Hong Kong to slam door on pregnant mainland Chinese

Reuters – 2 hrs 15 mins ago HONG KONG (Reuters) - Hong Kong may bar mainland Chinese mothers from giving birth in public hospitals next year to ease over-crowding in local maternity wards, the city's health chief said on Tuesday.

Since it reverted from British to Chinese rule in 1997, Hong Kong has benefited from its deepening integration with China. Yet the unfettered access of mainland Chinese to public services in the densely populated city has also caused social strains.

"Right now, we expect that in 2013, all public hospital obstetric services may be reserved for local pregnant mothers," Hong Kong's Health chief York Chow told reporters.

The comments came after the financial hub's leader-elect, Leung Chun-ying, said private hospitals should bar mainland Chinese mothers and that their newborns will no longer be able to claim permanent residence in the city.

"If they apply now and prepare to come to Hong Kong next year to deliver their babies, in all likelihood, their babies will not have permanent residency status in Hong Kong because once I assume office, I will surely work on this," Leung told Hong Kong's Cable Television in an interview on Tuesday.

Leung, a property surveyor and Beijing loyalist was chosen in March to succeed the bowtie-wearing Donald Tsang by a 1200-member, largely pro-Beijing election committee, in a scandal-tainted contest that protesters denounced as a "small circle" affair puppeteered by Beijing's leaders behind the scenes.

Leung's tough stance on the mainland mothers signals a move toward a more populist agenda once he takes office on July 1, that has included pledges to provide more land for public flats and to make housing more affordable.

NO SPECIFICS

Leung did not say if the city would pass laws or use other methods to stop the children of mainland parents from gaining the right of abode, or permanent residency, in Hong Kong.

The pledges by authorities to tackle the hot-button issue come after street protests by local mothers, heated online debates and provocative advertisements in local newspapers denouncing mainland Chinese visitors as "locusts", including mothers crowding out Hong Kong's maternity wards for months.

In 2010, of the 88,584 newborns in Hong Kong, around a third, or 32,653 were born to mainland women, up from 620 babies in 2001.

The influx has spawned an industry of agents shuttling Chinese mothers across the border, hiding them in illegal 'inns' before birth, partly to circumvent China's one-child policy and also to gain the right the live in one of the world's most developed, wealthiest cities.

A broad provision in Hong Kong's mini-constitution grants Hong Kong citizenship to any Chinese born there.

"Everyone should know Hong Kong society already has a clear consensus about this matter. One, delivering babies of couples with no residency right is not the way we want to develop our healthcare industry. Two, such offspring are not the solution to the problem of our ageing population," Leung said.

Chow, the city's health secretary, said that he was in touch with Leung and respected his view of suspending the quota system, but a final decision had yet to be made.

Private hospitals that increasingly rely on maternity services said a sudden policy change would have a major impact.

"Can we change our mode of operation? Yes we can, but not suddenly. If we are given say three years, we can make a long- term plan," said Alan Lau, chairman of the Hong Kong Private Hospital's Association.

But Henry Yeung, president of the Hong Kong Doctors' Union, said blocking automatic permanent residency would ease the crowding at maternity wards.

"This move will return maternity beds to local mothers. Before this trend, private hospitals managed to survive."

(Additional reporting by James Pomfret; Editing by Ed Lane and Daniel Magnowski)

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Pricier therapy no better for early prostate cancer

Reuters – 1 hr 49 mins ago NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A new study suggests that expensive, high-tech proton beam radiation doesn't do any more for men with prostate cancer than the most commonly-used option.

Proton beam radiation, heavily promoted by facilities that perform the treatment, also came with a higher risk of certain side effects compared to intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT), researchers found.

"This paper is the strongest evidence yet that proton beam (therapy) is not only not better, but probably not as good as IMRT," said Dr. Matthew Cooperberg, a urologist from the University of California, San Francisco, who didn't participate in the new research.

The findings suggest that men have multiple radiation options when it comes to treating early, localized prostate cancer.

Though not covered in the new study, their options also include surgery -- or getting no treatment at all and waiting to see how the disease progresses, researchers said.

Dr. Ronald Chen of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his colleagues used data from a nationwide cancer registry covering treatment records for men insured by Medicare who were diagnosed with prostate cancer starting in 2000.

At that time, less than one percent of prostate cancers that hadn't spread beyond the gland were treated with IMRT, a minimally-invasive treatment meant to limit damage to the surrounding organs. The rest were treated conformal radiation, the previous standard of care.

By 2008, almost 96 percent of men got the high-dose, targeted radiation.

Intensity-modulated radiation was tied to an approximately 10 to 20 percent lower risk of stomach problems and hip fractures compared to conformal radiation therapy, which exposes more organs around the prostate to radiation. But it also came with a 12 percent higher risk of erectile dysfunction.

Over the course of each year after radiation, 2.5 percent of men who'd received IMRT needed more cancer treatment -- suggesting their disease came back -- compared to 3.1 percent of men in the traditional-radiation group.

That was based on records of close to 13,000 men age 66 and older.

In a smaller analysis, Medicare patients who got proton beam therapy, the most high-tech type of radiation offered, didn't fare much better or worse than those who had IMRT -- except that proton-treated men had more stomach-related side effects.

HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS IN COSTS

The use of both of those technologies has driven up the cost of prostate cancer treatment by hundreds of millions of dollars, the researchers wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

But with conformal radiation fading from popularity, patients' radiation choice now tends to come down to IMRT versus proton therapy -- which is available at far fewer cancer centers because of the technology required.

Researchers said that proton beam facilities can cost $100 million or more to build. A round of proton beam radiation treatment costs insurers up to $100,000 per patient, while IMRT is billed at about $50,000.

"Here we have more expensive therapy that is not proven to give a better outcome," said Dr. Eric Klein, a prostate cancer researcher at the Cleveland Clinic, who didn't take part in the new study.

Researchers agreed that policymakers, including those that decide how much Medicare will pay for various treatments, should reevaluate the evidence for cancer outcomes -- including whether proton beam therapy is worth its hefty price tag.

"There's a trend in this country of adopting newer, costly, promising treatments, without very much evidence to prove they're better," Chen told Reuters Health.

"What our data provides the patients is evidence that IMRT is a good prostate cancer treatment," he said. Until more rigorous studies are available, "That's the type of radiation that they should seek."

WATCHFUL WAITING?

Another perfectly good option for men with early prostate cancer is not to get treatment at all, but to wait and see whether the cancer grows or doesn't cause any harm, researchers said.

"Many men with early disease, especially men who are older, likely don't need treatment," said Dr. W. Robert Lee, a radiation oncologist at the Duke University School of Medicine in Durham who wasn't involved in the new study.

"Active surveillance really plays a very important role," he told Reuters Health.

Cooperberg told Reuters Health that if men find their doctor pushing one treatment option, especially if it's a high-tech radiation option, they should seek outside opinions and think about their priorities -- in terms of what side effects they can put up with and the chance of needing more serious treatment.

"Prostate cancer is very much a disease of options," Lee said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/hwxtTL Journal of the American Medical Association, online April 17, 2012.

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Blood Test Can ID Teen Depression, Study Says

Blood tests have long been the diagnostic standard for diagnosing teenage diseases, such as mono and diabetes. Now researchers have developed a blood test that can diagnose depression in teens, a step they hope will lead to a better way to identify the disorder in young people.

Currently, diagnosing depression depends entirely on a patient's willingness to report symptoms -- and a doctor's ability to interpret them. For teens, the diagnosis is particularly challenging, given the natural emotional ups and downs of adolescence.

"Teenagers are extraordinarily vulnerable to depression," said Eva Redei, author of the study and a professor of psychiatry and behavioral medicine at the Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. "And there are no objective, biological measures for evaluating them for depression."

In the study, published today in the journal Translational Psychiatry, Redei and her team developed a test that looks for markers in the blood of teens with major depressive disorder. By studying rats that had genetic and environmental predispositions for depression, the researchers were able to pinpoint 26 markers of major depression.

They looked for these markers in the blood of 28 human teenagers, ages 15 to 19, half with depression and half without. They found that 11 of the markers showed up in the depressed teens but not in teens without depression.

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Trauma patients taken by chopper may fare better

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New Zealand firm to trial pig cells to treat Parkinson's

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Low water flows cause U.S. avian cholera outbreak

Reuters – 41 mins ago PORTLAND, Oregon (Reuters) - More than 10,000 migrating birds have died from an avian cholera outbreak blamed on reduced water flows through vast marshlands of southern Oregon and northern California known as Western Everglades, federal wildlife officials said.

Avian cholera, which poses virtually no risk to human health, surfaces in the region nearly every year in wetlands of the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge, but the recent waterfowl die-off there is the worst in over a decade, said Matt Baun, a spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

"We estimate 10,000 to 15,000 birds will die, after everything is said and done," he said, adding that snow geese, American coots, American wigeon ducks, white-fronted geese and Northern pintail ducks have been the hardest hit.

The 53,600-acre (22,900-hectare) refuge encompasses a patchwork of shallow lakes, freshwater marshes and grasslands that serve as key roosting, nesting and feeding grounds for some 2 million birds that pass through the region along the Western migratory corridor called the Pacific Flyway.

The refuge lies at the heart of the larger Klamath River Basin, an area long considered the Everglades of the West and fed mainly by runoff from melting snow in the Cascade mountain range.

Water flow into the basin is controlled through dams and reservoirs operated by the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which must balance of needs of birds and other wildlife with endangered fish and the irrigation demands of farmers and Indian tribes.

For the first few months of the 2012 winter-spring migration, the refuge received only enough water to cover about half the 30,000 acres of its wetlands, according to the American Bird Conservancy, an environmental group.

The drier conditions have forced birds to congregate in smaller areas, causing crowded conditions that accelerate the spread of avian cholera.

"We anticipate this continuing to happen until there is better management of the water," said Steve Holmer, senior policy adviser for the conservancy.

The problem was aggravated by below-normal snow pack levels in the Cascades until early March, said Kevin Moore, a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said.

The snow pack, however, has rebounded since then, growing from 63 percent of normal in late February to 115 percent of normal today, he said.

As a result, Baun said, federal water managers were able to flood an additional 4,000 acres of the refuge since mid-March. Moreover, many of the birds that had crowded into the area have moved on, easing congestion, said John Beckstrand, a refuge biologist.

In the meantime, wildlife workers and volunteers have been gathering and incinerating the carcasses of dead birds to try to stem the cholera outbreak.

Water remains a highly contentious issue in this area. Several species of fish are listed as endangered or threatened, and the Endangered Species Act makes them a top priority for water management, Baun said.

"We also have legal contracts with agricultural irrigators to supply them with water, when water is available," Moore said.

Still, the American Bird Conservancy says it remains concerned about maintaining adequate water flows through the basin.

"We need to see a more equitable distribution of water and ways of managing this land," Holmer said. "Right now we are not getting it done."

(Editing by Steve Gorman)

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Fewer children die in accidents; drug overdoses up

Accidents are killing far fewer children and teenagers than in the past, according to a new government report released Monday.

The death rate for youths ages 19 and younger dropped about 30 percent from 2000 to 2009. The number of deaths dropped too, from about 12,400 to about 9,100.

"We've made progress, and because we've made progress our children are safer than ever before," said Ileana Arias of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the agency that released the report.

But accidental injuries remain the leading cause of death for youths ages 1 to 19. On average, one child dies every hour from fires, falls and other accidents, she added.

A 41 percent drop in traffic fatalities had a huge impact on the numbers

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Beyond drowsy, too little sleep ups diabetes risk

More people pull the night shift. Teens text past midnight and stumble to class at dawn. Travelers pack red-eye flights.

Nodding off behind the wheel isn't the only threat from a lack of shut-eye. There's growing evidence that people who regularly sleep too little and at the wrong time suffer long-lasting consequences that a nap won't cure: An increased risk of diabetes, heart disease and other health problems.

"We have a societal conspiracy for sleep deprivation," says Russell Sanna of Harvard Medical School's sleep medicine division, who attended a TEDMED conference last week where scientists called sleep loss one of health care's big challenges.

Just how unhealthy is it? Consider how sleep may play a role in the nation's diabetes epidemic.

Studies have long shown that people who sleep fewer than five hours a night have an increased risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, the kind that tends to strike later in life.

Rotating shift work

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Injury deaths drop among US kids: study

Injury deaths drop among US kids: …

Childhood deaths from injury have dropped almost 30 percent over the past decade, but suffocation deaths by infants and fatal poisonings among teens have risen, said a US study out Monday.

Despite the 29 percent decline, unintentional injuries are still the number one killer for US minors between the ages of one and 19, taking more than 9,000 lives in 2009, said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The US rate of unintentional injury deaths among youths in 2004 was about twice that in other high-income countries in the the World Health Organization's European and Western Pacific Regions, it added.

Car crashes dropped by 41 percent from 2000-2009, but remained the leading accidental killer among this group. The CDC attributed the decline to improvements in child safety seats and better training for teen drivers.

"Despite this success, traffic crashes remain the leading cause of death for persons in age groups 5-19 years, accounting for 67 percent of unintentional injury deaths and 28 percent of deaths from all causes among those aged 15-19 years in 2009."

Poisoning deaths among those age 15 to 19 have been rising -- up 91 percent in 2009 compared to 2000 -- along with the rest of the US population, mainly due to overdoses of prescription drugs.

The higher infant suffocation rate -- up 54 percent from 2000 to 2009 -- "could be curbed" if more parents followed pediatricians' recommendations to have infants "sleep in safe cribs, alone, on their backs, with no loose bedding or soft toys," the study added.

However, the CDC pointed out that the apparent higher rate of infant suffocation could be a result of the change of death certificate classification over time.

Such deaths were often previously attributed to mysterious "sudden infant death syndrome," but recently, more of these deaths have been classed as "suffocation" as understanding of the syndrome has improved.

"Kids are safer from injuries today than ever before. In fact, the decrease in injury death rates in the past decade has resulted in more than 11,000 children's lives being saved," said CDC Director Thomas Frieden.

"But we can do more. It's tragic and unacceptable when we lose even one child to an avoidable injury."

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Anti-AIDS pill makes cash sense for some gays: study

"Gay men who have five or more sex partners per year are part of a high-risk group that could benefit from daily pill Truvada to ward off HIV, said a cost-benefit analysis by US researchers on Monday. (AFP Photo/Justin Sullivan)" title

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Australia takes on big tobacco firms in court

"A combo of images, released by the Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing, shows both sides of a generic cigarette packaging with health warnings, taking up 85% of the pack and a minimal border. (AFP Photo/)" title

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Dental Fillings Are a Critical Dental Care Procedure For Healthy Teeth

April 16, 2012 by admin

Dental filling refers to the use of dental restorative substance to rebuild the functionality, integrity and morphology of a broken or missing tooth. Such a tooth breakage or loss may occur due to an internal tooth disintegration caused by caries, or due to an external accident. General dentists and even cosmetic dentists usually perform this procedure on patients. Among Chicago Cosmetic Dentist clinics, there are several clinics that undertake various dental restoration procedures.

Dental filling or dental restoration can be broadly categorized into two categories: Direct restoration and Indirect restoration. The restoration can be further sub-divided on the basis of its location, nature and size. A common tooth restorative procedure is the root canal filling that fills the gap where the dental pulp is usually present.

Tooth preparation is a key procedure that is followed before the dental restorative process can start.

Under this process the tooth is basically cut with a dental drill in order to create space for the restoration that has to take place. It also requires removal of any tooth decay and any such teeth that may be weak in structure. Once tooth preparation has been completed, the process of restoration is conducted. The restoration can be permanent or temporary in nature, depending upon the condition of the teeth.

There are various Chicago Cosmetic Dentist clinics that undertake both direct as well as indirect tooth restorations and perform the job competently.

Direct restoration: This is a method involving the placement of a soft filling substance into the prepared tooth space and helping to build up the tooth before the filling material hardens.

The advantage of a direct tooth restoration technique is that it mostly sets the tooth quickly. Normally it may take just one visit to the dental clinic to finish this procedure. It is mostly recommended where the damage or tooth space is small and not too significant. But wherever a lot of strength may be necessary for the tooth, an indirect restoration would be a better option.

Indirect restoration: Under this procedure, the dental impression from the patient’s mouth is taken, and a restorative material is fabricated externally. Thereafter the tooth preparation process is conducted, followed by the restorative process. Some of the popular indirect restorations include inlay and onlay, crown, bridge and veneer. Once the indirect restorative material has been fabricated, it is normally bonded with a permanent dental adhesive or dental cement. Usually this procedure will take at least two trips to your dentist. The indirect restoration substances commonly used are gold or ceramic for they have a long-lasting value and durability.

Mostly, when the indirect restorative fabrication is getting ready, a temporary restoration may be carried out in order cover and protect the prepared part of the tooth in order to safeguard the peripheral dental tissue.

Dental

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