Vietnamese distrust food products

Health is among the top concerns of Vietnamese consumers, many of whom are not confident about the nutrition from food products, according to a new study conducted by Nielsen Vietnam.

The research, presented at a recent forum in Ho Chi Minh City , found that health is the third biggest anxiety among Vietnamese, after the economy and job security.

Customers choose vegetables at a supermarket in Ho Chi Minh City. Photo courtesy of Nguoi Lao Dong

It said 34 percent of 700 surveyed consumers from Hanoi and HCMC are less than confident about their health, with common worries about weight, heart disease, unhealthy foods and where to get healthy food.

The research, conducted in March and April, also included in-depth interviews with a number of the subjects. Nielsen  is a global information and measurement company with headquarters in New York and Diemen, the Netherlands.

Doan Duy Khoa, Associate Director of Consumer Insights at Nielsen Vietnam who was directly in charge of the research, said at the forum Vietnamese consumers are highly suspicious of the nation’s food supply, even more so after recent reports on the presence of dubious Chinese products.

Khoa said 47 percent of the consumers reported being confused about which foods are considered healthy, as well as the relative healthiness of ingredients and methods of preparation, which should motivate producers to provide more information if they want to win consumers’ trust.

But he also said that any information needs to be clear and simple, because while 64 percent of people surveyed said they read nutritional fact labels, most did not read the labels entirety.

The research found that Vietnamese consumers are still quite conservative when it comes to nutrition as they prefer “fresh” foods found at traditional markets to packaged ones, feeling safe that the former comes from local farms.

Their top “healthy food” options are fruit juice and soy milk, due to their impression that such products are fresh and at least somewhat homemade, Khoa said.

He also pointed to the uniqueness of the Vietnamese market, where people value nutritional advice given by family and friends above all other sources – 92 percent compared to 78 percent for TV commercials, 46 percent for newspapers, 32 percent for the Internet while only 29 percent for doctors.

He advised producers to utilize word of mouth communication in order to succeed within the Vietnamese market.

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Vietnam Worries About Ginger from China

Viet Nam has tightened up inspections of ginger imported from China following reports that farmers in Shandong Province were over-using a highly toxic pesticide called Aldicard in growing ginger.— VNS File Photo

HA NOI (VNS)— Viet Nam has tightened up inspections of ginger imported from China following reports that farmers in Shandong Province were over-using a highly toxic pesticide called Aldicard in growing ginger.

The pesticide is currently banned in Viet Nam.

Consumption of Aldicard can cause dizziness, blurred vision, nausea and respiratory failure. About 50 milligrammes of the drug is enough to kill a person weighing 50kg, according to a report by the China Central Television.

The head of Viet Nam’s Plant Protection Department, Nguyen Xuan Hong, told Viet Nam News that samples were being collected for testing. The results will be published soon.

“We will also co-operate with China to track down ginger importers,” he said. “Any batches of ginger not meeting quality standards will be re-exported.”

More than 330 tonnes of ginger has been officially imported from China so far this year, mainly via border gates in northern mountainous Lang Son and Lao Cai provinces.

Under current regulations, samples of all border products must be tested. However, tests were not done on ginger because of the low amount imported, Hong said.

Chinese-grown herbs, such as ginger and garlic, remain popular in Viet Nam. It is generally bigger than the locally grown products.

Domestic ginger is sold at around VND40,000 a kilo, while the Chinese variety is sold for VND10,000.

The owner of a shop in Tu Liem District said that Chinese ginger and garlic were popular with restaurants who often bought hundreds of kilos at a time.

The Chinese products have a competitive edge because they are reputed to last longer. — VNS

Waist to height ratio ‘more accurate than BMI’ — Too large a trouser size can dramatically shorten your lifespan

Your waist should be no more than half the length of your height, according to experts who claim that having too large a trouser size can dramatically shorten your lifespan.

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Keeping your waist circumference to less than half of your height can help prevent the onset of conditions Photo: Alamy

By Nick Collins, Science Correspondent

The Telegraph

Measuring the ratio of someone’s waist to their height is a better way of predicting their life expectancy than body mass index (BMI), the method widely used by doctors when judging overall health and risk of disease, researchers said.

BMI is calculated as a person’s weight in kilograms divided by the square of their height in metres, but a study found that the simpler measurement of waistline against height produced a more accurate prediction of lifespan.

People with the highest waist-to-height ratio, whose waistlines measured 80 per cent of their height, lived 17 years fewer than average.

Keeping your waist circumference to less than half of your height can help prevent the onset of conditions like stroke, heart disease and diabetes and add years to life, researchers said.

For a 6ft man, this would mean having a waistline smaller than 36in, while a 5ft 4in woman should have a waist size no larger than 32in.

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Children in particular could be screened as early as five using the waist-to-height ratio to identify those at greatest risk of obesity and serious health conditions later in life, it was claimed.

Researchers from Oxford Brookes University examined data on patients whose BMI and waist to height ratio were measured in the 1980s.

Twenty years later, death rates among the group were much more closely linked to participants’ earlier waist-to-height ratio than their BMI, suggesting it is a more useful tool for identifying health risks at an early stage.

By comparing the life expectancies of various groups of people at different waist-to-height ratios, they were able to calculate how many years of life were lost as people’s waistlines increased.

For example, a man aged 30 with a waist-to-height ratio of 0.8, representing the largest one in 500 men, stood to lose 16.7 years of life due to their size.

A 50-year-old woman with the same ratio, accounting for about one in 150 women of the same age, would lose 8.2 years of life on average.

Dr Margaret Ashwell, whose previous research has suggested that the waist-to-height ratio could be a better tool than BMI for predicting a range of diseases, presented her findings at the European Congress on Obesity in Liverpool.

Measuring someone’s waist is important because it accounts for levels of central fat which accumulates around the organs and is particularly closely linked to conditons like stroke and heart disease.

She said: “If you are measuring waist-to-height ratio you are getting a much earlier prection that something is going wrong, and then you can do something about it.

“The beauty is that you can do it in centimetres or inches, it doesn’t matter. We have got increasing evidence that this works very well with children as well, because whilst they grow up their waist is growing but also their height.”

America To See New Guidebook for Mental Illness, Disorders, Depression

Health and Mental Health

By Monica Hesse

The Washington Post

It’s going to land soon, an eggplant-colored anvil of a book, and it’s going to affect clinical things like health diagnoses and bureaucratic things like insurance reimbursements and cultural things like the casual vocabulary of television sitcoms. And unless you are a doctor or a doctor groupie — a devoted devotee of the disease of the week — you will probably never read it.

On May 22, the American Psychiatric Association will deliver a tome unto the medical community: The fifth revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The clinician’s handbook. The DSM-5.

This is the first major revision of the DSM in nearly 20 years. No one has seen it.

Not the complete, final, tangible version, at least. Interested psychiatrists have seen most of it, during the manual’s multiple open comment periods. For months  — years — onlookers have dissected it with sharpened scalpels: Which diagnoses have been removed (Asperger syndrome). Which diagnoses have been added or reconfigured (hoarding). Whether the ones included are too broad, or too tied to the pharmaceutical industry, or maybe just too numerous.

Even before one can buy the DSM-5, one can buy books lambasting the DSM-5. Books with titles like “The Book of Woe.” Or “The Intelligent Clinician’s Guide to the DSM-5.” Or “Saving Normal,” which was written by an unexpected figure: the man who was the chair of the DSM-IV task force, the DSM-5’s predecessor, back in the 1990s.

There is a reason for the intense focus: Over the course of its 60-year history, the DSM has come to represent a diagnosis encyclopedia, a mental bible. It is made specifically for the psychiatric community, but an armchair hypochondriac may purchase it on Amazon.com for $135. (Hypochondriasis: a term that will not appear as usual in the DSM-5. Instead it will be combined with other disorders under the umbrella term “complex somatic symptom disorder.”)

It is the dictionary of our pain.

When we look at the DSM-5, what we’re looking at is 60 years of humanity’s attempt to understand what we will never give up trying to understand: ourselves. The last frontier of exploration in this vast, ever-expanding universe all takes place between our ears, and it’s all corralled into the pages of this manual.

A long road to revision

The American Psychiatric Association is headquartered in Arlington, on the 20th floor of a high-rise three blocks from the Rosslyn Metro. Most of the APA’s interior is bland — cubicles measured off like inches on a ruler — but the window offices have sprawling views of the Potomac River.

One such window office belongs to James Scully, the chief executive officer and medical director of the APA. This afternoon, a baking April weekday, he sits in it with Darrel Regier, the co-chair of the task force charged with the DSM-5 revision (the chair, who is not here today, is David Kupfer).

Scully has white hair and blue eyes and a soft voice that occasionally twinkles; you can picture him somewhere on a canoe or in front of a fireplace. Regier is dark-haired, thorough — a man who gives precise, date-packed answers, swaddled in history and context.

The APA “held 13 conferences from 2003 to 2008 covering all of the major diagnostic areas,” Regier says, talking about the decade-long endeavor to develop the new manual.

It was a long process, Scully explains.

“It took one year to vet the task force,” Regier elaborates. The task force was ready in 2007, “but then it took another year, to 2008, to appoint 130 members of 13 work groups.”

When the DSM-IV was released back in 1994, researchers didn’t know nearly as much as they know now about how the brain works. They didn’t know as much about circuitry, or about genetics. Under the DSM-IV, Scully says, too many patients were handed a diagnosis of “not otherwise specified,” a vague term meaning that doctors didn’t have a disorder to fit the symptoms at hand.

The task force hopes that will not be a problem with the DSM-5. “Altogether, we have about 157 specific mental disorders,” Regier says of this manual. “That represents a total of 15 new, and we deleted two.” In addition, the task force took 50 existing diagnoses and collapsed them into 22. Total, there are actually fewer diagnoses than there were in the DSM-IV, he says. “But there is an enormous amount of movement.”

For example: Binge eating now gets its own category under the general grouping of eating disorders.

For example: The diagnosis of ADHD has been expanded to account for the way that adults express symptoms differently from children.

The goal of the new manual, Scully says, “is to increase the accuracy in diagnoses so that we can do better care. Taking care of patients. Helping people get better.”

Of course, that has always been the goal, for any good doctor, in any branch of medicine. The trouble is that precisely what “helping people” means has changed radically over time — madhouses to electroconvulsive therapy to psychoanalysis to Prozac.

To truly understand the meaning of the DSM-5 — why it’s being revised, how it got here, what it means  — “I think,” Regier says, “it really goes back to the 1950s.”

Humble beginnings

Before that, even. The first published attempt at cataloguing mental health in the United States appeared in 1917. The Statistical Manual for the Use of Institutions for the Insane was a slim 40-page treatise, dispersed to mental hospitals trying to describe their clientele. It included 22 varieties of “mental disease,” 15 of which were types of psychosis.

Decades passed. The return of soldiers from World War II — and the psychological issues they brought with them — caused the medical community to think more intently about categorizing those issues.  In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association decided to create a new book. It would be dedicated solely to diagnosing mental illness. It would be called the “Diagnostic And Statistical Manual: Mental Disorders.” The DSM.

Not exactly a best-selling title, but then, it wasn’t meant to be a best-selling book. Outside of the mental health community in the United States, “Nobody much paid attention to it,” says Edward Shorter, a medical historian at the University of Toronto, and the author of “How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown.” There was already an international document, the International Classification of Diseases, that was in use worldwide.

Besides, in the early 1950s, psychiatry was still dominated by psychoanalysis, by the ghost of Sigmund Freud, who had died in 1939. “Nobody was interested in the classification of illness,” Shorter says. People were interested in dream analysis. In the mysterious vagaries of the subconscious, in the interplay between the id, the ego and the superego. The predominant diagnoses at the time were anxiety and “neurotic depression,” illnesses which lent themselves especially to the faddish dream interpretation of the period.

Ironically, the same year that the first DSM was released, in all of its psychoanalytical glory, the drug chlorpromazine became available in France. The first edition of the DSM was a new book representing old concepts — the “last gasp” of psychoanalysis, Shorter says. Chlorpromazine, sold as Thorazine in the United States and the first drug specifically market as an anti-psychotic, represented the dawn of psychopharmacology, the beginning of a new era.

A mirror of the times

Something was wrong with the water in London. Or if not the water, then the architecture. Or if not the architecture, then the traffic patterns. Or maybe the problem was the diagnostic tools.

What happened: In 1972, a team of British and American researchers published a study called “Psychiatric Diagnosis in New York and London” that compared diagnoses from hospitals on each side of the Atlantic.

The study’s results were confusing: 62 percent of New York’s patients were diagnosed as schizophrenics, compared with only 34 percent of London’s test subjects. London doctors, on the other hand, declared 24 percent of their subjects to be suffering from depressive psychosis — a diagnoses given to only 5 percent of New York’s study participants.

The study illustrated a problem with diagnosis at the time: It wasn’t consistent, and it wasn’t repeatable. Psychiatrists were ostensibly using the same definitions but were arriving at different conclusions.

The second revision of the DSM had been more of an update than an overhaul, but in the mid-1970s, the DSM task force decided that the third edition would be a rigorous and ambitious reimagining of what a psychiatric manual could do. Columbia psychiatrist Robert Spitzer was tapped to act as chair, and he set about changing the DSM from a more descriptive document to a rule-bound field guide for classification.

Gone were the Freudian “neuroses” that had populated earlier editions. Introduced were guidelines to help clinicians from different facilities arrive at the same conclusions, writes Bob Whitaker in “Anatomy of an Epidemic,” a history of mental health in the United States. A practitioner could not, for example, declare someone to be experiencing a “major depressive episode” unless five of nine listed criteria were met.

Moreover, the DSM-III was a rhetorical revolution, expanding the number of potential diagnoses — and the terms people had available to describe their suffering — to 265. It neatly organized people and behaviors into tidy compartments, laying the groundwork for manuals to come, and for the future of psychiatry as a whole. One psychiatrist at the time, writes Whitaker, heralded the new DSM as the victory of scientific psychiatry: “The old psychiatry derives from theory, the new psychiatry from fact.”

And this is what we, the patients, really want: Facts. Diagnoses. Pills, treatments, cures, therapy, anything to ease our psychic pain, to make us feel better.

Consider Sybil, the troubled young artist whose name became synonymous with multiple personality disorder (now known as dissociative identity disorder). Consider legions of vaguely socially uncomfortable men — everyone from Mark Zuckerberg to Mitt Romney — offhandedly referred to as “Asperger-ish.” Consider A&E, network of a hundred maladies, hosting a parade of cat ladies and newspaper stackers on the show “Hoarders.”

To laymen, psychiatry can still come across as theoretical, more difficult to grasp than other branches of medicine: The difference between a bloody foot and a bruised soul. But over the course of its history, the DSM has been a mirror, reflecting whatever is ailing society and providing a vocabulary with which to discuss it. The language of the DSM has been embraced (misused?) by the masses, aiding in the self-description, self-labeling and self-analysis that have defined the 2000s and 2010s. We are “a little bit OCD,” with bosses who are “classic narcissists.” We are dating boyfriends who might have generalized anxiety disorder.

The DSM takes that bruised soul and gives it a name. Which gives us peace of mind.

If something is wrong with all of us, is anything wrong with any of us?

Concerns and doubts

“I am a lazy, selfish person who has never been involved in a cause before this, but I felt like I had no choice.”

This is Allen Frances, the chair of the DSM-IV task force. The “cause” he speaks of is speaking out against the DSM-5. A few decades ago, his wife had a brain tumor, and he dropped out of practice for a while. When he became involved in the field again, he decided that the field had drifted toward over-diagnosis and over-medication.

Now he has been traveling around the world, spreading this gospel, which is also laid out in two separate books he has written on the DSM-5, and on what he sees as diagnosis inflation and migration.

Frances is one of multiple vocal critics who have expressed doubts about, reservations over, or downright hatred toward the new manual.

Last week, the National Institute of Mental Health, the largest mental health research organization in the world, announced that it had concerns about the DSM-5 and would begin reorienting its research away from DSM categories. “The weakness is a lack of validity,” NIMH director Thomas Insel wrote in a statement, criticizing the DSM-5 for basing its diagnosis on clinical symptoms rather than on “objective laboratory measures.” “Patients with mental disorders,” Insel wrote, “deserve better.”

David Kupfer, the DSM-5’s chair, responded to the NIMH’s concerns by arguing that  objective measures, like biological and genetic markers, are still too far off to wait for. “In the absence of such major discoveries,” he wrote in a statement, “it is clinical experience and evidence, as well as growing empirical research, that have advanced our understanding” of many disorders.

Understanding has been advanced — but not reached.

Because even for medical professionals, “fact” is a moving target, a difficult destination. Throughout its history, the DSM has remained a consensus document, says Shorter, the medical historian. “We didn’t [calculate] the speed of light in a consensus document . . . Psychiatry aspires to scientific status,” Shorter says, but it’s also subject to the political or interdisciplinary nuances of the day.

“People don’t change quickly,” says Frances. “Labels change on a dime. Labels follow fashion. Whenever there’s a sudden jump, it’s not because there’s more pa­thol­ogy, it’s because there’s a difference in labeling it.”

It brings up an essential, philosophical question: Who are we? Are we the same people we’ve always been? Sicker? Healthier? Wounded as ever, but with better terminology?

The DSM might relabel our suffering, but does it bring us any closer to understanding the unquiet of our minds?

“We’re very comfortable with what we’ve done,” says James Scully, the APA chief executive, back in his office overlooking the Potomac. “And moving forward, we think it’s a wonderful book, and people get to see it in a few weeks.”

Not that he expects that this is psychiatry’s final destination.

“Will there be changes in the future? I hope so. It’s not the word of God. It’s the best science we have currently,” he says. “This is DSM-5, it’s not DSM-The End.”

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Obama Calls On Congress To Spend $100M Next Year To Map Brain

President Barack Obama speaks in the East Room at the White House in Washington, DC, on April 2, 2013 to announce his Administration’s BRAIN, Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, Initiative. (credit: JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)

That’s a relatively small investment for the federal government — less than a fifth of what NASA spends every year just to study the sun — but it’s too early to determine how Congress will react.

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Britain’s Overwhelmed National Health Service: “It’s the No F—ing Hope Service.”

It’s where the buck stops in the health service, and the strain is showing.

Previously: Yanks call them Emergency Rooms. Brits call them “Accident & Emergency” or simply A&E.  Now they have become like “warzones”….

Hospital Emergency Rooms Turning Into “Warzones” In Britain’s Health Care Service

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Even the best hospitals can struggle with the demands for A&E services Photo: ALAMY

By Jenny McCartney

We had already been waiting in A&E for two hours, or thereabouts, and were just settling in on the plastic seats for the long haul, when we became aware of the inevitable drunk from central casting in our midst.

He was lurching towards the vending machine – one step forward, two steps back – in a manner that might have been comic had it not been so fused to the certainty of disaster.

Sure enough, the moment came. A tall, trembling, elderly lady in a wheelchair, possibly touched with dementia, was clumsily navigating the narrow walkway in front of the vending machine: something about the display attracted her, like a long, fragile moth to a lit shop window. The drunk got enmeshed with the spokes of her wheelchair and crashed in staggering slow-motion to the floor. He lay, loudly cursing her: they were both jammed there together, helpless symbols of age and addiction, two factors whose encroaching grip is slowly immobilising the NHS.

Emergency! Several weary nurses appeared, pertly snapping on blue plastic gloves, and gently bundled him into a chair of his own. Even sitting down, he still made the other patients edgy: he bounced his empty polystyrene cup hard across the room, fixing individuals with his gaze and slurring: “I’m a man… I’m going to kill you.”

A young African woman in a hijab, sitting alone, looked nervous. The drunk stumbled up and loomed purposely close over a seated Eastern European man in yellow shoes, who said quickly: “Don’t touch me, please, take your hands off me.”

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It’s touching, that conciliatory little “please” that foreigners use in tense situations, as though the formal extension of politeness might act as a shield against the jagged unknowns in this new, uncharted country. There was, of course, always the natural apprehension that the drunk might suddenly vomit on you: you could see at a glance he felt bad.

Not much seemed to be moving. The middle-aged woman behind the Plexiglas window at reception said that it was a very busy night “from the back”: that’s where the ambulances and their human cargo come in.

As the hours passed, the virulent rash that had brought me in – a severe allergy to a commonly prescribed antibiotic – deepened, spread and got more painful. I couldn’t complain when I looked at the young Polish mother and daughter next to me, the mother nearly crying from the pain of her damaged ankle. The drunk asked for a Lucozade Original from the machine, which I got him: the uncharacteristic precision of his request, and the focused way he ate two Mars Bars, made me think he might be struggling to prevent a hypo: alcohol was in the mix, but diabetes might be, too. He wasn’t just time-wasting in emergency; he was a permanent emergency, trailing complicated layers of need.

The predicted wait after going on the list was “up to four hours”. Indeed, the number of people waiting in A&E for more than four hours has doubled in two years. Dr Cliff Mann, from the College of Emergency Medicine, last week said that A&E doctors were comparing their units to “a war zone” and there was a recruitment crisis because so many had bowed out.

In the out-of-hours system, however, most roads lead to A&E. I was told by the GP who saw me in the morning to call back later if the rash got much worse. But later – when it did – the GP’s surgery was, of course, closed. I called NHS 111 as instructed, and a woman took me through a brisk checklist of worst-case scenarios (“Is your skin peeling off in sheets?”). A nurse phoned me back, and was delighted to hear that I had an A&E unit nearby, to which she strongly advised a visit. The trouble is that, if anything sounds potentially serious, the people on the end of the NHS phone lines want you to go to A&E because they know the doctors there have the means to treat it decisively.

So A&E is where the buck stops most often. Watching the staff last week in London’s Whittington Hospital (a unit, unbelievably, under discussion for closure), the nurses were stoic, the doctors polite, swift and professional – with the wired energy of bright people coping with insane demands – and the security guards firm, but not aggressive. It works, thanks to them. It could work so much better. But A&E has become the sponge that absorbs the overflow of failure from all the other parts of the NHS system and beyond, whether medical or social, and it is sodden.

When I left to go home at 2am, a new, energetic drunk was being softly bundled out by the security guards, as he yelled: “It’s the No F—ing Hope Service.” A doctor had insulted his feelings, he said. The original drunk was sleeping soundly on the chair, his face briefly as peaceful as a child’s, his bottle of Lucozade Original nestling on the floor beside his feet.

Wise MPs always listen to mother

It is all most confusing. Over recent years, there has been only one real constant in my attitude to politics: whatever Nick Clegg is for, I am generally against, from the escalation of tuition fees to his curious preoccupation with reform of the House of Lords in the face of more urgent business.

Now, however, Clegg has made me lose my bearings: he has clogged up the Government plan to increase a single nursery worker’s number of infant charges (to six two-year-olds, or four babies under the age of one) and, for once, I think he’s absolutely right. No matter what useful points Liz Truss, the Conservative education minister, might make about the importance of “structured play” – a vision in which a calm but firm lady in a chignon expertly marshals obliging toddlers to learning activities – it will all turn to tears in the Play-Doh if the children grossly outnumber the real, flagging adults caring for them.

I thought, perhaps, that Clegg’s conspicuous family time had richly endowed him with domestic common sense. But the furious Tories – who say he fully backed the proposals at first – are instead accusing him of having been “got at” by representatives of the internet forum Mumsnet.

If true, Clegg’s stance may be less admirable, but at least he has finally absorbed one of the iron laws of government: defy David Cameron if you like, but mess with Mumsnet at your peril.

Punk? You’re off your rockers

Looking at the pictures of the groomed, polished “punk” night at the New York Met Ball last week was a surreal experience for anyone who remembers, however dimly, a little of what the punk that slunk down British high streets was actually like.

It was home-made, a bit rough, frequently odd-smelling (from sugar-water hair gel and the pong of second-hand clothes), and often bedraggled.

The whole point, as I recall, was that you could do it yourself, rather than have it applied by a stylist who added a bejewelled clip-on nose-spike as the edgy icing on the “pretty” cake. In our house, my older sisters used to leave home for Belfast clubs in heavily accessorised outfits they had made themselves, to my grandfather’s joyous disbelief. The trickle-down effect led my brother to buy me a chunky black eyeliner, and a copy of the Sex Pistols’ God Save The Queen for my 11th birthday.

Looking back, one of the most interesting things about punk was the way that it liberated girls from struggling to look “cute”: they wanted to seem interesting, original, even aggressive.

I suppose it’s poignant that punk, perhaps the most angrily democratic of all youth styles, ends up being playfully channelled by Sarah Jessica Parker with a red-carpet, bejewelled Mohican. Still, it fits the compulsive gloss of our times: even Merida, the quirky, curly-haired character from Disney-Pixar’s film Brave, last week suffered a creepy reinvention as a “princess” doll, with Barbie-esque curves and gently undulating locks.

We have been too keen lately to airbrush all the character out of our girls; now we’re doing it to entire eras.

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Cocaine vaccine passes key testing hurdle

Neuropsychopharmacology

May 10, 2013

Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College have successfully tested their novel anti-cocaine vaccine in primates, bringing them closer to launching human clinical trials.

Their study, published online by the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, used a radiological technique to demonstrate that the anti-cocaine vaccine prevented the drug from reaching the brain and producing a dopamine-induced high.
“The vaccine eats up the cocaine in the blood like a little Pac-man before it can reach the brain,” says the study’s lead investigator, Dr. Ronald G. Crystal, chairman of the Department of Genetic Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College.

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“We believe this strategy is a win-win for those individuals, among the estimated 1.4 million cocaine users in the United States, who are committed to breaking their addiction to the drug,” he says. “Even if a person who receives the anti-cocaine vaccine falls off the wagon, cocaine will have no effect.” Dr. Crystal says he expects to begin human testing of the anti-cocaine vaccine within a year. Cocaine, a tiny molecule drug, works to produce feelings of pleasure because it blocks the recycling of dopamine—the so-called “pleasure” neurotransmitter—in two areas of the brain, the putamen in the forebrain and the caudate nucleus in the brain’s center.

When dopamine accumulates at the nerve endings, “you get this massive flooding of dopamine and that is the feel good part of the cocaine high,” says Dr. Crystal. The novel vaccine Dr. Crystal and his colleagues developed combines bits of the common cold virus with a particle that mimics the structure of cocaine. When the vaccine is injected into an animal, its body “sees” the cold virus and mounts an immune response against both the virus and the cocaine impersonator that is hooked to it. “The immune system learns to see cocaine as an intruder,” says Dr. Crystal. “Once immune cells are educated to regard cocaine as the enemy, it produces antibodies, from that moment on, against cocaine the moment the drug enters the body.”

In their first study in animals, the researchers injected billions of their viral concoction into laboratory mice, and found a strong immune response was generated against the vaccine. Also, when the scientists extracted the antibodies produced by the mice and put them in test tubes, it gobbled up cocaine. They also saw that mice that received both the vaccine and cocaine were much less hyperactive than untreated mice given cocaine. Booster Shots to Dampen the Cocaine High In this study, the researchers sought to precisely define how effective the anti-cocaine vaccine is in non-human primates, who are closer in biology to humans than mice.

They developed a tool to measure how much cocaine attached to the dopamine transporter, which picks up dopamine in the synapse between neurons and brings it out to be recycled. If cocaine is in the brain, it binds on to the transporter, effectively blocking the transporter from ferrying dopamine out of the synapse, keeping the neurotransmitter active to produce a drug high. In the study, the researchers attached a short-lived isotope tracer to the dopamine transporter.

The activity of the tracer could be seen using positron emission tomography (PET). The tool measured how much of the tracer attached to the dopamine receptor in the presence or absence of cocaine. The PET studies showed no difference in the binding of the tracer to the dopamine transporter in vaccinated compared to unvaccinated animals if these two groups were not given cocaine. But when cocaine was given to the primates, there was a significant drop in activity of the tracer in non-vaccinated animals. That meant that without the vaccine, cocaine displaced the tracer in binding to the dopamine receptor. Previous research had shown in humans that at least 47 percent of the dopamine transporter had to be occupied by cocaine in order to produce a drug high.

The researchers found, in vaccinated primates, that cocaine occupancy of the dopamine receptor was reduced to levels of less than 20 percent. “This is a direct demonstration in a large animal, using nuclear medicine technology, that we can reduce the amount of cocaine that reaches the brain sufficiently so that it is below the threshold by which you get the high,” says Dr. Crystal.

When the vaccine is studied in humans, the non-toxic dopamine transporter tracer can be used to help study its effectiveness as well, he adds. The researchers do not know how often the vaccine needs to be administered in humans to maintain its anti-cocaine effect. One vaccine lasted 13 weeks in mice and seven weeks in non-human primates. “An anti-cocaine vaccination will require booster shots in humans, but we don’t know yet how often these booster shots will be needed,” says Dr. Crystal. “I believe that for those people who desperately want to break their addiction, a series of vaccinations will help.”

Journal reference:Provided by Weill Cornell Medical College

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Read more at: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-05-cocaine-vaccine-key-hurdle.html#jCp

News SARS-like Coronavirus Kills 7 of 13 Infected in Saidi Arabia, Spreads to Qatar, Jordan, Britain the United Arab Emirates and France

Saudi Arabia has 13 cases of SARS-like coronavirus

May 8 (Reuters) – Saudi Arabia has had 13 cases in a recent outbreak of a new strain of coronavirus that has emerged from the Gulf and spread as far as Britain and France, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday, and seven of those have died.

Saudi Arabia has reported 23 confirmed cases in total, Qatar two, Jordan two, Britain two and the United Arab Emirates one, the WHO said. Although there is no evidence of sustained human-to-human spread, there are concerns about clusters of cases.

France reported its first case on Wednesday.

The latest Saudi outbreak was restricted to al-Ahsa governorate in Eastern Province and all those infected had pre-existing health conditions, Arab News newspaper quoted Doctor Jafar al-Tawfiq, an infections specialist in Eastern Province, as saying.

Officials at Al-Moosa hospital in the town of Hofuf in Ahsa, where the patients are being treated, declined to comment.

WHO spokesman Glenn Thomas said in Geneva on Wednesday that Saudi authorities are organising a mission with two WHO staff and that their focus will be on Hofuf. The first reports of infections in the recent outbreak were on April 14, WHO said.

Saudi state news agency SPA quoted Deputy Health Minister Mansour al-Hawasi on Tuesday as saying the situation “called for no concern” and that the ministry had taken all precautions around anyone who had been in contact with those infected.

Worldwide, there have been 30 laboratory-confirmed infections, including 18 deaths, since it came to scientists’ attention last September, the WHO’s Thomas said.

Other strains of coronavirus can cause common colds as well as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) that emerged in Asia in 2003 and killed 775 people.

A retrospective study in Jordan found that there had been an outbreak of the new virus there as long ago as April 2012, with two confirmed cases and 11 probable ones, including 10 health care workers, the WHO’s Thomas said.   (Reporting by Mahmoud Habboush; Additional reporting by Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva and Catherine Bremer in Paris; Editing by Louise Ireland and Yara Bayoumy)

Chris Christie: Weighing The Odds

Maybe I’m just too naive to be writing and talking about politics.

When the New York Post reported that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie had undergone lap-band stomach surgery earlier this year to lose weight, I actually thought he offered a reasonable explanation when he said, “For me, this is about turning 50 and looking at my children and wanting to be there for them.”

Silly me.

“This means he’s running for president,” a top political donor told the paper. “He’s showing people he can get his weight in control. It’s the one thing holding him back.”

You can see how obtuse–not obese, obtuse–I was. On the one hand, avoiding early death. On the other hand, improving your political options. It’s obvious to anyone who’s spent 10 minutes strategizing on cable news what the real motivation must be.

Look, I understand the cynicism about all things political; and the politicians have brought a lot of it on themselves. When an office-holder facing a multi-count indictment says that he has decided to spend more time with his family, the proper response is a horse-laugh. When an accused politician explains that a charge of corruption is “really” an attack on his or her race, religion, ethnic background or gender, the odds that something felonious happened jumps. Protestations of indifference to higher office are hard to take seriously when the “non-candidate” is busily engaged in testing the waters.

And it’s certainly reasonable that a potential presidential candidate would take appearance into account. America hasn’t elected a genuinely overweight president since William Howard Taft, and the recent presidents, from Jimmy Carter on have been eager to demonstrate their affection for jogging or golf or power biking or basketball (although Carter’s collapse at the end of a road race in the fall of 1979 turned into an unhappy symbol of his re-election prospects).

William Howard Taft

But just as Freud noted that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” political people really do things at times for reasons that are not political–at least, not in the usual sense. Consider the spate of retirements from the United States Senate. Does anyone think that Maine’s Olympia Snowe doubted that she’d have been re-elected last year?  Is there something about her explanation–that she’d had enough of the rancorous partisanship–that gives rise to any doubt? When Michigan’s Carl Levin announced his retirement, was there any reason to believe he was facing a daunting political challenge? Or maybe the fact that he’s been in the Senate since 1979, and will be 80 years old next year, is a pretty convincing motive for stepping down. More broadly, the changing nature of the once-prestigious job of senator–endless fund-raising, legislative gridlock, competing demands to be in Washington and back home at the same time–are convincing a near-record holder of politically safe incumbents to self-deport from the Capitol.

I understand that it’s hard to think that normal human motives could govern anyone who is part of the political universe, much less someone who is being judged as a potential president. We have now reached the point where there is never a time-out; last week, an article in POLITICO used a passing phrase that spoke volumes: “..as 2016 draws nearer…” Nearer? We’re four and a half months into Obama’s second term. So I guess it’s inevitable that every time Gov. Christie or any of the “mentionables” eats an ear of corn, it will be seen as an obvious effort to appeal to the Iowa agricultural interests.

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So why do I take Gov. Christie’s explanation for his weight loss hopes at face value? I have four young grandchildren, with a fifth on the way, and I will soon reach my allotted three score and ten years. The desire to be around to cheer at their graduations and dance at their weddings is a motivation I deeply understand.

Related:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie reveals secret stomach surgery to lose weight

With Obamacare and Doctor Shortage: Get Ready For Robot Diagnosis and “Care” By “Telepresence”

Photo: Remote Presence Virtual + Independent Telemedicine Assistant, or RP-VITA.

 

BOSTON (CBS) — The RP VITA robot will be deployed allowing doctors and patients to interact with nothing more than an iPad and video screen. It’s the first such robot approved for use by the FDA.

Marcio Macedo, Director of Product Development for iRobot tells WBZ the system developed with InTouch Health of Santa Barbara, California, is based on a tablet interface that allows a doctor to be up and running virtually without training.

The cost to a hospital: between $4,000-$6,000 a month, including all the services needed to run the technology.

Macedo says patients prefer having consultations through technology.

iRobot says more hospitals will be using robots in the coming months.

Related:

Vietnam Hospital Uses Cameras To Keep Tabs On Medical Providers; Service and “Attitude” To Be Evaluated

Technology May Take Away Many American Jobs: Possibly Never To Return

Obamacare Expected To Overwhelm Emergency Rooms Due To Doctor Shortage

Obamacare Raising Health Insurance Costs for Everyone

By 2020, The U.S. Will Have A Doctor Shortage of 45,000

Above: Meet  TUG the  robot (which now come with an Automated Robotic Delivery System for hospitals), they can both schedule meal deliveries as well as deliver on-demand when a patient requests a meal. Singularity Hub, a leading authority in the robotics space, named these TUG robots one of 2010’s best robots .

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In case you missed the memo, there’s quite a bit more to iRobot than adorable autonomous vacuums — these days the firm works on military projects, consumer electronics and tablet-controlled telepresence robots. Earlier this year, iRobot even retooled itself to build an emerging technologies group, announcing a partnership with InTouch Health to put its AVA telepresence technology to better use. Today the two companies are announcing the fruits of their labor — the Remote Presence Virtual + Independent Telemedicine Assistant, or RP-VITA. The project aims to combine the best of iRobot’s AVA telepresence units with InTouch health’s own bots, creating an easy to use system that allows physicians to care for patients remotely without stumbling over complicated technology.

The RP-VITA features state-of-the-art mapping and obstacle detection and avoidance technology, a simple iPad user interface for control and interaction and the ability to interface with diagnostic devices and access electronic medical records. The remote rig will eventually be able to navigate to specified target destinations autonomously, though this feature is still being reviewed by the FDA for clearance. iRobot and InTouch are optimistic about the unit, but claim that the RP-VITA is only the beginning. “While this represents our first foray into the healthcare market, the RP-VITA represents a robust platform,” said Colin Angle, Chairman and CEO of iRobot, “we see many future opportunities in adjacent markets.” The new telemedicine assistant is slated to make its first appearance at InTouch Health’s 7th Annual Clinic Innovations Forum later this week. Check out the press release after the break for the full details.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/24/irobot-intouch-health-unveil-rp-vita-telepresence-robot/

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie reveals secret stomach surgery to lose weight

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie secretly underwent lap-band stomach surgery to aggressively slim down for the sake of his wife and kids, he revealed to The Post last night.

The Garden State governor agreed to the operation at the urging of family and friends after turning 50 last September.

By TARA PALMERI and BETH DEFALCO

He told The Post he was thinking of his four kids and how it was time to start improving his health when he decided to have the procedure.

“I’ve struggled with this issue for 20 years,” he said. “For me, this is about turning 50 and looking at my children and wanting to be there for them.”

HEAVY DUTY: Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told The Post last night he had lap-band surgery Feb. 16 because he wants to stay alive for his kids. Photo: AP

He also insisted that, contrary to what observers may say, the effort to slim down was not motivated by thoughts of a presidential bid.

“It’s so much more important than that,” he said.

Christie checked in to a surgery center on Feb. 16. A source said he registered under a false name.

The operation included placing a silicone tube around the top of his stomach, where it restricts the amount of food he can eat at one time and makes him feel fuller, faster.

“A week or two ago, I went to a steakhouse and ordered a steak and ate about a third of it and I was full,” he said of his newly tamed appetite. He declined to say how much he lost, but sources said he has already shed nearly 40 pounds.

Christie has struggled with his weight for decades. He sometimes jokes about it, while other times, it’s a sensitive topic. Insiders said it was the only thing keeping the straight-talking executive from higher office.

Chris Christie on the David Letterman Show

Despite Christie’s denials, political fund-raisers say that the surgery is a clear sign that he’s going to join the 2016 race — and will do whatever it takes to win.

“This means he’s running for president. He’s showing people he can get his weight in control. It was the one thing holding him back,” a top political donor told The Post.

Sources said Christie didn’t make the decision lightly — he even had private conversations about the operation with once-rotund Jet coach Rex Ryan.

Ryan lost about 100 pounds — down from a massive 350 — after he had the same procedure done in 2010.

Christie has never revealed his weight, but estimates have run from about 300 to 350 pounds.

He hired the same ace laparoscopic and bariatric surgeon as Ryan — Dr. George Fielding, head of NYU Medical Center’s Weight Management Program.

Christie employed cloak-and-dagger tactics to hide the operation. First, he never went into Fielding’s office for medical visits — instead, the doctor came to the governor’s house in Mendham, the sources said.

He managed to keep it under wraps for nearly three months.

Christie said he went under the knife at 7 a.m. for 40 minutes and was home the same afternoon.

As he drops pounds, doctors will pump more saline solution into the lap band, restricting his stomach further and forcing him to eat even less.

In 2006, Christie said in an interview that getting a more involved surgery — gastric bypass — was never a consideration because it was “too risky.”

Christie, a Republican who is running for re-election as governor this fall, saw his girth become a campaign issue in the 2009 governor’s race, when Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine’s campaign ran TV ads with extremely unflattering videos of his rival.

But Christie defeated Corzine.

The enlivened pol said that he knew the clock was ticking on his health and that the time had come to do something drastic.

“I know it sounds crazy to say that running for president is minor, but in the grand scheme of things, it was looking at Mary Pat and the kids and going, ‘I have to do this for them, even if I don’t give a crap about myself,’ ” he said.

Difficulty falling asleep ? Prayer and Meditation Has “Cured” Millions

We like to say, “It is amazing how good we feel when we do the right thing.” It turns out, many doctors are convinced that prayer and meditation may be the best way to find peace of mind and a great night’s sleep…

The problem sleeper may be completely cured through prayer and meditation

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Dr. Vincent Fortanasce

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how we can use prayer, meditation, and socialization as an alternative to medication. Add exercise to the treatment and you have a threefold treatment. Depression is physiologically correlated to low levels of Serotonin, Dopamine, and Noradrenalin. Chemical treatments (anti-depressant drugs) are based on this knowledge. The drugs increase the levels of neurotransmitters that relieve depression. A University of Wisconsin study with Monks showed that meditation and prayer is an effective anti-depressant and that our brain has an optimistic center that works with serotonin and dopamine production- calm, peaceful, anti-addictive neurotransmitters. The optimistic center promotes production of serotonin and dopamine and, in turn, serotonin and dopamine (Grace-Amine) allows the optimistic center to be easily accessed and turned on. As exercise helps you lose weight, losing weight makes it easier to exercise.

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Serotonin is an integral part of the biorhythm sleep cycle. During sleep, especially stage III and IV, serotonin and dopamine are produced in the median raphe, substantia nigra and several other places. As these neurotransmitters, especially serotonin rise, so does our ability to sleep. When sleep is chronically disturbed, by a stressful day or chronic stress, (lasting more than 15 days), it causes a chronic increase in cortisol, our alarm and aging hormone that turns on our alarm sympathetic nervous system. (There really is nothing sympathetic about the sympathetic nervous system). Our ability to sleep worsens. We have difficulty falling asleep (insomnia) and staying asleep (fragmented sleep), which is often due to a combination of physiological problems resulting in a decrease in serotonin and an increase in the hormone cortisol.

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Cortisol: The Stress Hormone

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As serotonin decreases so does our ability to stay calm and handle everyday stressors. As cortisol increases so does our general alarm to even minor events. The result is anxiety leading to panic disorders, heightened adrenaline and cortisol, which ends in depression when these hormones and neurotransmitters are depleted.

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Prayer and Meditation

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Prayer and meditation can augment both serotonin and dopamine production and your optimistic center. It turns on the vagal system, the optimistic center and suppresses the pessimistic center and the sympathetic nervous system- reversing a downward trend. The same is true about negative thought, such as anger and uncontrolled stress. This turns on cortisol and the pessimistic center that cause further deterioration leading to depression and sleeplessness.

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Prayer and meditation also allow one to forgive and let go of negative thoughts, which decreases the production of our aging hormone, cortisol. Dopamine and serotonin aid in forgiveness, but the actual forgiving is freewill (Grace). We give our negative feelings and thoughts to God to handle. We forgive and let go of the very things that will cause us physiologically to destroy ourselves (The poisons that kills us, not those we hate)

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Medications To A Good Night’s Sleep

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I’m often asked, “Doctor, what medications can I take to help sleep?” The answer is a good dose of Prayer and meditation. This is how I recommend it:

• Find a quiet, peaceful place without distractions.
• Start with a slow inspiration that begins from your abdomen. Watch it expand and at its peak fully exhale over a 10-15 second period. Sigh if need be. This will evoke a vagal nervous system response, one that provokes calm, release of serotonin and dopamine and stimulates the optimistic center.
• One’s prayer should be positive for the welfare of others. Visual images such as gardens or a solitary beach help the centering. Repetitious prayer such as a Rosary or a Mantra work for many. Body image relaxation might also be done at the same time. Relaxing one’s jaw, neck, shoulders, etc.
• Be attentive to one’s bodily reaction to meditation and prayer. You will feel your hands become warmer, your muscle relaxing, and a feeling of calm and contentment.
• Allow drowsiness to set in without willing it.

The trio of prayer, exercise, and socialization leads to an extra sensory perception of spirituality and leads to peace and happiness.
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About the Author: Dr. Vincent Fortanasce is a renowned bio-ethicist, author, and radio show host with twenty years experience dealing with medical issues on a national and international level. His rehabilitation center was ranked in the top 10 on the West Coast in 2003, and Dr. Fortanasce was selected as in the top 100 physicians in Los Angeles County and Best Physicians in the USA in 1998. Over the past decade, he has treated such notables as the Dali Lama and Pope John Paul II.

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http://www.seniorcarehomes.com/medical
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Internet is leaving children brain-dead: ‘Google generation who spend life in front of screens are losing creativity and skills’

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How stress and depression can shrink the brain

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Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll: All Humor the Same Part of Your Brain

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Prayer and Meditation for Saturday, April 13, 2013: Jesus Is Steering Our Boat; “Do Not Be Afraid”

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Prayer and Meditation for Tuesday, April 30, 2013 — “It is necessary for us to undergo many hardships to enter the Kingdom of God.”

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