New Bird Flu Cases Rise in China, Three Deaths

China has found two more cases of a new strain of bird flu and one of the victims has died, state media said on Wednesday, bringing to nine the number of confirmed human infections from the previously unknown flu type.

A 38-year-old cook fell ill early last month while working in the province of Jiangsu, where five of the other cases were found. He died in hospital in Hangzhou city on March 27, the Xinhua news agency reported. Samples tested positive on Wednesday for the new bird flu strain, H7N9.

The second patient, also in Hangzhou, is a 67-year-old who is having treatment. Xinhua said no connection between the two cases had been discovered, and no one in close contact with either patient had developed any flu-like symptoms.

(Read More: For China, New Era Brings New Set of Problems)

The World Health Organization said it was "following the event closely" and was in contact with Chinese authorities, which it said were actively investigating the cases amid heightened disease surveillance.

Flu experts across the world are studying samples isolated from the patients to assess H7N9'S human pandemic potential.

Other strains of bird flu, such as H5N1, have been circulating for many years and can be transmitted from bird to bird, and bird to human, but not generally from human to human.

So far, this lack of human-to-human transmission also appears to be a feature of the H7N9 strain.

Of the seven other cases of the new strain, two have died, both in the business hub of Shanghai. The other five are in a critical condition in hospital in Nanjing. Shanghai, Nanjing and Hangzhou are all close to each other in eastern China.

(Read More: China's Urbanization Leaves Migrant Workers in the Cold)

China's Agriculture Ministry said it had yet to find any animals infected with H7N9, though added it was possible it had been brought to China by migratory birds.

The WHO says so far it has seen no evidence of human-to-human transmission, but there are questions about the source of the infection and about how it may be being transmitted to people.

"We still don't know the mode of transmission or host (of the virus)," said WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl. "Those are the two most important pieces of information we would need. In order to control it, we need to know where it is coming from."

The WHO said in a statement it was also focusing its efforts on encouraging collaboration between researchers to ensure information and materials are available for scientists wanting to develop diagnostic tests, drugs and vaccines.

No vaccine is currently available for H7N9 flu, but preliminary test results provided by the WHO Collaborating Centre in China suggest it is susceptible to the antiviral drugs Tamiflu, sold by the Swiss drugmaker Roche, and Relenza, sold by Britain's GlaxoSmithKline.

Chinese authorities dismissed speculation on some websites that the H7N9 outbreak may be related to more than 16,000 pig carcasses found dumped in rivers around Shanghai.

(Read More: China's 'Internationalization' Won't Be Painless: WTO's Lamy)

Yin Ou, deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Agricultural Committee, told reporters on Tuesday that the city had tested 34 dead pigs found in the city's Huangpu River for the H7N9 virus, but the tests had all come back negative.

China has a chequered record when it comes to tackling disease outbreaks, which some officials have previously sought to cover up. However, since the H7N9 cases have been identified, China has stepped up its alert level and said it is being transparent in dealing with them.

In 2003, authorities initially tried to cover up an epidemic of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which emerged in China and killed about a 10th of the 8,000 people it infected worldwide.

View the original article here

Over-Consumption Of Salt Linked To One In 10 American Deaths

Just days after a study linked sugary drink consumption to 180,000 worldwide deaths per year, a study by the same team of Harvard researchers has found salt to be even more deadly.

The preliminary study found a diet high in sodium contributed to 2.3 million cardiovascular deaths worldwide in 2010, and was responsible for one in 10 U.S. deaths. The researchers, who presented the study Thursday at the annual American Heart Association meeting in New Orleans, said 40 percent of those deaths are premature — affecting people 69 years old or younger.

Dariush Mozaffarian, one of the study’s researchers and associate professor of medicine and epidemiology at Harvard Medical School, told ABC News that salt is more dangerous than sugar largely because of its pervasiveness in the American diet — it’s everywhere, especially in processed, packaged foods:

MOZAFFARIAN: Sugar-sweetened beverages are just one type of food that people can avoid, whereas sodium is in everything. [...] It’s really amazing how pervasive it is. For the average person, it’s very hard to avoid salt — you have to be incredibly motivated, incredibly educated, have access to a range of foods and do all the cooking yourself.

It may take motivation and education, but cutting salt may be exactly what Americans need to do to curb the country’s rising obesity epidemic. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Pervention, the human body needs only 180 – 500 milligrams of salt per day to function, and the Institute of Medicne recommends 1,500 milligrams as an adequate salt intake level. But 75 percent of people worldwide consume twice that much, with Americans averaging 3,600 milligrams per day. One study found that cutting “hidden” salt — the kinds in packaged and restaurant foods — could result in 11.1 million fewer cases of high blood pressure each year.

And the threat of salt starts at a young age. A recent study found that 75 percent of pre-packaged meals and snacks for toddlers are high in sodium, and some contain as much as 630 milligrams of sodium — more than half of the U.S. Institute of Medicine’s reccommended 1,000 milligrams daily intake for children aged 1 through 3. In a statement, the study’s researchers explained that high salt intake as a toddler could not only lead to childhood obesity or early cases of high blood pressure; it could also hardwire children to crave saltier foods throughout their lives. “The less sodium in an infant’s or toddler’s diet, the less he or she may want it when older,” said Joyce Maalouf, the study’s lead author and fellow at the CDC.

In 2010, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I) spearheaded an initiative to encourage food companies such as Kraft, Heinz, Subway and Starbucks to lower the sodium content in their packaged and restaurant food, and it’s starting to work. But so far, the U.S. government hasn’t taken any similar steps to regulate sodium in packaged or restaurant foods — in 2010, it appeared as though the FDA was going to limit the amount of salt in food products, but that rumor was quickly squashed by the agency.

View the original article here

Alcohol Causes 20,000 Cancer-Related Deaths In The U.S. Each Year

The next time you feel the lure of the “last call” at the bar, you might want to keep this in mind: alcohol consumption causes over 20,000 cancer-related deaths in America ever year, making it a significant preventable risk factor for the disease.

As CBS News reports, the World Health Organization already classifies alcohol as the world’s third largest risk factor for disease burden. But its link with cancer is “not widely appreciated by the public and remains underemphasized even by physicians,” the study’s author, Dr. Timothy Naimi of the Boston University School of Medicine, explained in a press release.

The report’s authors hope to combat that ignorance with their findings, which conclude that alcohol causes as many as 3.7 percent of all American cancer-related deaths annually — and drinking alcohol increases risk factors for “cancers of the mouth, throat, esophagus, liver, colon, rectum and breast:”

Researchers determined that alcohol-related cancer death took away an average of 18 potential years from a person’s life. Average consumption for the group was 1.5 drinks a day or less, and those drinkers made up 30 percent of the reported deaths. Larger amounts of alcohol led to higher risks of dying from cancer. Forty-eight to 60 percent of the deaths were attributed to people who drank three or more drinks a day.

“When it comes to alcohol consumption and cancers, clearly excessive drinking is the riskiest type of drinking,” Naimi said to CBS station WBZ in Boston. “But when it comes to cancer, there is no safe level of alcohol consumption.”

In addition to figuring out how many cancer deaths were related to alcohol, researchers also determined that breast cancer was the most common type of drinking-related deaths in women. This form of cancer alone made up 15 percent of the alcohol-related deaths, amounting to 6,000 women annually.

For men, mouth, throat and esophageal cancers were the most common alcohol-associated deaths, making up about 6,000 deaths annually.

All told, the combined costs of lost productivity from criminal justice proceedings, missed work, and medical care related to drinking alcohol adds up to $223 billion in health expenditures every year. That number might actually be even bigger, considering that it likely does not incorporate the full breadth of cancer-related costs caused by alcohol.

The findings also underscore the disproportionate toll that alcohol advertising targeting America’s youth may have on the black population. In general, alcohol advertising targets young, black Americans, a group that also tends to be more susceptible to both getting cancer and dying from cancer than other racial demographics.

View the original article here

Chilean Study Proves that Outlawing Abortion Does Not Lead to “Coat-hanger Deaths”

For decades, supporters of abortion on demand have insisted on two completely unproven assertions concerning what would happen if abortion were made generally illegal in this country. First, they have asserted, somewhat counter-intuitively and again without any proof, that such a law would not work, and women would continue to get abortions. Second, based on the first unfounded assertion, they insist that therefore women would be forced into “back alley abortions” which would presumably always be performed with a dirty coat-hanger, thus leading to massive maternal mortality. These two pronouncements have been peddled uncritically with all the fervor (and factual backing) of a particularly obnoxious street corner preacher wearing a “THE END IS NEAR” sandwich sign by virtually everyone who supports abortion on demand. Now, for the first time, a scientific study published in a peer-review journal has scientifically disproven both assertions.

Of course, these assertions have been from day one based on fabrications generated by the abortion industry. As Bernard Nathanson, co-founder of NARAL, admitted:

We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000 but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1,000,000. Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public. The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200-250 annually. The figure we constantly fed to the media was 10,000. These false figures took root in the consciousness of Americans convincing many that we needed to crack the abortion law.

“Another myth we fed to the public through the media was that legalizing abortion would only mean that the abortions taking place illegally would then be done legally. In fact, of course, abortion is now being used as a primary method of birth control in the U.S. and the annual number of abortions has increased by 1500% since legalization.

Of course, the revelation that these facts were made up out of thin air has not in the least dissuaded the abortion industry from insisting that they nonetheless conveyed a true story – “fake, but accurate” did not originate with Dan Rather. Problematically, no one had conducted a scientific study to evaluate the evidence one way or another, so these lies took root in the public’s mind and the burden fell on opponents of abortion to disprove an assertion that had never been founded in fact in the first place.

Enter Dr. Elard Koch, an epidemiologist from the Department of Family Medicine, Faculty of Medicine at the University of Chile. Chile provides a somewhat unique opportunity to study the issue of the effects of making abortion illegal. In recent history (in particular since a number of advances that have overall reduced maternal mortality worldwide), most countries that have changed their abortion laws have made abortion more widely accessible, not less. Chile, on the other hand, has moved in the opposite direction. Before 1989 in Chile, abortion was largely legal, but in 1989, Chile banned all “therapeutic” abortions, thus providing an actual laboratory in which we might study the question, “What happens when abortion is made illegal?”

The study by Dr. Koch and his team is vitally important and should be read in its entirety. Most importantly, the study conclusively showed that a) outlawing abortion is remarkably effective at reducing the number of abortions that take place in a country, including clandestine ones, and b) there is absolutely no link between making abortion illegal and an increase in the number of deaths from clandestine abortions. In Koch’s own words about the conclusions of his study:

In Chile, therapeutic abortion was prohibited in 1989 since it was considered unnecessary for protecting the life of the mother and her baby. From the perspective of the Chilean medical practice, the exceptional cases in which the life of the mother is at risk are regarded as a medical ethics problem to be solved by applying the principle of double effect and the concept of indirect abortion.

Thus, in Chile, exceptional problems that require medical intervention to save the life of the mother are considered a decision of medical ethics and not a legal issue. Therefore, any kind of directly provoked abortion was prohibited in 1989, in agreement with Article 19 of the Chilean Constitution which protects the life of the unborn.

The second question — does it save lives? — is very complex and important. We can address this important issue from different perspectives.

First, from a public health view, restrictive laws are hypothesized to cause a dissuasive effect on the population, similar to restrictions on tobacco or alcohol consumption. We observed that reduction of maternal mortality in Chile was paralleled by the number of hospitalizations attributable to complications of clandestine abortions. While over 50% of all abortion-related hospitalizations were attributable to complications of clandestine abortions during the 1960s, this proportion decreased rapidly in the following decades.

Indeed, only 12-19% of all hospitalization from abortion can be attributable to clandestine abortions between 2001 and 2008. These data suggest that over time, restrictive laws may have a restraining effect on the practice of abortion and promote its decrease. In fact, Chile exhibits today one of the lowest abortion-related maternal deaths in the world, with a 92.3% decrease since 1989 and a 99.1% accumulated decrease over 50 years.

Second, from the perspective of human life, especially if a developing country is looking to simultaneously protect the life of the mother and the unborn child, a plausible hypothesis after the Chilean study is that abortion restriction may be effective when is combined with adequately-implemented public policies to increase educational levels of women and to improve access to maternal health facilities. A restrictive law may discourage practice, which is suggested by the decrease of hospitalizations due to clandestine abortions estimated in Chile.

Third, from the perspective of protecting human life from the very beginning, obviously, abortion restriction saves many lives, in contrast to countries where elective — on demand — abortion is allowed, because in these countries all the unborn lose their lives.

Finally, it is necessary to remark that our study confirms that abortion prohibition is not related to overall rates of maternal mortality. In other words, making abortion illegal does not increase maternal deaths: it is a matter of scientific fact in our study.

Read, as they say, the whole thing.

Not, mind you, that anything as pedantic as scientific evidence is expected to have any impact on the rhetoric of the same charming people who manufactured and sold “coathanger pendants” a couple years ago. The abortion industry has never been about truth, facts or logic. But to the extent that people in the middle remain persuadable by objectivity, a major arrow in the quiver of the merchants of death has been irretrievably destroyed.

View the original article here