Kim’s public health blog

A nationwide study of over 280,000 women showed that postmenopausal women who are overweight or obese have advanced breast cancer at significantly higher rates than women of normal weight or less than normal weight. From 1996 to 2005, researchers collected ongoing mammography data on 287,115 postmenopausal women who were not using postmenopausal hormone therapy. They found that overall breast cancer rates went up in direct relationship to weight, as did rates of advanced cancer – specifically, rates of large invasive tumors, advanced-stage tumors, and high nuclear grade tumors. Nuclear grade is a measure of tumor cell growth and rate of cell division; the higher the grade, the more aggressive the tumor.

Google.org’s investment of “More than $14Million for genetic and digital detection” is the title of a blog post that I recently came across. Under a program called Predict and Prevent, Google is working with Healthmap.org and Promed-mail.org to tract the outbreak of infectious diseases across the world through digital and genetic approaches. These three organizations work together to use GIS to display geospatial data on global disease alert maps.
See: http://rose.geog.mcgill.ca/wordpress/?p=1126

The new basophil-microarray based allergy assay is the brainchild of researchers in The University of Nottingham’s Schools of Pharmacy and Biosciences. The new technology developed at Nottingham is a lab-based, in-vitro test to mimic human allergic reaction that could be used as an alternative to the traditional skin-prick test. It can test up to 5,000 different food or inhalant allergens that could cause an allergic reaction in a patient and the researchers are hoping it could also be developed as a diagnostic tool for parasitic infections.

The cancer death rate in the United States continues to go down, a new report from the nation’s leading cancer organizations says. What’s more, cancer incidence also appears to be dropping. The findings come from the Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer, 1975-2005, Featuring Trends in Lung Cancer, Tobacco Use and Tobacco Control. Cancer death rates for both sexes combined declined about 1.8% per year from 2002 through 2005, almost double the 1.1% per year decrease seen from 1993 through 2002. And for the first time in the 10-year history of the report, incidence rates for all cancers combined decreased, falling by 0.8% per year from 1999 to 2005.

Although life expectancy is constantly growing in the countries of the EU, living longer isn’t always the same as living well, and knowing to what age someone will live in good health remains a different question altogether. Carol Jagger, Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Leicester, is part of the European Health Expectancy Monitoring Unit (EHEMU), who have undertaken a research project on healthy life expectancy within the EU. Using a new indicator called Healthy Life Years, they found that in 2005 life expectancy in the EU was 78 years on average for men and 83 for women, while men live on average without any health problems up to 67 years and women to 69 years. Great disparities persist, however, between the countries of the EU, and the differences in Healthy Life Years are much greater than differences in life expectancy. The lowest ‘years of healthy life’ is seen in Estonia, where the age is 59 years for men and 61 for women. In Denmark, by contrast, those values rise to 73 years for men and 74 years for women. The UK is higher than the European average with figures of 69 years and 9 months for men and 70 years and 9 months for women. Comment: Note the disparity is much more related to income than anything else, If we were not so hung upon race in the US we might well find that disparity is much more relates to income than anything else

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have found evidence of a novel pathway for potential human exposure to antibiotic-resistant bacteria from intensively raised poultry—

driving behind the trucks

transporting broiler chickens from farm to slaughterhouse. A study by the Hopkins researchers found increased levels of pathogenic bacteria, both susceptible and drug-resistant, on surfaces and in the air inside cars traveling behind trucks that carry broiler chickens. The study is the first to look at exposure to antibiotic-resistant bacteria from the transportation of poultry.

A federal regulation aimed at preventing mad cow disease from getting into the food supply (a very rare occurrence) could create health risks of its own: many thousands of cattle carcasses rotting on farms, spreading germs, attracting vermin and polluting the water. The new rule could lead farmers to put hundreds of thousands more dead animals into the ground,” which, according to the agency’s assessment, may result in “foul odors; pollute soil, groundwater and streams; and attract insects and scavengers. Comment: Some risk may not be worth the cost if they cause greater hazard than they are trying to correct, which is common when politics trumps science..

According to a study in American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine children born in fall have increased risk of developing asthma. The “risk for childhood asthma was higher for babies who suffered from a respiratory tract infection early in life.  Further, the risk for developing asthma is about 40 percent if one parent has asthma, and about 80 percent if both parents have asthma. However, contracting a serious viral respiratory infection in early life can increase your chances of developing asthma by about 30 to 40 percent.  Comment: This is one more reason for pre-contraceptive planning

Today’s NEJM contains a must read editorial discussing the health of presidents and candidates. The issue is whether the media should have access to genetic scans of candidates.  The media is incapable of understanding scientific analysis and reporting research correctly. One of the final paragraphs of the editorial states “For the foreseeable future, the examination of thousands of genes in any genome is likely to result in large numbers of false positive findings, along with “incidental” findings of dubious clinical value. Thus, when sequence information about individual genomes becomes available, we will have to contend not only with the statistical issues of replication, effect size, and attributable risk but also with the specter of genetic information that is wrong or misleading.”
These comments apply to most of the genetic scans being foisted on the public at present. At best they mislead while at worst they are downright dangerous. An association is not  causation.

HealthDay reported that “in the not-so-distant future, American seniors may turn to helpful, uncomplaining robots to fill the worrisome ‘care gap’ that many face today.” Already, University of Massachusetts researchers have created the uBOT-5, which is “capable of carrying out simple tasks, while it monitors the home environment.” The $65,000 prototype “can even spot trouble — such as a person falling down — and call 911 if necessary.” According to co-inventor Rod Grupen, Ph.D., “any ‘authorized user’ can jump into and guide the robot,” meaning that “if you can’t get to your doctor, your doctor can now come to you.” Moreover, “the UMass team hopes that the uBOT-5 will someday be capable of running simple medical tests, such as measuring blood pressure or blood sugar.”