More Young People Entering Nursing Homes
January 19th, 2011
AOL Health
By: Deborah Huso
Twenty-six-year-old Adam Martin (pictured left) is confined to a place no young person wants to be — a nursing home.
Martin is a quadriplegic who lost the use of his legs and arms after being accidentally shot in the neck. He now lives at the Sarasota Health and Rehabilitation Center. “It’s lonely here,” he told the Associated Press.
In the past eight years, the number of nursing home residents under the age of 65 has increased about 22 percent, according to AP.
“Nursing homes are not prepared in any way shape or form for young people,” Jamie Huysman told AOL Health. Huysman is a social worker and spokesman for the International Human Rights Campaign for Caregivers and a member of the National Association of Social Workers.
About one in seven nursing homes residents is younger than 65, according to statistics from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
There are some health-care establishments that provide more specific care to young people and are able to offer designated wings of the building to their younger residents. But since the population under 65 is usually low in most homes, these accommodations can’t always be provided.
Most younger patients have to share a room with someone who exceeds their age by 20 years or more, and generational gaps can cause tension. Older residents don’t like the louder music of the younger residents, and the younger residents can’t be healthy, emotionally and mentally, when they are faced with death everyday.
“It’s a depressing place to live,” explained Martin to the AP. “People die around you all the time. It starts to really get depressing because all you’re seeing is negative, negative, negative.”
Not all younger residents are in for the long haul. Some are just there to recover from an injury since it is a cheaper method for their insurance companies.
Either way, for those younger people who find themselves disabled, recovering and in a nursing home, sometimes the hardest part of the battle can be psychological.
“It is a real challenge for young people,” Dr. James Campbell, Geriatric Center director and executive director of Post Acute and Extended Care at The MetroHealth System in Cleveland, told AOL Health.
Many young residents can slip into depression from their physical limitations, lack of socializing and dreary and sad surroundings. According to Campbell, social perks, such as activities, game nights and social outings, are “critical” and can sometimes make or break the mental and emotional health of a younger resident. “The risk is without that they will be become isolated and depressed.”
Click here for the full report from AOL Health
How to Profit From Soaring Food Demand
January 19th, 2011
Daily Finance
By: Charles Wallace
Anyone who has been to a supermarket lately knows that food prices are spiraling higher. In the coffee aisle, prices are up 30% in the last couple of months alone, and chocolate, beef and chicken also have grown more costly. Sugar is at a 30-year high. Wheat prices have shot up 47%, thanks to droughts in Russia and floods in Queensland, Australia. And corn keeps surging, not only because of its use as food and feed, but also because of its role as part of the burgeoning biofuels industry.
Food-price inflation doesn’t always get much attention in the U.S. because food accounts for such a small part of our overall household budgets, usually 10% to 15%. But those prices play a far bigger role elsewhere, making up as much as 90% of household spending in Africa and 30% in China and other developing countries.
The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization this week reported that world food prices have reached a record high, surpassing the food crisis of 2007. In December, the FAO’s food basket of meat, sugar, diary and cereals was up 4% from November.
But you can also find some profit in this pain: When a commodity’s price climbs, it generally signals an investment opportunity. That holds true for food as well.
Why Ag May Is Poised for Growth
John Stephenson, an asset-management expert who has written a new guide called The Little Book of Commodity Investing, expects agricultural commodities to grow in value because “the world has more people in it, and people are changing their diets as they become more affluent and now eat more protein.” That means high demand for meat and for animal feed such as corn.
Want to get in on the booming agricultural market? One way to invest in it is to buy futures on the Chicago Board of Trade. But for small investors, futures often can be confusing and difficult to trade. Instead, Stephenson recommends other methods, including investing in exchange-traded funds. Unlike ETFs for gold and silver, agricultural ETFs don’t actually own the commodity, but instead buy futures contracts, saving investors the trouble.
Two of the most popular agricultural ETFs include the Agribusiness ETF (MOO), which is based on the DAXglobal agribusiness index and has grown 50% in the last six months, and the PowerShares DB Agriculture Fund (DBA), which is based on the Deutsche Bank Liquid Commodity Index Diversified Agriculture Excess Return and is up 32% from six months ago. Both ETFs invest in a basket of agricultural commodities, which can shift quickly, making it difficult for investors to know how much they’re betting on corn, for example, or soybeans at any specific time.
For more specific commodity investments, Stephenson recommends ETF Securities, a U.K.-based firm. It has specific ETFs for coffee (COFF), corn (CORN), leanhogs (HOGS), soybeans (SOYB), sugar (SUGA) and wheat (WEAT), all of which are traded on the London Stock Exchange.
Click here for the full report from Daily Finance
Actor to News Host on Arkansas Bird Death: ‘Call a Veterinarian, Not Me’
January 19th, 2011
PopEater.com
By: Sarah Crow
Things Kirk Cameron will be remembered as: Mike Seaver, philanthropist, evangelist.
Things Kirk Cameron will not be remembered as: a theology scholar, a foreseer of the apocalypse, a man who takes kindly to subtle mockery from Anderson Cooper.
Following the mysterious death of close to 2,000 red-winged blackbirds in Beebe, Ark., earlier this week, Anderson Cooper reached out to the former ‘Growing Pains’ star in an attempt to have him address reports that the event is a sign of the impending apocalypse.
Cameron, who stars in the popular ‘Left Behind’ films, which take place following the Rapture, was not amused by Cooper’s implication that his religious beliefs were the same as end-of-days zealotry. The actor told the Silver Fox, “You know, I’m not the religious-conspiracy theorist go-to guy, particularly. But I think it’s really kind of silly to try to equate birds falling from the sky with some kind of an end-times theory.”
Click here for the full report from PopEater.com
Wife of White House Aide Found Dead in Burning Car
January 19th, 2011
Politics Daily
By: Christopher Weber
Ashley Turton, wife of the Obama administration’s House of Representatives liaison, Dan Turton, was found dead in a burning car Monday morning, Roll Call and other news outlets are reporting.
Fire officials said it appeared the car crashed as it was pulling in or out of the garage behind a rowhouse in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C., at about 5 a.m. Neighbors dialed 911 after spotting the fire.
The body was discovered after fire crews doused the blaze. The fire also charred part of the garage. Nobody in the house was injured, fire officials said.
Ashley Turton worked as a lobbyist for the utility giant Progress Energy, according to Politico. She was a former staffer for U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn.
Metropolitan Police Lt. Nicholas Breul told Roll Call a joint investigation is underway. Homicide detectives were called to the scene.
“This could be just a tragic freak accident,” Breul said, adding there was no indication that there was a crime committed.
The White House had no immediate comment on the incident.
Click here for the full report from Politics Daily
Big Banks to New Jersey: Stop Bugging Us About Foreclosure Documents
January 19, 2011 by Andrew
Filed under Government
January 19th, 2011
Daily Finance
By: Abigail Field
When New Jersey tightened its rules for foreclosures in response to the crisis over false loan documents, it took the unprecedented step of ordering the six largest servicers — Ally Bank/GMAC, Bank of America (BAC), Citibank (C), JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Wells Fargo (WFC) and OneWest — to explain why they should be allowed to continue with their foreclosures. If any of them couldn’t adequately justify itself, New Jersey would suspend all the foreclosure actions by that bank in the state and appoint a special master to investigate its past and proposed processes.
On Jan. 5, the banks responded, and in essence each said: Look judge, we’re good guys committed to keeping people in their homes whenever possible, and while we admit that in the past we had problems — teeny-tiny problems — we’ve fixed them already.
Most of the banks’ briefs then argued, with varying degrees of aggressiveness, that the court doesn’t have the power to impose a foreclosure moratorium or appoint a special master because that would break court rules, violate New Jersey’s Constitution and the U.S. Constitution — including the banks’ due process rights — and overstep the judiciary’s role. They also claimed it was generally wrong because the banks were regulated federally. Only Chase declined to challenge the court’s authority to impose the moratorium or appoint a special master.
Systematic Rule-Breakers
However strong these challenges to a potential moratorium and special master may be, the irony of banks arguing that halting foreclosures would break court rules and violate their due process rights is richer than New York cheesecake. After all, the banks’ actions in the foreclosure process have systematically involved documents that break court rules and violate homeowners’ due process rights, which is what led New Jersey to act in the first place. Irony aside, the banks are essentially saying: If you suspend our foreclosures or appoint a special master to investigate us, we’ll sue to stop you.
Although the banks vigorously assert that their document problems never led them to foreclose wrongly and that their records are in impeccable shape, they do admit to errors in their documents, at least to some degree.
Click here for the full report from Daily Finance
Now the FDA Is Going After Vitamin C!
January 19th, 2011
Alliance for Natural Health
The FDA has just notified one pharmacy that it will no longer be allowed to manufacture or distribute injectable vitamin C—despite its remarkable power to heal conditions that conventional medicine can’t touch. Please help reverse this outrageous decision!
Let’s get this straight. The government acknowledges the risk of a worldwide flu pandemic. It acknowledges that conventional drugs cannot cure big viruses-like the mononucleosis and hepatitis viruses, many influenza viruses, and many others. It acknowledges that many bacteria have become resistant to antibiotics and are killing increasing thousands. It acknowledges the risk of a worldwide drug-resistant TB pandemic.
Despite acknowledging all this, it now insists on wiping out one of the best potential treatments for these conditions and for certain cancers as well. And why is this being done? What possible rationale is offered? Because it’s dangerous? No. Because it can’t be patented and therefore won’t be taken through the standard FDA approval process. No matter that vitamin C is one of the least toxic components of our food supply and liquid forms of it have been used safely for decades.
By the way, here is what is not safe. Don’t substitute home-made vitamin C solution for pharmaceutical grade liquid. That is not safe for injection. If the FDA action leads someone to do that, the FDA should be held responsible for the results.
The government, instead of banning intravenous vitamin C, should instead be supporting research into it. Even though IV C is being used in burn units around the world, including in the US, and has been adopted by the military for this purpose, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) refuses to fund any studies using intravenous C in patients. There are privately funded studies currently underway, but of course these cannot continue if the FDA bans the substance.
With this pharmacy, the FDA also banned injectable magnesium chloride and injectable vitamin B-complex 100. These two substances are routinely added to intravenous C to make the “Myers Cocktail,” used especially for conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome, and infectious diseases such as hepatitis, AIDS, mononucleosis, and flu. The FDA is not going after the Myers Cocktail directly, but is rather attacking each individual substance used to make the cocktail, and may conceivably be going after injectable vitamins and minerals in general, despite such injections being given under the care of a qualified physician.
Please contact the FDA right away, and tell them to stop this foolish war on intravenous vitamin C!
Each of us reading this should think, “Intravenous C could someday save my life.” Dr. Jonathan Collin, editor of the Townsend Letter, discusses the case of a man in New Zealand who nearly died from swine flu. After developing a severe fever and upper respiratory infection, his condition deteriorated and he became comatose. Eventually even a ventilator was insufficient to keep him breathing because his lungs were so compromised by pulmonary edema. After weeks of heroic intervention, doctors decided there was no chance of survival and nothing further should be done for him.
The family asked the hospital to administer intravenous vitamin C. After much disagreement, the hospital gave him 25 grams of vitamin C every 6 hours. There was so much improvement over the next two days that the hospital decided to reinstate his intensive care—but they discontinued the vitamin C, saying that he had improved only because they had rolled him onto his side or his stomach instead of keeping him on his back! Not surprisingly, his condition once again deteriorated.
Click here for the full report from the Alliance For Natural Health
Toxic Chemical Threatens Safety of Students, Teachers at NYC Public School
January 18th, 2011
ParentDish.com
By: Honey Berk
Last night’s snowstorm may not have closed down New York City public schools, but most of the kids at P.S. 36 in Staten Island will be kept home by their parents, anyway, while the Department of Education sorts out a toxic mess.
Last week, potentially dangerous levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a known carcinogenic chemical, were found inside the school as a result of leaking fluorescent light fixtures.
Banned in 1979 by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), PCBs are now listed in the top 10 percent of the EPA’s most toxic chemicals. But, despite the ban, products made with PCBs still may be present in older buildings, typically in fluorescent lights and caulking.
Though the PCB situation at P.S. 36 came to light just last week, the teacher who reported it first noticed a drip from a light fixture more than a year and a half ago, Sam Pirozzolo, president of Community Education Council District 31, tells ParentDish.
However, it wasn’t until the teacher recently read an article about PCBs that she made the connection to what she had seen at the school.
In response to concerns expressed last week by school officials, the DOE closed two classrooms at P.S. 36 for testing, though the school remains open.
While EPA safety guidelines for PCBs limit exposure to 50 parts per million (ppm) or less, Pirozzolo tells ParentDish a swipe test on the floor at P.S. 236 last week showed dangerously high levels, ranging from 1,000 to 12,000 ppm.
Yet, Dennis Walcott, the city’s Deputy Mayor for Education and Community Development, refused to close the school, saying he and the city health commissioner do not believe there is a health concern that warrants closure.
But, in a letter obtained from Pirozzolo, EPA Regional Administrator Judith Enck tells Walcott:
“EPA does not agree with your characterization of the potential health risks posed by PCB ballasts nor do we agree with your conclusion that there is no need for an expedited program to remove PCB containing lighting fixtures from schools.”
Fearful of the effects of PCB exposure, a majority of parents still refuse to let their children return to the school, and attendance has dropped to about 25 percent since Jan. 10, Pirozzolo says.
“I’m going to keep (my daughter) out until the truant officer tells me I have to send her back to school or unless test results come back and say the school is safe to go in,” parent Ellen Ambrose tells NY1 News.
To address the problem, the DOE sent a crew to the school over the weekend to inspect the fluorescent lamps, but the inspection turned out to be less than extensive, Pirozzolo says.
The situation escalated Jan. 10, when, during a meeting with Deputy Schools Chancellor Kathleen Grimm, parents discovered PCB stains in the auditorium where the meeting was being held.
“If you would have looked for a definition of PCB stain in the dictionary, that would have been it, right there,” Pirozzolo says.
In an unrelated incident, PCBs were recently discovered at another Staten Island school, P.S. 53, when it was randomly chosen by the EPA to be part of a pilot study checking for PCBs in a sample of New York public schools. As a result, eight classrooms have been closed.
Click here for the full report from ParentDish.com
Depression On The Rise In College Students
January 18th, 2011
NPR
By: Patti Neighmond
Researchers say severe mental illness is more common among college students than it was a decade ago, with most young people seeking treatment for depression and anxiety. A study presented at the American Psychological Association found that the number of students on psychiatric medicines increased more than 10 percentage points over the last 10 years.
Effective Counseling
A large part of the reason for this increase has to do with the success of treating younger high school-age students. Today, there are more effective public and private sector counseling programs for children. As a result, health experts say, more students with learning disabilities and emotional problems manage well during high school years and then go on to college.
“These are youngsters many of whom in the past wouldn’t have even finished high school,” says Dr. Katherine Nordal, with the American Psychological Association. “Special education services in high school mean that more students with emotional difficulties and special needs are going on to college,” with their more emotionally stable counterparts.
Nordal points to one recent study that showed approximately one out of every four or five students who visits a university health center for a routine cold or sore throat turns out to be “depressed.”
While most colleges and universities have some form of mental health counseling, the majority are understaffed and overwhelmed, Nordal says. But treatment is there for students who persist and Nordal offers some advice to friends and family who want to help identify problems.
Recognizing Symptoms
Symptoms grow slowly and insidiously, she says, over time.
“It’s not like flipping a switch and someone has normal mood and behavior one morning and then wakes up the next morning in some other kind of zone,” she says.
There are also certain behaviors that should clearly sound an alarm: If young people are distancing themselves from friends, losing interest in things that they once enjoyed doing, becoming irritable or angry, having outbursts toward people who were close to them, experiencing changes in eating or sleeping patterns, having unexpected, unexplainable episodes of tearfulness — these are all potential symptoms of depression, anxiety or other emotional problems.
These problems can be exacerbated by the very nature of going off to college. For many young people, this is the first time they have left home for any period of time. They are outside the familiar and safe family structure, complete with parental discipline, control and advice. They may find themselves in a challenging new environment with a completely new set of peers.
Unfortunately, many new friends, says Nordal, just don’t have the “reference point” on the student’s “normal” behavior to make a judgment about erratic behavior or changed mood. Often it is close friends and family who know the student best — the new friends are just beginning to get to know them.
Even so, Nordal says if a student’s new friends notice what appears to be obvious distance, difficulty or depression, they should suggest the student seek counseling. They can even pressure the student, she says, because in some cases, treatment can be life saving.
Click here for the full report from NPR
Can Woolly Mammoth Be Cloned From Frozen DNA?
January 18th, 2011
AOL News
By: Lauren Frayer
They’ve been extinct for about 10,000 years, but woolly mammoths could be back on Earth in just five years, according to Japanese scientists who plan to use frozen DNA to resurrect the behemoth.
Last summer, researchers plucked skin and muscle tissue from an ancient mammoth’s carcass that was found preserved under permafrost in Siberia. A nearly complete body of one of the animals was found there and has since been kept in a special freezer in a Russian research lab.
Researchers from Japan’s Kinki University have found a way to isolate DNA from the frozen mammoth’s tissue. Now they plan to insert that DNA into the egg cells of a normal, modern African elephant and then plant the resulting embryo into the elephant’s womb.
Elephants are the closest contemporary relative to ancient woolly mammoths, which are believed to have died out during the last Ice Age. Zoos across Japan were asked to donate their female elephants’ eggs, harvested from the animals when they died.
After a 600-day gestation period, the elephant would give birth to a baby mammoth. That baby would be a clone of that frozen mammoth found in the Siberian tundra and believed to have died more than 10,000 years ago. The baby would not have any genetic relation to the surrogate mother that actually gives birth to it.
The whole process will take about five years to complete. It’ll be about two years before a mammoth embryo is ready to be planted into the surrogate elephant, the lead Japanese researcher, Akira Iritani, told London’s Daily Telegraph.
Russian and American scientists are also assisting on the project, with Russian archaeologists providing the mammoth tissue samples and U.S. in vitro fertilization experts helping to create the mammoth embryo, CNN reported.
Unlike dinosaurs and other extinct animals whose remains have been fossilized, bodies of several mammoths were frozen under ice, preserving their muscle, skin and, most important, their DNA. The massive creatures are believed to have once grazed in large herds across Asia and North America. Whatever caused their species to die out is a huge point of contention among paleontologists. Some believe it was the onset of human hunters or climate change that led to the mammoths’ demise.
In 2008, biologists at another Japanese institute succeeded in cloning a mouse from cells of another mouse that had been kept in a deep freeze for 16 years. It was the first such achievement in the world, the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun reported.
Iritani told the newspaper that he and his colleagues are still discussing whether to put the baby mammoth on display to the public, if their experiment is successful.
“After the mammoth is born, we’ll examine its ecology and genes to study why the species became extinct and other factors,” he said.
Click here for the full report from AOL News
WikiLeaks Acquires Details of Thousands of Swiss Bank Accounts
January 18th, 2011
ABC News
By: Jim Sciutto and Jessica Hopper
Former Swiss banker Rudolf Elmer handed over two computer discs detailing thousands of offshore bank accounts to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange today, claiming that they contain evidence of massive potential tax evasion and other potentially illegal activity by banks.
Standing next to Assange, Elmer said that he had tried to hand the data over to tax authorities and members of the media.
“WikiLeaks is my only hope to get society to know what’s going on,” Elmer said.
The discs are full of details about the Swiss bank accounts belonging to more than 2,000 American, European and Asian individuals and multinational companies, Elmer has said. Among them, are some 40 politicians, as well as business leaders, celebrities, organized crime leaders and three major financial institutions. One of those banks is Bank Julius Baer, the former employer of Elmer.
Elmer previously leaked documents to WikiLeaks in 2008. Those files contained information about his former employer’s offshore operations in the Cayman Islands and prompted a U.S. judge to temporarily shut down WikiLeaks.
“I want to let society know how this system works,” Elmer said. “It’s damaging society.”
Also present at the event at London’s Frontline Club was John Christensen from the Tax Justice Network who estimated that $20 trillion is held offshore with the intention to evade taxes.
“Secrecy encourages criminal activity. And bankers…promote secrecy,” Christensen said.
Elmer said he would not immediately release the names of any individuals or institutions, in part to ensure the names on the accounts are real, and not aliases for individuals or companies involved. “The investigation is for government authorities to sort out,” Elmer said.
Elmer repeatedly emphasized that he, not Assange, takes full responsibility for the information.
“This is not my news conference. This is Mr. Elmer’s news conference,” Assange said.
Click here for the full report from ABC News
