Category: Health

Years of universal healthcare, rising health spending, cancer screening, immunisation and anti-smoking laws have failed to stop Britain falling behind in reducing early death and disease, a study showed on Tuesday.

Researchers who compared Britain’s health performance since 1990 with 14 European Union countries plus Australia, Canada, Norway and the United States said its pace of decline in premature death was “persistently and significantly” behind the average – a finding they described as “startling”.

Chris Murray, who led the work at the University of Washington, said Britain’s poor performance was partly due to dramatic increases in Alzheimer’s disease and in drug and alcohol abuse problems, and to a failure to tackle leading killers such as heart disease, strokes and lung diseases.

“Concerted action is urgently needed,” said Murray, director of the university’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

Using data from a vast study called the Global Burden of Diseases, headline findings of which were published last year, researchers analysed patterns of ill health and death in Britain, calculated the contribution of various preventable risk factors, and ranked it among high-income countries that spent similar amounts on health in 1990 and 2010.

They found that only in men older than 55 years had Britain seen significantly faster drops in death rates than other nations over the last 20 years.

Britain’s ranking in premature mortality rates for adults aged between 20 and 54 had “worsened substantially”, they found.

This was partly due to dramatic growth in problems linked to drugs and alcohol, which were ranked among the least important causes of death in this age group in 1990 – ranked 32nd and 43rd respectively – but rose to sixth and 18th place in 2010.

Reuters

President Hugo Chavez is breathing with greater difficulty as a new and severe respiratory infection has taken hold, Venezuela’s government said, describing the cancer-stricken president’s condition as “very delicate.”

A brief statement read on national television by Communications Minister Ernesto Villegas late Monday carried the sobering news about the charismatic 58-year-old socialist leader’s deteriorating health.

Villegas said Chavez is suffering from “a new, severe infection.” The state news agency identified it as respiratory.

Chavez, 58, has been undergoing “chemotherapy of strong impact,” Villegas added without providing further details.

Chavez has neither been seen nor heard from, except for “proof-of-life” photos released in mid-February, since submitting to a fourth round of surgery in Cuba on Dec. 11 for an unspecified cancer in the pelvic area. It was first diagnosed in June 2011.

The government says he returned home on Feb. 18 and has been confined to Caracas’ military hospital since.

wirestory

The queen went into hospital in London on Sunday with symptoms of gastroenteritis, a Buckingham Palace spokesman said.

The 86-year-old monarch first developed symptoms of the stomach bug on Friday and the decision to take her to hospital was a precautionary measure.

She was in good spirits and her condition was not deteriorating, the palace spokesman said.

All the queen’s engagements for the coming week, including a trip to Italy scheduled for March 6-7, have been cancelled or postponed. It is unusual for the monarch, who is very diligent in carrying out her royal duties, to cancel any engagement.

The queen last appeared in public on Thursday, when she bestowed honours on British Olympic medallists including heptathlon star Jessica Ennis.

The queen appeared well and happy in a salmon pink outfit in photographs of that event.

The head of state, who last year celebrated 60 years on the throne, is known for her robust health. She was last hospitalised in 2003 when she had a knee operation.

The palace spokesman said she had been spending the weekend at Windsor Castle, outside of London, and was driven by private car from there to the King Edward VII hospital in central London at about 3 p.m. (1500 GMT).

The spokesman said she was there for precautionary assessments and may remain there for a couple of days.

Reuters

A baby born with the virus that causes AIDS appears to have been cured, scientists announced Sunday, describing the case of a child from Mississippi who’s now 2½ and has been off medication for about a year with no signs of infection.

There’s no guarantee the child will remain healthy, although sophisticated testing uncovered just traces of the virus’ genetic material still lingering. If so, it would mark only the world’s second reported cure.

Specialists say Sunday’s announcement, at a major AIDS meeting in Atlanta, offers promising clues for efforts to eliminate HIV infection in children, especially in AIDS-plagued African countries where too many babies are born with the virus.

“You could call this about as close to a cure, if not a cure, that we’ve seen,” Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health, who is familiar with the findings, told The Associated Press.

A doctor gave this baby faster and stronger treatment than is usual, starting a three-drug infusion within 30 hours of birth.

That was before tests confirmed the infant was infected and not just at risk from a mother whose HIV wasn’t diagnosed until she was in labor.

“I just felt like this baby was at higher-than-normal risk, and deserved our best shot,” Dr. Hannah Gay, a pediatric HIV specialist at the University of Mississippi, said in an interview.

That fast action apparently knocked out HIV in the baby’s blood before it could form hideouts in the body. Those so-called reservoirs of dormant cells usually rapidly reinfect anyone who stops medication, said Dr. Deborah Persaud of Johns Hopkins Children’s Center.

She led the investigation that deemed the child “functionally cured,” meaning in long-term remission even if all traces of the virus haven’t been completely eradicated.

Next, Persaud’s team is planning a study to try to prove that, with more aggressive treatment of other high-risk babies. “Maybe we’ll be able to block this reservoir seeding,” Persaud said.

No one should stop anti-AIDS drugs as a result of this case, Fauci cautioned.

But “it opens up a lot of doors” to research if other children can be helped, he said. “It makes perfect sense what happened.”
Better than treatment is to prevent babies from being born with HIV in the first place.

About 300,000 children were born with HIV in 2011, mostly in poor countries where only about 60 percent of infected pregnant women get treatment that can keep them from passing the virus to their babies.

In the U.S., such births are very rare because HIV testing and treatment long have been part of prenatal care.

“We can’t promise to cure babies who are infected. We can promise to prevent the vast majority of transmissions if the moms are tested during every pregnancy,” Gay stressed.

The only other person considered cured of the AIDS virus underwent a very different and risky kind of treatment — a bone marrow transplant from a special donor, one of the rare people who is naturally resistant to HIV.

Timothy Ray Brown of San Francisco has not needed HIV medications in the five years since that transplant.

The Mississippi case shows “there may be different cures for different populations of HIV-infected people,” said Dr. Rowena Johnston of amFAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research. That group funded Persaud’s team to explore possible cases of pediatric cures.

It also suggests that scientists should look back at other children who’ve been treated since shortly after birth, including some reports of possible cures in the late 1990s that were dismissed at the time, said Dr. Steven Deeks of the University of California, San Francisco, who also has seen the findings.

“This will likely inspire the field, make people more optimistic that this is possible,” he said.

In the Mississippi case, the mother had had no prenatal care when she came to a rural emergency room in advanced labor.

A rapid test detected HIV. In such cases, doctors typically give the newborn low-dose medication in hopes of preventing HIV from taking root.

But the small hospital didn’t have the proper liquid kind, and sent the infant to Gay’s medical center. She gave the baby higher treatment-level doses.

The child responded well through age 18 months, when the family temporarily quit returning and stopped treatment, researchers said.

When they returned several months later, remarkably, Gay’s standard tests detected no virus in the child’s blood.

Ten months after treatment stopped, a battery of super-sensitive tests at half a dozen laboratories found no sign of the virus’ return. There were only some remnants of genetic material that don’t appear able to replicate, Persaud said.

In Mississippi, Gay gives the child a check-up every few months: “I just check for the virus and keep praying that it stays gone.”

The mother’s HIV is being controlled with medication and she is “quite excited for her child,” Gay added.

AP