Kim’s public health blog

Ann Falsey, M.D., <a href=”http://www.urmc.rochester.edu/pr/news/story.cfm?id=2248″>associate professor of medicine</a> at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and an infectious diseases specialist at Rochester General Hospital,  discussed how Giving people age 65 and older a dose four times larger than the standard flu vaccine boosts the amount of antibodies in their blood to levels considered protective against the flu, more so than the standard flu vaccine does. The findings from a study of nearly 4,000 people were presented Oct. 26 at a national meeting on infectious diseases. The higher dose of vaccine generally resulted in approximately 30 percent to 80 percent more antibodies against flu, long considered a good measure of protection.

After four decades on the decline, rheumatoid arthritis is on the upswing among women in the United States. That’s the finding presented by Mayo Clinic investigators. From 1955 to 1994, the incidence of rheumatoid arthritis had continually been on the decline. That apparently changed beginning in the mid-1990s. Compared to the previous decade when approximately 36 women out of every 100,000 developed rheumatoid arthritis each year, the new study showed a jump to 54 women in the more recent decade. The incidence for men remained at about 29 per 100,000. Overall, the percentage of the entire population with the condition rose from 0.85 percent to 0.95 percent.

Vaccinating new mothers and other family members against influenza before their newborns leave the hospital creates a “cocooning effect” that may shelter unprotected children from the flu, a virus that can be life-threatening to infants, according to researchers at Duke Children’s Hospital. The hospital-based outreach tested in this study proved effective at boosting immunization rates in parents — especially new fathers — and siblings who otherwise may not be vaccinated.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have been selected to lead a new national survey of older Americans to understand patterns of disability and aging. The National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health, is expected to award approximately $24 million over the next five years to develop and implement the new survey. “Our aim is to provide scientific evidence that can help in reducing disability and improving the daily lives of older people,” said Judy Kasper, PhD, principal investigator. “We will assemble a rich database of information that will allow researchers to study how people’s ability to function independently changes over time, as well as examine the factors that influence those changes, such as social environment and medical care.”

A recently introduced blood test can reveal which patients may develop active tuberculosis (TB) much more precisely than the 100-year old TB skin test, according to a new study published today in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. Around a third of the world’s population is infected with the TB bacteria and approximately 9 million new cases of active TB are diagnosed around the world each year, according to World Health Organisation estimates. The majority of those infected live in the developing world. The researchers believe that the ELISpot blood test can enable preventative treatment to be targeted in a more focused way than the tuberculin skin test. Unlike the blood test, the skin test commonly gives falsely positive results if a patient has previously been vaccinated against TB.

The number of young people who had a food or digestive allergy increased 18 percent between 1997 and 2007, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2007, approximately 3 million U.S. children and teenagers under age 18 – or nearly 4 percent of that age group – were reported to have a food or digestive allergy in the previous 12 months, compared to just over 2.3 million (3.3 percent) in 1997..” A. Wesley Burks, “co-author of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ 2008 food allergy recommendations who was not involved in the new CDC report,” said that “because so many studies have documented a rise in allergic diseases, doctors believe the increase is ‘real,’ rather than the result of greater awareness or expanded testing.”

College students often spend their free time thinking about beer, but a group of Rice University students are taking it to the next level. They’re using genetic engineering to create beer that contains resveratrol, a chemical in wine that’s been shown to reduce cancer and heart disease in lab animals.

ScienceDaily (Oct. 17, 2008) — Images of white men predominate in western anatomy textbooks, which present them as a “universal model” of the human being. This is the main conclusion of a study that has analysed 16,329 images from 12 manuals currently recommended by 20 of the most prestigious universities in Europe, the United States and Canada. Comment: Do our textbooks bias the thinking of health workers by stereotyping potential patients?

Children living in the vicinity of powerful radio and television transmitters are not significantly more at risk of leukemia than others, according to a new German study. This is one of the main results of the Epidemiological study on childhood cancer and proximity to radio and television transmitters, conducted by the Institute for Medical Biometry, Epidemiology and Informatics (IMBEI) of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz on behalf of the Federal Office for Radiation Protection (BfS).
The study included 1,959 children aged 0-14 years, diagnosed with primary leukemia between 1984 and 2003, living in the surrounding of 16 amplitude-modulated (AM) and 8 frequency-modulated (FM) transmitters (UKW-/TV-transmitters). The leukemia cases were registered at the German childhood cancer registry. Three age-, gender-, and transmitter area-matched controls per case were drawn from population registries. The study design was defined as case-control study without conducting interviews. Comment: This anxiety fueled by activists has been around for more than 30 years. 20+ years ago, when I was state health commissioner, the department of health had to report annually on the dangers of transmission towers to the General Assembly. Despite all the data we gathered from around the world showing this was a non-event, politicians still keep looking for a cause célèbre!

In the Los Angeles Times (10/20) Booster Shots blog, Susan Brink wrote that “concerns about privacy and security…have stalled efforts to” create “a unique patient identifier — a number carried by each American linking patients to their individual health records.” Currently, the majority of “hospitals and health systems…rely on what’s called statistical matching, based on multiple personal attributes, such as name, address, birth date, gender, and Social Security number, to accurately match a given patient with his or her…records or medical history,” thereby exposing patients to privacy risks and possible identity theft. But, according to a RAND Corporation study released online on Oct. 20, it may be “easier to safeguard patient privacy with a records system that makes use of a unique health ID, rather than a system that uses statistical matching.” Implementation of such a system “would cost up to $11 billion. But, once implemented, [it] would save about $77 billion in increased efficiency and reduced errors.” Such a system would provide “no Social Security number, name, or other identifying information,” so hackers “wouldn’t be able to steal” anyone’s identity.