Shots Should Be on College Kids' Back-to-School List

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More Americans Have at Least 2 Chronic Health Issues: CDC

HealthDay – 1 hr 50 mins ago TUESDAY, July 31 (HealthDay News) -- The number of Americans aged 45 and older with two or more chronic conditions has grown over the past decade, new research estimates, with seniors especially vulnerable to a rising risk of both diabetes and high blood pressure.

Between 1999-2000 and 2009-2010, the percentage of Americans in the 45- to 64-year age group with two or more of the conditions grew from 16 percent to 21 percent, according to survey results. For adults 65 and older, the percentage increased from 37 percent to 45 percent. The survey was compiled by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, part of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Released Tuesday, the report from Virginia Freid and colleagues looked at nine chronic conditions: hypertension (high blood pressure), heart disease, diabetes, cancer, stroke, chronic bronchitis, emphysema, current asthma and kidney disease.

The percentage of Americans aged 65 and older who had both diabetes and high blood pressure grew from 9 percent to 15 percent, the investigators found.

The report also revealed that 23 percent of adults aged 45 to 64 with at least two chronic conditions -- out of the list of nine -- either didn't receive necessary medical care or delayed it because of cost. That's up from 17 percent a decade earlier.

The percentage of people in that group who didn't get necessary prescription drugs due to cost grew from 14 percent to 22 percent over the decade.

Among individual conditions in people aged 45 or older, the prevalence of high blood pressure grew from 35 percent to 41 percent, diabetes from 10 percent to 15 percent, and cancer from 9 percent to 11 percent.

The rise in the number of people with more than one chronic condition "presents a complex challenge to the U.S. health care system, both in terms of quality of life and expenditures for an aging population," the report stated.

The findings are published in the July edition of the NCHS Data Brief.

More information

For more about coping with chronic illness, visit the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

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Imaging Tests Up Among Advanced Cancer Patients

HealthDay – 1 hr 50 mins ago TUESDAY, July 31 (HealthDay News) -- A new U.S. study finds that the use of diagnostic imaging tests in Medicare patients with advanced cancer has risen faster than among patients with early-stage cancer.

The costs of diagnostic imaging have increased more than the overall costs of cancer care, making diagnostic imaging the fastest-growing part of Medicare-reimbursed services, the researchers noted. Medicare is the U.S. government-funded health insurance program for people over 65 and certain other patients.

They added that cancer care costs are highest during the last year of life, but little is known about the use of high-cost imaging tests in cancer patients during their final year.

In this study, the researchers examined data on the use of CT, MRI, PET and nuclear medicine scans for Medicare patients with late-stage (stage 4) breast, colon, lung or prostate cancer between 1995 and 2006. Stage 4 cancer means the cancer has spread throughout the body.

The analysis revealed that most of the patients underwent imaging procedures during the course of their care, and that the use of imaging in late-stage cancer patients increased between 1995 and 2006.

The study was published July 30 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

The increasing use of imaging in late-stage cancer patients may be due to a lack of guidelines in this area or the use of imaging to help doctors manage symptoms, detect disease progression and assess the effects of treatment, said Dr. Yue-Yung Hu and colleagues at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and the University of Wisconsin.

While imaging often leads to appropriate measures to ease dying patients' suffering, it can also distract them from focusing on achievable end-of-life goals, cause them to spend more of their remaining time in medical care settings, and provoke anxiety, the researchers said.

Determining the most appropriate care for patients with late-stage cancer is complex, Drs. Robin Yabroff and Joan Warren, of the Health Services and Economics Branch at the U.S. National Cancer Institute, noted in an accompanying editorial.

"Physicians tend to overestimate survival for terminally ill cancer patients, which may influence their treatment and related imaging recommendations," they wrote in a journal news release. "Development of practice guidelines for advanced imaging in patients with stage IV disease, with explicit statements about the state of evidence will be critical, particularly for care outside of the window surrounding patient diagnosis."

More information

The American Cancer Society offers advice for cancer patients nearing the end of life.

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Health Highlights: July 31, 2012

HealthDay – 1 hr 50 mins ago Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by the editors of HealthDay:

U.S. Blood Supply Critically Low, Red Cross Warns

The level of U.S. blood donations is at its lowest point in 15 years and the shortfall is such that some patients may have to have elective surgeries canceled, the American Red Cross reports.

"People will put off having knee replacements, hip replacements and other elective surgery," Danny Cervantes, a donor recruitment director for United Blood Services in Las Vegas, told NBC News.

The shortfall appears due to a number of factors. Kim Talkington, regional director of donor recruitment for the Red Cross in Wichita, Kan., told NBC News that there's a high demand for blood in summer because it's high season for travel and road accidents.

On the donor side, the supply from college students -- who typically make up about one-fifth of donations -- falls by about half in the summer months, according to Quincy, Ill., donor recruitment representative Beth Forbes.

This summer has been especially tough for the blood supply because storms have upped demand in the East and Midwest, even as they helped dry up the supply, according to Rodney Wilson, another Red Cross representative based in Ohio.

"The power outages and storms we experienced earlier in the month caused dozens of blood drives to be canceled," Wilson told NBC News. "We normally try to keep a three-day supply on hand locally, and we are down to a one-day supply."

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Devices Not Enough to Save Children Left in Overheated Cars: Report

Devices aimed at preventing kids from dying in overheated cars may not work well enough to keep children from harm, a new review finds.

Parents shouldn't rely on special seats and other devices to stop them from accidently leaving children in cars, David Strickland, administrator for the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), said in a Monday press briefing, NBC News reported.

"While these devices are very well-intended, none of them are a full or complete solution for making sure a parent never leaves a baby behind in a hot car," Strickland said.

According to NHTSA, about 38 children die each year of heat stroke after being left in cars. The new report reviewed 18 commercial products, including pads that sense if a child is in a car seat; devices that can tell if a seatbelt is buckled and alarms that remind parents to check.

"The devices were inconsistent and unreliable in their performance," the researchers wrote in their report. "They often required adjusting of the position of the child within the child restraint, the distance to activation varied across trials and scenarios, and they experienced continual synching/unsynching during use."

The report also notes that "devices which integrate into a child restraint would not be applicable in scenarios where the child is playing and gets locked in the vehicle (30 percent of fatalities) or in a scenario where the parent/caregiver intentionally leaves the child in the vehicle (17 percent of fatalities)."

According to Strickland, parents can help ensure tragic heat stroke accidents in cars don't happen by using a few simple precautions. These include leaving a child's toy in the front seat as a reminder, putting a purse or briefcase in back seat so that the driver is forced to look in the back before exiting the car, or setting an alarm on the cellphone to remind yourself to check on a child's whereabouts.

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New Seal Flu Could Pose Threat to Humans

HealthDay – 1 hr 50 mins ago TUESDAY, July 31 (HealthDay News) -- A new influenza strain found in New England harbor seals could potentially threaten people as well as wildlife, new research suggests.

Scientists cautioned that viruses like the newly discovered seal flu must be monitored in order to predict new strains and prevent a pandemic flu emerging from animals.

The report was published online July 31 in mBio.

"There is a concern that we have a new mammalian-transmissible virus to which humans haven't been exposed yet. It's a combination we haven't seen in disease before," report editor Dr. Anne Moscona, professor of pediatrics and of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, said in a journal news release.

Another expert agreed that the flu strain could someday pose a threat to people.

"Infections that threaten wildlife and human lives remind us how our health is intermingled on this dynamic planet," said Dr. Bruce Hirsch, attending physician in infectious diseases at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y. He said that while transmission via direct contact between humans and harbor seals is unlikely, the virus could find other ways to get to people.

"A dangerous virus infecting mammals increases the risk to us -- not by direct infection -- but by evolutionary development of even more riskier strains," Hirsch explained. For example, he said, the strain might pass from seals to birds, expand its presence in the environment and mutate in ways that make it easily passed to or between humans.

Scientists from several organizations, including Columbia University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, co-wrote the new report. They said that flu viruses found in mammals, such as the H1N1 "swine flu" that emerged in 2009, can put people's health at risk. The new seal flu, they warned, presents a similar threat to humans.

The researchers analyzed the DNA of a virus linked to the death of 162 harbor seals in 2011 off the coasts of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine. Five autopsies revealed that the seals died from infection with a type of flu known as H3N8.

The report pointed out that the seal flu is very similar to a flu strain found in North American birds since 2002. The virus, the researchers noted, adapted to living in mammals. It also has mutations that are known to make viruses easier to spread and more dangerous. They added the seal flu, which is able to target a protein found in the human respiratory tract, may have the potential to move between species.

The researchers warned that pandemic flu can originate in unexpected ways, so preparation is essential.

"Flu could emerge from anywhere and our readiness has to be much better than we previously realized. We need to be very nimble in our ability to identify and understand the potential risks posed by new viruses emerging from unexpected sources," said Moscona. "It's important to realize that viruses can emerge through routes that we haven't considered. We need to be alert to those risks and ready to act on them."

Still, viral strains typically must undergo several key mutations to become the source of a human pandemic, Hirsch said.

"Each time the flu virus infects a cell, it is a roll of the dice," he said. "There are eight separate segments of genes inside the virus -- simple viral versions of chromosomes -- which recombine at random, producing unique viruses. Cells can be infected with multiple viruses, so a dangerous gene from a bird can get mixed in with a gene that makes it easy to infect humans."

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides more information on the spread of flu viruses from animals to people.

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Burnt-Out Nurses Linked to More Hospital Infections

HealthDay – 1 hr 50 mins ago TUESDAY, July 31 (HealthDay News) -- Burnout among nurses is linked to an increase in hospital infection rates, researchers have found.

In addition, job-related exhaustion among nursing staff costs millions of health care dollars each year, according to the study from the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing.

In conducting the study, the researchers analyzed data from the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council and the American Hospital Association Annual Survey. They also examined a 2006 survey of more than 7,000 registered nurses from 161 Pennsylvania hospitals that provided insight into their job-related attitudes, including feelings on depersonalization and personal accomplishment. The survey also revealed the nurses' levels of emotional exhaustion, which is a key factor in burnout syndrome.

The study showed that among nurses caring for an average of 5.7 patients, for every additional patient they were assigned there was roughly one additional catheter-associated urinary tract infection per 1,000 patients. This translates to 1,351 more infections every year, according to study co-author Jeannie Cimiotti of the New Jersey Collaborating Center for Nursing and Rutgers School of Nursing in Newark, N.J., and her colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing.

Each 10 percent increase in a hospital's high-burnout nurses was associated with almost one more catheter-related infection and two more surgical site infections for every 1,000 patients each year, the investigators noted in a news release from the Association for Professionals in Infection Control.

Catheter-related urinary tract infections cost an average of $749 to $832 each, and surgical site infections can cost up to $29,443. Based on those figures, the researchers projected that 4,160 infections could be prevented and hospitals could save $41 million by reducing rates of nursing staff burnout to 10 percent from an average of 30 percent.

"Health care facilities can improve nurse staffing and other elements of the care environment and alleviate job-related burnout in nurses at a much lower cost than those associated with health care-associated infections," Cimiotti and colleagues concluded. "By reducing nurse burnout, we can improve the well-being of nurses while improving the quality of patient care."

The study was published in the August issue of the American Journal of Infection Control.

While the study uncovered an association between nursing staff burnout and infections among patients, it did not prove a cause-and-effect relationship.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about health care-related infections.

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Rezidor announces the Radisson Blu Hotel, Chisinau in Moldova

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2012The Rezidor Hotel Group, one of the fastest growing hotel companies worldwide and a member of the Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group, announces the Radisson Blu Hotel, Chisinau.

(1888PressRelease) August 01, 2012 - Chisinau is the capital city of Moldova

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Watch: Eye Twitch Pesters Pediatrician for 10 Years

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Careington International Corporation at the 16th Annual Dallas Mayor's Back to School Fair

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Aug
2012Careington International Corporation, a premier nationwide marketer of discount dental, prescription, vision and other health care, wellness and lifestyle products, headquartered in Frisco, Texas, will be exhibiting at the 16th annual Mayor's Back to School Fair at Fair Park in Dallas, Texas, distributing free discount prescription program ID cards to all attendees.

(1888PressRelease) August 01, 2012 - Careington International Corporation will be exhibiting at the 16th Annual Dallas Mayor's Back to School Fair on August 2, 2012.

Careington International Corporation, a premier nationwide marketer of discount dental, prescription, vision and other health care, wellness and lifestyle products, headquartered in Frisco, Texas, will be exhibiting at the 16th annual Mayor's Back to School Fair at Fair Park in Dallas, Texas, distributing free discount prescription program ID cards to all attendees.
This family-friendly annual event will be a great way to provide parents and school-aged children with an opportunity to see what education, health and social services are available to them in their community. These services will be displayed through interactive and informative activities, displays and entertainment.

Careington will be at the event to hand out no-cost discount prescription cards that families can use to save 15% to 60% off generic drugs and 15% to 25% off brand name prescriptions. These cards can be used right away and are accepted at over 58,000 participating pharmacies nationwide, such as CVS Pharmacy, Target, Walmart Pharmacy, Kmart Pharmacy and more in the local DFW area. Over 67% of children in America do not have prescription cards, and Dallas is one of the most expensive cities to fill prescriptions. Simply stopping by the Careington booth can help you save money on prescriptions at your local participating pharmacy. Careington is looking forward to participating in the event and interacting with local consumers.

"Careington is excited to be part of the Dallas Mayor's Back to School Fair and give back to our North Texas community residents, providing an opportunity for families to save money on their prescriptions. Families can pick up a free pharmacy card at the event and use it immediately at participating pharmacies all over Dallas and the nation. Careington has provided access to health care savings for over 30 years and has helped millions of members save money on dental, vision, health and wellness, and more. To date, since only 2009, Careington has helped members save over $15,501,912.00 in prescription costs," said Mark Roberts, Manager of National Accounts.

Please contact Mark Roberts, Manager of National Accounts for Careington International Corporation, for more information on this exciting event. This program is not Insurance.

About Careington International Corporation
Since 1979, Careington International Corporation has provided affordable solutions to more than eight million members nationwide. Dedicated to improving the health and well-being of individuals, Careington's health and wellness discount solutions are designed to complement traditional health insurance and provide significant savings for uninsured or underinsured individuals. For more information, call (800) 441-0380 or visit www.careington.com.

THIS PLAN IS NOT INSURANCE. THIS IS NOT A MEDICARE PRESCRIPTION DRUG PLAN.

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Santevia Adds New Tritan(TM) Water Bottles to Product Line

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Aug
2012 Santevia Water Systems, a leader in Alkaline Water Products, today announced the addition of it's NEW Santevia TRITAN

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Americans gaining more weight than they say

ScienceDaily (Aug. 1, 2012) — Despite the increasing awareness of the problem of obesity in the United States, most Americans don't know whether they are gaining or losing weight, according to new research from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.

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Obesity increased in the US between 2008 and 2009, but in response to the questions about year-to-year changes in weight that were included in the most widespread public health survey in the country, on average, people said that they lost weight. Men did a worse job estimating their own weight changes than women. And older adults were less attuned to their weight changes than young adults. The findings are being published in the article "In denial: misperceptions of weight change among adults in the United States" in the August edition of Preventive Medicine.

"If people aren't in touch with their weight and changes in their weight over time, they might not be motivated to lose weight," said Dr. Catherine Wetmore, the lead author on the paper. "Misreporting of weight gains and losses also has policy implications. If we had relied on the reported data about weight change between 2008 and 2009, we would have undercounted approximately 4.4 million obese adults in the US."

A range of public health campaigns in recent years have urged Americans to lose weight to lower their chances of developing heart disease, diabetes, and other chronic conditions. To understand whether people in the US are heeding this advice, Dr. Wetmore, a former Post-Graduate Fellow at IHME and now a biostatistician at Children's National Medical Center, and IHME Professor Dr. Ali Mokdad compared self-reported changes in body weight between 2008 and 2009.

They used data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), a yearly cross-sectional survey of adults in the US designed to monitor leading risk factors for morbidity and mortality nationwide. More than 775,000 people were surveyed in the years analyzed, and they were asked multiple questions about their weight, including how much they weighed on the day of their interview and how much they weighed one year prior to their interview.

The researchers found that, on average, American adults gained weight over the study period -- because the reported weights increased between the 2008 and 2009 surveys -- but the 2009 study participants told surveyors that they had lost weight during the previous year. Based on the weights they reported, the prevalence of obesity in the US would have declined from 2008 to 2009. Instead, the prevalence of obesity inched upward from 26% to 26.5%, and average weight increased by about one pound per person between 2008 and 2009.

"We all know on some level that people can be dishonest about their weight," Dr. Mokdad said. "But now we know that they can be misreporting annual changes in their weight, to the extent of more than two pounds per year among adults over the age of 50, or more than four pounds per year among those with diabetes. On average, American adults were off by about a pound, which, over time, can really add up and have a significant health impact."

Not everyone reported losing weight. The researchers found that reports of unintentional weight gain were more common in specific groups:

men and women under the age of 40 those identifying as black, Native American, or Hispanic current and former smokers those consuming less than five servings of fruits and vegetables per day those reporting no physical activity those with diagnosed chronic diseases, frequent poor mental health, and insufficient sleep those lacking health care coverage

"It's very popular right now to talk about the underlying environmental causes of obesity, whether it's too much fast food or not enough parks," Dr. Wetmore said. "While we know that the environment definitely plays a role, these results show that we need to do a better job helping people to be aware of what's going on with their own bodies."

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Mom, Daughter Pregnant Raises Issues

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