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- Poultry Slaughtered to Control Bird Flu Outbreak in South Korea
- Men More Likely to Desire Alcohol When Upset: Study
- Lawsuit Alleging Mercury-Autism Link to Begin in U.S. Court of Claims
- 85 Hepatitis C Cases Confirmed at Las Vegas Clinics
- Flu Vaccine Makers Preparing 143 Million Doses for Next Season
Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by editors of HealthDay:
Poultry Slaughtered to Control Bird Flu Outbreak in South Korea
All poultry in South Korea's capital city of Seoul have been killed in an effort to prevent the spread of bird flu following a new outbreak of the disease in the city, officials said Monday.
The slaughter of about 15,000 chickens, ducks, pheasants and turkeys began Sunday night, hours after confirmation of the city's second outbreak of bird flu in less than a week, the Associated Press reported. Authorities are now focusing on blocking any live poultry from being brought into Seoul.
Tests are being conducted to determine if the latest outbreak in the city was caused by the H5N1 virus. Results may be available as early as Monday night.
Last month, bird flu outbreaks started appearing in southern parts of South Korea for the first time in more than a year, which led to the slaughter of more than 6.8 million birds, the AP reported.
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Men More Likely to Desire Alcohol When Upset: Study
Men are more likely than women to want alcohol when they're upset, suggests a U.S. study that examined emotional and alcohol-craving responses to stress.
The study included 27 women and 27 men who were healthy social drinkers. They listened to three types of stories -- stressful, alcohol-related and neutral/relaxing -- in separate sessions on separate days, United Press International reported.
The participants' emotional, behavioral/bodily, and cardiovascular responses to the stories were assessed using heart rate and blood pressure monitoring, along with self-reported alcohol cravings.
"After listening to the stressful story, women reported more sadness and anxiety than men, as well as greater behavioral arousal," first author Tara M. Chaplin, of Yale University School of Medicine, said in a prepared statement. "But for men ... emotional arousal is linked to increases in alcohol craving. In other words, when men are upset, they are more likely to want alcohol."
Chaplin and her colleagues found that men had greater blood pressure response to stress, but didn't report greater sadness and anxiety, UPI reported. The researchers said this may mean that men are more likely to try to distract themselves from physiological arousal, possibly by consuming alcohol.
The study is published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.
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Lawsuit Alleging Mercury-Autism Link to Begin
A preservative containing mercury and once widely used in childhood vaccines becomes the topic of a U.S. lawsuit this coming week as two Oregon families seek to prove that the substance caused two 10-year-old boys to develop autism.
The Associated Press reported that the boys' families are the first of 4,900 families to charge in court that the preservative thimerosal does indeed trigger autism in some children. The case is being heard in the U.S. Court of Claims.
A number of studies in recent years have found there was no evidence that thimerosal had any link to the onset of autism after a child had received one or more of the standard childhood vaccinations, the wire service said. In 2004 a committee from the Institute of Medicine concluded that thimerosal did not cause autism when used as a vaccine preservative, the AP reported.
Today, however, only the influenza vaccine contains thimerosal. The attorneys for the boys must prove that autism was caused by the vaccines, which at the time the children were injected contained thimerosal, the wire service reported.
According to interviews and examination of the court documents, the AP reported that the plaintiffs will attempt to present evidence that injections with thimerosal deposit a mercury variant in the brain. This, in turn, excites certain brain cells, which leads to autism.
"In some kids, there's enough of it that it sets off this chronic neuroinflammatory pattern that can lead to regressive autism," attorney Mike
Williams told the AP.
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85 Hepatitis C Cases Confirmed at Las Vegas Clinics
Health officials have identified at least 85 people treated at two Las Vegas area outpatient clinics over a four year period as having contracted hepatitis C, the Associated Press reported.
The two clinics in question, the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada and the Desert Shadow Endoscopy Center, treated about 50,000 patients over this amount of time, the AP said, and while no official reason for the 85 people getting hepatitis C has been given, the cause may have been because the clinic staff reused syringes and vials of medication while administering anesthesia.
The doctors who ran the clinics, Dipak Desai and Eladio Carrera, have had their medical licenses suspended until Nevada's state Board of Medical Examiners holds hearings, the wire service reported.
Brian Labus, a senior epidemiologist with the Southern Nevada Health District, told the AP that the link between being treated at the clinics and contracting hepatitis C was strong. "We know they [the 85 patients] didn't have a positive test before they went to the clinic, and now they're positive," he said.
State officials are worried that all 50,000 patients who were treated at the clinics between March 2004 and Jan. 11, 2008, may have been exposed to hepatitis C, which can linger in a person's system for years without symptoms. The disease can result in liver failure.
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Flu Vaccine Makers Preparing 143 Million Doses for Next Season
Hoping they picked the right viruses this time, the five companies that make influenza vaccine plan to offer at least 143 million doses to Americans for the 2008-09 flu season, the Associated Press reported.
The 2007-08 flu season, which is just ending, was the worst in four years for adult deaths, the wire service reported, largely because the viruses used in the flu vaccine were ineffective against many of the viruses that actually circulated in the population.
The viruses included in the vaccine each season are determined by scientists who have had a good record of predicting accurately, the AP reported. But two of the three viruses this season were wrong and were only 44 percent effective against the flu that circulated in the United States, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC and the American Medical Association are hosting a flu vaccine "summit" meeting in Atlanta this week. Each year in the United States, more than 200,000 people are hospitalized from the flu, and an average of 36,000 deaths occur, according the U.S. government statistics.
Copyright © 2008 ScoutNews LLC. All rights reserved.
Published on: 05/12/2008
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