cdistaffing.com Blog

Kidney donors fare just as well as non-donors over the long term, according to a new study.

Researchers compared survival rates of kidney donors to healthy adults who were not kidney donors and found kidney donation did not affect long-term survival rates.

“Regardless of what physiologic changes might occur in a healthy adult after kidney donation, our findings of similar long-term survival between donors and healthy comparison patients suggest that these physiologic changes do not result in premature death,” write researcher Dorry L. Segev, MD, PhD, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and colleagues in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Although kidney donors face a higher risk of death in the 90 days immediately following surgery because of the risks inherent in major surgery, researchers say the findings confirm that the practice of live kidney donation should continue to be considered a reasonable and safe alternative to using deceased donor organs.

The use of live kidney donation has increased dramatically in recent years due to a major donor organ shortage in the US. An estimated 6,000 people undergo the surgery to remove one of their kidneys for donation each year.

The study followed more than 80,000 people who underwent kidney donation surgery between 1994 and 2009 and compared them to a matched group of 9,364 healthy participants in a nationwide health survey for an average of about six years.

The results showed there were 25 deaths within 90 days of live kidney donation surgery, with the risk of death being 3.1 per 10,000 donors compared to a death rate in the comparison group of 0.4 per 10,000 people during the same time period.

Doug

CDIstaffing.com

Basic Food Flavors Inc., the Las Vegas company at the center of a recall of more than 100 food products, continued to make and distribute food ingredients for about a month after it learned the bacteria salmonella was present at its processing facility, according to a Food and Drug Administration report.

The FDA last week recommended companies recall products, from chips to soups, that contain a commonly used additive made by Basic Food Flavors that tested positive for salmonella. The additive is mixed into foods to give them a meaty flavor.

FDA officials inspected Basic Food’s plant for about two weeks starting in mid-February and found the company didn’t adequately clean equipment and store foods to protect against the growth of contaminants such as salmonella, according to the inspection report.

The report comes as the number of products being recalled has expanded to over 100, including vegetable dips made by McCormick & Co. and honey mustard pretzels sold at CVS Caremark Corp. drug stores and Safeway Inc. grocery stores.

Doug

CDIstaffing.com

Medications can reduce the level of the AIDS virus in the blood to zero, but HIV doesn’t disappear and often roars back when patients stop taking their pills. Now, research is giving scientists new insight into how the virus manages to hide and avoid the killing powers of medicine.

In a new study, researchers report that the virus lurks in certain bone marrow cells and “reawakens” only under certain circumstances.

The research provides a new target for scientists, but it also presents new challenges because killing off bone marrow cells is a dicey proposition.

Overall, the findings provide “a better understanding of how HIV hides in the body” and could lead to better strategies to kill or control it, said study co-author Dr. Kathleen Collins, an associate professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan.

Doctors have long known about the ability of HIV — the AIDS virus — to avoid being killed off completely by medications. Drugs may prevent the virus from infecting new cells, “but they don’t get rid of cells that contain the virus and have potential to make new viral particles,” Collins said.

This helps explain why HIV isn’t curable. The immune systems of patients may be able to control the virus for a time but later fall victim to a renewed attack and, ultimately, to AIDS.

“A patient cannot be cured of HIV until all sources of infection are eliminated,” said Jerome A. Zack, director of the UCLA Center for AIDS Research in Los Angeles.

Doug

CDIstaffing.com

- In the United States, colorectal cancer is the fourth most common cancer in men, after skin, prostate and lung cancer. It is also the fourth most common cancer in women, after skin, breast and lung cancer. It’s also the second leading cause of all cancer deaths.

The risk of colorectal cancer increases with age. Other risk factors include a high fat intake, a family history of colorectal cancer and polyps, the presence of polyps in the large intestine, and chronic ulcerative colitis.

The colon is the part of the digestive system where the waste material is stored. The rectum is the end of the colon next to the anus. Together, they form a long, muscular tube called the large intestine or bowel. Tumors of the colon and rectum are growths that start on the inner wall of the large intestine.

Doctors are certain that colorectal cancer is not contagious – a person cannot catch the disease from a cancer patient. Symptoms of colorectal cancer include fatigue, weakness, shortness of breath, change in bowel habits, narrow stools, diarrhea or constipation, red or dark blood in stool, weight loss, abdominal pain, cramps or bloating.

Doug

CDIstaffing.com

In a lawsuit filed in a San Francisco court on Tuesday, an environmental group alleged that 10 types of fish oil and shark oil supplements contain a toxic substance that may cause cancer.

The group, Mateel Environmental Justice Foundation (MEJF), claims that California’s Proposition 65 mandates that the producers and sellers of the supplements in question are legally required to inform consumers that their supplements contain the substance, polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB), the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

The more than 100 brands of fish oil are currently available, MEJF tested only 10 products, all of which had some level of PCB.

“People buy fish oil to improve their health,” David Roe, the plaintiff’s attorney, told the news source. “We have no way of knowing if all of the other fish oil products have PCB, too.”

Doug

CDIstaffing.com

13th Annual Nursing Assembly

When:  Thursday, March 18, 2010

Where:  UWF Conference Center, Pensacola FL

Time:    8AM-4:30PM

Co-sponsors: UWF Department of Nursing, and Upsilon Kappa Chapter, Sigma Theta Tau International

Theme for this year’s Assembly:  Conditions that are genetically linked (Diabetes, Sickle Cell, Autism, etc.)

The Assembly will include two contact hours for Domestic Violence.

Fee:     $60.00

            Members, Sigma Theta Tau International – $50.00

            UWF Nursing Students:   $15.00

            Other students:                $25.00

Fee includes: conference materials, up to 7 approved contact hours, lunch, breaks

This is a great opportunity for STTI members who may be inactive to re-activate membership.  Go to the STTI website http://www.nursingsociety.org/Membership/Benefits/Pages/membership_options.aspx      to transfer your membership to Upsilon Kappa Chapter (Chapter #464)

Registration Forms will be available in late January 2010.

This Assembly for 2010 will be the best ever! Plan to join us on the lovely UWF Campus in the Spring.

For further information, contact:

Laurel Boyd, M.Ed., RN

lboyd@uwf.edu

RESERVATIONS AND PRE-PAYMENT ARE REQUIRED. REGISTRATION ON-SITE MAY NOT BE ACCOMMODATED

Those “prewashed” and “triple-washed” bagged salad greens in the produce section of the supermarket may not be as clean as you think.

In a new investigation from the Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports, high levels of bacteria commonly linked to poor sanitation and fecal contamination were found in many of the sampled packaged salads.

The bacteria did not pose a health risk to the public, but their presence indicated a higher likelihood of contamination with rare but potentially deadly pathogens like E. coli and salmonella, Consumers Union senior scientist Michael Hansen, PhD, tells WebMD.

Doug

CDIstaffing.com

Fish oil pills may be able to spare some young people with signs of mental illness from a progression into fully developed schizophrenia, according to a preliminary study of 81 patients in Austria.

The study adds to evidence suggesting that severe mental illness may be prevented with intervention. The researchers are starting a larger study in eight cities, hoping to replicate the findings, which appear in the February issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, released Monday.

A severe mental illness, schizophrenia affects adolescents and young adults. Some 2.4 million Americans have the disorder, which is treated with antipsychotic medication.

“Schizophrenia is among the most mysterious and costliest diseases in terms of human suffering, so anything that gives some hope to avoid this is great,” said lead author Dr. G. Paul Amminger, formerly in Vienna and now at the Orygen Youth Health Research Center at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

Researchers have wondered if the disease could be stopped before it overpowers a person’s grip on reality. Studies have tried antipsychotics in select young people, but side effects pose ethical questions, and results have been mixed.

Researchers in the new study identified 81 people, ages 13 to 25, with warning signs of psychosis, including sleeping much more or less than usual, growing suspicious of others, believing someone is putting thoughts in their head or believing they have magical powers. Forty-one were randomly assigned to take four fish oil pills a day for three months. The other patients took dummy pills.

After a year of monitoring, 2 of the 41 patients in the fish oil group, or about 5%, had become psychotic, or completely out of touch with reality. In the placebo group, 11 of 40 became psychotic, about 28%.

No one knows what causes schizophrenia but one hypothesis is that people with the disease don’t process fatty acids correctly, leading to damaged brain cells. Omega-3 fatty acids in fish oil could help brain cells repair and stabilize, the researchers speculate.

Doug

CDIstaffing.com

British and U.S. researchers said they had grown a crystal that enabled them to see the structure of an enzyme called integrase, which is found in retroviruses like HIV and is a target for some of the newest HIV medicines.

“Despite initially painstakingly slow progress and very many failed attempts, we did not give up and our effort was finally rewarded,” said Peter Cherepanov of Imperial College London, who conducted the research with scientists from Harvard University.

The Imperial and Harvard scientists said that having the integrase structure means researchers can begin fully to understand how integrase inhibitor drugs work, how they might be improved, and how to stop HIV developing resistance to them.

When the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infects someone, it uses the integrase enzyme to paste a copy of its genetic information into their DNA, Cherepanov explained in the study published in the Nature journal on Sunday.

Some new drugs for HIV — like Isentress from Merck & Co and elvitegravir, an experimental drug from Gilead Sciences — work by blocking integrase, but scientists are not clear exactly how they work or how to improve them.

The only way to find out was to obtain high-quality crystals — a project that had defeated scientists for many years.

Doug

CDIstaffing.com

Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda have said they will donate £10bn (£6.2bn) over the next 10 years to develop and deliver new vaccines.

Mr Gates, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, said the aim was to see 90% of children in developing countries immunised

Wow! 

Doug

CDIstaffing.com