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India’s absolete visa rules undermine medical tourism

India, long seen as a centre for cost-effective treatment by people around the world, is losing its competitive edge in the medical tourism space.

The strict visa regime is making people give the country a miss in favour of other Southeast Asian nations like Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia which, although costlier, are seen as more welcoming of medical tourists. While there are no studies to show how much business is being lost annually, experts say getting a medical visa to India is almost impossible without hassles.

“Stringent visa rules are really ruining our prospects of becoming a hub for medical tourism,” says Prathap C Reddy, founder and chairman of Apollo Hospitals. The medical tourism industry, valued at $10.5 billion globally in 2012, is estimated to reach a $32.5 billion by 2019. India was able to garner a chunk of this revenue initially, but despite its obvious advantages in terms of quality and costs, the country has been unable to grow the business, says Reddy.

“Our infection rate is only half of the best hospitals in the world. India not only has clinical excellence, but it also has cost benefits. Having got that brand, we would have expected that India would become a great attraction for people, but that has not happened,” he adds. The country attracted only 350,000 medical tourists in 2012 compared to 1.2 million by Thailand and 610,000 by Singapore, according to data from Patients Beyond Borders, a guidebook for medical tourism.

As things stand today, delays in visa processing are rampant, even in case of genuine medical emergencies, and the fee for visa processing is much higher when compared to Thailand or Malaysia.

Another visa-related hassle is the requirement for foreigners to periodically report to the police during their stay in India. “How can anyone ask a patient to go and report at a police station?” says Reddy.

Pradeep Thukral, chief executive officer of SafeMed, a medical travel facilitation agency and founder of the India Medical Tourism Association, says visa application process for medical tourists is cumbersome, to say the least: patients are asked to come to the Indian embassy which is not easy when they are sick, furnish a whole lot of documents like bank statements and medical reports and then referred to the embassy doctor for a second opinion. “It seems they try their best to dissuade the patient from going to India,” adds Thukral.

Experts says tweaking the visa rules will go a long way in making India, which currently attracts only 3 per cent of the global medical tourists, an attractive destination for patients.

“As we aspire to harness the true potential of this enormous market, particularly against the backdrop of an attractive dollar/rupee conversion rate, a liberal visa regime would be of great help. Speedier grant of visas and their easy availability would go further in enabling the Indian medical sector,” says Vishal Bali, group chief executive officer, Fortis Healthcare.

He says adequate public infrastructure outside the hospitals as in other countries would further strengthen India’s position. In Thailand, for instance, medical tourists are treated with tea on arrival while they wait for their visa and then are taken in a bus waiting outside the airport to the hospital. Thailand promoted medical tourism when its currency depreciated in the 1990s and today it is one of the largest medical tourism destinations in the world. Singapore, too, is fast catching up, even as treatment costs there are comparable to those in the US.

“The governments in these countries help the industry with incentives and other support. In India, the government should also do the same and remove the barriers,” says Reddy.

However, it is not just Southeast Asian countries which are becoming a competition for India. For the North American patients, destinations with improving healthcare infrastructure such as Mexico, Costa Rica and Colombia are fast emerging as attractive options, despite higher costs than India, say international healthcare experts.

Some experts even go to the extent of saying there is a case for abolishing medical visas altogether. Josef Woodman, chief executive officer, Patients Beyond Boarders, says medical visa ipso facto makes things more complicated and serves little purpose. “I see no reason not to abolish medical visas”.

There’s no doubt medical tourism’s potential in terms of job creation is huge. Reddy says the sector can create 8-10 million jobs. To add to this, unlike Indonesia or some other counties, which don’t offer liver or heart transplants, Indian hospitals can do everything which is done anywhere in the world. There success rates are impressive too. In Apollo for instance, the success rate for heart-related issues is around 99 per cent, and for liver transplants, it is about 90 per cent. To build on this advantage, Thukral says the government should look at issuing medical visas on arrival, provided the patient is carrying a minimum threshold of money for treatment. Among other suggestions, providing a multiple-entry visa for one year would help the medical tourism sector as well.

Source: Business Standard

Flight Delayed Because of Tuberculosis Scare

Authorities are trying to determine whether a man who flew into Phoenix has tuberculosis, but any risk to passengers on his flight is extremely low even if it turns out he does have the infectious respiratory illness, public health officials said Monday.

About 70 passengers on the US Airways Express flight on Saturday from Austin, Texas, were briefly kept on the plane until after responders boarded and removed the man, who was asked to put on a medical mask.

Dr. Rebecca Sunenshine, medical director of the disease control division of the Maricopa County Department of Public Health, said the man is being tested to determine whether he has TB or any another illness.

Sunenshine said test results should be available within a week or so. The man is being tested at a hospital to speed up the process, not because of illness, she said.

Even if he has the disease, the short flight coupled with the fact that he wasn’t coughing or sneezing on the plane means risk of transmission is extremely low, Sunenshine said.

During her own hour-long interview with the man, “he did not cough at all,” Sunenshine said.

Sunenshine declined to provide details about the man but said he was put on no-fly status by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after the federal agency was contacted by health authorities in Texas.

Unfortunately the airline wasn’t notified until the flight was in the air, Sunenshine said.

Though a responder who went on the plane reportedly suggested that passengers get tested for TB, Sunenshine and a CDC physician familiar with the case said the other passengers don’t need to do anything.

The absence of coughing by the man made “it almost impossible to transmit TB to these passengers,” Sunenshine said.

“There’s really no risk in this situation,” said Dr. Francisco Alvarado-Ramy, a supervisory medical officer assigned with the CDC’s division of global migration and quarantine.

Along with the flight’s duration and the absence of coughing, there are other medical indicators that point to “very low to no concern,” Alvarado-Ramy said from San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Source: abc news

Mild brain injuries from bomb blasts have lasting effects on vets

Even mild brain injuries from bomb blasts may put soldiers at risk for long-term health effects, HealthDay News reported.

According to a new study presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, researchers used diffusion tensor imaging – a special type of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) – to analyze the brains of 10 American veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. All of the vets had been diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injuries.

The researchers found that the veterans demonstrated significant differences in their brains’ white matter, when compared to a group of 10 people without any brain injuries. The differences were linked with a variety of health problems – including attention deficits, delayed memory and poorer movement and motor skills.

According to the researchers, these findings suggest that even mild brain injuries from blasts can result in long-term brain changes.

“This long-term impact on the brain may account for ongoing [mental] and behavioral symptoms in some veterans with a history of blast-related [mild traumatic brain injuries],” study co-author P. Tyler Roskos, a neuropsychologist and assistant research professor at the Saint Louis University School of Medicine, said in a society news release.

Fertility doctors aim to lower rate of twin births

In the five years since the “Octomom” case, big multiple births have gone way down but the twin rate has barely budged. Now fertility experts are pushing a new goal: One.

A growing number of couples are attempting pregnancy with just a single embryo, helped by new ways to pick the ones most likely to succeed. New guidelines urge doctors to stress this approach.

Twins aren’t always twice as nice; they have much higher risks of prematurity and serious health problems. Nearly half of all babies born with advanced fertility help are multiple births, new federal numbers show.

Abigail and Ken Ernst of Oldwick, N.J., used the one-embryo approach to conceive Lucy, a daughter born in September. It “just seemed the most normal, the most natural way” to conceive and avoid a high-risk twin pregnancy, the new mom said.

Not all couples feel that way, though. Some can only afford one try with in vitro fertilization, or IVF, so they insist that at least two embryos be used to boost their odds, and view twins as two for the price of one.

Many patients “are telling their physicians ‘I want twins,'” said Barbara Collura, president of Resolve, a support and advocacy group. “We as a society think twins are healthy and always come out great. There’s very little reality” about the increased medical risks for babies and moms, she said.

The 2009 case of a California woman who had octuplets using IVF focused attention on the issue of big multiple births, and the numbers have dropped, except for twins.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s most recent numbers show that 46 percent of IVF babies are multiples— mostly twins —and 37 percent are born premature. By comparison, only 3 percent of babies born without fertility help are twins and about 12 percent are preterm.

It’s mostly an American problem — some European countries that pay for fertility treatments require using one embryo at a time.

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine is trying to make it the norm in the U.S., too. Its guidelines, updated earlier this year, say that for women with reasonable medical odds of success, those under 35 should be offered single embryo transfer and no more than two at a time. The number rises with age, to two or three embryos for women up to 40, since older women have more trouble conceiving.

To add heft to the advice, the guidelines say women should be counseled on the risks of multiple births and embryo transfers and that this discussion should be noted in their medical records.

“In 2014, our goal is really to minimize twins,” said Dr. Alan Copperman, medical director of Reproductive Medicine Associates of New York, a Manhattan fertility clinic. “This year I’m talking about two versus one. Several years ago I was talking about three versus two” embryos.

The one-at-a-time idea is catching on. Only 4 percent of women under 35 used single embryos in 2007 but nearly 12 percent did in 2011. It’s less common among older women, who account for fewer IVF pregnancies, but it is gaining among them, too.

“Patients don’t really want multiples. What they want is high delivery rates,” said Dr. Richard T. Scott Jr., scientific director for Reproductive Medicine Associates of New Jersey, which has seven clinics in that state.

Better ways to screen embryos can make success rates for single embryos nearly as good as when two or more are used, he contends. The new techniques include maturing the embryos a few days longer. That improves viability and allows cells to be sampled for chromosome screening. Embryos can be frozen to allow test results to come back and more precisely time the transfer to the womb.

Taking these steps with single embryos results in fewer miscarriages and tubal pregnancies, healthier babies with fewer genetic defects and lower hospital bills from birth complications, many fertility specialists say.

Multiple studies back this up. In May, doctors from the New Jersey clinics did the kind of research considered a gold standard. They randomly assigned 175 women to have either a single embryo transferred after chromosome screening or two embryos with no screening, as is done in most IVF attempts now. Delivery rates were roughly equivalent — 61 percent with single embryos and 65 percent with doubles.

More than half of the double transfers produced twins but none of the single ones did. Babies from double transfers were more likely to be premature; more than one-third spent time in a neonatal intensive care unit versus 8 percent of the others.

Chromosome testing and freezing embryos adds about $4,000 to the roughly $14,000 cost for IVF, “but the pregnancy rates go up dramatically,” and that saves money because fewer IVF attempts are needed, Scott said. Using two or more embryos carries a much higher risk of twins and much higher rates of cerebral palsy and other disorders.

After explaining the risks, “this is the easiest thing in the world to convince patients to do,” Scott said of screening and using single embryos.

But Dr. Fady Sharara of the Virginia Center for Reproductive Medicine in Reston, Va., found otherwise. For a study, he offered 48 couples free medications and embryo freezing if they would agree to transfer one at a time instead of two. Eighteen couples refused, including one-quarter of those whose insurance was covering the treatment. Some who refused said they viewed twins as two for the price of one.

“I tell my patients twins are not twice the fun,” Shahara said. “One is hard enough. Two at a time is a killer for some people. Some marriages don’t survive this.”

The New Jersey couple, who had a daughter using a single embryo, has eight more frozen embryos. When it’s time to try again, Abigail Ernst said, “we would do the same thing” and use one at a time.

source: The Big story

New Hampshire Hospital Worker Gets 39 Years in Hepatitis Case

A traveling medical technician was sentenced Monday to 39 years in prison for stealing painkillers and infecting dozens of patients in four states with hepatitis C through tainted syringes.

David Kwiatkowski, 34, was a cardiac technologist in 18 hospitals in seven states before being hired at New Hampshire’s Exeter Hospital in 2011. He had moved from job to job despite being fired at least four times over allegations of drug use and theft. Since his arrest last year, 46 people have been diagnosed with the same strain of hepatitis C he carries.

Kwiatkowski admitted stealing painkillers and replacing them with saline-filled syringes tainted with his blood. He pleaded guilty in August to 16 federal drug charges.

He apologized Monday, saying he was very sorry what he done.

Prosecutors had pushed for a 40-year prison sentence, saying he created a “national public health crisis,” put a significant number of people at risk and caused substantial physical and emotional harm to a large number of victims.

Defense lawyers argued that a 30-year sentence would better balance the seriousness of the crimes against Kwiatkowski’s mental and emotional problems and his addiction to drugs and alcohol, which they said clouded his judgment.

In all, 32 patients were infected in New Hampshire, seven in Maryland, six in Kansas and one in Pennsylvania. Kwiatkowski, 34, also worked in Michigan, New York, Arizona and Georgia.

Two of the 16 charges stem from the case of a Kansas patient who has since died. Authorities say hepatitis C, a blood-borne virus that can cause liver disease and chronic health problems, played a contributing role.

Linda Ficken, 71, of Andover, Kan., was one of two Kansas victims attending Monday’s sentencing hearing. She underwent a cardiac catheterization at Hays Medical Center in Hays, Kan., in 2010, and said she is haunted by the memory of Kwiatkowski standing at her bedside for more than an hour, applying pressure to the catheter’s entry site in her leg to control a bleeding problem.

Ficken told The Associated Press last week that while she has struggled with fatigue since her diagnosis, a bigger blow came last month when her brother was diagnosed with leukemia and was told he needs a stem cell transplant. While siblings often are the closest match, she can’t donate because of her hepatitis C status.

In a written statement to the court, she told Kwiatkowski she would like to see him spend the rest of his life “locked away from society, in a prison that provides you the ultimate hell on earth which you so deserve.”

Source: Time

Brighten up tired eyes

Tired of being told you look tired? Here’s how to get rid of eye bags, puffiness, dark shadows, and circles.

Morning-After Puffy Eyes

Seasonal allergies, a cold, a sinus infection: These are some of the things that can lead to water building up under the eye.
“We have the thinnest skin around our eyes, so it’s the area that’s most influenced by the in-and-out flow of fluids,” Goldburt says.
A dinner heavy with salty food or a night of crying while watching a tearjerker movie can also cause morning-after puffiness. The reason is osmosis. “Water always travels from areas in the body where there’s low salt concentration to tissues where there’s more salt, Goldburt explains. That principle holds true whether the salt comes from tears or from soy sauce.
Simple Fixes for Under-Eye Bags
Addressing the underlying cause will help treat these temporary eruptions of puffiness.
Here are steps to try:
Treat hay fever, if that’s the problem. There are non-sedating, over-the-counter allergy medications that may help. If you have or suspect hay fever, talk with your doctor about how to treat it (whether or not it’s affecting your eyes’ appearance).
Try a neti pot. Irrigating the nasal cavity with a neti pot — a device that looks like a small teapot — can help relieve fluid buildup caused by allergies, sinus congestion, or a cold.
Switch your sleep position. Your sleep position may be contributing to under-eye bags. Thanks to gravity, sleeping on your side or stomach can encourage fluids to collect under your eyes. If you’re a side sleeper, you may notice a heavier bag on the side you sleep on. Goldburt advises her patients who wake up with puffy eyes to sleep on their back and add an extra pillow under their head.
Changing your sleep position takes some getting used to, says Goldburt, a self-described “former eye-bag sufferer” and stomach-sleeper herself. Still, she says, “The earlier you start changing your sleep position, the better, because after a few years under-eye bags can became permanent.”
Other everyday habits, including rubbing your eyes frequently, going to bed with makeup on, and excessive drinking, can contribute to under-eye bags, too. “Sleeping in eye makeup can irritate your eyes, causing fluids to pool,” Goldburt says. Heavy alcohol drinking causes dehydration . That weakens the delicate skin around the eyes, making it more likely to sink into a pouch.
Eye bags are very common, and are usually not related to your health. But if your bags appear suddenly and you’re not suffering from allergies, a sinus infection, or a cold — and they don’t ease up when you try the lifestyle steps mentioned above — it’s a good idea to see your doctor. Some thyroid or kidney problems can cause under-eye fluid retention, notes New York dermatologist Craig Austin, MD.

Source: health India

 

Pills of the future: nanoparticles

Researchers design drug-carrying nanoparticles that can be taken orally
Drugs delivered by nanoparticles hold promise for targeted treatment of many diseases, including cancer. However, the particles have to be injected into patients, which has limited their usefulness so far.

Now, researchers from MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) have developed a new type of nanoparticle that can be delivered orally and absorbed through the digestive tract, allowing patients to simply take a pill instead of receiving injections.

In a paper appearing in the Nov. 27 online edition of Science Translational Medicine, the researchers used the particles to demonstrate oral delivery of insulin in mice, but they say the particles could be used to carry any kind of drug that can be encapsulated in a nanoparticle. The new nanoparticles are coated with antibodies that act as a key to unlock receptors found on the surfaces of cells that line the intestine, allowing the nanoparticles to break through the intestinal walls and enter the bloodstream.

This type of drug delivery could be especially useful in developing new treatments for conditions such as high cholesterol or arthritis. Patients with those diseases would be much more likely to take pills regularly than to make frequent visits to a doctor’s office to receive nanoparticle injections, say the researchers.

“If you were a patient and you had a choice, there’s just no question: Patients would always prefer drugs they can take orally,” says Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT, a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and an author of the Science Translational Medicine paper.

Lead authors of the paper are former MIT grad student Eric Pridgen and former BWH postdoc Frank Alexis, and the senior author is Omid Farokhzad, director of the Laboratory of Nanomedicine and Biomaterials at BWH. Other authors are Timothy Kuo, a gastroenterologist at BWH; Etgar Levy-Nissenbaum, a former BWH postdoc; Rohit Karnik, an MIT associate professor of mechanical engineering; and Richard Blumberg, co-director of BWH’s Biomedical Research Institute.

No more injections

Several types of nanoparticles carrying chemotherapy drugs or short interfering RNA, which can turn off selected genes, are now in clinical trials to treat cancer and other diseases. These particles exploit the fact that tumors and other diseased tissues are surrounded by leaky blood vessels. After the particles are intravenously injected into patients, they seep through those leaky vessels and release their payload at the tumor site.

For nanoparticles to be taken orally, they need to be able to get through the intestinal lining, which is made of a layer of epithelial cells that join together to form impenetrable barriers called tight junctions.

“The key challenge is how to make a nanoparticle get through this barrier of cells. Whenever cells want to form a barrier, they make these attachments from cell to cell, analogous to a brick wall where the bricks are the cells and the mortar is the attachments, and nothing can penetrate that wall,” Farokhzad says.

Researchers have previously tried to break through this wall by temporarily disrupting the tight junctions, allowing drugs through. However, this approach can have unwanted side effects because when the barriers are broken, harmful bacteria can also get through.

To build nanoparticles that can selectively break through the barrier, the researchers took advantage of previous work that revealed how babies absorb antibodies from their mothers’ milk, boosting their own immune defenses. Those antibodies grab onto a cell surface receptor called the FcRN, granting them access through the cells of the intestinal lining into adjacent blood vessels.

The researchers coated their nanoparticles with Fc proteins — the part of the antibody that binds to the FcRN receptor, which is also found in adult intestinal cells. The nanoparticles, made of a biocompatible polymer called PLA-PEG, can carry a large drug payload, such as insulin, in their core.

After the particles are ingested, the Fc proteins grab on to the FcRN in the intestinal lining and gain entry, bringing the entire nanoparticle along with them.

“It illustrates a very general concept where we can use these receptors to traffic nanoparticles that could contain pretty much anything. Any molecule that has difficulty crossing the barrier could be loaded in the nanoparticle and trafficked across,” Karnik says.

The researchers’ discovery of how this type of particle can penetrate cells is a key step to achieving oral nanoparticle delivery, says Edith Mathiowitz, a professor of molecular pharmacology, physiology, and biotechnology at Brown University.

“Before we understand how these particles are being transported, we can’t develop any delivery system,” says Mathiowitz, who was not part of the research team.

Breaking through barriers

In this study, the researchers demonstrated oral delivery of insulin in mice. Nanoparticles coated with Fc proteins reached the bloodstream 11-fold more efficiently than equivalent nanoparticles without the coating. Furthermore, the amount of insulin delivered was large enough to lower the mice’s blood sugar levels.

The researchers now hope to apply the same principles to designing nanoparticles that can cross other barriers, such as the blood-brain barrier, which prevents many drugs from reaching the brain.

“If you can penetrate the mucosa in the intestine, maybe next you can penetrate the mucosa in the lungs, maybe the blood-brain barrier, maybe the placental barrier,” Farokhzad says.

They are also working on optimizing drug release from the nanoparticles in preparation for further animal tests, either with insulin or other drugs.

The research was funded by a Koch-Prostate Cancer Foundation Award in Nanotherapeutics; the National Cancer Institute Center of Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence at MIT-Harvard; a National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Program of Excellence in Nanotechnology Award; and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.

Source: MIT News

 

Energy Drinks Affect Heart, MRI Scans Show

Energy drinks may provide a bit too much of a boost to your heart, creating additional strain on the organ and causing it to contract more rapidly than usual, German researchers report.

Healthy people who drank energy drinks high in caffeine and taurine experienced significantly increased heart contraction rates an hour later, according to research scheduled for presentation Monday at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, in Chicago.

The study raises concerns that energy drinks might be bad for the heart, particularly for people who already have heart disease, said Dr. Kim Williams, vice president of the American College of Cardiology.

“We know there are drugs that can improve the function of the heart, but in the long term they have a detrimental effect on the heart,” said Williams, a cardiology professor at Wayne State University School of Medicine, in Detroit.
For example, adrenaline can make the heart race, but such overexertion can wear the heart muscle down, he said. There’s also the possibility that a person could develop an irregular heartbeat.

From 2007 to 2011, the number of emergency room visits related to energy drinks nearly doubled in the United States, rising from slightly more than 10,000 to nearly 21,000, according to a meeting news release. Most of the cases involved young adults aged 18 to 25, followed by people aged 26 to 39.

In the new study, researchers used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure the heart function of 18 healthy participants both before and one hour after they consumed an energy drink.

The energy drink contained 400 milligrams of taurine and 32 milligrams of caffeine per 100 milliliters of liquid (about 3.4 ounces). Taurine is an amino acid that plays a number of key roles in the body, and is believed to enhance athletic performance. Caffeine is the natural stimulant that gives coffee its kick.

After downing the energy drink, the participants experienced a 6 percent increase in their heart contraction rate, said study co-author Dr. Jonas Doerner, a radiology resident in the cardiovascular imaging section at the University of Bonn, in Germany.

It appears that the unique blend of sugar, caffeine and taurine in an energy drink may combine to have an effect on the heart, Doerner said. He and his colleagues tested a second group using a drink containing only caffeine, but those patients did not show a significant increase in heart contractions.

“Maybe the mechanism could be from the taurine, or from the combination of taurine and caffeine,” he said.

Because this study was presented at a medical meeting, the data and conclusions should be viewed as preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Source: Web Md

‘One-stop shop’ for tracking diseases in the US

Tracking a nation’s health can be a painstaking business. But now, a team of researchers from the University of Pittsburgh have brought together and digitized all the weekly surveillance reports of diseases in the US since 1888 into one database.

The researchers collated all weekly modifiable disease surveillance tables published between 1888 and 2013 – approximately 6,500 tables. Because of their age, many of these tables were available only in paper format or as PDF scans in online repositories that could not be read by computers and had to be hand-entered.
With an estimated 200 million keystrokes, the data – including death counts, reporting locations, time periods and diseases – were digitized. A total of 56 diseases were reported for at least some period of time during the 125-year time span, with no single disease reported continuously.
Tracing the path of epidemics
Named Project Tycho after Tycho Brahe, a 16th century nobleman whose detailed astronomical observations helped Johannes Kepler derive the laws of planetary motion, the database is free to use and is publicly available.
Dean of the Graduate School of Public Health Dr. Donald Burke explains the

significance of the choice:

“Tycho Brahe’s data were essential to Kepler’s discovery of the laws of planetary motion. Similarly, we hope that our Project Tycho disease database will help spur new, life-saving research on patterns of epidemic infectious disease and the effects of vaccines. Open access to disease surveillance records should be standard practice, and we are working to establish this as the norm worldwide.”
The database enables researchers to track the spread of diseases and also chronicle the impact that vaccines have had in controlling communicable diseases.
The researchers focused on eight vaccine-preventable contagious diseases: smallpox, polio, measles, rubella, mumps, hepatitis A, diphtheria and pertussis.
By overlaying the reported outbreaks with the year of vaccine licensure, the researchers are able to give a clear, visual representation of the effect that vaccines have in controlling communicable diseases.
The results showed that despite a pertussis vaccine being available since the 1920s, the largest outbreak since 1959 was recorded in the US last year. Recurrences of measles, mumps and rubella have also been noticeable since the 1980s.
Lead author Dr. Willem G. van Panhuis, assistant professor of epidemiology at the university, notes:
“Using this database, we estimate that more than 100 million cases of serious childhood contagious diseases have been prevented, thanks to the introduction of vaccines. But we also are able to see a resurgence of some of these diseases in the past several decades as people forget how devastating they can be and start refusing vaccines.”
Steven Buchsbaum, deputy director of Discovery and Translational Sciences for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which partly funded the research, concludes:
“We anticipate this will not only prove to be an invaluable tool permitting researchers around the globe to develop, test and validate epidemiological models, but also has the potential to serve as a model for how other organizations could make similar sets of critical public health data more broadly, publicly available.”

Source: Medical News Today

 

Many Parents Unaware About Medical Research Opportunities for Their Children

A recent poll shows that roughly 44 percent of parents polled claimed they would enroll their child into medical research involving the testing of new medications or vaccines if their child suffered from the disease being studied.

That figure jumped to over 75 percent when the research being conducted involved questions on mental health or diet and nutrition. So why is it only five percent of parents claim they have signed their children up for medical research?
It’s a no-brainer that children’s healthcare can only improve through medical research. The University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health, which surveyed 1,420 parents with a child or children between birth and 17 years of age, claims awareness of medical research opportunities accounts for the low percentage of participants.

Greater than 66 percent of parents polled stated they were not aware of research opportunities for their children. In fact, the poll shows parents who are aware of medical research opportunities are far more likely to have their children take part.
“Children have a better chance of living healthier lives because of vaccinations, new medications and new diagnostic tests. But we wouldn’t have those tools without medical research,” says Matthew M. Davis, MD, MAPP, director of the National Poll on Children’s Health and professor of pediatrics and internal medicine in the University of Michigan Health System.
“With this poll, we wanted to understand parents’ willingness to allow their children to participate in medical research. The good news is that willingness is far higher than the current level of actual engagement in research. This means there is great opportunity for the medical research community to reach out to families and encourage them to take part in improving medical care.”

As mentioned above, the poll differentiated between types of studies and found the willingness of the parents to allow their children to participate was affected by this differentiation. Studies aimed at nutrition and mental illnesses were more positively favored by the parents. However, parents were more reticent about subjecting their children to studies which involved exposure to new medicines or vaccines.
This poll specifically targeted the level of participation by children in medical research since 2007. Over the previous 5 years, the proportion of families where the children have actually taken part in medical research has basically remained unchanged. The figure was four percent in 2007. In both last year’s results and the results reported this year, that figure was only at five percent.
“Five percent of families with children participating may not be enough to support important research efforts that the public has identified in previous polls – things like cures and treatments for childhood cancer, diabetes and assessing the safety of medications and vaccines,” says Davis, who also is professor of public policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.
“But the results indicate that a much bigger percentage of the public does understand the importance of medical research to advancing healthcare for children.”
Though parents in the poll claim they would be willing to allow their children to participate in studies, researchers are too often at a loss of obtaining a significant sample size that could lead to a real difference in healthcare discoveries. If the poll is to be believed, it seems the medical research community needs to focus as much energy on marketing their studies as they do carrying them out.
“This poll shows that the research community needs to step up and find ways to better reach parents about opportunities for children to participate, answer parents’ questions about benefits and risks of participation, and potentially broaden the types of studies available,” Davis says.
Source: Red Orbit