Public Health
Why do so many people in Ontario have inflammatory bowel disease? One in every 200 Ontarians has been diagnosed with IBD, an increase by 64 percent between 1999 and 2008, according to a study by researchers at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES), the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO), and the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute.
That puts Ontario in the 90th percentile for IBD prevalence in the world.
The study in Inflammatory Bowel Diseases is the first and largest Canadian study of IBD – including Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis ─ to demonstrate…
It has been almost 400 years since the publication of Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus ("On The Motion Of The Heart And Blood In Animals") by the British physician William Harvey, which accurately described the circulation of the blood around the body, and we are still discovering the secrets of the circulatory system and its contents.
This is especially relevant when leveraging the circulatory system’s contents for clinical applications, such as prenatal testing.
The presence of circulating fetal DNA in maternal blood was first reported in the mid-1990s,…
It happened to Target
and recently we learned it happened to UPS
stores, too. It went on for a year at the Montana
Health Department and it happened to millions of customers of Kaiser
Permanente Northern California. It's the theft of customer or patient data,
and it can take place in many ways – a laptop goes missing, an employee
downloads malware to an internal computer, someone on the inside intentionally leaks
the data.
When this happens at a retail outlet like Target, customers
can lose their credit card information, leading to a lengthy process of sorting
out with the credit card…
You know, medicine is not an exact science, but we are learning all the time. Why, just fifty years ago, they thought a disease like your daughter's was caused by demonic possession or witchcraft. But nowadays we know that Isabelle is suffering from an imbalance of bodily humors, perhaps caused by a toad or a small dwarf living in her stomach. - Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber (Saturday Night Live)
While we do not share our bodies with small dwarfs, toads, or (literal) demons, we are not alone.
It has been said that “No man is an island.” While you may quibble that it should be “No one is…
Long before wheat and sugar, a popular craze against salt swept America. The salt in this case was the popular flavor enhancer monosodium glutamate (MSG), common in Chinese food, soups and meats. Glutamic acid is also naturally present in our bodies.
It was used as an additive starting in 1908, it gives food its savory umami flavor, but once it got public attention, anecdotes began to pour in about lots of non-specific symptoms that must be caused by it, despite the fact that hundreds of millions of Chinese people did not report headaches.
In the 1990s, the Federation of…
Cancer screening is one of the controversial aspects of health care; America has long had a 'defensive medicine' problem, where in some cases doctors and hospitals run many unnecessary tests to check off the boxes so that if something does go wrong, lawyers won't be shedding tears in court about how the greedy or incompetent medical community ruins lives.
Then in other cases doctors may be running tests with little value because the effect on patients is psychological or it won't be meaningful, such as in cancer screening for the elderly.
Then there is the issue where it's good business…
Chest pain, breathing difficulties, fainting. Each year approximately 25 percent of patients admitted to medical departments with symptoms of serious illness are sent home again without receiving a diagnosis of the severe symptoms that led to their hospitalization, find Aarhus University and Aarhus University Hospital scholars.
And that is in Denmark, where health care is free for citizens.
"Naturally, there is no need for a diagnosis if the examinations at the hospital disprove that there is a serious illness. So some patients will always be discharged without a specific diagnosis. But…
According to the 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health,
about 16 million people have used ecstasy at some point in their life,
and during the 2012 year, 869,000 people used ecstasy for the first
time, far higher than the number of new LSD and PCP users combined. The
number of new ecstasy users is also greater than the number of new users
of cocaine,
stimulants, and inhalants. The percentage of people who will use
ecstasy sometime in their life is between 2 percent and 3.5 percent. The
average age for first-time users was 20.3 years old, smack dab in the
middle of the college years.…
Young girls with an intense, red, itchy rash on their outer genital organs - vulvitis - may be at increased risk of developing urinary tract infections, according to new research from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.
Vulvitis is not a disease, but rather inflammation of the the vulva. It is the most common gynecological condition in pre-menstrual girls and is the greatest reason for referral to a pediatric gynecological specialist.
The treatment may be as simple as better hygiene and avoiding potential irritants such as bubble baths and swimming pools.
"Vulvitis is a common…
Hank |
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/acrylamide-in-foodhttp://www.who.int/foodsafety/publications/chem/acrylamide_faqs/en/http://www.foodmanufacture.co.uk/Manufacturing/FSA-boss-calls-for-change...http://www.forbes.com/sites/trevorbutterworth/2014/06/12/bpa-a-concern-f...
Acrylamide and the lawsuit against potato chip and French fry manufacturers fall under Proposition 65's umbrella