Good Health is Your Greatest Wealth……Virgil
It concerned Jay Portnow, M.D. Jay was in the audience of a talk that I was giving at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco maybe 25 years ago to a convention of physical medicine docs of which he is a prominent member. In my talk, I was musing about why my leg recently emerged from six weeks in a long leg cast as a result of a ski accident and became precociously old.
A sick restaurant worker in Missouri may have exposed thousands of Red Robin customers to hepatitis A. On Wednesday, county health officials announced that people who visited the chain's location in Springfield between May 8 and May 16 may have come in contact with the virus. According to the Springfield News-Leader, as many as 5,000 people may have been affected. However, since the employee worked at the restaurant for several months before the infection was discovered, it's possible that many others who visited the Red Robin were exposed to hepatitis A, local news outlet KSPR notes.
Reviewers on the online restaurant and business rating site, Yelp, helped New York City health officials find hundreds of unreported cases of possible food borne illnesses, health officials reported on Thursday. Researchers involved in a pilot project between the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Columbia University and Yelp trawled the site for reviews that included words like "sick," "vomit," "diarrhea" and "food poisoning," between July 2012 and March 2013. Roughly 294,000 Yelp reviews were analyzed, and researchers found 468 posts that were consistent with cases of recent food borne illnesses.
By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) – Superbugs resistant to drugs pose a serious worldwide threat and demand a response on the same scale as efforts to combat climate change, infectious disease specialists said on Thursday. Warning that a world without effective antibiotics would be “deadly”, with routine surgery, treatments for cancer and diabetes and organ transplants becoming impossible, the experts said the international response had been far too weak. “We have needed to take action against the development of antimicrobial resistance for more than 20 years. Despite repeated warnings, the international response has been feeble,” said Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust medical charity.
By Chris Michaud NEW YORK(Reuters) – Mark Ruffalo was puzzled when he was recruited to play Ned Weeks, a thinly fictionalized character based on AIDS activist Larry Kramer in the HBO film adaptation of Kramer's Tony award-winning play "The Normal Heart." "I was like: 'Me?' " said Ruffalo. The actor, who often plays sensitive roles in films such as "The Kids Are All Right," asked director Ryan Murphy, "Shouldn't a gay person be playing Ned Weeks at this point in time? "The Normal Heart," which debuts on HBO on Sunday, also features Jim Parsons of "The Big Bang Theory," Oscar-winner Julia Roberts ("Erin Brockovic,") and Matt Bomer of TV's "White Collar." The play was first staged in 1985 and revived on Broadway in 2011.