Health and Fitness News
- Hungarian home birth advocate looses appeal
Hungarian home birth advocate looses appeal
BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) ? A Hungarian obstetrician known for promoting home births lost an appeal Friday against her two-year prison sentence for malpractice.
Last year's verdict was already unusual because the judge's sentence was much tougher than the suspended prison term sought by prosecutors.
"The court applies a double standard by judging hospital births and home births differently," said a statement from the Justice for Agnes Gereb Movement and the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union.
- For pregnant women with cancer, chemo possible
For pregnant women with cancer, chemo possible
Associated Press
Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Updated 08:34 a.m., Friday, February 10, 2012
Only about 1 in 1,000 pregnant women face this dilemma, but doctors fear that more will because the risk of cancer rises with age, and more women are delaying having children until they're older.
Doctors have long worried about how to balance treating a pregnant woman with cancer and the need to protect her fetus from the effects of toxic cancer drugs and radiation treatments, and whether it is safe to continue a pregnancy in certain situations.
Radiation therapy is best done in the first two trimesters, when the baby is small enough to be covered with a lead blanket, according to a review of previous studies, led by Belgian researchers.
? Another review of previous studies by French and American researchers concluded doctors should aim to preserve pregnancy in women with cervical or ovarian cancers where possible.
Nelson-Piercy was not linked to the Lancet series and often works with pregnant women diagnosed with cancer or other illnesses.
"Terminating a pregnancy is not always necessary," said Theriault, who heads a program to treat pregnant women with cancer.
- Obama: Birth control policy meets everyone's needs
Obama: Birth control policy meets everyone's needs
Associated Press
Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Updated 10:08 a.m., Friday, February 10, 2012
WASHINGTON (AP) ? President Barack Obama declared Friday he's found a solution to a birth-control uproar that will protect religious liberty but also ensure that women have access to free contraception, as he rushed to defuse an election-year issue that threatened to overtake his administration.
Capping weeks of growing controversy, Obama announced he was backing off a newly announced requirement for religious employers to provide free birth control coverage even if it runs counter to their religious beliefs.
Congressional Republicans as well as GOP presidential hopefuls were beating up on Obama relentlessly over the issue, and even Democrats and liberal groups allied with the Roman Catholic church were defecting.
After the many genuine concerns that have been raised over the last few weeks, as well as frankly the more cynical desire on the part of some to make this into a political football, it became clear that spending months hammering out a solution was not going to be an option.
[...] religious universities and hospitals that see contraception as an unconscionable violation of their faith can refuse to cover it, and insurance companies will then have to step in to do so.
"The framework developed has responded to the issues we identified that needed to be fixed," Sister Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association, a trade group representing Catholic hospitals that had fought against the birth control requirement, said in a statement.
Planned Parenthood also backed the revisions, saying the Obama administration was still committed to ensuring all women have access to birth control coverage, no matter where they work.
By keeping free contraception for employers at religious workplaces ? but providing a different way to do it ? Obama was able to assert he gave no ground on the basic principle of full preventative care that matters most to Obama.
Officials said Obama has the legal authority to order insurance companies to provide free contraception coverage directly to workers.
The furor has consumed media attention and threatened to undermine Obama's re-election bid just as he was in stride with improving economic news.
- Russians alarmed by rash of teenage suicides
Russians alarmed by rash of teenage suicides
Associated Press
Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Updated 08:34 a.m., Friday, February 10, 2012
In recent years, there have been 19-to-20 annual suicides per 100,000 teenagers in Russia ? three times the world average, Boris Polozhy of the respected Serbsky psychiatric center in Moscow said Friday.
"[...] the highest authorities see suicide as a problem, our joint efforts will be unlikely to yield any results," he said.
Internet-savvy and handy with cell phones and computers, Russian teens spend hours on social networking websites and idolize pop stars just like teens elsewhere in the world.
Pavel Astakhov, the government-appointed children's rights ombudsman, said school psychologists should find and help suicidal teenagers on social networking websites and crack down on cyber-bullying, another widespread cause of teenage suicides.
- India's global pharmacy role threatened by EU pact
India's global pharmacy role threatened by EU pact
Associated Press
Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Updated 03:22 a.m., Friday, February 10, 2012
India's $26 billion drug industry has become an immense profit engine, growing at 15-25 percent a year ? but also a lifeline for millions of patients in poor countries, many in Africa, unable to pay sky-high Western prices to treat illnesses that include HIV, malaria, asthma and cancer.
Despite the EU assurance, Indian drug makers and health workers say two broad provisions in the agreement ? one on intellectual property rights, and the other on investor lawsuits ? would make it much easier for international pharmaceutical giants to sue the Indian government, drug manufacturers and distributors.
"The EU has changed strategy and has now focused on enforcement," trying to create an intellectual property rights regime "that will intimidate even legitimate generic manufacturers and thereby impact access and availability," said Dilip G. Shah, a former Pfizer executive who now heads both the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance and the industry's Vision Consulting Group.
"[...] there would be a serious impact on society, as many of the poor would be cut off from treatments," he said.
Since the talks began in 2007, Indian negotiators have refused to hamper the country's generic drug industry by undermining the low-cost production, high-quality professionalism or permissive licensing regime that has helped the industry grow.
[...] this is for a very small, profit-taking group of people.
- Lawyer: 6 Austrians were injected with malaria
Lawyer: 6 Austrians were injected with malaria
Associated Press
Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Updated 12:40 p.m., Thursday, February 9, 2012
The allegations ? and the growing number of people making them ? casts renewed focus on past practices at publicly funded Viennese institutions less than half a year after municipal authorities set up an independent commission to investigate allegations of systematic rape of young girls more than five decades ago at a foster home run by the city.
Oehlboeck said eight people who say they were juvenile psychiatric patients at Vienna's University Clinic in the 1960s spoke of painful or debilitating methods, including six who described the "malaria treatments."
[...] injections were an accepted method in the early 20th century to treat syphilis, with the resulting high fever killing the bacteria that caused the disease, while the malaria was kept under control by doses of quinine.
Bernd Kuefferle, a psychiatrist at the Vienna University Clinic during the 1960s, told the Austria Press Agency that some psychiatric patients were forced to undergo such "fever cures" to keep malaria pathogens alive for possible syphilis treatment.
- Doctors telling more adults: Get out and exercise
Doctors telling more adults: Get out and exercise
Associated Press
Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Updated 10:09 a.m., Thursday, February 9, 2012
ATLANTA (AP) ? More and more U.S. adults are being told by their doctor to get out and exercise, according to government survey released Thursday.
[...] among people with chronic health problems, diabetics, were the most likely to get the advice and cancer patients were least likely.
The most dramatic ? and surprising ? increases were reported in patients age 85 and older.
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