United States

Mother has Christmas wishes for family after her 2 years death

The wife and mother of four wanted three requests fulfilled when her husband found a life partner.

This holiday season, a local radio station has helped carry out the final wishes of a wife and mother of four in Des Moines, Iowa, who passed away two years ago at 46, CNN and the Des Moines Register report.

When Brenda Schmitz was dying of stage 4 ovarian cancer, she addressed a letter to Star 102.5 FM’s Christmas Wish program in August 2011 and instructed an anonymous friend to give it to the station only when her husband, David, found a new wife who would help raise their four sons.

A few months ago, David asked Jayne Abraham to marry him. A week-and-a-half ago, the station received the letter, and on Dec. 19, host Colleen Kelly broadcasted Schmitz’s three requests: a spa day for David’s fiancé, a “magical trip” for the whole family, and a night out “full of drinks, food and fun” for the nurses and doctors who took care of Brenda and all of the other cancer patients at Mercy Medical Center. Full text of the letter is embedded on the Des Moines Register‘s website as well.

Star 102.5 FM and local businesses are fulfilling all three wishes and have booked the family a vacation to Disney World. As the Iowa newspaper reports, “David said he hopes the story can help other people who have lost loved ones to ‘know someone is watching out for them, giving them guidance.’”
Source: Time News Feed

California family celebrates 3 heart transplants

A California family is celebrating this holiday season after the mother and two of her three sons all received life-saving heart transplants for an inherited cardiac condition.

Deanna Kremis and her sons, 17-year-old Matthew and 13-year-old Trevin, all suffer from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. It’s a genetic condition that causes the heart muscle to thicken until the heart can’t pump blood properly.

Matthew and Trevin got their new hearts in 2007 within five weeks of each other. But as they got healthier, their mother – who was diagnosed as an adult – began to fail. She finally got a new heart in July and her sons are helping her adjust to her new life.

The transplants are not a cure: There is a constant threat of organ rejection and infection.

Source: Straits times

Judge orders Calif. hospital to keep teen declared brain dead on ventilator

With a family fighting a hospital to keep their daughter who has been declared brain dead on life support, a California judge on Monday ordered the hospital to keep treating 13-year-old Jahi McMath for another week as a second medical evaluation is conducted.

Jahi experienced complications following a tonsillectomy at Children’s Hospital in Oakland.

As her family sat stone-faced in the front row of the courtroom, an Alameda County judge called for Jahi to be independently examined by Paul Graham Fisher, the chief of child neurology at Stanford University School of Medicine.

The judge also ordered the hospital to keep Jahi on a ventilator until Dec. 30, or until further order from the court.

The examination was expected to occur later on Monday, and early Tuesday.

Hospital staff and Fisher will conduct an electroencephalogram, or EEG, and tests to see if blood is still flowing to Jahi’s brain.

Doctors at Children’s Hospital concluded the girl was brain dead on Dec. 12 and wanted to remove her from life support.

Jahi’s family wants to keep her hooked up to a respirator and eventually have her moved to another facility.

The family said they believe she is still alive and that the hospital should not remove her from the ventilator without their permission.

“It’s wrong for someone who made mistakes on your child to just call the coroner … and not respect the family’s feeling or rights,” Sandra Chatman, Jahi’s grandmother who is a registered nurse, said in the hallway outside the courtroom.

“I know Jahi suffered, and it tears me up.”

The family’s attorney also asked Judge Evelio Grillo to allow a third evaluation by Paul Byrne, a pediatric professor at the University of Toledo. The hospital’s attorney objected to Byrne, saying he is not a pediatric neurologist.

The judge is expected to take up the request to use Byrne, and another hearing was scheduled for Tuesday morning.

Byrne is the co-editor of the 2001 book “Beyond Brain Death,” which presents a variety of arguments against using brain-based criteria for declaring a person dead.

In a phone interview, Byrne said he could not comment in detail because he had not seen any of Jahi’s medical records. But the fact that her ventilator is still functioning properly is a sign that she is alive, he said.

“The ventilator won’t work on a corpse,” he added. “In a corpse, the ventilator pushes the air in, but it won’t come out. Just the living person pushes the air out.”

Jahi’s family says the girl bled profusely after a tonsillectomy and then went into cardiac arrest before being declared brain dead.

Outside the courtroom, Dr. David Durand, chief of pediatrics at Children’s, said that staff have the “deepest sympathy” for the family, but that Jahi is brain dead.

“The ventilator cannot reverse the brain death that has occurred and it would be wrong to give false hope that Jahi will ever come back to life,” he said.

Durand said Jahi’s surgery was “very complex,” not simply a tonsillectomy.

“It was much more complicated than a tonsillectomy,” Durand said. He refused to elaborate, citing health care privacy laws.

Arthur L. Caplan, who leads the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center and is not involved in Jahi’s case, told The Associated Press that once brain death has been declared, a hospital is under no obligation to keep a patient on a ventilator.

source: abc news

Twin U.S. studies unlock mystery of how HIV causes AIDS

U.S. scientists have discovered the basic mechanisms that allow HIV to wipe out the body’s immune system and cause AIDS, which could lead to new approaches to treatment and research for a cure for the disease that affects 35 million people around the world.

Instead of actively killing immune system cells known as CD4 T cells, much of the damage done by HIV occurs when the virus tries to invade these cells and fails, triggering an innate immune response that causes the cells to self-destruct in a fiery kind of cell suicide known as pyroptosis.

The findings, published simultaneously in the scientific journals Science and Nature, also suggest that an experimental anti-inflammatory drug owned by Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc that has already been tested in people with epilepsy could be repurposed as a possible new treatment for AIDS.

“Our papers deal with the fundamental issue that causes AIDS, and that is the loss of CD4 T cells,” said Dr Warner Greene of the Gladstone Institutes, an independent biomedical research nonprofit based in San Francisco, whose lab produced the research in both papers.

Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, said the papers offer an “elegant” solution to a question that has eluded scientists since the virus was first identified in 1983.

Greene said for years, scientists had thought that HIV killed immune system cells by infecting them directly, hijacking their DNA machinery and turning them into virus-producing factories.

But this only happens to a small portion of CD4 T cells. In a series of experiments in human spleen, tonsil and lymph node tissues from HIV-infected patients, the Gladstone scientists discovered that the real damage of HIV infection occurs in so-called “bystander cells,” the most common type of CD4 T cell.

These cells are in a resting state, so when the virus attacks, it is unable to hijack them, and aborts the attempt.

But the damage is done. These so-called abortively infected immune cells release a protein that activates an enzyme called caspase-1, which causes the highly inflammatory form of cell suicide, pyroptosis.

“The cell is committing suicide in a vain attempt to protect the host,” Greene said. “The abortive process releases a call for help from new CD4 cells, who then fall victim to this fiery death.”

In the paper published in Science, the Gladstone team identified a mechanism that detects the damaged cells and triggers this cell death pathway.

“This idea that CD4 depletion is more of a cellular suicide than it is a murder by the virus is a new and important concept,” Greene said.

In the paper published in Nature, the team explored the implications of blocking this cellular suicide with experiments using anti-inflammatory drugs that block the caspase-1 enzyme, including the Vertex drug VX-765.

Greene said the company tested the treatment in patients with a chronic seizure disorder who would not respond to normal anti-epileptics, but the effect was not strong enough to continue development.

What they did find in a six-week clinical trial in people is that the drug was safe and well-tolerated.

“We would like to see if that drug could be repurposed to prevent inflammation in CD4 T cell loss in HIV infection,” Greene said.

Gladstone is in talks with Vertex to gain access to the drug for clinical trials as a potential new treatment for HIV infection. Such a drug could have three potential applications.

It could be used globally as a stop-gap treatment for the 16 million individuals who are infected with HIV but do not have access to antiretroviral therapy or ART, the highly effective medicines that keep HIV from replicating in the body.

Because the drug fights the inflammatory response linked with HIV infection, it might also be useful in addition to ART as a way of preventing the long-term consequences of HIV infection, such as early dementia, heart attacks and cancer.

Greene thinks the drug might even be useful in the research for an HIV cure, helping to flush out parts of the virus that go into hiding and cause the infection to start up again once people stop taking antiretroviral therapy.

At this point, all of these potential uses are theoretical, Fauci said. “It still remains to be seen what the ultimate practical usage of this is, but nonetheless, it’s still a significant paper.”

Greene said his team is in negotiations with Vertex for access to its drug, and hopes to come to an agreement soon as to how to proceed. “For the benefit of HIV-infected individuals, this merits testing.”

Source: IBN Money

Death penalty in the United States gradually declining

A shortage of lethal injection chemicals has contributed to declining use of capital punishment in the United States with a new report on Thursday noting only 39 executions this year.

It is only the second time in the past two decades the annual number of inmates put to death has dropped below 40.
The total represents a 10 percent reduction from last year. No further executions are scheduled in 2013.

Un-tested drugs used in executions

“Twenty years ago, use of the death penalty was increasing. Now it is declining by almost every measure,” said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, and the author of the report.

“The recurrent problems of the death penalty have made its application rare, isolated, and often delayed for decades. More states will likely reconsider the wisdom of retaining this expensive and ineffectual practice.”

The nonprofit organization provides accurate figures and a range of analysis, but opposes use of the death penalty.
Lethal injection in nine states

While the annual number of executions and death sentences continues to drop nationally overall, it remains a legally and socially acceptable form of justice for aggravated murder in 32 states.

But just nine states conducted lethal injections this year, and two — Texas with 16 and Florida with 7 — accounted for nearly 60 percent of the total.

Texas is among the active death-penalty states scrambling to find new lethal injection protocols after European-based manufacturers banned U.S. prisons from using their drugs in executions.

Among them is Danish-based Lundbeck, which manufactures pentobarbital, the most commonly used — either as a single drug, or in combination with others — to execute prisoners.

New drug combinations

States have been forced to try new drug combinations or go to loosely regulated compounding pharmacies that manufacturer variations of the drugs banned by the larger companies, according to an investigation last month by CNN’s Deborah Feyerick.
A pending lawsuit against Texas filed by several death row inmates and their supporters alleges the state corrections department falsified a prescription for pentobarbital using an alias.

Until recently, most states relied on a three-drug “cocktail,” but many jurisdictions now use a single dose or a two-drug combination.
Various state and federal courts have postponed some planned executions until issues surrounding the new protocols are resolved.
Every execution this year relied on pentobarbital, except in Florida, which used midazolam hydrochloride — a drug applied for the first time in human lethal injections.

And Missouri was prepared to inject a single dose of the anesthetic propofol for its two recent executions, until Gov. Jay Nixon halted its application.

The European Union had threatened to limit export of the widely used drug for other purposes if the state had proceeded. The two inmates were separately put to death in recent weeks using pentobarbital instead.
First woman executed

Among the high-profile capital cases this year involved Kimberly McCarthy, the first woman executed in the United States in three years.

The former Dallas-area resident was convicted of murdering her neighbor, and in June became the state’s 500th prisoner to die at the hands of the government since 1976, when the Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to resume.
So far, 1,359 people have been put to death across the country since that time, using lethal injection, electrocution, gas chamber, hanging, and firing squad. That includes three federal prisoners.

Spared for now was Georgia inmate Warren Hill, whose attorneys say he is mentally disabled. Courts earlier this year stayed three separate execution dates, one with just minutes to spare.
The Supreme Court in March will hold oral arguments and decide whether the Florida scheme for identifying mentally disabled defendants in capital cases violates previous standards established by the high court.
Freddie Lee Hall and an accomplice were convicted of the 1978 murders of a pregnant 21-year-old woman and a sheriff’s deputy in separate store robberies, both on the same day. His lawyers say the death row inmate has an IQ of 60.
In Missouri, Reginald Griffin was freed in October and his sentence thrown out after the state high court found the trial prosecution withheld critical evidence that may have implicated another prisoner in a jailhouse murder.
He became the 143rd person exonerated from death row in the past 40 years.

Maryland abolishes death penalty

Maryland became the sixth state in as many years to abolish its death penalty, joining Connecticut, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and New Mexico. Eighteen other states have previously done so.
Attorney General Eric Holder faces a tough decision in coming months: whether to seek the death penalty in federal court for Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzokhar Tsarnaev.

Across the country, capital sentences remain at historic lows, with just 79 so far this year.
They have declined in number by 75 percent from 1996, said the report, when 315 people were put on death row.
With the death penalty declining and recent polls showing a corresponding drop in public support, some legal analysts wonder if the Supreme Court is prepared in coming years to take another look at the issue’s overall constitutionality — whether capital punishment in the 21st century represents “cruel and unusual punishment.”

No sign of Supreme Court review
The justices in most cases continue to deny most requests for stays of executions, usually without any comment, or a breakdown of which members of the nine-member bench might have granted such a delay.
“It certainly seems that it merits another day in court after 40 years,” said Evan Mandery, a law professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and author of the new book “A Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America.”

“There are a lot of reasons to think that (moderate-conservative) Justice Anthony Kennedy’s vote is up for grabs and his mind is open on this question. So I don’t think the outcome of a case would be predetermined one way or another.”

But there is no sign such a monumental legal and social review by the nation’s highest court will be coming soon.

Source; CNN

Claims of virgin births in U.S. near 1 percent: study

Nearly 1 percent of young women in a U.S. study who have become pregnant claim to have done so as virgins, according to a report in the Christmas edition of Britain’s BMJ medical journal.

The authors of “Like a virgin (mother)” – whose prose is devoid of irony – say such scientifically impossible claims show researchers must use care in interpreting self-reported behavior. Fallible memory, beliefs and wishes can cause people to err in what they tell scientists.

Based on interviews with 7,870 women and girls ages 15 to 28, 45 of the 5,340 pregnancies in this group through the years – 0.8 percent – occurred in women who reported that they conceived independent of men. The figure does not include pregnancies that result from in vitro fertilization or other assisted reproductive technology.

Each year, the BMJ Christmas edition publishes untraditional science papers. In addition to the report on virgin pregnancies, the latest BMJ includes papers on whether there is a local baby boom nine months after home sports teams triumph (only a small one, but statistically significant) and whether an apple a day would keep the British doctor away (yes, saving about 8,500 lives in the United Kingdom each year, about as many as would expanding the use of cholesterol-lowering drugs to everyone over 50).

For the study of putative virgin pregnancies, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill analyzed data from the thousands of teenage girls and young women who took part in the long-running National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.

The girls were 12 to 18 years old when they entered the study in the 1994-95 school year and were interviewed periodically about their health and behavior over 14 years, including via computer as a way to encourage them to be candid when answering questions about their sexual history.

The 45 women and girls who became pregnant despite, according to what they told interviewers, being virgins at the time of conception differed in several ways from peers who acknowledged that men had had a role in their procreation.

Of those who said they became pregnant as virgins, 31 percent also said they had signed chastity pledges; 15 percent of nonvirgins who became pregnant said they had signed such pledges, in which a girl vows not to have sex until she marries.

The 45 self-described virgins who reported having become pregnant and the 36 who gave birth were also more likely than nonvirgins to say their parents never or rarely talked to them about sex and birth control. About 28 percent of the “virgin” mothers’ parents (who were also interviewed) indicated they didn’t have enough knowledge to discuss sex and contraception with their daughters, compared to 5 percent of the parents of girls who became pregnant and said they had had intercourse.

The ostensibly chaste mothers were also less likely to know how to use condoms, according to the report. UNC biostatistician Amy Herring and public health expert Carolyn Halpern led the group.

The researchers found that although the mothers in question were more likely to have boys than girls, and to be pregnant during the weeks leading up to Christmas, neither similarity to the Virgin Mary was statistically significant.

Source: Reuters

3-year-old Tampa boy survives rare 5-organ transplant

A little boy from Tampa has survived a five-organ transplant. Tuesday, his mother and doctors shared their medical miracle with the world.

Three-year-old Adonis Ortiz was born with his intestines outside his abdominal wall.

“Four hours after he was born, he had his first surgery,” said his father Eximer Ortiz.

Adonis had “short gut syndrome,” which meant he did not have enough intestine to absorb nutrients.

It means he has had to be fed intravenously all his life, and has never been able eat.

Then, his liver started to fail.

So in October, doctors at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami did a rare, multi-transplant surgery. Adonis got a new liver, pancreas, stomach, and small and large intestines.

All the organs came from the same donor.

The surgery took six hours, and Adonis pulled through remarkably well.

Source: News whip

Road Crashes Found to be Americans Biggest Killers While Abroad

Americans traveling abroad are faced with larger health threats including road crashes, a new study finds.

Between 2003 and 2009, more Americans have died abroad from crashes that involved cars or motorcycles than from homicide and other terrorist events, the researchers involved in the study wrote in the journal Injury Prevention. “Money spent on public health interventions related to homicides has apparently been spent successfully,” said Dr. David Bishai, lead author of the study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“But there is a gap in funding now,” he added. “What gets travelers abroad isn’t so much infectious disease or homicide – it’s road safety. The U.S. Department of State spends approximately $51.6 billion annually to protect its citizens both abroad and at home, but health risks during international travel can be very tricky. Bishai and his team measured deaths per one million visits to a country by American travelers. During the six-year study period, the U.S. Department of State data showed a total of $5.417 unnatural deaths among Americans while traveling abroad.

The top-five countries for international deaths were Colombia, with 13.7 international deaths per million American visits, the Dominican Republic with 11 deaths per million; Thailand and Morocco, each with 5.5 international deaths per million visits and the Philippines, with a rate of 21 per million visits. With the exception of the Philippines, more Americans died from road crashes in all of the 160 countries surveyed than from homicide.

Thailand has the most number of traffic fatalities with 16.5 deaths per million visits, followed by Vietnam with 15 fatal road accidents per million visits. “People will go to Vietnam and ride on a motorcycle because it’s the way to get around,” Bishai said.

Source: parent herald

U.S. states affected by deadly pig virus now at 20 – USDA

Nebraska has become the latest U.S. state to be hit by a deadly pig virus, bringing the total number of states affected to 20, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said this week.

The Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus (PEDv) had never been reported in North America until May, when it was discovered in the United States.

The virus has fueled market concerns that U.S. hog supplies will decline steeply next spring and summer.

PEDv causes diarrhea, vomiting and severe dehydration. Hog epidemiologists have found that a large number of very young piglets infected with the virus die.

While the disease has tended not to kill older pigs, mortality among very young pigs infected on U.S. farms is commonly 50 percent, and can be as high as 100 percent, according to veterinarians and scientists studying the outbreak.

To date, more than 1,500 cases, each of which could represent thousands of infected animals, have been reported in 20 states across the Hog Belt. The states include such major pork producers as Iowa, North Carolina, Minnesota and Oklahoma.

As defined by the USDA, each diagnostic case could represent multiple animals at either a single farm site or several locations. The USDA’s National Animal Health Laboratory Network released its latest pig virus data on Wednesday.

Nebraska, the sixth-largest pork production state, had 1.35 million hogs spread over 2,200 operations as of Sept. 1, according to USDA data.

The spread of the disease has heightened scrutiny of the U.S. trucking industry, as livestocktransportation vehicles have been targeted as a possible means of transmission.

The National Pork Board has issued biosecurity guidelines urging transporters to clean, disinfect and dry vehicles that are used to transport pigs and hogs.

The guidelines also include stricter standards for handling of manure by producers and commercial haulers.

Source: Godlike productions

Camp Lejeune water contamination linked to birth defects

Water pollution at the Camp Lejeune military base in North Carolina has been linked to increased risk of birth defects and childhood cancers, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A study released by the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substance & Disease Registry on Thursday confirmed a long-suspected link between chemical contaminants in tap water at the Marine Corps base and serious birth defects such as spina bifida

It also showed a slightly elevated risk of childhood cancers including leukemia.

Dr. Vikas Kapil, a medical officer and acting deputy director of the CDC agency that produced the study, said it surveyed the parents of 12,598 children born at Lejeune between 1968 and 1985, the year most contaminated drinking water wells at Camp Lejeune were closed.

From that same group of participants, 106 cases of birth defects and childhood cancers were reported. But Kapil said researchers could only confirm the diagnoses in 52 cases.

Computerized birth certificates first became available in 1968. The study’s authors said they could not prove exposure to the chemicals caused specific individuals to become ill.

The CDC has linked the contamination to a number of sources including leaking underground storage tanks, industrial spills, and an off-base dry cleaning firm.

Lejeune spokeswoman Captain Maureen Krebs said the Marine Corps has supported scientific and public health organizations studying the health impacts of the contamination.

“These results provide additional information in support of ongoing efforts to provide comprehensive science-based answers to the health questions that have been raised,” Krebs said in a statement.

“The Marine Corps continues to support these initiatives and we are working diligently to identify and notify individuals who, in the past, may have been exposed to the chemicals in drinking water.”

The Veterans Administration has already been providing disability compensation claims to the affected families and personnel exposed to the contaminated water.

Source: Reuters