Month: July 2014

By Elizabeth Barber BOSTON (Reuters) – Massachusetts lawmakers have passed a bill this week to rein in compounding pharmacies after tainted drugs produced by a local company were implicated in killing 64 people across the country and sickening hundreds more. Governor Deval Patrick’s office said on Thursday he is reviewing the proposed legislation. The new bill ramps up the state’s oversight of compounding pharmacies, granting greater powers to the state board overseeing such companies and tightening the standards to which the pharmacies must adhere. “This legislation clearly defines the boundaries of safe and appropriate compounding pharmacies and applies strict standards to all pharmacies producing or shipping compounding drugs in Massachusetts,” said House Representative Jeffrey Sánchez, Chairman of the Joint Committee on Public Health, in a statement.

By Shereen Lehman NEW YORK (Reuters) – Drowning deaths among boaters in Victoria, Australia, fell from almost 60 in the years before a law required everyone to wear a “personal flotation device” to 16 afterwards, according to a new study. Educational campaigns encouraging life-jacket use may not be enough to get all boaters to wear the vests at all times, but making it mandatory does make a difference, the study team writes in the journal Injury Prevention. “Why are life jackets important? Quan, an emergency pediatrician at Seattle Children’s Hospital, was not involved in the study but has examined how changes to the law in Washington state improved life-jacket use.

(Reuters) – North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory on Thursday signed a law allowing limited use of medical marijuana to treat seizures, joining states where cannabis has been legalized in some circumstances for therapeutic purposes. The legislation, called the Hope 4 Haley and Friends bill, was named for 6-year-old Haley Ward of Newport, who suffers from daily seizures. It passed with wide support among North Carolina legislators, following testimony from parents calling it their last hope. North Carolina joins states that include Alabama, Mississippi and Florida in allowing the controlled use of a cannabis extract, cannabidiol.

The Philippines urged its large Muslim minority on Thursday to reconsider plans to join pilgrimages to Saudi Arabia this year due to a deadly virus outbreak there. About 6,500 Filipinos who are set to join the annual Hajj pilgrimage in October are being urged to go next year instead, when the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) is expected to be under control, health department spokesman Lyndon Lee Suy said. "We know it's a religious custom, but it is also our duty to provide health advisories," Lee Suy told AFP. "It's an appeal for them to delay the trip if possible due to the MERS virus…. If possible, they should go next year."

Accra (AFP) – The United Nations health agency said on Thursday it expected the worst Ebola outbreak in history to continue its deadly rampage through west Africa for at least "several months".

By Gene Emery NEW YORK (Reuters) – Steroid injections widely used to treat back pain offer little or no real benefit, according to a new study of 400 patients. Those who received the drug mixed with the painkiller lidocaine scored no better on measures of disability and leg pain after six weeks than patients in a control group who received lidocaine injection alone. “These (injections) are so commonly used and the steroids do pose an added risk to patients without much benefit,” the study’s lead author Dr. Janna Friedly of the University of Washington in Seattle told Reuters Health. “I do hope patients and their doctors will be more cautious about using them” for spinal stenosis, she said.

By Maria Tsvetkova SLAVIANSK Ukraine (Reuters) – When the daily shelling starts in this besieged city in eastern Ukraine, those who have not yet fled the fighting grab their children and head underground. If there is time before running into cellars and basements, the people of Slaviansk gather chairs, clothes, water and other provisions for stays that can last for hours or, sometimes, all night. “We live in our cellar,” said Svetlana Dobrostroy, who has a six-year-old daughter and a son aged 10. They’re the first to run to the cellar.” About half the 130,000 residents of Slaviansk are thought to have fled since fighters who want eastern Ukraine incorporated into Russia took control of the city in April, a month after Moscow annexed the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea.

Researchers at the University of Virginia and Harvard University conducted 11 different experiments to see how people reacted to being asked to spend some time alone. Some were college students, others were volunteers who ranged in age from 18-77 and were recruited from a church and farmers' market. Researchers asked them to sit alone in an unadorned room, with no mobile phone, reading or writing materials, and then report back on what it was like to entertain themselves with their thoughts for between six and 15 minutes. In one experiment, students were asked to do the "thinking time" exercise at home.

In fact, some of the volunteers, men in particular, in one of the 11 experiments led by University of Virginia researchers preferred to administer mild electrical shocks to themselves rather than sit and do nothing. "Many people find it difficult to use their own minds to entertain themselves, at least when asked to do it on the spot," said University of Virginia psychology professor Timothy Wilson, who led the study appearing in the journal Science. Some experiments involved only college students.