process “that all manufacturers can count on.”

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-27/medical-devices-vulnerable-to-hacks-need-oversight-report-says.html