Friday, Jul 19th
Last update05:01:52 AM GMT
Health Glance
A report released by Medco Health Solutions Inc., the biggest U.S. pharmacy-benefit manager, shows that over 25% of children and teens are involved with taking prescription medications – although that number may have risen over the past couple years. Based on the company’s data from 2009, 7% of U.S. children are on a shocking two or more drugs.
Despite the alarming amount of children being fed prescription medication, many of these drugs were intended or tested for only adult use.
The Office of National Statistics in the United Kingdom discovered a 50 percent increase in frontal and temporal lobe tumors in children during the ten year span covering 1999 to 2009. Was this a result of cell phone radiation?
The Department of Health in the UK would appear to think so. One in three children under the age of ten currently has a cellphone in their possession. The governmental agency put out the following statement: "Children should only use mobile phones for essential purposes and keep all calls short."
In the article Iowa Women’s Health Study, much of the piece takes many things that are widely known as beneficial within a large number of vitamin supplements, and links some of these to various deaths in which people with diseases would essentially overdose themselves on vitamins in a desperate grab to fight off the disease. The article then discounts the fact that many people do not even use vitamins except for when they are sick, wrongfully linking an absurd amount of deaths directly to the use of vitamins and other supplements. As an example, a person was diagnosed with a life threatening disease, and in a sense of sheer panic began using as much as 40 supplements all at once, going up from using literally nothing the previous day. This example was then taken out of context and used as a source of evidence that supplements are in fact potentially deadly – a completely biased and ridiculous claim!
To reasonable people it makes a whole lot of sense that the act of pumping tons of unidentified chemicals, water, and sand into the Earth’s surface and then exploding them will result in catastrophes for both land and man.
Yet the energy and natural gas industry question that outcome, insisting that the long and short-term impacts of hydraulic-fracturing on human health demand “more study.”
In a medical science first, researchers turned skin cells from heart failure patients into heart muscle cells that may then be used to fix damaged cardiac tissue.
The researchers said the achievement -- done initially with rats -- opens up the prospect of using heart failure patients' own stem cells -- a form of cell called human-induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) -- to repair damaged hearts. And since the reprogrammed stem cells would originate with the patient, their immune systems would not reject the cells as foreign, the researchers explained.
There’s a usual route for firms that want to market a generic drug: Buy samples of the brand-name version and run tests to show regulators that the generic is identical. If the firms can’t get their hands on the samples, they can’t get to the starting line.
A growing number of generic drug makers say they’re getting shut of the race because of a loophole in the law that gives their brand-name rivals a competitive edge.
It has been prescribed since 1978 and reports of the ingredient sodium valproate causing birth defects such as spina bifida go back almost as far. FACS is believed to have affected up to 20,000 babies – ten times more than Thalidomide.
FACS is, Dr Turnpenny points out, less dramatic than the missing and distorted limbs caused by Thalidomide, but the neurological effects are far worse. ‘About ten per cent of foetuses exposed to sodium valproate will have a major congenital malformation such as cleft palate. Twelve per cent are likely to be diagnosed with a neuro-developmental disorder.’
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