Environmental Medicine News

The News Review:

- Tone up together
- Cigarette smoking impedes tendon-to-bone healing
- Grammar May Help Fight Bacteria
- Prescription Pain Medication Abuse On Surprising Increase, With…
- Earnings lag behind health care costs.
- Flu season is on the way

Tone up together
Denver Post - Oct 18, 2006
In the home, the biggest culprit for quashing activity is television. Edward Laskowski, a specialist in physical medicine and co-director of the Sports Medicine Center at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. , notes that children who watch more than five hours of TV a day are eight times more likely to be obese than children who watch less than two hours. In the schools, tight budgets are cutting physical education. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the percentage of children in daily physical education classes has declined from 42 percent in 1991 to 33 percent in 2005. Research now suggests that exercise actually readies a child’s brain for improved learning… We do offer concurrent activities for teens, children and adults and have full- and part-time child care and ‘child watch’ so that parents can work out while the kids enjoy supervised play in the child care center. ” At South Suburban Parks and Recreation, sport conditioning classes for the whole family are offered, as are family events, according to Justin Hamel, marketing specialist. Nature hikes and holiday activities such as post- Thanksgiving family workouts are on the fall schedule. With five golf courses, four recreation centers, two ice rinks and miniature golf courses, there are plenty of options available. Another option for family fitness is martial arts studios. At Tiger Kim’s Academy in Denver, offering taekwon do and tang soo do, for example, all family members can participate in the same class. Sung Hwan Kim, the master teacher at Tiger Kim’s, says everyone in a class learns at his own pace.

Cigarette smoking impedes tendon-to-bone healing
EurekAlert - EurekAlert (press release) - Oct 18, 2006
The true incidence of the injuries is hard to determine because between 5 percent and 40 percent of people who may have a torn rotator cuff have no accompanying shoulder pain. What surgeons do know is that rotator cuff repairs can fail in the days and weeks after surgery. Some studies have reported short- to intermediate-term recurrence rates from 30 percent to 90 percent, depending on the size of the tear, chronic nature of the injury and the age of the patient, among other factors. “Especially during the first six weeks after surgery, tissue may be vulnerable to re-injury,” says Leesa M. , first author of the study and assistant professor of orthopaedic surgery at Washington University School of Medicine in St… Washington University School of Medicine’s full-time and volunteer faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research, teaching and patient care institutions in the nation, currently ranked fourth in the nation by U. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.

Grammar May Help Fight Bacteria
FOX News - Oct 18, 2006
The unusual method to try to defeat drug-resistant microbes and anthrax borrows a page from”The Da Vinci Code”and the TV show”CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. “Studying potent bacteria-fighters found in nature called antimicrobial peptides, biologists found that they seemed to follow rules of order and placement that are similar to simple grammar laws. Using the new grammar-like rules for how these peptides work, scientists created 40 new artificial bacteria-fighters. They found that nearly half of them vanquished a variety of bacteria and two of them beat anthrax, according to a paper being published Thursday in the journal Nature. This potentially creates not just a new type of weapon against hard-to-fight germs, but a way to keep churning out new and different microbe-attackers. In theory, that means that when bacteria evolve new defenses against one drug, doctors won’t be stymied… He used the example of a sentence:”Dave asks a question. “What Stephanopoulos did was the equivalent of substitute different names for Dave and found that the peptide often still beat the bacteria. Harvard evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser said that using grammar rules to decode genetics and medicine is growing more popular. But he said he worries that too many people are calling grammar what is really just simple code, not nearly as complicated as human language. Berwick said the bacteria-fighting grammar rules are equivalent to the extremely basic spelling rule,”i before e except after c. “The grammar rules Stephanopoulos developed are about what 2-year-olds learn on their own by listening to adults speak, he said. ___ On the Net:.

Prescription Pain Medication Abuse On Surprising Increase, With…
Medical News Today - Oct 18, 2006
“It is for this reason that PPM abuse must be monitored separately from other illicit substances, and the most commonly abused or most problematic PPMs should be monitored individually. Oxycodone, in particular, was singled out by Moric’s group because of its highly addictive nature and specific distribution pattern, which differed from many other PPMs and illicit drugs. Similar to heroin in both its effect on the body and addictive nature, oxycodone is often crushed or mixed with other drugs and used for its heroin-like “rush. ” Moric warned that the key to understanding and identifying abuse requires a more sophisticated understanding than that abusers simply want to “feel good. “As users become addicts, they undergo a fundamental neurobiological change,” Moric said. “Processes such as learning, memory, perception, arousal and motivation all drastically change, and to classify abuse purely as ‘pleasure seeking’ is a gross oversimplification. The surprising results from the study should offer something of a wake-up call to physicians and other health care workers everywhere in the country… If PPM abuse is identified in a particular area, a multifaceted response should be implemented, he said. “Drug abuse prevention, outreach and information dissemination programs by federal, state and nonprofit agencies should be notified so that public awareness can be heightened and action be taken to reduce the problem. According to Moric, anesthesiologists who practice pain medicine play a particularly crucial role in combating PPM abuse. “We feel that the most important function of anesthesiologists with respect to PPM abuse is in education. Anesthesiologists are the most relevant spokespersons for both the benefits of PPMs and the potential abuses,” Moric said. Contact: Mary Ann Schultz.

Earnings lag behind health care costs.
Free with registration - Dayton Daily News - AccessMyLibrary.com - Oct 18, 2006
–> COPYRIGHT 2006 Dayton Daily News Byline: Anthony Gottschlich Oct. 18–DAYTON — The price of health care insurance is taking a bigger bite out of our paychecks, a new report illustrates, and at least one health care economist sees the trend growing. “It’s definitely going to continue,” said John McAlearney of Wright State University’s Boonshoft School of Medicine. The cost of health insurance keeps climbing because the cost of health care — expensive improvements in medical technology, drugs and procedures — are growing, too, McAlearney said.

Flu season is on the way
Shelbyville Times-Gazette - Oct 18, 2006
Kenitra Smith-Washington, a recent graduate of the U-T Memphis pharmacy school who grew up in Shelbyville, has started her career at the Kroger pharmacy. Both pharmacists are immunizers and will administer a shot by appointment as long as the vaccine lasts. There’s no shortage this year, but at least one manufacturer is shipping the medicine out to as many customers as possible as it becomes available and that means fewer doses per package to county health clinics. As a result, the Bedford County Health Department is waiting until it has a sufficient supply available before it starts offering shots, according to Sherry Adams, spokeswoman for the Tennessee Department of Health. “We think we can start taking appointments on Monday,” Adams said. Depending on circumstances after enough vaccine arrives, the clinic’s nurses may be administering shots on a walk-in basis, Adams said. “There is no prioritizing for who gets it this year,” she said.