More than 75 people have died in Kenya of a hemorrhagic fever called Rift Valley Fever over the past three weeks and another 183 are infected with it. The diseases’ victims are residents of either the Northeastern or Coast Province, which received uncharacteristically heavy rain in December that caused flooding and created a large breading ground for mosquitoes, which spread the fever’s virus from livestock to humans.
U.S. House of Representatives Democrats introduced legislation on Friday that would require the health secretary to negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs covered by the Medicare insurance program for the elderly and disabled. A vote by the full House is expected on Jan_12.
Ashley had a normal birth, but her mental and motor faculties did not develop. Over the years, neurologists, geneticists, and other specialists conducted every known traditional and experimental test, but still could not determine a diagnosis or a cause. Doctor?s call her condition ?static encephalopathy of unknown etiology?, which means an insult to the brain of unknown origin or cause, and one that will not improve.
Attempts to address widespread and persistent health disparities between African Americans and whites has led to advocacy for increasing the number of African American physicians in the healthcare workforce. A recent article in Health Services Research proposes that this will improve health outcomes in African American communities and among the disadvantaged and poor.
Academic researchers reported that all five standard hospital-based performance measures used to gauge quality of care for hospitalized heart failure patients may not be the best benchmarks, since none were significant predictors of patient mortality during the critical 60 to 90 days immediately following hospital discharge.
Genentech, Inc. (NYSE: DNA) announced encouraging results from a randomized Phase II study comparing pertuzumab plus gemcitabine to gemcitabine alone in women with platinum-resistant ovarian, primary peritoneal, or fallopian tube cancer. Data from the study will be submitted for presentation at an upcoming medical meeting.
If playing video games makes kids less active — and contributes to obesity — why not create more video games that require activity? That’s the question prompted by a Mayo Clinic research study published in the current issue of the medical journal Pediatrics.
In the most comprehensive study of its kind, researchers have found that the inpatient length of stay for youth with mental illness fell more than sixty percent between 1990 and 2000, despite concurrent increases in illness severity and self-harm, and declining transfers to intermediate and inpatient care within the same population.
A new study shows that more people were at risk of anthrax infection in the Oct_2001 attack on US Senator Tom Daschle’s office than previously known. The research is published in the January 15 issue of the Journal of Infectious Diseases, now available online. On the other hand, the study shows, prompt intervention with antibiotics and vaccination appeared to be highly effective against the disease.
Newly published research by Rice University chemists and North Carolina State University toxicologists finds that repetitive movement can speed the uptake of nanoparticles through the skin. The research is based on in vitro experiments involving animal skin that was exposed to buckyball-containing amino acids. It appears in the January 10 issue of the American Chemical Society’s journal Nano Letters.